Growth Insights for CEOs

Outsider Insights | The Backup Plan You Don't Have Is Already Costing You
Executive Takeaways
- Commercial team gaps happen for many reasons: someone leaves, someone is underperforming, or the business needs a capability the current team doesn’t have.
- Mid-sized companies tend to run lean, which means there’s rarely a qualified backup ready to step into a critical role.
- The real cost of that gap isn’t the empty seat. Priorities slow, teams lose direction, good people get frustrated, and commercial efforts stall.
- Rushing a permanent hire isn’t always the answer. Fractional resources can keep the business moving while you make the right long-term decision.
- The best time to decide how you’ll handle a critical commercial is before one opens.
Outsider Insights
Across Chief Outsiders, we talk to hundreds of CEOs every month. In this series, we explore the trends and challenges we’re hearing from these discussions – and what you can do if you’re facing the same issues in your business.
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Seven Considerations in Evaluating your Marketing and Sales Process
Sun, Jun 23, 2013 — I just finished reading several books that come at the changes in the marketing and sales process from different perspectives. Launch by Michael Stelzner, discusses how to use social media to grow your brand and your business. It includes some very pragmatic tools and examples for the marketing crowd. I highly recommend it as a primer for anyone interested in how to optimize their social media efforts. Sales Shift by Frank Belzer presents how the buying process has changed and how it will continue to evolve. Of particular interest is Belzer’s discussion of why sales skills that have worked in the past will no longer be effective going forward. When considering the combination of these two perspectives, the transformation of the commercialization process is significant.