OLC Winter Meeting Themes

Each year our Outsell Leadership Community members, largely CEOs, COOs, MDs & Presidents meet F2F in London and on the East Coast, augmenting their digital meetings, with opportunities to exchange practices with smaller like groups and the meet-ups we host for member networking.

Yes, they have access to Outsell data, research and SMEs and are assigned their very own Executive Advisor, a CEO who’s been in their shoes. It’s all designed for a CEO. After each series of meetings what’s on each other’s minds is important to them. What’s the community at large feeling? And so, we do a round-up and this is what came out of our winter season meetings:

1. Company Culture and Talent Management:

• Hybrid working is still a challenge, particularly for younger, new employees with little or no experience of office work. They are often less engaged with the organization as a whole. For larger companies, building a culture globally also remains fraught.
• There are also some concerns that staff turnover is now too low, with not enough opportunities to bring in new, more highly skilled talent.

2. Sales Management:

• There are new challenges now primarily in dealing with elongated sales cycles and identifying the types of products which can have shorter cycles. Optimizing SDRs and their role in an LLM world and how best to align them between marketing and field sales is another set of topics on the rise. It’s about ROI on the marketing and sales investment and its top of mind.
• In companies offering marketing intelligence solutions, sales teams are finding it difficult to navigate to both marketing and sales, the key user groups for these services. Over the years multiple stakeholders in the sales cycle have gotten more complex. Add now with tighter budgets and it can be rough out there.

3. Audience, Content and Marketing:

• Audience development is another critical issue for those with Media and Marketing business models. There are many areas to work on: targeting audiences with content that matters to them, managing the marketing funnel, measuring engagement, understanding the audience lifecycle, subscriber retention, and the role of events (digital and in-person) in the audience journey. And most of all delivering ROI to marketeers.

4. Research integrity:

• For organizations in the scholarly communications space, there is a lot of discussion and shared desire to act and weed out improper practice when it comes to research integrity.
• Publishers see this as their core activity, and they are targeting paper mills that churn out unreliable articles and re-invigorating established editorial practices.
• Extending the topic more broadly, members from other sectors stressed how important it is that the content they produce can be trusted — a potential differentiator given the fallibility shown by current generative AI services.

5. Licensing content for Generative AI use cases

And no meeting series these days would be complete without generative AI on the concerns of many CEOs.

• There were lively discussions. Many content businesses remain concerned about the threat to their Intellectual property posed by unlicensed use of content. Others are actively working on their AI licensing strategy (both in and out) and looking at AI pricing as they look to extract more value.
• In London, an IP lawyer joined a panel discussion, stressing that establishing clear and strong contracts offered the best form of protection. Pursuing claims on general copyright, trademark, and other IP legislation is likely to be a long and expensive process and so there was healthy dialog about contracting.
• And of course, use cases continue to come up. What’s being chosen and why, how ROI is measured, managing higher costs associated with implementing generative AI etc. The balance between internal operational use cases and those that go into the making and capability enhancement of their commercial offerings is also of great interest.

So much to discuss and so little time. There is a lot on the minds of leaders these days and why we welcome new members to apply to join us.

June is right around the corner (Spring Season) and we continue to plan the Outsell Signature Event — more time, more topics, and lots to cover. Mark your Calendars for June 5 (Washington DC,) June 12 (London,) and October 9–10 (Boston.) Interested in becoming a member? Please contact us.