How to sell to CEOs with Account-Based marketing and Customer-Centric Selling?

Co-Authors: Shana Aiach, ex CRO @Heuritech, and Celia Poncelin, ex CMO @Heuritech

This article is written in exclusivity for Serena’s blog

Serena’s note: One of our greatest strengths and pride at Serena is the Serena Squad, an amazingly dynamic community, made of our portfolio’s 500 executives. It’s a unique scheme in a European VC, that thrives in a culture of knowledge sharing. As members, founders and managers have access to a comprehensive private e-library made of actionable & exclusive content (ready-to-use scorecards for recruitment, sales processes guides, cohorts templates, salary benchmark, ready-to-go board deck templates…) as well as workshops hosted by our Squaders and hand-picked specialists from our network. These peers are often at the same stage or one step ahead; they share their challenges on a weekly basis through meetups and Google groups, exchange solutions, and move their organizations forward.

Among the talents that are part of this group, we have the luck to count Heuritech’s former commercial director, Shana Aiach, and marketing director, Celia Poncelin. Throughout the years, they have both brought a wealth of knowledge to their peers on sales & marketing topics. Today, we’re delighted to share their work on our blog.

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Selling to CEOs is notably hard, and for a reason: they are famous for being impossible to reach and having low to zero time to dedicate to your solution. So how to hack their attention and sign the deal you have been dreaming of for a long time?

The purpose of this article is to convince you to focus on a qualitative approach to delivering higher sales results.

Why CEOs could be the right persona for you, even though you don’t think so

When it comes to B2B sales, whether you are selling products or SaaS, the objectives that you want to reach are obvious:

• Maximize the basket size (ARPU for SaaS)
• Maximize the lifetime value of the customer
• Maximize the cash flow
• Minimize the lead time from the first touchpoint to your first sales
• Minimize the Cost of Acquisition (CAC)of your customer

However, in typical sales cycles, you will face some hurdles as your client wants to minimize its own risk:

• Client too wants to maximize his net result and primarily thinks this means spending less
• Client seeks to minimize the risk of choosing you as a partner and will rather engage in small-time periods
• Client wants to be sure he makes the right decision before engaging in a collaboration with a supplier. He may take a lot of time to evaluate the different suppliers, identify risks and benefits for each of them
• Client time is precious, and he does not have time to talk to you, nor does he want to disturb his colleagues. He is reluctant to meet you and introduce you to the right people.

You may think that meeting with low hierarchy members or people who are willing to spend time with you will increase your meetings KPIs and eventually lead to more sales. But this rule is not always true. The truth is that it might put too much uncertainty in your sales process and waste your time

You rely on meeting the right person at the right moment, hoping he will understand why he should work with you. Once the project is financed, you hope that the right people are around the table and manage to find value in your product.

This way will probably lead you to sign one-off proof of concepts with an innovation team, willing to fulfill their own mission (basically engage POCs), but not impacting the business. In the long run, it will damage your company more than anything else.

This is how we started at Heuritech.

As an AI startup in the fashion & luxury area, winner of the LVMH award, we were considered “sexy”. Innovation teams from large fashion companies wanted to meet with us. Some of them had a significant budget to waste and were willing to spend it with Heuritech.

Heuritech offers data-driven trend forecasting for luxury and fashion

However, this strategy was not scalable. Pilots were never followed by long-term adoption, sales cycles lasted for months, and contracts were signed for 3 to 6 months maximum withdrawing any form of cash flow forecast. The main reason is that we were not addressing the right personae.

Innovation teams are often far from the business, they do not think through the value they want to achieve working with you, nor gather the people able to unlock the value from the project. You end up delivering a platform that no one will ever use, and that no one knows what it is for.

This is why we decided to change our target personae from the innovation team or merchandising managers to CEOs or Chief Merchandising Officer for very large companies.

• CEOs do not need anyone’s approval to implement a project
• CEOs have a vision: they want to move forward fast and build long term relationships with suppliers rather than spending time and money on one-off trials
• CEOs can federate their teams in the implementation of a new tool and ways of working
• CEOs think ROI rather than dollars spent

But CEOs are very busy, so how can you have them spend time with you?

Discover the 4 concrete steps to sell to CEOs

If you feel that selling to CEOs is relevant for your business, take the four steps below to get and maintain their interest in your company:

• Address high-value issues and market your product this way
• Drive attention from a CEO
• Use the Customer-Centric Selling process to sign deals
• All your teams should be focused on bringing CEOs on board, not just sales

1) Address high-value issues and market your product this way

CEOs want to spend time on high-value elements for the company, related to the core of the strategy and — when relevant — impacting the stock price.

If you want to be received by CEOs, you need to have a product with high-value benefits: A CEO would rather send his office manager to the meeting if you tell him that you sell sport lessons. However, if you tell him that you sell happiness at work, employee retention and employee productivity, you have a higher chance to be received.

At Heuritech, we decided to move from a communication use case (increase your engagement rate) to a merchandising use case (increase sell-through rate and sales) to be able to sell to CEOs and benefit from all the advantages mentioned. This implied some changes in the product itself, and a comprehensive redesign of the storytelling, sales pitches and internet website.

