Boardroom Insiders
Executive Engagement Made Easier

In recent years, the buzz in B2B marketing has been around account-based marketing, or “ABM.” Today, enterprise B2B marketers are looking to executive engagement to bolster ABM efforts. With buying decisions for professional services and technology increasingly influenced by senior executives, everyone is vying for relevance with the C-suite. The situation calls for marketers to move beyond personas, which while useful, are mere educated guesses as to what might resonate. Marketers and sales people who consistently succeed at getting a foot in the doorhave one thing in common: they do their homework on prospects’ interests and business priorities before reaching out.

Addressing this need is Boardroom Insiders. The company provides enterprise marketers and salespeople with executive insight via its rich database of 30,000 executive profiles. The profiles dive deep into executives’ past roles, current business strategies and challenges, educational background, hobbies, and other interests.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Sharon Gillenwater, CEO and Co-Founder of Boardroom Insiders, explains how the company’s products help marketers and salespeople establish relevance and drive engagement with executive-level prospects.

Could you give us a little background on Boardroom Insiders and the factors that led to the company’s conception?

Back in 2006 I was consulting for a well-known technology company and the office of the CEO tasked me with creating 200 executive profiles of prominent Chief Information Officers.They were interested in a lot more than their biographies—they wanted to know their business priorities and challenges, their hobbies and who they knew and admired. The profiles were a hit with my clients, so in 2008, I decided to compile them into a subscription-based database product. In 2010, my co-founder Lee Dem by joined me and we set out to scale the database and take it to market. At that time, only a handful of big tech companies were exploring C-suite sales and marketing. So, we were way, way ahead of the market—like years ahead.

Today executive engagement has become critical and we have emerged as the leader in this space. COVID accelerated this, as B2B companies looked to find new ways to engage their customers at a time when in-person events and meetings couldn’t happen.

Whether in person or over Zoom, those looking to successfully engage C-suite leaders must first understand who they are and what they care about, from a business perspective. If you don’t have something to say that is personalized and relevant, you won’t get their attention. It’s that simple.

Please tell us more about your solutions and their benefits.

Our original product is BI Signature— an online database of 30,000 profiles of Fortune 500 senior executives. It is a subscription-based product with a powerful combination of filters. Users can search by company, executive name, keyword, industry, region, hobbies and more. So if, for example, you want to find all the Fortune CIOs who are interested in golf, you can do that with a couple of clicks. Our customers can also request new profiles and get them delivered within 48 hours.

Our other product, BI PRO, is proprietary software that extracts insight about specific audience segments, such as women CFOs in the northeast, Fortune 100 CMOs, Financial Services CEOs, etcetera. It’s like a persona but better, because it is based on real people. BI PRO is popular with account-based marketers and event marketers because it gives them instant insight into the exact groups they are targeting so they can confidently designtheir events and communications for maximum relevance.

One of thecore value propositions of our solutions is time to value. Customers can quickly get up and running on our solution within 15 minutes or less. Also, its user-friendly interface makes it easy to immediately start accessing executive profiles and insights.

How do you help your clients when it comes to account-based marketing?

We help our customers understand and track what’s top of mind with the executives they are targeting right now. We look for “in their own words” content from interviews and earnings call transcripts and incorporate it into our profiles. We also keep them updated to reflect new developments and initiatives. ABMers and the sales teams they support use this information to tailor their strategies for engaging their most important accounts. For example, if a CIO has said that they will spend the majority of their budget on solutions that enable employee self-service, a smart ABMer will narrow their communications to focus on solutions that do just that, instead of highlighting absolutely everything they have to offer.

What does the future look like for Boardroom Insiders?

We’ve been successful selling into large enterprises, but today we are witnessing midsize and smaller companies talking about the value of executive engagement. So, we’re shifting our own sales focus to include more small and medium sized companies. We’re excited about this, because our executive insight, if leveraged correctly, is a great equalizer for smaller firms going up against the big guys. It can really give them a real competitive edge.

We are also in the process of adding all Fortune 500 board members to our database, including non-executive board members such as academics, lawyers, and retired executives who serve on Fortune 500 boards. This move was driven 100% by our customers, who are seeking more avenues to influence deals and better access executive decision makers. UsingBI Pro, our customers can map their own executive team against these board members and uncover and leverage any actionable connections.