How to Talk to the C-Suite and Elite Audiences

Critical Lessons for Being Exceptional and Growing Your Career

Why are so many C-Suite skills learned haphazardly on the job, if you’re lucky, and if you have skilled mentors? Even if you’re a fantastic writer, public speaker, and thinker - you still might miss the mark on communicating to elite audiences - investors, board members, the CEO, and the C-Suite. It’s taken me many years to refine my effectiveness, with the support of many executives and a number of missteps. A few weeks back, I summarized my insights for the Carta Marketing team at their planning offsite. I knew I had to bring my A-Game since I’m such a fan of Carta’s CMO, Nicole Baer, and Head of Insights, Peter Walker.

There are three fundamental truths you need to accept when you are preparing your communication to elite audiences:

• Time is their scarcest asset - They are super busy. They need you to pre-analyze, summarize, give context, be clear about exactly what you need so they can keep moving ASAP. If you send pre-read materials, they need to be delivered 24-48 hours in advance. Elite people often have back-to-back meetings or travel all day, every day.

• They don’t have as much context on this topic as you do - How can you orient them quickly with the minimum necessary information (while having more for their review if they want to click through to a document or read the appendix)?

• They might not care very much at all about whatever it is you want to tell them. How do you think about what matters to them and why? What’s the best format to get your message across quickly and effectively? Can an email suffice? Will a pre-read before a meeting help save time?

Communicating to a Fortune 100 CEO

Some of my best C-Suite comms techniques came from my time at Oracle. While I was there, we grew from 80,000 to 120,000 employees. But Larry Ellison, the CEO, wanted to PERSONALLY approve advertisements and advertising budgets! So, we had to ultra-synthesize everything to maximize his time and get through his email tsunami. We would work on an advertisement, slide, or email sometimes for a week or more to get it right. Tons of research went into summarized recommendations with clear support, deadlines, and context. In email, for instance, we had a specific titling system so that he would understand what was needed even if he didn’t have time to open or read the email. The format included a capitalized context beginning, a due date, and a descriptive topic, for example:
- [APPROVAL BY NOV 1st] WSJ Ad Concepts - Ironman and Exadata
- [AS REQUESTED] Budget Details - Sports Marketing Strategy
- [FYI] Oracle ad Placed in the Middle of Dreamforce (See picture)

We also scrutinized the body of the email and attachments to have the absolute minimum necessary to give him context, answer his questions and support his decision. We once got a $80M budget approved via a ~250 word email with a 10-slide attachment. The time overhead was more than early startups can shoulder, but made sense to reduce demands on his precious time.

5 Pillars of Effective C-Suite Communications

The most essential elements for effective communications sound intuitive but trip up even experienced executives. The critical aspects to keep in mind are:

1. Center on the Strategy: Give context on “so what” and “why”?

   Often, we get so deep into a topic that we forget to keep bringing it back to its broader implications. Executives have many urgent issues, many other concerns, and many team members to support. Start by framing the overall issue and giving the “why." Keep coming back to the “why” and “so what” as you prepare and in your conversation. Help them get the point and move on as quickly as possible.

2. Be Brief and Direct: Provide synthesized insights and clear, measurable impact.

   Although mastery of detail helped so many of us progress in our careers, sharing too much detail can hold us back. As you speak to senior leaders, it’s essential to SYNTHESIZE and SUMMARIZE exactly what the C-Suite member wants - you must KNOW all of the important details but not take THEM through all of it. I had a LinkedIn post a few weeks back that went crazy viral on this topic:
   

   

3. Data and ROI: Focus on business OUTCOMES—what are the predicted revenue results, not just the activity?
   Strong communications to senior leaders should have a brief and clear reference to OUTCOME data, not just activity data. Marketing often falls into the trap of activity (100 attendees or 1000 MQLs!), but how does the activity lead to REVENUE? If you don’t know, can you predict and set a goal? What is the fully loaded ROI of an activity? Executives want to see a few critical data points, a very instructive chart, and support for the recommendation or decision. Ideally, you’ve selected the most critical data and put it in context (how does it relate to last year, last quarter, goal, competitors?). Many junior team members either fail to provide helpful data (that executives need), or provide too much data and make the executive do a lot of work to find meaning and trends.

4. Predictive Analytics: Come with Hypotheses and Recommendations - Executives want you to use your insights to help them drive a better future and inform the decisions they need to get there. They don’t want you to dump the data on them - they would prefer that you, deeper in the context, dig deep to figure out what’s going on, develop a hypothesis to test, and make a recommendation. How can you make sense of the data, not just report it?

5. Depth of Analysis: While the executives don’t want you to deluge them with details, they DO want you to do the deep analysis yourself. They just want you to share conclusions, not the process. (Unless they want to see and go deep together…. Then you better know the numbers and have a great appendix.)

I’ve written two articles that expand on executive communications specific to board meetings: CMO Board Meeting Success: 5 Essential Strategies and 3 Stages of Board Deck Preparation.

One C-Suite leader I deeply admire is Chandar Pattabhiram, he’s currently the Chief Go-To-Market Officer at Workato overseeing sales, marketing and customer success. Previous to that, he was the CMO of Coupa and Marketo. He summed up executive communications eloquently at our recent SaaStr CMO brunch…

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Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.

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