Outsell Leadership Community
Forget Elon and Trump; the bro-break-up of the week is Altman and Nadella. Scientific Journals remain in justice department crosshairs. Geopolitical tensions are running higher. We await word on what caused the disaster of Air India Flight 171 while seat 11A remains indelibly marked in our collective memories.
Each week now feels like dog-years, internet time on steroids. Our now retired Chief Analyst, Leigh Watson Healy used to say, ‘two hands on the steering wheel, hair blown back.’ That pretty much sums up about every minute of every day for leaders in the land of information services, including yours truly.
Coming off two weeks of CEO meetings for clients, here are the themes that prevailed and that members addressed:
- Client and customer hesitancy.
- Upgrading talent in budget neutral ways.
- Using AI to re-engineer work, improve efficiency, reduce costs.
- Product life-cycle management including end-of-life decision-making and handling in the market.
- Revenue diversification through experimentation.
- PE Hell as one leader referred to it. The tight leashes portco CEOs are on; cost mitigation; deal flow or lack thereof.
- Moving with agility vs. certainty and being ok with constant adjustment/iterations — improv too.
- Marketing tactics that no longer work and new ones that do.
- Succession planning — 9 box talent reviews — jobs on hold — investments on hold.
- Uncertainty.
Resilience became the operative word for both meetings in NY and London And with it the importance of trust. Delivering trust; offering trust; being trustworthy. It is a grounding issue. Just this week one of our team members popped this into Teams:
I just had a LinkedIn connection request from a virtual AI assistant called Muhammad “with over five years of experience”. What?!! Now bots have résumés?! This is getting weird…
Pretty much sums up the world’s state of affairs. If you want more certainty tap into what’s here. We are fielding our next update on sales performance so you can benchmark and make plans. Tap into key tactics for dealing with customer uncertainty — a few that were discussed:
- Lowering entry prices and chunking services into smaller bites.
- Providing more optionality and features in service offerings.
- One example for events companies was providing marketers with creative solutions (like sponsored dinners) instead of booth space.
- Provide opt-outs and satisfaction guarantees.
- Utilizing more F2F and social media in sales and relying less on emails and in B2B that remains LinkedIn even if Bots have resumes!
- Build an ecosystem of solutions with partners.
- Create an industry advisory board.
And if you have questions we’ll field the answers — we just shared member experiences with AI Tool Adoption in Sales & Marketing : AI Tools Adoption in Sales & Marketing.
And another on how members are dealing with new proposed auto-renewal requirements.
So when you wish to make sense out of the non-sense and create clarity from the uncertainty — give us a call.
And don’t forget we have upcoming meetings October 8 in London; October 9 in New York and don’t miss Outsell Accelerate! April 22–23, 2026. Mark your calendars.