Are you kidding me?
How would you seek to do business with the CEO? Would you have a different approach for the CEO of one million dollar per year firm, how about for a start-up, versus a 100 million dollar one, versus 500 million plus? How about one billion and up?
In any of these cases, would you consider calling the CEO’s office and leaving a message on voicemail that you will be “in the area” and want to stop by to introduce yourself?
Perhaps instead you would have an inside sales rep or call on behalf of “person X, our vice president” or “director” and state that they “are going to be in your area next Tuesday and would like to stop by for a few minutes to discuss our offering.”
Of course not. It is a ridiculous approach. So why on earth do you do this with CIOs?
This is a technique that is reminiscent of the copier salesperson in the 1980s. I suspect this was probably once taught as an official approach by one copier pioneer and migrated to other organizations.
Do you really see this as a model that will work for the CIO? What if you stratified organizations in the same way that I noted above, would you use the same tactic for every one? This approach demonstrates a real ignorance, a lack of any sophistication into understanding the operations of your prospect organization.
There are so many things that are fundamentally wrong with this approach and for know, I’ll express that it shows that you do not understand how others use their time. This is a very immature approach and it does not even factor in the concept of decision structures and entry points, which I’ll tackle in future blogs.
Every single day, in the pursuit of sales, there is an assault on me by 25-30 organizations. These messages, if thought to be polite, targeted approaches to the top of the IT food chain are instead futile.
This particular message was left at my office this week. (with names and numbers changed to protect the guilty).
Not only is this the wrong approach, in hearing the message it was obvious that is was scripted and the person reading the script had poor delivery, simply by the fact that his word flow did not match any natural speaking pace, with pauses and starts lining up more with the carriage return than they did with the intended message and sentence structure.
Here is the message translated to text:
“Hello, this is Chip S. form ABC Consulting. We are an IT staffing and consulting company and I was going to be in your area next Tuesday and Thursday and wanted to know if I can stop by and introduce myself and see what possible needs you may have in the coming month. Please give me a call when you have the opportunity. 555-1212 extension 270, 555-1212 extension 270. Thanks in advance for your time.”
Chip did not receive a call back.
by Mr. CIO Talks
Mr. CIO Talks has spent the last 20+ years working with information technology. He has been a start-up entrepreneur; worked in a consulting and sales capacity, led IT organizations, along with other responsibilities in addition to CIO. He has held IT leadership responsibility across several industries and in global geographies. He has served in an executive officer role in both times of market growth and contraction. He has served on the boards of several organizations, from board chair to committee chair, to board member; from the publicly traded firm to the not-for-profit, to government appointed. He currently spends his time as a CIO, board member, volunteer, and an advisor.
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