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Selling to CIOs is not easy.
They are extremely busy and they are inundated with
technical sales calls. Nonetheless, those who make
a good living selling to CIOs have learned that there
are ways to sell to CIOs that are truly effective.
This article is designed to provide good solid advice
on selling to CIOs that will help you and your company
meet your CIO selling objectives.
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If your organization wants to become more effective
at selling to CIOs, Walker Sands Communications can
provide assistance—simply contact our Business Develoment Team or call us at (312) 267-0066.
The most important skill in selling to CIOs is to have
empathy for and understanding of their challenges.
At the most simplistic level, that's easy. CIOs are
no different from you or me. They are driven by self-interest.
They have a set of objectives for their IT organization.
If they meet those objectives, they will be highly
regarded by senior management. This results in career
advancement and additional compensation -- good things
for the CIO. If they fail to meet those objectives,
they may soon find themselves out on the street looking
for new opportunities.
Great CIOs want to be the best CIO they can be. They
recognize that they can do that only if they select
great technology vendors. It's a symbiotic relationship
that ideally is win-win for everyone involved.
So what's the bottomline? Your ability to make a CIO
successful is critical to his or her being willing
to establish a business relationship with you and
purchase your technology products and services.
Can you win the lottery if you never buy a ticket?
No. You have to play to win.
The worst thing you can do when selling to CIOs is
not get enough “at-bat” opportunities.
I've heard many technology companies say “We've
got a great technology offering that can really help
people. But we don't have enough sales opportunities
with CIOs that allow us to explain the benefits.”
You may think you are doing well because you close
a high percentage of the opportunities you have in
which you are selling to CIOs but if you only have
one or two opportunities per year, you may find that
your perfect batting average doesn't prevent your
company from going under.
If a tech company isn't getting enough “at-bat”
opportunities, it could be for any of the following
reasons:
- The sales force is understaffed or undertalented.
Many technology companies are started by technologists,
not by sales people. It's quite typical for such
companies to spend a ton of time and money creating
a product but invest little time and money in
creating a quality sales force. Those who are
successful in selling to CIOs know that it's not
necessarily the best product that wins the deal.
It's the people who are best at selling to CIOs
who get the deal.
If your company isn't hitting its sales projections,
you should consider changing or expanding the
sales lineup and bringing in people and processes
that have a proven track record of securing sales
opportunities with CIOs. Alternatively, hire a
sales consultant who can work with your existing
technology sales team to raise the level of its
game.
- Your personal reputation doesn't precede you.
It's not what you know, it's who you know. At
a recent industry conference, a senior technology
executive at Allied Vans stated: “We do
deals much more quickly if we know and trust the
people we are talking to.” Similarly, a
successful technology sales executive said: “To
be honest, our selling abilities are based on
our ability to befriend the IT executives—we
play racquetball with them, we take them out to
dinner, whatever it takes.”
The lesson for an aspiring technology salesperson?
Cultivate relationships with CIOs and individuals
who are likely to become CIOs in the future. The
lesson for the CEO of a high-tech company? If
you want to sell to Corporation X, hire a sales
person who knows their IT executives and who has
sold to them in the past. If that's not an option,
hire sales people who are adept at building new
friendships with CIOs.
- Your company's reputation doesn't precede you.
If your firm hasn't mastered marketing to CIOs,
it won't stand a chance when it tries to sell
to CIOs. Are you aware that CIOs receive thousands
of email and phone messages per year trying to
sell technology products to them? Given their
busy schedules, CIOs only have time to look at
and evaluate a very small fraction of these inbound
messages, let alone to actually evaluate and understand
the hardware and software offerings behind the
message
If your firm's marketing department has done it's
job well in marketing to CIOs, then the CIO will
return your call because he's heard of your offering
and he understands how it can add value to his
organization. Not only that, companies that market
to CIOs well find that their sales cycle in selling
to CIOs is greatly accelerated.
Hence, among other things, it's extremely important
that your web site is compelling and includes
case studies of client success stories and technical
white papers; that the media writes nice things
about your technical offerings; that you reach
out to existing customers and prospective customers
on a regular basis with timely and effective HTML-based
emails that explain the latest news about your
company; and that your executives appear at industry
events as speakers and become viewed as thought
leaders in your area of focus. Your marketing
department may do this for the company or they
may utilize an external firms, such as Walker
Sands Communications, to do those functions for
them.
- Your company reputation does precede you (and
it's not doing you any favors). Let's face it.
