A template for Selling to CTOs

Whether you’re just building out your executive GTM motion or whether you’ve got an established system that you’d like to benchmark, here’s an opinionated template for building a strong pipeline of executive sales for [dev|data|platform] tool companies.

I was chatting with a dev tool founder the other day. Super smart, really technical. They were getting good PLG adoption of their tool and they were asking for advice on events to build relationships with engineering leaders to help build out an enterprise motion. 

I dug in and quickly realized they didn’t have any thought leadership to map their product to top of mind pain points, clear executive value propositions to make an executive prioritize their adoption, or a nurture funnel for anyone they met that wasn’t ready to drop everything and change their OKRs to add their product this quarter.

I suggested they save the money and time and spend it building systems to intrigue, captivate and then delight the executive audience before they blew time and money on events that would be very unlikely to drive sales.

A template for executive GTM

There’s nothing wrong with running, attending or sponsoring executive events to get insights into your hypotheses for value propositions that will land. Indeed I plan to write a piece recommending that as a strategy for accelerating your learning if you’re in the early stages of building an enterprise GTM motion for a new offering.

However, if you’re looking to drive sales from attending executive events, here are the three essential elements that you’ll want to have in place.

1. Content

1.1 Executive Value Proposition

As a CTO my job is to deliver business value quickly, consistently and reliably. The software I deliver needs to meet or exceed user expectations consistently, and I need to attract and retain an excellent team at an affordable cost to build and manage the apps. I also need to keep operating costs under control, be ready to identify opportunities for innovation and have an answer for the board any time there’s a new trend in software development (cloud, apps, platform, web3, LLMs, etc).

How do you help me to do the above? That’s your executive value proposition.

It’s often a different value proposition than the one for Individual Contributors, and if you don’t nail a compelling executive value proposition, any money spent on marketing or sales is going to provide a very poor ROI.

1.2 Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is a way to tie your executive value proposition to educational content that engineering leaders will be excited to consume. It’ll teach them something new and relevant and will help them to deliver more value and sound informed and smart when talking to their boss or the board.

Depending on the maturity of your market segment, you might need to create thought leadership that; can create interest in a new category, that differentiates your offering when they’re selecting between vendors and/or that will allow you to replace an existing vendor by providing a compelling reason to switch.

Thought leadership should be the kind of content that engineering leaders want to engage with. And other than a logo and a tagline, it shouldn’t mention your product directly. We’re smart. We know that if you take the trouble to write about observability, you’re probably got an enterprise SaaS that we could purchase. Just focus on concise, compelling, differentiated content that solves executive level pain points and we’ll ping you if we’re interested.

2. Nurture

Once you have the content in place, the next step is putting in place a nurture funnel. Far too many companies invest in demand gen and events without having a well thought out strategy for nurturing the leads when they get them.

Most well qualified leads won’t buy from you now. They might be interested and excited, but they already have projects in flight and OKRs for the quarter. They might even have large scale projects prioritized for the next year or two if they’re moving to the cloud or back on-prem, so you need to find a way to stay top of mind until they’re ready to add something new.

The goal of a nurture funnel is to deliver value to your prospects while positioning you as experts in the field, and to stay top of mind so you’re on the short list when they decide to investigate new projects for next quarter or pick a list of vendors to evaluate.

Generally you want to deliver some kind of relevant content every 2-4 weeks and have in-person get togethers every so often (a quarterly breakfast, drink up or dinner usually works well) to build the relationships while connecting them with other engineering leaders to expand their knowledge and their network.

3. Leads

Once you have nailed the positioning and a strategy for nurturing prospects, you’re ready to start adding leads to your pipeline. For executive sales motions, you need to experiment with a combination of thought leadership content, paid ads, newsletter/podcast opportunities, online and in-person events/experiences - along with any other differentiated growth hacks that will capture attention and support your positioning.

I’ll be digging much deeper into each of these topics as time goes on, but make sure you’ve nailed your though leadership, executive value proposition and your nurture funnel so that when you invest in generating leads, you can maximize the ROI.