Marketers often talk about the challenge of reaching particular audiences and CEOs are regarded as one of the most challenging audiences of all. But if we are honest, ‘reaching’ CEOs is not an issue: their lives are often carefully regimented by others and we know where to find them, how they travel and the type of media they consume. The real challenge is getting their attention once you’ve reached them. How can we engage rather than interrupt them and avoid being ignored?
Last year, we interviewed 20 C-level executives at blue-chip companies in Europe and the US to question preconceptions about their behaviour and help us understand how best to engage CEOs with commercial communication. We were also interested in how CEOs react to being targeted within the travel corridor one of the most common environments for reaching them. While we talked only to board-level managers of the largest organisations, what we learned about effective communication provides general rules for effective business-to-business communication. Our research reveals that CEOs are likely to be in a state of partial attention when you try to reach them. This means that although they may appear focused on a particular task, they also have an eye or ear open for anything relevant to them.
Therefore, catching the CEO’s eye becomes theoretically simple. To get their attention, you must say something essential that they can’t afford to miss. The challenge is that any message, commercial or otherwise, must be able to answer the question: ‘Do I need to know this?’ If the answer is ‘no’, then you’ll be ignored. As one CEO said of emails, A quick glimpse and 99 per cent of the time you know instantly you don’t want them.
CEOs don’t browse sources of information, they use them with precision. They are used to having someone else identify and highlight relevant information, giving them summaries of only what they have to know and successful commercial communication copies this approach presenting headlines that immediately demonstrate why something should be read, followed by summaries that distil the important points.
Engaging their attention with unsolicited communication is a particular challenge. The research showed that senior business people are likely to ignore communication from people they don’t know unless they’re expecting it. The easiest way to get their attention is to ensure that information reaches them from within their ‘circle of trust’ those closest to the CEO such as their gatekeepers (e.g. their PA), or trusted advisors and peers.
A colleague was on the judging panel for a marketing industry awards and the winner was a perfect example of the type of communication to reach the CEO via this circle of trust. It resembled an internal-mail envelope sent to a short list of CEOs. When each received it the two crossed-out names that preceded theirs were those of the other targeted C-level executives in their company. This gave them a reason to read it since it had apparently come from inside their circle of trust.
It’s worth remembering that any communication may end up handed right back to people within that circle. CEOs’ attention may not go beyond the headlines in whatever they read; they have a tear-sheet mentality, pulling things from the media or other sources of information to pass on to someone else as you can see from one of our respondents, who said, I tear things out a lot too often according to my team. I usually come back with 20 or 30 things I’ve torn out for somebody to look at.
One way of bypassing the circle of trust is the direct access that mobile communication offers: the Blackberry has become the umbilical cord connecting many executives to their offices and CEOs are no exception. However, although these devices are regarded as a business channel, advertising via them is often ignored, so unsolicited communication on a Blackberry is as unwelcome as in other channels.
Communication targeted at CEOs must clearly ‘state its case’ for the CEO’s need-to-know attention. Overall, what is clear is the importance of understanding not what media CEOs use, but how they use different media and sources of information. And of course, equally important is the consideration of the context in which a message is to be delivered, if we are to appreciate that the easiest way to reach CEOs may not always be the best way to engage them.
