C-Suite Marketing: Doubling Down on “Considered Insight”

We talk all the time about the importance of insight to support personalization, ABM, executive engagement, and pretty much every type of effective B2B marketing. Simply put, you can’t know too much about your clients and prospects!

When I talked with Lee Demby for the second episode of our new C-Suite Marketing podcast, though, he went a bit deeper on the topic and talked about the importance of “considered insight,” especially in light of the pandemic pivot to doing everything online.

Lee is president and co-founder of Boardroom Insiders, a business intelligence platform that provides data and insight on senior executives in the Fortune 1000. (They also sponsor the podcast, for which we’re grateful!)

Generating relevant insight for executive engagement has always been a challenge. Opportunities to meet with C-suite executives are typically few and far between, and their tolerance for irrelevant content or conversation is low.

Providing sales with “considered insight,” in Lee’s phrase, is a key to successful engagement. This means going well beyond a data dump or a quick email or something that can be pulled together in a few minutes. It requires gathering and reviewing a lot of data, synthesizing and highlighting what is most relevant for the given situation, and then presenting it in ways that make sense to the specific C-suite audience and helps them draw connections, solve problems, and devise innovative solutions.

It’s not easy – and the challenge is doubly great now in light of the pandemic.

For one thing, as Lee notes, “there is a large number of account directors and sales leaders that are largely effective because of their force of personality, the in-person effect of being with them. It’s very difficult to tell them no in person.” With the shift to all-digital selling, that personality and approach is far less effective.

At the same time, the data and insight that marketers provided to sales from even a few months ago may well be obsolete today. For example, generalizing about industries can be quite misleading: “Some industries are suffering more than others, but that doesn’t mean every company is suffering. And with the industries you think that would be doing well, some of those companies may not be because of their cash position or maybe they went through an acquisition and they’re having to digest it.”

Fortunately, of course, B2B marketers are used to gathering a lot of data, generating targeted and relevant insight from that raw information, and then packaging and communicating that insight to our sales and account teams just in time to help them prepare for their critical, online executive meetings. We are, right?

Listen to the podcast to hear the full discussion as well as Lee’s thoughts on:

• How C-suite executives have responded to the pandemic
• Relationship mapping for ABM-ers and field marketers
• Leveraging executive insight to design better engagement programs
• The importance of a coordinated effort for executive engagement

Have you listened to Lee or other episodes already? We’d love your feedback and suggestions on future topics or questions. Email me at rleavitt@itsma.com.