One key component of inbound marketing is to focus the communication on the decision makers, the preparers and the influencers with their individual needs, strenghts and weaknesses. The idea is to get a better idea of who you are communicating to. As a result you develop a micro-positioning towards of all these groups. I kept vague in my e-book, but following a few blog postings in the last days I would like to define it more clearly. Chris Koch of ITSMA pointed out in his blog that there are four groups of CIOs to be defined. This is a differenciation originally by the CIO magazine (I took this shorter version of the first 3 from the Savvy B2B-Marketing Blog):

• Function Head: These CIOs are primarily focused on activities that face the IT organization and are intended to achieve IT operational excellence.
• Transformational Leader: These CIOs are primarily focused on creating change for their enterprise through close partnerships with business operations and cross-functional corporate departments. CIO leadership activities are centered more on process reengineering and automation, not just delivering the basic IT services.
• Business Strategist: These CIOs focus most of their attention on driving business strategy for competitive advantage.
• Turnaround Artist: These are a small, powerful minority of CIOs who defy categorization. You can find the Turnaround Artists in any of the archetypes, but they have one important issue that marketers need to be aware of: they’ve been brought into fix what the business thinks is a broken IT department.

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