How you show up: Leading insights for C-suite executives
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
C-suite executives can be a tricky group of stakeholders. Learn how Heide Tierney, head of market intel and customer insight at Enova International, has shown up and lead insights for C-suite executives in her various roles.
During this 2025 Quirk’s Event – Virtual Global session, Tierney gave three ideas that will help research professionals in their daily responsibilities but also in their careers.
Session transcript
Emily Koenig Hapka
Hello and welcome to the session, “How you show up: Leading insights for C-suite executives.”
My name is Emily and I'm an editor at Quirk’s.
Before we get started, let's quickly go over ways you can participate in today's discussion. You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session, and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions for the presenters.
Our session is presented to you by Enova International. Enjoy the presentation.
Heide Tierney
Hi, I'm Heidi Tierney, currently head of market Intel and customer Insight at Enova, a FinTech company.
Today I'd like to share with you the top 10 ways to create and deliver relevant insights and analytics to C-Suite executives, even if you don't report directly to them. But first, a little bit about me.
I spent the last 15 years reporting to the C-Suite, regularly interacting with them to influence their decision-making. I grew into my positions from being an analyst, to a manager, to an executive senior role. Many people have asked me, how do you do it? How did you build a department from one employee to 50 employees? How did you influence the C-Suite to change company strategies?
Well, I showed up and today I'd like to share with you what I've learned along the way.
Today, this presentation will give you three ideas to help you in your everyday responsibilities, but also in your career. One, maximize your research and insights. Two, deliver C-suite relevant insights. And three, advance your skillset and your career. No matter what your level or your role, you can become an impact player.
There's three ways I'd like to think about leading insights for C-suite executives, customers, content and communication. Let's dive deeper into each of these with examples.
Let's start with the customer.
We typically think of our customer as our consumer, but today I'd like to think about the customer as our stakeholders, the chiefs and company investors.
Each C-suite executive has their own responsibilities and it's important to understand what matters most to them. The CMO is interested in building brands, marketing effectiveness and staying relevant in culture. The CFO is focused on performance drivers, including the ROIs. The chief sales officer needs action. The president is looking across the business for growth.
Let's consider this example. A new consumer target.
I had the relevant consumer insights that would guide marketing strategies and communications, but I had to influence the president and the CFO that this was worth investing in.
So, what mattered to them?
EBITA, Earnings Before Interest and Taxes Adjusted. This was a stated company financial goal, as it is in many companies.
So, I worked with our strategy department to take my ideas for the new target and size the prize in EBITA. It was $250 million.
Considering this was a quarter of our current EBITA, I got their attention and support for more resources to make it happen. You might say, ‘well, I don't report to them.’ No, but your cross-functional team does. So, it's important to think about these customers.
In addition to these customers, and you're trying to understand what matters most to them, do your research on their key stakeholders. The company investors, importantly, listen to your accompanying earnings calls and public releases.
If you're not public, what is the story they're telling? Do you have insights that could build or even change the story?
And after the call is done, don't hang up before the Q&A. That's when you'll learn the most. What is the impact on tariffs? Do you still have room to grow with your current customers?
After the calls, I proactively worked on the questions the investors were asking. The result, I earned a see at the table in the investor relation prep meetings. My insights and analytics influence the stories and quarterly calls.
Another approach is to do your research on the board of directors. Find out what matters most to them. For public companies, research them.
One of my board of directors had apparel retailers, although we were a beverage company, what would they want to know from this apparel company? They wanted to know about a seamless customer experience and the digital transformation. Therefore that's what I started working on. I prioritized those topics.
By the way, there's also forms and conferences where your company is speaking, whether you're private or public.
In food and beverage CAGNY it's a very popular one. And here's a little secret. You can even use CAGNY to learn about other companies, so you're ready to interview when the time is right.
The second pillar is content.
Now that you know your customers, how will you show up with your content? First, provide clarity to your story.
One of my brands was focused on the Hispanic consumer. I had the aha insight with the videos to build empathy, but I knew I needed to hook the C-suite. So, I started with the percentage of profit this consumer contributed to our company. Then they wanted to learn and hear more.
You can also provide clarity to the work you're doing.
When I was an individual contributor on the supplier side, I created an impact tracker. Not just the number of projects I worked on, not the money I spent or the people I service, but the impact I had on business initiatives.
This also helps for your performance reviews and ultimately your career progression.
Next is connect. Integrate insights even if you don't own all of them.
I remember sitting in a focus group listening to consumers talk about our brand. I wasn't hearing them speak to our brand like we did internally. So, I looked into our brand health.
Sure enough, we were slipping on these key attributes.
I could have stopped there where my responsibilities and my job kept me. But then I referenced business performance. We were losing share during the time when these attributes mattered most.
Then I checked our media effectiveness. And I looked into our merch analytics. The competition was beating us.
I didn't own analytics, but I knew they were important to the story. I connected these insights to reignite the brand strategy, moving sales back to green.
As for my career, six months into my new job, they added “Integrated” into my title. And it all started with a few comments from a focus group.
