How to Market to the C-Suite

[jrineakter]

Senior executives are notoriously hard to convince. They're busy, often preoccupied, and have perfected the art of saying no. After all, you don't get to the top by approving every proposal or idea. The ability to make quick decisions and judiciously protect your time is a requirement of senior management.

As a marketer, this can be intimidating. First, you have to navigate your way through several levels of gatekeepers and gain an audience with a time-poor CEO, and then you have to capture and hold their attention long enough to convince them that your offering is worth their investment.

It's a complicated, delicate process with plenty of room for error (which is why so many marketers miss the mark).

Here's what you need to know to take the gold medal and effectively approach senior management.

Should You Market to the C-Suite?
Before you schedule a team coordination meeting and start creating a strategy, you need to decide if it’s worth the investment. I’ve sat in countless meetings and conversations with marketers who wholeheartedly believe that marketing to senior management is a wasted effort, and chances are you’ve heard the same thing. And to be fair, they’re partly right.

Marketing to senior management can be useless if you employ the same strategies and tactics as when targeting managers, middle managers, or individual contributors. Plus, in most canada telegram data cases, reaching a senior executive requires an ABM approach . So unless you’re willing to put in the time and effort to specifically target senior management and get their attention, you’re better off investing your energy into fostering closer relationships with the people who report to them.

That said, if you do choose to target senior management, there are some things you should do (and some things you should avoid).

GTM B2B Strategy

3 mistakes marketers make when targeting the C-suite
While some organizations are wildly successful in marketing to senior management, others often fail. What holds them back? Here are the top three reasons why marketers fail to convince senior management:

01. They don't know how to respect their time
You're busy, I'm busy, everyone we know is busy... and we all hate it when someone wastes our time.

Now imagine that you're not only busy with the usual demands of your life, but you also have investors breathing down your neck with lofty revenue targets. You're fully responsible for the performance of your department, or in the case of a CEO, the entire company. You know that if something goes wrong, your head is on the chopping block. At the same time, you're bombarded with calls, emails, and advertisements from hundreds of vendors competing for your time and budget.

As you can imagine, anyone who can't empathize with a C-suite's over-burdened schedule (or, worse, completely ignores their time constraints) isn't going to get very far.