Today’s CIOs do more than just keep the lights on.

The role of the CIO has changed radically in recent years. They need to act as both an innovator and gatekeeper. They’re the ones driving an organisation’s digital transformation. And the same person the organisation turns to when something goes wrong.

The Salesforce platform team wanted to reach out to CIOs to show that they understood the complexity of their roles. The aim was to share experiences, stories and tips that could help CIOs succeed.

In this case, the internal customer. We spoke directly to Salesforce’s IT teams to see how they used the Salesforce platform to build products and solutions that allow their 80,000 employees (and growing) to be effective in their varied roles.

We saw the incredible solutions they created (small IT teams were regularly building at record speed). We found out what really mattered to them and gained valuable insights through their experiences. And the key takeaway? We learned how the CIO had helped shift the role of IT from being reactive to a function that drives innovation and collaboration within the organisation.

We already knew plenty about CIOs thanks to our research team. It turned out that EMEA’s CIOs wanted to learn more about the potential of Salesforce. So we asked ourselves: ‘why not draw on the experience of Salesforce’s own CIO?’ Essentially, we needed to learn how Salesforce uses Salesforce.

Today’s IT buyer expects more from content – it needs to be helpful and understand their role. Brands literally need to speak the customer’s language. That was the thinking behind the CIO Playbook – a step-by-step guide of real insights from key IT players within Salesforce.

We spoke to the marketing teams tasked with getting an important message out to CIOs – ‘Salesforce is here to help’. We discovered some invaluable insights along the way. The most requested content from customers was for how Salesforce uses Salesforce. EMEA field teams were using US content. Some teams were finding it challenging to create their own campaigns. These are many of the same issues faced by tech marketers.

At this stage, we were deep in the customer mindset. Now it was time to work our creative magic. We needed to excite our audience by showcasing the immense possibilities of working with Salesforce. Our research and insider insights fed into the entire campaign, as we carefully crafted an eBook, blogs, emails, video content and infographics.

Once our creations were good to go, we packaged our assets into a ‘campaign-in-a-box’, so EMEA field marketing teams could start using them right away. But before we went to market, we tested our messaging with CIOs to make sure we were on the right track. Their insights were invaluable. We re-ordered our content and language, so it directly met the needs of today’s CIO.