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Beyond the Buzzwords: How CEOs Can Build a Truly Resilient Business
In every keynote, article, and boardroom conversation, “resilience” gets tossed around as the Holy Grail of leadership virtue. But resilience is more than just surviving economic turbulence—it’s about turning disruption into a competitive edge.
Too many CEOs treat resilience as a slogan rather than a strategy. Real resilience is built in advance, not claimed during a downturn. It starts with clarity regarding where you are in the economic cycle, where you’re headed, and how to align your people and resources accordingly.
Where Pricing and Marketing Strategies Intersect
Thu, Mar 28, 2024 — Back in the day, pricing was a foundational piece of all marketing strategies. When I went to grad school, for example, the four Ps were in vogue – product, price, place, and promotion. At that time, the intersection of pricing and marketing was seen as a given, almost a tautological concept. But as marketing professionals and professors' desire to innovate and differentiate intensified, the traditional 4Ps evolved into new frameworks like the “4Cs”, emphasizing concepts such as customer, cost, convenience, and communication and the "4Es" of experience, exchange, evangelism, and everywhere into the marketing lexicon. And I admit I lapse into momentary shudders when I think of all the as-yet-untapped letters in the alphabet.
Navigating Growth: The Role of Fractional Sales Leaders in Transformative Strategies
Thu, Feb 1, 2024 — Today’s trend of hiring fractional executives is gaining momentum among growth-oriented businesses aiming to enhance their management expertise and bandwidth cost-effectively. In this article, I will delve into the dynamic world of fractional sales leaders, exploring their pivotal role in driving revenue growth, providing specialized expertise, and offering flexibility to scale sales leadership based on organizational needs. I will reveal how these leaders contribute to strategic focus, mitigate hiring risks, and deliver quick results, drawing insights from real-world scenarios.
How to Use Positioning to Own Your Market
Thu, Feb 9, 2023 — Become a big fish in your pond In my previous blog, “What Tech CEOs Get Wrong About Positioning,” we introduced the concept of market positioning – and specifically, how it helps your customers connect the dots between their needs and your product or service. Of all the marketing strategy lessons we at Chief Outsiders share with founders and business leaders like yourself, positioning ranks among the most critical. It truly is a difference-maker for businesses that wish to become the leader of the pack -- to become, in fishing parlance, the big fish in your pond.
CEO Go-To-Market Warning: Avoid the Blind Spots That Cause Products to Miss the Mark
Tue, Oct 4, 2022 — Part 1: Avoiding the Dust Bin Requires an Insights-Driven Approach Have you ever heard of the Apple Pippin or the Twitter Peek? Played a game of TowerFall on the Ouya Console? Taken an important call on your Amazon Fire Phone? If so, you are among the rarest of the rare – the chosen few who took the calculated risk of trying a new product during its brief run on earth. The world is littered with also-rans, whoopsies, and well-intentions gone awry. There are so many consumer product failures each year – some that miss with a whimper, and some that make a giant megaton splash into the depths of nowhere – that several “Museums of Failure” warehouse the worst and dimmest of the bunch. In fact, up to 95 percent of new product launches fail to hit a target, according to one market analyst.