How to Sell to a CIO (and Count the List by Country)

TL;DR

• A CIO is judged on risk, uptime and cost, not on features. Sell a smaller risk or a smaller bill, and name which one in the first line.
• Count first, send second. On 2026-10-21 LeadOcean showed 65,346 mailable people with "Chief Information Officer" in their title worldwide, 37,376 of them in the US.
• The recipe takes about 25 minutes and spends about 26 LeadOcean records. Every count is free.

Prerequisites

• A free LeadOcean account and an API key from app.leadocean.io. Free gives you 1,000 records for life, no card, 5 requests a second.
• The key in your shell as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY.
• curl and jq.
• Optional: Claude or any MCP client connected to https://api.leadocean.io/mcp, which has 13 tools including free counts.

What a CIO actually cares about

A CIO answers for the systems the whole company runs on. When one fails, the CIO is in the room explaining it.

They care about five things, roughly in this order.

1. Risk and security. A new vendor is a new attack surface. They will ask where the data lives and who can touch it.
2. Reliability. Uptime, support response and what happens at 2 a.m.
3. Cost and consolidation. Vendor count is a cost of its own. A tool that replaces two others is easier to buy than one that adds a line.
4. Integration. It must work with the stack already there. A tool that needs a rebuild is a project, not a purchase.
5. Business outcomes. The CEO and CFO ask what IT delivered. A CIO wants a result they can repeat in a board slide.

They do not read feature lists. They read a sentence that touches one of these five.

What kills the deal

CIOs say no for predictable reasons. Answer them in the first email, not the third.

• "We have a standard vendor for that." Do not argue. Ask what happens when a team needs something the standard vendor does not cover.
• "Security has to review it." Good. Send a short note with the data you touch, the auth method and the endpoint list so the review starts the same day.
• "No budget this year." Offer a pilot that fits inside a free plan or a small team budget, so it needs no new line item.
• "Talk to my director." Good. Send the director one paragraph with the count, the filters and the use case.

Where a CIO sits in the buying committee

A CIO is usually the approver for anything that touches the stack, and rarely the person who runs the trial. In a large company the CIO may be two or three levels above the user.

• The CEO or CFO signs when spend crosses a threshold, or when the tool changes how the company operates.
• The CISO reviews risk. In many companies the CISO can block a purchase the CIO supports.
• IT directors and architects test the tool and tell the CIO whether it works. They are often the real first contact.
• Engineering and marketing leads join when the tool feeds a product or a campaign. See how to sell to a VP of Engineering and how to sell to a VP of Marketing.
• Procurement handles terms, and often has a vendor list you must be on.

Write to the CIO as the person who needs one sentence to forward to the CISO. Give them the sentence. If you sell to talent teams around IT, how to sell to a recruiter covers that buyer.

Step 1: Count CIOs by country (free)

Start with a count. It spends zero records and tells you whether the segment is worth a campaign.

leadocean_count_leads counts mailable people by default: verified, catch_all_valid and catch_all addresses. This count filters on the title text, so it matches titles that contain "Chief Information Officer". That includes variants such as deputy and associate CIOs. Run it from any MCP client.

{
  "tool": "leadocean_count_leads",
  "arguments": {
    "title": ["Chief Information Officer"],
    "country": ["US"]
  }
}

Repeat with GB, CA, AU and DE, or leave out country for the worldwide figure. Add employeeRange: ["1001-5000"] to see mid-enterprise only.

Step 2: Read the count for each country

Put the counts in one table before you pick a market. These ran on 2026-10-21 with title: ["Chief Information Officer"] and the default mailable email statuses.

Read three things from this. The US is 57% of the worldwide mailable list (37,376 of 65,346). Every other country is small, so a non-US campaign is a named-account play. And the last column shows how much you would mail blind: in Germany, 1,402 people match but only 358 are mailable.

The industry mix is the useful part. In the US count (run with facets on), Hospitals and Health Care (4,240), Higher Education (2,883) and Government Administration (2,172) lead. In Germany, IT Services and IT Consulting (26) and Motor Vehicle Manufacturing (13) lead. Those are different conversations from a software CIO.