Even though the best products don't always win
the deal, it's widely accepted that the worst
technology products and services never win the
deal. A company that offers poor service or buggy
software doesn't get repeat business or referrals.
Word spreads quickly throughout the industry.
Even if you are the CIO's best buddy, he won't
buy from you. If you work for an organization
that has a bad reputation, of course your sales
calls won't get returned and CIOs will not meet
with you.
There's a certain level of bad reputation that
can be turned around - cured through new management,
better marketing, and improved business practices
within an organization. There's another level
of bad reputation that is incurable - companies
die a slow and painful death and sales people
don't hit their numbers. If you are affiliated
with such a company, there's only one thing to
do: leave and find a new opportunity with a company
that has a strong reputation. If it's not clear
whether your company's reputation is strong or
weak, consider engaging a marketing consultant
to objectively test your reputation for you and
find out what prospective customers really think
about you.
- The “sales pitch” is poor. This is
the biggest reason that companies fail to sell
to CIOs. The words you use to solicit interest
from a CIO must be perfectly crafted. It's very
important to not just explain what your product
does and give the CIO the task of figuring out
if he needs it or how he could use it in his organization.
You need to quickly explain the offering and then
- this is extremely important -- spend the bulk
of your time explaining how your offering can
help the CIO do his job well and help his organization
achieve its business objectives better than any
other alternatives they might be considering.
The rest of this article explains how you can
do this effectively and improve your ability in
selling to CIOs.
As mentioned above, CIOs don't have time to investigate
how your technology offering can help them. You need
to do that for them.
Here's an example of inefficient technology selling.
I recently spoke with the former CIO of a large consumer
goods company. He indicated that he would receive
hundreds of calls from technical sales people each
day. When the phone rang, his company's Caller ID
system allowed him to tell if the caller was an employee
of his company calling from within the organization
or if the call was an external call. If the call was
from outside, he could see if he knew the caller.
If he didn't know the caller, he would assume it was
a technology sales person and would let the call go
to voice mail.
He instructed his assistant to screen the calls and
create a call summary sheet that he would review.
Presumably, the assistant may not have always recorded
some important details about the technology offering
if he or she wasn't familiar with the technology.
But this particular CIO took the time to educate his
assistant on what was important to him and the organization
so that she would be sure to properly record and identify
those messages that could help him to achieve his
IT objectives. The CIO reviewed the call log each
day. If the CIO saw something that seemed relevant
to his current IT challenges, he would pass the call
along to someone who worked for him for further investigation.
At one point in time, the CIO explained to me, he was
working on an implementation of PeopleSoft. He was
desperately in need of consultants who had extensive
experience with PeopleSoft implementation projects
- these experts were a scarce commodity at the time.
In that instance, he personally returned the calls
of every technical consultant or staffing agency and
asked them “Do you have anybody with PeopleSoft
experience?”
What's wrong with this picture? Isn't it obvious? Nobody
called him and said “I know you are struggling
with your PeopleSoft implementation. We have some
PeopleSoft gurus who we think can help you to get
your PeopleSoft project done on time. It's our understanding
that current plans call for the project being completed
by the end of next quarter. We understand that your
senior management is counting on the implementation's
being completed on time to allow them to achieve their
key business objectives.”
The CIO summarized the problem: “I was very surprised
that nobody took the time to figure out what I needed
and call me with a solution. Instead, I wasted a lot
of time trying to find somebody who could provide
a solution. It shouldn't have been that difficult.”
So, based on this example and based on your selling
experiences to date, I'm sure you will agree that
understanding the CIO's technology and business objectives
is critical to CIO selling success. Unfortunately,
you don't have a crystal ball that lets you know everything
that's happening within a prospect organization. How
can you know what they are trying to accomplish? We
cover this in more detail in Lesson #4.
A truly exceptional technology company will have internal
or external resources who support their sales force
by researching a prospective client. At one company
I've worked with, an enterprise software sales person
once showed me how he researched a prospective client.
He had an opportunity to meet with the CIO of Bergen
Brunswick, a Fortune 200 health care products distributor,
to discuss his company's software offering.
He called his company librarian and requested a “public
information book” on Bergen Brunswick. The next
morning, he had it on his desk. It contained the following:
a copy of their latest annual report, their most recent
10-K and 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC); analyses of the company from financial
analysts; company summaries from Standard & Poors
and Bloomberg; and abstracts of news articles within
the last two years that mentioned Bergen Brunswick;
a listing of web sites that mentioned Bergen Brunswick;
and a complete printout of the Bergen Brunswick web
site. Based on his review of these materials, he was
able to completely impress the CIO with his understanding
of the business environment for Bergen Brunswick and
its current challenges.
