Notes for owners · Business growth
How to advertise to CTOs and CIOs
The CIO signs and rarely shortlists. Reach the engineer who runs the evaluation, be easy to verify in the security review, and know the renewal date.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 8 min read
Nobody replaces a working system because they saw an advertisement. That single fact should decide how you spend against this audience. The opening comes from a date: a maintenance contract expiring, an audit finding, a migration that failed, a new plant, or a new chief information officer reviewing every vendor in her first six months. Your job between those dates is to be a name the engineer running the evaluation already knows, and a company whose documents survive a security review without three weeks of back and forth.
Five people, five different documents
The chief information officer signs, and rarely shortlists. The evaluation is run by an engineer or a manager, the list reaches the top with two names on it, and by then four other people have asked for four different things.
Each of them wants a different document. The engineer wants the architecture, the API notes and a sandbox. The CIO wants the escalation matrix, the uptime record and who else in the same industry runs it. The CFO wants capital against operating expenditure and what happens in year three. Information security wants your certifications, your data location and your answer on the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Purchase wants the rate held for two years.
An advertisement can reach the first two. The other three are reached by documents, and the documents arrive when your advertising has already worked.
What gets read, and by whom
LinkedIn, but not the way it is usually bought. A CIO in Bengaluru or Pune scrolls for a few minutes between meetings and reads posts by people they know, not by companies. Advertising against the job title alone will reach a large number of consultants, jobseekers and people who added the title to a headline. Advertising against a list of named companies reaches fewer people, costs more per person, and is the only version worth running.
Peer conversation, which is where most shortlists actually begin. A CIO asks two other CIOs what they use. Community events, user groups, the practitioner track at a conference and the industry association meeting all matter more than any media buy, and they cannot be bought, only attended.
Their own team. The engineer researches on a laptop at eleven at night, reads documentation, watches a product walkthrough on YouTube, and asks on a forum. Documentation that is public and complete does more for this than any campaign.
System integrators and resellers. For a great many Indian mid-market buyers, the technology decision is made with an existing integrator in the room. If that integrator has never heard of you, you are not on the list, whatever the CIO read last week.
Six tactics that fail here every time
| The tactic | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| "Book a demo" advertising to a job title | Filled in by students and jobseekers, and by nobody with a budget |
| Cold calls to the board line | Blocked, and the caller's number is noted |
| A gated whitepaper followed by four sales calls | The document was worth reading; the follow-up taught them not to download the next one |
| Fear creative about breaches and downtime | Read as marketing by people who handle real incidents, and filed |
| A discount to close this quarter | The buying cycle is annual and your discount moves nothing, except your credibility |
| A testimonial from a company one tenth the size | The first question is always who runs this at our scale, and the wrong answer ends it |
The trigger is a date, not a mood
Nobody replaces a working system because they saw something. The opening comes from an event, and most of those events are on a calendar somebody already holds.
The annual maintenance contract expiry. The last date of the financial year, because unspent capital budget disappears on the thirty-first of March and fresh budget is not usable until the new year is approved. An audit finding. A failed migration. A compliance deadline. A new plant, a new branch, an acquisition. A new CIO in the chair, which is the single largest opening, because a new CIO reviews every vendor in the first six months.
For example, imagine a Bengaluru firm selling a warehouse management system to mid-size logistics companies. Its best advertising month is not the one with the biggest budget. It is the eight weeks before the renewal dates of the eleven companies whose current contracts it has taken the trouble to find out about.
What to spend on instead of reach
Write the documents that survive a security review before you need them: where the data sits, who can see it, how access is logged, what happens to the data when the contract ends. In India that conversation now includes the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and your customer's compliance officer will ask about consent and about data held outside the country. Your legal adviser should check what you publish on this.
Publish the architecture, the limits and the pricing logic. An engineer who cannot find your limits assumes the worst.
Name your people. A CIO buying from a small firm is buying the three people who will answer the phone, and a team page with real roles does more than a brochure.
Put your case studies in the same industry and the same size. One story from a comparable company beats twenty logos.
What to do next
Write down the twenty companies you want as customers. Find, for each, the person who would run the evaluation and the month the current contract ends. That sheet is your media plan, and most of it will be filled by asking rather than by buying data.
If your enquiries from this audience are arriving but dying after the first call, the problem is usually the handover rather than the campaign. That is what the free audit reads first.