Outsell Q1/Q2 Sales Benchmark
More participants are meeting plan and nearly two-thirds are reporting year-over-year gains from this same time last year. Gains continue to be in the single digits. In our experience that’s emblematic of the industry more than anything else.
Growth is driven by enterprise budgets and those are still growing at a modest pace. With growth in enterprise budgets comes mostly stable growth.
Buyers remain slower to move with budget uncertainty and elongated buying-cycles still the norm. And now, a full third of respondents are citing AI as reshaping markets and increasing pressure on differentiation, product strategy, and competitive positioning which all coincides with my post last week focused on pureplay application software and the types of companies at risk in the sector and those who will likely be ok longer term.
Pricing remains in flux with a lot of experimentation; upskilling of sales talent remains a top priority. Thankfully discounting to close deals is at the bottom of the heap in terms of actions taken to close business.
This quarter’s “question of the quarter” focused on evolving approaches to pricing and packaging of AI. The two most popular approaches are pricing API access as an add-on to core licenses or new pricing models for data access (e.g., MCP) and delivery — while in some cases, pricing frameworks are being entirely re-written for AI. This shows a bias toward subscription revenue and for pricing added value for this capability vs. bundling it into the current license with no lift.
Pricing remains in flux, with roughly 50% of companies experimenting across AI, API, and data models — including usage-based, add-on, and MCP-enabled approaches. The most common direction is to position API access as a paid add-on to core licenses or to introduce entirely new pricing structures for AI capabilities. This reflects a clear bias toward protecting and expanding subscription revenue, with companies increasingly pricing AI as incremental value rather than bundling it into existing licenses.
At the end of the day, it boils down to leading with solving thorny problems that help drive revenue or mitigate risk, demonstrate ROI, and differentiation.
Our next quarterly study will be first week of July. Contact Michael to see how you are doing against the peer group.
For a stronger sense about how you are doing deploying AI in product, marketing, and sales functions to drive more efficiency and throughput, or generating revenue from it in your products or through licensing to big tech and customer’s LLMs, be in touch to take your complimentary Outsell Accelerate A! Benchmark™. It will only take an hour of your time, and you’ll have execution-ready results within days. Contact Michael . We look forward to hearing from you. Happy Selling!
By Anthea Stratigos on .
Exported from Medium on June 29, 2026.