He learned a little bit about the technical environment
from some articles in ComputerWorld and Information
Week. He was able to deduce many of the technical
projects that likely were underway and he determined
prior to his sales meeting how his company's offerings
could help. In the end, he later told me, he did get
the sale and the CIO had indicated to him that his
superior knowledge of Bergen Brunswick and its challenges
had been the key factor that allowed him to beat the
competition.
Unfortunately, if you work at a smaller company, you
may not have a resource who can do this research for
you. But the good news is that it's not to tough to
do yourself. Many of the resources mentioned above
are freely available. For example, you can go to the
SEC site and see all the filings that a public company
has made. You'd be surprised how much valuable information
is contained in those filings. And, of course, you
probably already know how to go a search engine site
and find other sites that reference a prospective
clients. Sometimes you'll find that an article or
case study that has been written about them that reveals
specific information about their technology initiatives.
Your understanding of those initiatives should help
you to better understand how your technology offering
can add value. And, in any case, the fact that you
spent the time to research the prospect in great detail
often in and of itself is greatly appreciated by a
CIO who is evaluating you and your offering.
A poor technology sales person will jump haphazardly
from one sales opportunity to another, perhaps calling
on a telecomm company one day and an insurance company
the next day. A successful technology sales person
will concentrate on a specific industry. If the prospective
customer is large enough, a single sales person may
dedicate 100% of their efforts to that customer.
Why does the successful technical sales person focus
on a specific industry for an extended period of time?
It's because, now more than ever, selling to CIOs
requires specialized, focused industry expertise.
Companies don't buy technology. They buy solutions.
More specifically, they buy solutions for their industry
and for their company.
Accordingly, as discussed above, you need to become
one with their industry. If you are selling to banks,
you need to read American Banker. If you are selling
to a consumer electronics manufacture, you should
attend the Consumer Electronics Show to learn more
about that particular industry. If you try to sell
to multiple industries, you spread yourself too thin
and you will lose to your competitor - a sales person
at another company who has immersed himself in becoming
an industry expert.
Another key reason to focus on one industry at a time
is that referrals and references are the primary driver
of new technology sales. One IT consulting company
started off by just telling its sales people “Go
out and sell!” and they had limited success,
even in a booming market for outsourced technical
services. A new sales executive came in and reorganized
the sales force around industry verticals. After becoming
expert in the nuances of airline operations, the sales
team that focused on the travel industry was able
to secure a project with Delta Airlines. With this
industry-specific reference account in the bag, the
company was subsequently able to secure business with
British Airways. Those two reference accounts were
instrumental in allowing them to get a project with
Travelocity - an opportunity that came via a referral
from an executive at Delta Airlines. What made the
company so effective in selling to CIOs? Senior executives
and sales staff at this company agree that industry
focus was what allowed them to take their company
and its selling success to the next level.
Take a moment and brainstorm about what industries
your company should be pursuing. What tactical programs
could be put in place to get in front of those industries?
Perhaps your marketing department should engage a
public relations firm to secure speaking engagements
for you at vertical-industry conferences. Perhaps
they should pursue article placements in publications
that focus exclusively on the vertical that you want
to pursue. Maybe your company should host a seminar
and invite CIOs from that particular industry to attend
an event that specifically addresses challenges they
may be facing in their industry.
This is a short lesson—it should be obvious.
You can't bluff your way through a sales call with
a technology-savvy executive. If you don't know your
stuff, it becomes painfully obvious. In the old days,
the CIO was not technically savvy. That's because
all of the technically savvy people were 18 years
old and weren't old enough (or experienced enough)
to become CIOs. Guess what? Those kids are now CIOs.
They grew up playing with computers, implemented numerous
big IT initiatives, and keep current on new technology
trends. It may help to schmooze them and take them
to the local professional basketball team's games,
but that in and of itself is not going to get the
job done.
I recently talked to a sales person who was selling
supply chain software. I probed him as to what the
difference was between his software and that of I2
and Manugistics; from my prior experience providing
IT consulting services to large organizations and
from my operational experience, I knew quite a bit
about these two products. He had some canned answers
but they were unconvincing. I would have been really
impressed if he had mentioned some specific modules,
technical attributes, or functionality within I2 and
had specifically identified how his product was superior.
