Content Marketing Today

How to Find Out What C-Level Execs are Thinking

Even if you don’t sell directly to C-level executives, you may need to know what they think with regard to critical business issues. 

Specifically, it is always important to understand the extent to which they care about the problems that you are product or service may solve.  The more that they care, the more important it becomes for you to develop a genuine understanding of their beliefs, attitudes, and concerns.

How do you find this out?  You probably will not be able to pick up the phone and call a large sample of CEO’s.  A better alternative would be to conduct a projectable research survey that would help guide your content marketing efforts.

Because CEO’s reside at a much higher level than most of us, getting them to respond to a survey will involve more than offering them a chance to win an iPod shuffle.  According to Ellen Sills-Levy and Claire Tinker of ESL Insights,interviewed by ClickZ, you will need to take a significantly different approach than you might with a mid-level manager:

“At the C-level, you have a number of unique challenges. Besides having a very busy audience, you are dealing with boundaries of nondisclosure and usually not being able to accept anything of monetary value as an incentive for participating in a survey.”

Sills-Levy and Tinker suggest that setting up an ongoing advisory panel composed of your best customers and prospects is the ideal approach.  This would be a set of executives who have agreed in advance to participate in regular research surveys.

If this is not possible,there are existing prescreened panels of senior executives at companies can access for research purposes.  However, Tinker notes that you must be careful to ask filter questions that will isolate the real senior executives from the pretenders.

To get all the great information on researching senior executives effectively, follow this link to the ClickZ article