2) Drive attention from a CEO

Unless you have an amazing personal network, this is not easy to get in touch with CEOs. Inbound hardly comes from CEOs themselves.

Hence you need to set up a strategy to get attention from a CEO. To make it possible, you need to reassure him that he will not waste his time meeting you. You must bring value as soon as you get the first interaction with him.

To bring value to a CEO and immediately position yourself as a partner that will help him make a shift in his organization, personalized content can have a high impact. When prospecting for him, use a concrete problem that you know he has, and show him how your product would help him solve this problem.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM- strategy will help you drive this.

1. Select the companies you want to work with
2. Sales managers should look for the company specificities: business problematics, org’ chart, contacts, key numbers etc. At Heuritech, we have put in place a specific ABM mapping chart for the sales team to fill and discuss with marketing
3. Marketing teams, with sales, think of the best content to produce to bring an answer to the company problematic

Eg: To have a meeting with a targeted luxury brand’s CEO, we generated a specific analysis on their latest bag with key actions that they could do to increase the performance of the launch. Do not be stingy about the information that you share. If this has proven to be useful, the CEO will want you to provide the same kind of analysis for the next key event (and they will pay for it!).

This is an example of a personalized report that was sent by email by the sales manager. Other forms of ABM can include dedicated conferences, webinars, videos, lunches, or dinners. Anything where you will share something specifically relevant for the person you are targeting.

An example of personalized content that was sent to the brand’s CEO

3) Do not neglect the Customer Centric Selling process

Once you get in touch with the CEO, things usually go fast. You have one opportunity and you do not want to spoil it.

There is a low chance that you do not convince the CEO once you meet him. He already knows the value that you can bring him (except if he meets you because he was asked to by someone from your network). However, you need to make sure that all the discussions that you engage in are around the value that you will create for him personally and for his company.

Do not hesitate to simulate the Return on Investment (ROI) that he can have using your product. At Heuritech, we created a ROI calculator where the client can fill his hypothesis and see how much he will earn using Heuritech.

The key thing hence is to drive the path for the long-term relationship and make sure he sees a long-term future with you. This is where Customer Centric Selling ® is key. CCS is a sales methodology that involves all teams (especially marketing and customer success) based on questioning your client in a precise way, through “sales-ready messaging” (templates of questions around the value you know you can bring) so he shares with you the pain he has and you can identify and measure the value that you can bring to him.

Once the CEO is convinced, you need to make sure he embarks on his teams too as they will be the ones making the project real and unlocking the value.

All in all, if you want to sign a long-term contract rather than a 6-months PoC, the key is to make sure that:

1. The CEO of the target company has a vision of how he wants to work with you and he has a clear understanding of how much you will bring
2. He passes over this vision to his team, who are in turn convinced and want to make it work on the ground

4) All your teams should be focused on bringing CEOs on board, not just sales

As you can see, engaging with CEOs is not at all the ownership of the sales team only. The whole team should be embarked with the same goal: having a solution bringing value to CEOs.

• Product teams must be sure they deliver a high-value product
• Marketing should work on the story-telling: create use cases from previous collaborations you had, where CEOs were able to meet their objectives. The full company pitch must be around the ROI that you bring rather than who you are and what you do
• Marketing must produce the best ABM content possible to convince CEOs to meet you

Content is key in Heuritech’s strategy. Here, for example, white papers are being exclusively delivered to a selected audience of C-levels in luxury and fashion, personally invited.

• Customer Success teams must be ready to engage with the client teams to have them adopt the product, find the value as early as possible to avoid doubt
• Tech and operations must deliver a product that is usable by a CEO (no bug, user-friendliness, etc.)
• The CEO of your company himself of course, as he should participate in the first meeting with the CEO. CEOs need to meet CEOs. This does not mean that the sales director should not have direct contact with the CEO, but before engaging in a long-term relationship, the CEO may want to validate that both CEOs get along and share similar visions.

A concrete example with Heuritech: 4 key actions to create a success

Heuritech engaged in collaboration with a tier 1 luxury brand by getting on board the General Manager.

This had a great value-added during Covid. Despite group restrictions, the group did not want to pause the relationship with Heuritech. He made Heuritech an exception to the “cut-all-supplier-budgets” policy as i) he had a strong relationship with Heuritech and ii) he was well aware of the benefits that Heuritech would bring, even during Covid.

To make the relationship last over time, here are some key actions engaged by Heuritech:

• Dedicated meetings with the brand CEOs & teams around very specific business topics (personalized presentations or training)
• Business reviews to prove how much the company earned using correctly Heuritech
• Specific conferences at business schools where the GM of the company & Heuritech share about their collaboration and write together “the success story”
• Annual lunches with both executive teams followed by roadmap meetings where everyone shares their roadmap and the client can explain what matters to him

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We hope this article has convinced you to stop running after quantitative meetings and focus on meeting the CEOs of the company that you strongly believe you can help. You may do fewer volumes, but you waste less energy and sign high-value contracts, and create long-lasting relations.

Plus, CEOs will surely introduce you to more CEOs!

📚 Useful content:

👉 Here is an example of an account mapping and ABM plan. This document should help you plan the prospection for the CEO and his team and identify the right people to include in your sales process. This mapping can directly be implemented in your CRM.

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