He didn't do that so I remained unimpressed. As it
turned out, his background, prior to becoming a technology
sales executive, was working at a fashion retail chain
in marketing. He was very polished, very smooth and
professional but I'm guessing he is struggling at
technology sales because he doesn't speak the language
well.
What's the bottomline? If you are in charge of building
a sales force for a high-tech company, hire people
who are technologically-savvy. The perfect hire is
a computer-science undergraduate, ideally with an
MBA, deep experience in a specific vertical industry
or functional area, and previous IT selling experience.
Facilitate your sales team staying current on IT trends
and make sure they fully and intimately understand
the competition and its offerings.
If you are on the front lines selling, spend as much
time as you can learning about technology so that
you can “talk the talk” and “walk
the walk” with customers who are increasingly
sophisticated, with little patience for salespeople
who don't know what they are talking about. Lobby
your upper management to help you to be more educated
by sending you to conferences and buying you relevant
technology books. Attend your competition's seminars.
Encourage your marketing department to do detailed
competitive analyses on competitive offerings (or
engage a marketing consultant such as Walker
Sands Communications to do it for them).
I once was part of a sales team that competed for a
project building an expert system (using artificial
intelligence and business rules) for a large hotel
company. Our competition created Powerpoint presentations
and proposals that were 90% boilerplate materials,
the same materials they'd use to pitch an MRP software
implementation for a medical products company.
We thoroughly researched the company, the available
technologies, and the industry to fully understand
it. Every slide in our presentation and every page
in our proposal was specifically customized to the
prospective client.
We also convinced our technologists to work late and
build a quick prototype of the system. A few pizzas
was all it took to get them to work all day and all
night for a couple of days to build a demo that was
tailored for this client.
Based on this customization and this above-and-beyond
effort to show the prospective customer that we understood
their needs and that we bring a strong work ethic
to all of our engagements, we got the project.
If you put the effort in and do more than your competition,
you'll find that you will beat them every time. Even
a small company, a David, can slay its big Goliath
competitors through this technique. If senior management
argues that you're giving too much away during the
proposal process and shouldn't go so far as to build
a demo for the client, let them know that if you don't
do it and a competitor does, you won't get the sale.
Do they want to get the sale?
Selling to CIOs isn't that different from selling to
others. There are basic selling principles that apply
across industries. One of those is to understand why
and how things get done at your prospective customer.
Take my business as an example. I've left the world
of IT selling and the task of selling to CIOs to form
Walker Sands Communications, which focuses on helping
high-tech companies to increase their selling success
via marketing and media relations initiatives. Although
I've never worked at a PR firm, I've learned the business
of PR through careful study and by hiring a team or
skilled individuals who have spent their entire lives
in the pursuit of marketing and communications excellence.
We sell on both sides of the fence. We persuade clients
that we can help them with marketing and public relations.
Once we are engaged, we help with positioning and
ultimately we package up story ideas and present them
to the media, with the hope of securing story placements.
In this instance, we are selling to journalists and
editors.
Do we need to understand why and how things get done
at a given publication in order to “sell”
them a story idea? You bet. For example, I've learned
that if you send an email to a Chicago Tribune technology
reporter on a Thursday, you never get a response.
That's because they are working on the big Monday
Business/Technology edition deadline and have no time
to read superfluous emails. But on a Friday afternoon,
send them an email and you will get a response. That's
because they are no longer on deadline for Monday
and they have time to start thinking about what to
write about next. Once we understood that nuance of
how things work at this particular publication, we've
become much more effective at our “selling”
work there.
Similarly, those who are selling to IT organizations
need to understand the business of IT. When are the
new budgets finalized? How much of the budget is flexible?
Do the business units initiate new technology initiatives
or does IT “seed fund” an initiative it
likes and then present it to the business units to
find somebody to champion further investment. Does
the company have a “Management By Objective”
compensation methodology in which case the CIO and
his staff are compensated based on hitting defined
objectives? If so, what are those objectives? If one
of them is “Server Consolidation”, does
that help you to sell your offering? When are these
objectives defined? Is there any way you can influence
them such that eventually your offering will be the
key to a CIO's hitting her objectives?
Part of this is just being able to talk the talk and
show that you understand the CIO's business. If you
are oblivious to the interaction between business
units and the IT department, you can't effectively
play that interaction to your advantage. If you don't
understand common IT policies, you can't play them
to your advantage. The more you learn about how IT
departments work (and where they don't work), the
better equipped you'll be to navigate through the
IT selling process.