What makes an insights and analytics department successful at a company? It's having courage and being an independent voice.
I always reported through marketing, but one day I shared insights in a meeting that the CSO, the chief sales officer, found to be very compelling. And this inspired me to develop an insights guide for planning that was valuable for all departments.
I'll be honest, the chief sales officer was my biggest challenger at first. Why should he believe my insights?
So, I started to deliver independent presentations. Presentations that weren't just inputted into a marketing story, but a document that told the full story in an independent way.
From a department standpoint, one of my new team values was ‘truthtellers.’ Good or bad, you can count on us to tell the story. That's what we were known for at the company.
By the way, that chief sales officer became my biggest champion.
For the first time in the history of the company, a non-sales employee, me, won the company of the year award impact player, all because I had the courage to have that independent voice across departments.
Next is currency.
Often, we get asked immediate short-term questions. What are the opportunities and threats we should be thinking about this quarter? When you set the stage for today and show them how to plan for tomorrow, you are leading insights for C-Suite executives.
In the past. I've created the world we live in today. In my SVP role, I spent 50% of my time on the three-to-10-year outlook painting a picture of where we needed to go. This also applies to your role in the department.
What are your responsibilities today? What do you want them to be? How can you start to deliver in a way that supports your tomorrow?
When building my department, I not only consider the resources, the people and capabilities today and next year, but also in the three to five years.
And guess what? When you deliver a five-year plan, they think of you leading this five-year plan.
And that's how you build departments leading with C-Suite executives.
So, now that we have our customers and we know what content we want to include, let's talk a little bit about communication.
Conversation is the first one. How do we show up in conversations?
When I was newer in my position as a director, I remember being in a meeting and the CMO said, “just ask Heidi for the facts. She has so many files, she's like a librarian.”
What? I do not want to be known as a librarian. From then on, I made it a point to give my point of view during the moments that mattered.
Interestingly, a few years later when I was building my team, I was back with that same CMO in a meeting talking about performance reviews. And he said, “yeah, they know the data, but I really don't hear them speaking from their point of view.” Aha, I changed his perception of our department.
Preparing for the conversation is important. We spend so much time perfecting our reports and our PowerPoint slides that we don't give much time to the actual meeting. The goal here is to change the conversation with your POV.
Curiosity, this is one of my favorite ones.
We spend so much time, as I mentioned, perfecting our PowerPoints that we show up in the meeting only prepared to stay on script. But what are the big questions the business should be talking about?
This ladder here is from “The Art of the Question.” I use it every single time I presented to the C-suite in the monthly meetings.
Yes, we have our ‘what,’ ‘so what’ and ‘now what’ framework to focus on. But we also need to encourage curiosity.
What if we created a new product that we don't have in our portfolio today? What if the future of retail looked like this? How might we, what do you think about? And the important thing to note here is that you, as the presenter, don't need to have the answers.
You are the one who's asking the thought leader questions.
Creativity, this is the fun one. You know what? Here's the thing. We can be marketers too. We need to be creative when we deliver our insights and analytics.
Number one, we need to humanize it.
Here's an example with my stakeholder, my customer, who was a president. She was very into the numbers. She was very sharp in her work. So, I put together this multicultural opportunity framework, and it was spot on.
It had all the data I needed in there to tell the story, but right before I pressed send, I realized I had nothing in there about the actual person. I had all the numbers, I had all the data, but I didn't have any pictures, I didn't have any videos. I had nothing to bring this consumer to life.
So again, humanize it. Don't forget, in all the numbers and the data, to bring it to life.
Two brand it. I really believe in this one.
I'll give an example of just a simple newsletter.
You send out a newsletter, you call the newsletter. You send out a report, you call a report. But all of a sudden, if you call it something that people think sounds interesting, they want it, like the “Insights Insider.”
I started an Insights Insider with the C-Suite executives. And all of a sudden people wanted to know what the Insight Insider is? That sounds a lot more interesting than a newsletter. Lastly, scale it.
So, there's things that you can do that if you have the right framework, you're humanizing it and branding it, you can replicate it and scale it across the organization. This is definitely one where you can have fun.
And lastly, but importantly, is champion. You need to be a champion of your insights to inspire enterprise-wide action.
We already talked about marketing and sales. Now I'm talking about how it impacts other departments like HR, corporate affairs and M&A.
Let's go back to my first example, a new target with the EBITDA opportunity. If we are going to go all in on this target, we needed it to be across the organization. We needed to change our HR policies, how we supported this group externally with corporate affairs and how we invested in M&A activity.
For example, this target opportunity analysis led to my recommendation of an advisory group that led to the creation of the very first business resource group. It paved the way for so many others at the organization.
This opportunity analysis also uncovered gaps and what consumers wanted, questioning what our employees were looking for, changing our employee policies.
When you champion insights across the enterprise, it changes the way we run the company.
And guess what? It also builds ambassadors. You build insight ambassadors and ambassadors of you.
To recap, there's three ways to lead insights for C-Suite executives. It's all about knowing your customer, providing the right content and tailoring your communication.
So, I ask you, how will you show up?