How should startups look to sell to CIOs?
Sort By:
Oldest
CTO in Software7 years ago
First and foremost, really work on your messaging and positioning. It’s easy to get enamored with the technology how instead of the strategic why - why is this important to them and why should they listen to you. If you can’t articulate that in a couple of minutes, you don’t want to go talk to a CIO.Once you have that, it’s about finding the right warm introductions, or reaching out to meet if you’ll be at the same conference/event and just having a conversation. Hard selling doesn’t work. Find out what they are working on, what their priorities are, and then if applicable work it in. Take a trusted advisor approach instead of a cold email or call, which may work sometimes but certainly doesn’t scale.Principal | CMTO, Ekspansiv in Services (non-Government)7 years ago
Ditto on what Mike says. Be cautious on promises of delivery. As a startup, a CIO will know there are going to be issues. Be clear on your expected outcomes, offering a beta for free is nice, but it's not free. It carries time and people costs in the organization doing the beta as well as risks.
CIO in Consumer Goods3 years ago
I was tempted, and I finally accepted myncurrent position as CIO last year, yes amazing April 2020.I came from a corpo with morw than 35k employees, 7B earnings... Moving to a startup 1 year old? And... At that time I was 59?
There's always a dream, a view of a new path to creat, a way to feel free in a gfewn field where you can build your own world.
There's a land of opportunities, my best advise JUMP... It's amazing!
Senior Information Security Manager in Software3 years ago
Spend time crafting the presentation to the specific CIO.Don’t used a canned PowerPoint.
Know what their pain points are and show how the product can fix that.
And don’t waste time mentioning Gartner and their reports.
Director in Manufacturing3 years ago
Have some real case studies of implementation from time to purchase until real value is provided. So many times we here installed and are up and running in 2 months…. Technically true but then spend a year deployment to 200 sites and 100k people and really didn’t get value for 6-9 months…. And more months tuning…. Be realistic on timing and resultsDirector of Technology Strategy in Services (non-Government)3 years ago
I recently lost a significant chunk of a day while exploring new tools trying to find out how they work to understand if they would deliver on the problem I was trying to solve for one of my clients.Their websites were beautifully laid out, there was a lot of content available, the what it did was clear.
But missing from all 6 of the ones I was looking at was a simple architecture diagram that would tell me how the tool worked in an offline mode.
This was necessary because the client has a product that is often run by their customers in an airgapped environment.
I get that SaaS is not aimed at the tech department, but in a large enough company they will still be involved in the sign off process and the CIO will have an part to play in that process.
The CIO may not need to know how your underlying tech works, but someone who works for them will.