Basic selling training encourages you to anticipate
objections and prepare your answers before the client
presents the objection. In some cases, this involves
turning a perceived negative into a positive - have
you ever heard the IT consulting expression “It's
not a bug, it's a feature”?
Everyone has their own motivations - their own “hot
buttons”. And in many instances, one man's objection
is another man's motivator. For example, an acquaintance
of mine sells network management software. When business
executives hear his sales pitch, they say “You
mean to tell me that I've got five guys monitoring
these networks now and if I buy your software I don't
need those five guys.” Obviously, that executives
hot buttons are decreasing headcount and minimizing
expenses to enhance profitability.
Now, the challenge is that the business executive can't
make the sale all by himself. One of the most important
things you need to know to sell to CIOs is that you
typically need to sell many different people to close
a deal - you need to sell the CIO of course but you
also need to sell the business executives and the
IT staff. Any one of the three can kill a deal if
they don't like it.
So, in the case above, do you think the IT staff will
want to buy a product that will allow the business
executive to cut IT headcount. Hell no!! They may
want their company to do well but not if it costs
them their jobs and endangers their ability to make
the mortgage payments. Similarly, the CIO doesn't
want his staff to be decreased for a variety of reasons.
Accordingly, a good technical salesperson knows how
to spin the situation. My acquaintance doesn't tell
the business executive and the CIO that this will
result in staff cuts. Rather, he tells them that it
will allow the existing IT staff to concentrate on
more strategic projects. In this way, the sales professional
reaches out to the CIO and helps him to avoid headcount
reductions and he does see the value - after all,
he is always resource constrained and would love to
redeploy resources to more valuable tasks - that is
a given at every IT organization!
What about the IT staff? My acquaintance gets their
buy-in in the following way. He knows that the IT
staff is frustrated with their inability to convince
management to buy some new hardware and software that
they want. My acquaintance uses this to his advantage.
To the IT staff, he says “If you buy my network
management software, you will get detailed reports
that will identify deficiencies in your network. Armed
with this objective quantification, it'll be much
easier to get your IT procurement requests approved
in the future.” That is music to the IT staff's
hears and, joining the business executive and the
CIO, they jump on the bandwagon and my friend gets
his purchase order.
The key to his success? It was understanding what people
are motivated by and playing those “hot buttons”
to his advantage. Those who are good at selling to
CIOs understand those motivators implicitly and intuitively
over time because they understand the business of
IT. Are you able to anticipate the objections you
will receive and spin your responses such that everyone
is happy with your offering and wants to buy it? If
not, it's time to sit down, by yourself or with your
marketing department, and think things through. Once
you do, you'll be on your way to more effective IT
selling.
If you've read all of the previous lessons, you may
have noticed that you are not the Lone Ranger, out
their selling alone. For an organization to be truly
effective at selling, sales needs to be built into
the entire organization. Marketing and technical personnel
should attend sales training and should periodically
participate in sales calls.
The reason should be readily apparent. Marketing needs
to get the word out to prospective customers in order
for Sales to be successful. If they don't understand
how to sell and they don't understand why sales efforts
for your company win or lose, they aren't going to
be able to help you much, are they? Similarly, if
the Product Development Team in technology doesn't
appreciate how to sell, they will likely create a
product that doesn't sell. What may seem like an unnecessary
bell-and-whistle function to them may be the feature
that you know will get you in the door at a company
you've been chasing for months. Creating formal feedback
loops within an organization that focus on selling
is a critical role of senior management.
When formal techniques that encourage integrated selling
are absent, you may need to resort to informal techniques.
In other words, get to know your marketing team intimately
and be able to call in a few favors. The technical
sales person who says “Our marketing stinks.
That's why we can't sell this stuff.” should
proactively reach out to the marketing staff and work
to improve things. Similarly, it's advantageous to
get to know the technical people in the Product Development
Team. As discussed earlier, sometimes you can get
them to create something specifically for you that
will help you close a deal and the price may be just
a few late-night pizzas.
You finally have been successful in selling to CIOs
and have closed a deal. The commission is in the bank.
Is your job done?
Absolutely not. You need to make sure the client is
happy. Otherwise, you may not get a good reference
account and you may not get referrals to other prospects.
Remember that in technology selling the vast majority
of sales to CIOs are driven by reference accounts
and referrals.
In addition to getting a referral, staying in touch
with somebody you've sold to can have other benefits.
First and foremost, there are cross-selling opportunities.