Company size matters too. Of the 37,376 US CIOs, 8,616 work at companies with 1001-5000 employees. That is the largest single size band.

Step 3: Pull a sample from your best region

Pull 25 rows from the region you picked. This spends 25 records. Search is a flat JSON body, filters are arrays, and limit runs from 1 to 100.

curl -s -X POST https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": ["Chief Information Officer"],
    "country": ["GB"],
    "emailStatus": ["verified"],
    "limit": 25
  }' | jq '.data[] | {name: .profile_data.profile_full_name, person_id: .meta.source_ids.person_id}'

Page with the cursor value from meta. One search pages to 10,000 rows, so narrow the filters instead of walking the whole index.

Step 4: Enrich one record to read the career history

Before you write, read one profile. Person enrich returns career history: past roles, education, certifications and awards. Past employers carry no company_id yet.

Enrich takes exactly one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id. Use the person_id a step 3 row carries at meta.source_ids.person_id.

curl -s -X POST https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"person_id": "PERSON_ID_FROM_STEP_3", "reveal_email": true}' \
  | jq '.data.resume_data.experiences[0:3]'

This costs one record. A person we hold nothing for returns a 404 and costs nothing.

Look for the path. A CIO who rose through infrastructure cares about uptime and cost. One who came from a business unit cares about outcomes. One who started in the last six months is reviewing the vendor list and is open to a short call.

Step 5: Write the first line

The first line must show you know the job. Pick one of these four angles and keep the email under 90 words.

1. Risk: "Every new vendor adds a review for your security team. Could this one ship its data map and endpoint list on day one?"
2. Cost: "How many tools does your team run for {job}? Would you want to see which one you could drop?"
3. Integration: "I assume anything new has to fit the stack you have. Here is the one-page spec so your architects can say yes or no."
4. Territory: "I counted {N} mailable CIOs in {industry} on {date}. Want the list?"

The territory line works because it is checkable. You ran a free count, so the number is real. Send it with the count and the date.

Match the angle to the industry. Health systems and universities buy under tight budgets and heavy compliance, so lead with risk and cost. Manufacturers and banks run long integrations, so lead with integration.

These are starting points from how the segments are shaped, not measured results. Do not claim a reply rate you have not measured. Test two angles on 100 contacts each and keep the winner.

Step 6: Save the list as a CSV

When the sample converts, export the list. Bulk CSV export is not on the Free plan. Solo ($97 a month) includes it, and Agency ($497 a month) exports 50k rows a file. The ceiling is 50,000 rows a request and 500,000 rows a day.

curl -s -X POST https://api.leadocean.io/v1/exports \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "cio-list",
    "filters": {
      "title": ["Chief Information Officer"],
      "country": ["GB"],
      "emailStatus": ["verified"]
    },
    "limit": 5000
  }'

Search filters go inside filters, and limit sets the row count. Poll GET /v1/exports/{id} until the file is ready.

You can build the same export in the app at app.leadocean.io. The Exports page has a filter builder, a column picker and a price preview before you download.

What you get

The count in step 1, run on 2026-10-21 with title: ["Chief Information Officer"] and country: ["GB"], returned:

{
  "total": 1373,
  "totalIsExact": true,
  "totalAll": 4147,
  "distinctCompanies": 962,
  "credits": 0
}

total is the mailable count. totalAll is everyone matching without the email filter. The call cost no records.

A search row follows the response shape from the API reference, shown here with placeholder values. Rows carry no addresses; enrich by person_id for those.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": [
    {
      "profile_data": { "profile_full_name": "Jane Doe", "profile_headline": "Chief Information Officer at Acme" },
      "contact_data": {
        "has_email": true,
        "email_status": "verified",
        "email_type": "work",
        "contact_current_experiences": [
          { "job_title": "Chief Information Officer", "company_name": "Acme", "company_domain": "acme.com" }
        ]
      },
      "meta": { "source_ids": { "person_id": "1234567890", "person_group_id": "1234567890" } }
    }
  ],
  "meta": { "count": 1, "nextCursor": "..." }
}

Troubleshooting

FAQ