How did you work with the C-Suite, earlier in your career?

Earlier in my career exposure to the C-Suite was understandably in more controlled, scheduled environments. At an analyst level, and sometimes even at a manager level opportunities to directly connect with the C-Suite are few and far between. I am a firm believer that exposure matters.  

It is the responsibility of every leader out there to look for opportunities to uplift and uplevel their teams by giving them the time in the spotlight. I had some notable mentors in the past who believed this as well and worked to create those moments for me. These moments fit into two buckets:

1. Visibility: I was able to sit-in and observe strategic discussions that would inevitably lead to action items. These were incredibly important as this enabled me to see the dynamics between leaders, how effective and ineffective collaborative communication worked, and how strategy transformed into the tactical.  

• My managers would "bounce" ideas off me in the session, putting the focus briefly on me while gathering my tactical input.
• I would be responsible for the meeting notes, sending recaps and documented decisions.
• I would work with my manager on next steps, bringing back updates in follow up syncs.

Some examples:

• Weekly forecast calls
• Revenue reconciliation efforts post M&A
• Strategy meetings on headcount planning for business development, customer success, and support
• Workshops on territory planning for mid-year or fiscal year changes
• Workshops to build requirements on the product roadmap for a new integration between the product and Salesforce

2. Delivery: Presentations on major initiatives. I was either the lead, or co-lead working on a significant project that supported a company wide objective. These would be presented to senior managers and likely a couple members of the C-Suite.

• These would be scheduled in advance by my manager, with pre-read materials sent at least a day in advance.
• I would work closely with them to build the story, and messaging within the deck, to ensure it was clear what we were looking for: whether that was constructive feedback, approval or guidance on next steps.
• There were dedicated sections where I would be the primary speaker, conveying insights to those able to make fundamental decisions.

Some examples:

• The decision on a new customer success platform
• The progress updates and final version of a customer health score
• The read out of newly built AE, SDR and CSM scorecards
• Implementing a novel, predictive model for an ICP
• Building out pro forma analysis on pipeline impacts from competitive pressure

This is just scratching the surface.

I was fortunate enough to have access to client C-suite early in my career at Google when I was part of their ad sales teams.

Within the sales team, I specialized in marketing analytics, where my job was to help calculate and present to clients the digital media ROI they would receive from investing with Google ad products. While in this role, I used some best practices that helped grant me access to the client C-suite, including:

1. Understand what keeps the CXO up at night, and have an innovative solution to solve it

2. Once you have the CXO's attention, use every opportunity to learn more about their business challenges, and continue offering unique insights to help them address these challenges

3. Adopt a customer first mentality for the CXO when proposing solutions, even if it won't directly benefit you, and you'll earn their trust

Understand the CXO's Business Challenges - you need to earn the right to access the C-suite. Spend extra time up front researching what are the CXO's business priorities and challenges. Once you understand their priorities, employ all your resources to create a unique POV or solution to address the solution.

For example, my Google sales team managed health insurance clients in our book of business. I learned a health insurance client's CEO wanted to understand how to pivot their marketing strategy when Obamacare upended their industry. Using proprietary Google search data, I created and presented to the CEO a digital media strategy showing how the company could use different digital media at different parts of the insurance purchase journey to maximize sales while meeting ROI targets.

Grow the CXO Relationship - once you've caught the CXO's attention (see step 1), build upon that relational momentum and continue asking what are other challenges they face and providing unique data or POVs that help address them.

Referring back to the previous Google example, the CEO embraced my strategy, which gave me confidence and permission to ask the CEO and his team follow-up questions around their business strategy and challenges. Armed with this information, I continued to come back with additional insights to help inform their marketing strategy. This relationship eventually led me to becoming the head account executive on the account while also being the analytics lead.

Adopt a Customer First Mentality - you gain access to senior leadership when you gain their trust. Gaining trust is dependent upon various factors, including your minimizing your self-orientation. To help minimize self-orientation, adopt a customer first principle. When problem solving for CXOs, think about what solutions would be best for their company in light of the different business dynamics they company faces and what challenges they're facing, even if the solution may not necessarily be optimal for yourself.

At Google sales, I had a quarterly sales quota. Despite my desire to optimize to against the quarterly quota, I would try to apply a customer first mentality when defining digital media strategies for my clients. This often meant proposing solutions that would net less digital spend initially. But by demonstrating that my solution was optimized to the customer's interest, I gained their trust, and was able to propose and ask for more aggressive solutions that drove greater long term media spend.

My early exposure was around projects where I was working to directly tie work we were doing in the Marketing org to company revenue and lifetime value. It was important to help the company quantify marketing efforts and calculate a true ROI view to help the C-Suite understand how we were optimizing and spending budget efficiently and how we could tie that back to the bottom line. I was given exposure to the C-Suite through this work, gradually learning how to take very technical or complex concepts and distill them into 1 or 2 bullet or key points to make sure that the key points I wanted to make were the primary focus.