Once you are in, after the first sale, you learn more
about the customer. Now, you don't need a crystal
ball to tell you what challenges are facing the CIO.
You are right there - front and center - within the
organization, either as a consultant or as a dedicated
sales person who returns frequently to ensure that
your hardware or software products are well regarded.
While you are
Another important benefit of not abandoning the customer
after the sale is driven by CIO turnover. The half-life
of CIOs is much shorter than most CIOs would like.
It's not uncommon for CIOs to jump to new companies
every two years. If the CIO were to stay in one place
for his entire career, you might just get one sale
from him or her. If you keep up relationships and
provide exceptional customer service you may find
that you get five sales from the same person over
the course of a decade of selling. Similarly, if you
leave and go to a new company, you can revisit your
relationship with the CIO to sell your new offering
- but that is possible if and only if you made sure
that the CIO was happy with what you sold him the
last time. That happens if and only if you stay in
contact with the CIO after the sale and make sure
he's happy.
I made the mistake of not doing this early in my career.
I had worked on a big consulting project for a large
chemicals company. The CIO liked me and appreciated
my work. Years later, I was at a new consulting company
and the CIO had also moved on to new things - he had
become the CIO of another large chemicals company.
I looked him up, found out what projects he was working
on, and introduced him to my new company's services.
He asked us to provide a proposal on a project. Using
the highly customized above-and-beyond approach discussed
above, we won the deal.
However, once the deal was won, I moved on to other
things. I had another client engagement that I was
working on and assumed that things were in good hands
with the engagement at my CIO friend's company. As
it turned out, we didn't do a good job for the CIO
and we were not asked back for any additional work.
I haven't spoken to the CIO since then, and, based
on the last experience, I'm not sure he'd entertain
any new ideas from me. Had I simply followed the progress
of the consulting engagement after the sale and intervened
when things didn't go smoothly, I'm certain I could
have salvaged the engagement and the relationship,
which would have been useful in my future endeavors.
Oh well. We all make mistakes once - it's just important
that we learn from our mistakes (you get to learn
from mine as well!) and that we don't make the same
mistakes twice.
Hopefully, the previous lessons have been helpful.
There are all kinds of tidbits of advice that can
help you to be more successful in selling to CIOs.
Here are a few final tips and techniques:
- Choose an Appropriate Title. Make your
title “business development” or “consultant”
instead of using a title that mentions “sales”
explicitly. Let's face it. The profession of sales
carries some baggage and you'd do well to call
on prospective clients as a consultant or prospective
business development partner, rather than call
on them as a salesperson.
- Befriend the Executive Assistant. Remember
the CIO who had his assistant log all of his vendor
calls and screen them for relevance. Creating
a relationship with that assistance can be the
difference between getting in the door and not
getting in the door. Offend that assistant and
you've probably lost the sale.
- Find the Research Screener. Most CIOs have
somebody who reads all the research that comes
from outfits like Gartner Group and Meta Group.
They also read the computer trade publications.
They then cull out a small number of “important”
articles that they forward on to the CIO to read.
If you can find out who screens magazine articles
and research for the CIOs and get your articles
in front of them, you may find that you can influence
the CIO's worldview to your advantage.
- Know When to Call. Call in the early hours
or in the late hours after most people will have
left the office. During the day, it's tough to
get past the CIO's executive assistant. However,
if you call the office at 6:30 AM, you may find
that the CIO is at work getting a jump on the
day and will answer the phone himself - he has
to do that if his assistant isn't in yet. Similarly,
some CIOs work late into the night and you can
catch them then.
- Attend Industry Events. Some CIOs are featured
speakers at industry conferences and you can learn
about their business challenges by listening to
them speak. You may also be able to talk to them
directly during a coffee break. Be sure to avoid
stalking the CIO in an obnoxious manner - that's
a sure way to annoy him or her and lose a sale.
- Identify Circles of Influence. Every CIO
has a group of people that he listens to concerning
IT decisions. Maybe there's an analyst at Forrester
or one of the other research houses that he looks
to for advice. Don't underestimate the power of
the analysts in influencing purchasing decisions!
Maybe the CIO calls his former boss for advice
or a peer CIO in a non-competitive industry. Find
out who influences the CIO and get your messaging
in front of those key influencers.
If you organization is struggling in its efforts to
increase CIO selling success, you may be well served
to pursue some additional marketing and media relations
initiatives. Walker Sands Communications
can help. Simply contact our Business Develoment Team or call us at (312) 267-0066.
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