Cracking the C-Suite Code: What Executives Really Care About in 2025 | Jessica Gilmartin - 1929

What It Covers

Jessica Gilmartin, former CRO at Calendly and CMO at multiple companies, reveals why traditional executive selling strategies fail and explains how C-suite buying decisions actually work in 2025.

Key Questions Answered

• •Decision Authority Reality: C-suite executives rarely make tool purchasing decisions directly. CMOs and CROs at companies with $50M+ revenue delegate budget and decision-making power to team leads who understand technical requirements, integrations, and day-to-day implementation needs far better than executives do.
• •Going Over Heads Backfires: Contacting executives after speaking with their team members creates embarrassment for everyone involved. The executive forwards the message to their team member asking why the salesperson went around them, damaging trust and making the vendor look desperate and unprofessional in the process.
• •Implementation Bottleneck: Budget is not the primary constraint for technology purchases. Companies can only implement two to four new tools per quarter because they have just one or two people handling all implementations, plus every tool must pass through security, privacy, legal, and finance review processes.
• •AI Budget Exception: Every company maintains a separate AI budget even when freezing other spending. Expect short-term contracts, proof-of-concept requests, and simultaneous evaluation of three to four competing AI tools as organizations test solutions without clear success blueprints or established evaluation criteria.