"At the end of the day," said Caroline Bishop, "people buy from people." Bishop is Director of Client Services for Winsper, Inc., and she was making the point that, when you can get to them, selling to C-level executives is much like selling to anyone else. The difference is getting to them. "Reaching them is hard to do," she said, "and it costs a lot of money."

Bishop, together with Brian S. Chertok, Senior Global Program Manager for Cognos, gave a presentation to the NEDMA membership at our first breakfast meeting of the 2007-2008 programming year on September 12. Their topic: "How to Effectively Reach the C-Suite Audience." They specifically addressed the reaching of large-company customers and dealt early in their remarks with the notion that top management is not typically involved with purchases. "Their involvement changes over the course of the buying cycle," said Chertok. "They tend to be involved in the early stages, and as the process continues, they often drop away as lower-level managers move forward. But they usually get involved again at the end. C-suite influence never entirely goes away from a large purchase, but it ebbs during the middle stages of the process."

Who do the C-level executives talk to? First and foremost, according to Chertok, they talk to each other. Because they rely, as a group, heavily on networking and word-of-mouth in buying decisions, that means marketers need to cover the entire suite of executives in a customer company. In an IT purchase, for example, the CIO is likely the primary contact, but the CEO and the CFO will probably be involved as well. And because the business drivers are different for each position, you need to speak to each of them in a different way.

To reach them, Chertok recommends offering specific, relevant content. They tend to be interested in independent product evaluation, peer feedback on what works, detailed and objective case studies, critical analysis of implementation challenges, and white papers. "It's not like it was yesterday," said Chertok. "Today, the relationship comes before the deal, rather than vice versa."

Bishop then sketched out some of the principal characteristics of the C-suite population. They are well-educated, well-read joiners. They pride themselves on being current on diverse topics. Seventy-seven percent of them have traveled in the past year. Sixty-three percent do their own email; 85% participate in sports; 24% attend live theater. Most of them are men.

But here are the most interesting characteristics Bishop revealed about them. Ninety percent of them say that, compared to five years ago, they are doing more now to bring environmental, social, and political issues into core corporate strategy. Seventy percent believe that creative thinking and cultural shaping are more important to their jobs than hands-on management.

Chertok then revealed that his company did a survey of C-suite customers to discover how they wanted to be marketed to. The survey revealed that cultural events score very high while sports events rank very low. He cautioned that his population might reveal nothing about yours and recommended that everybody survey their own audience.

Toward the end of the informative presentation, Bishop and Chertok offered some insights on approaching the C-level audience. First, market to the individual and not the title. Second, creativity matters. Third, you must earn the relationship before you earn the business.

Perhaps the most important bit of advice from the presentation was to attend to the gatekeepers. Most marketers view gatekeepers (receptionists, assistants, and so on) as obstacles. Few appreciate that, while keeping marketers and salespeople away is a major part of their jobs, so is letting marketers and salespeople in. If you take the trouble to sell the gatekeepers (always remembering that the business drivers and motivators will be different than they are for the person you're trying to get in to see), you'll increase your chances of selling the C-level executive, too.