Pace & Precision
What’s on CEOs’ minds these days? There is no shortage of topics fresh out of our Outsell CEO Network meetings in New York and London these past two weeks. What’s on your mind?
Sentiment varied: Their single ‘word’ for the year: Shifts, Challenging, Curiosity, Interesting, Unsettling, Settling, Evolving, Vibrant, and so much more. As meetings evolved, problems were solved, and ten key themes emerged:
- Disruption — the constant drumbeat of change and managing teams through it.
- AI Everywhere — agents, MCP, the next UI being no UI now becoming the norm.
- Data — some customers are trimming their portfolios; others are doubling down to feed the machines and their internal LLMs. They are evaluating where the holes are in their data sources and making sure the gaps are addressed.
- Services — for many their business models are evolving to services; the importance of advisory (at the top of the Outsell Value Pyramid) and how businesses are migrating away from content at their core to services as the value-add. We call it moving from source to authority.
- Focus — when markets get rocky or change it forces sharp discipline. Vertical focus and vertical depth are having their day.
- Pricing — moving away from seat-based models to outcome-based models and pricing for machine use vs. people use.
- Partnerships — increasingly critical with licensing agreements becoming de rigueur as companies figure out their place on the value pyramid.
- Segmentation –the keys to success lie in understanding specific users, buyers, and those we serve. Understanding different segments and personas and prioritizing focus (there’s that word again) is key.
- Agility — the norm with an AI-first orientation to reinventing the business from the ground up. Start-ups are ‘native’ and doing it from scratch while larger companies aspire to shifting mature businesses. Moving planning to real-time rolling plans and saying good-bye to anything long-range is now standard. In the words of one leader: everyone in an AI start-up is an individual contributor.
- Pace and Precision — the need to operate and execute with both is the standard.
Just as our Outsell CEO Network navigated digital transformation over the past decades — print-to-digital, mobile, cloud, today it’s all about AI everywhere all at once
How are you measuring up? Review the Outsell Accelerate A! Framework ™
This is a marathon not a sprint. Or said another way — two hands on the steering wheel, hair blown back! It’s exhilarating and exhausting; we are back to pace and precision!