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00:00:01
How Cyber Marketing Teams Can Better Understand and Connect to Buyers
121 Plays5 days ago
This week Jeanette Belashov, of Anvilogic, joins the show to talk about smarter and more authentic cybersecurity marketing.
George K and George A talk to Jeanette about:
- Why the lead gen MQL mindset is total BS and hurts both your strategy AND your buyers
- Using selling signals instead of vanity metrics to actually help your sales team connect with the right accounts at the right time about the right use case
- Why marketers MUST get their hands dirty with the product and spend time understanding the day-to-day challenges of practitioners
- Creating hybrid attribution frameworks that actually make sense for today's complex buyer journeys
Jeanette drops some serious science about how successful cybersecurity marketers need to immerse themselves in the community - from Reddit threads to conference conversations - to truly understand what matters to security teams.
As the CISO said: "This has to be one of the most value-filled episodes I've ever been a part of... You could probably do an entire course based on the themes and ideas she brought up."
Check out the full episode wherever you listen to podcasts!
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Transcript
Introduction to Social Selling
00:00:00
Speaker
The one example I'll give is social selling. i talk so much about social selling. And like, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but in cyber, I think that out of my experience here, it's only continuing to grow more More security practitioners, more security leaders are posting, they're talking about their point of view, they're sharing what they want, probably more than ever before. so like, if I don't know if it was like that five to 10 years ago, I'm not sure, because I wasn't in cyber.
00:00:27
Speaker
um But I think that the biggest greenfield for sellers is like, Don't just repost what the company posts. Don't just post when we have some kind of event like, oh, come hang out with us. Go and post, like, storytell what you're experiencing with buyers, right?
00:00:42
Speaker
have a point of view. And I was like, you don't have to copy and paste and you don't have to sound like the company. Sound like yourself. Be a human. I was like, the biggest the biggest you know thing that sellers have to do is build relationships and be human with others.
00:00:57
Speaker
And so I have ah one of our one of our sellers here actually. He's a really, really good example of a social seller. he would do kind of these like storyline posts of like what he's hearing from CISOs in the industry.
00:01:08
Speaker
And I'm like, share that. i was like, you've talked to how many CISOs in the past few weeks? What are they all challenging? Like what's, what's challenging to them right now? What's, what's top of mind for them right now? Other people are going to relate when they read that. And they're going to think, oh, you really get it. Yeah. Like when you reach out to me, I'm going to know that you're talking to other CISOs in the industry and they're relating to you
Introducing the Podcast and Guest
00:01:26
Speaker
too.
00:01:26
Speaker
And I think that goes back to the whole, a lot of a lot of the buyers do their research before. They know people that know people.
00:01:38
Speaker
Welcome back. This is Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks, the cybersecurity podcast that tackles all the messy human bits in cybersecurity. Trust, respect, all the rest. I am George Kay with the vendor side.
00:01:50
Speaker
I'm George Kay, a chief information security officer. And today we have Jeanette Belashov, who is marketer extraordinaire, runs ABM and demand gen at Anvil Logic, which is no stranger to the show we previously interviewed their CMO, Chaz Larios.
00:02:08
Speaker
But Jeanette brings a lot of thought to her marketing. And this was really informative, gets a little bit nerdy, but I think the CISO enjoyed hearing how are the sausage is made on the other on the vendor side.
Jeanette's Career Journey
00:02:25
Speaker
ah Yeah, i had a I had a blast this episode. Yeah, look, man, like the nitty gritty of how this business gets done is like one of my favorite parts about the show.
00:02:35
Speaker
And we've had like a string of like security practitioners on, which obviously i absolutely love. But for once, having someone that understands the business of marketing, like with the same level of detail as a practitioner would on the technical side of the house, I looked at her like,
00:02:53
Speaker
Like there's no such thing quote, technical marketing, but she is research based and a sentiment backed as you want a marketer to be. And I mean, like you said, she's one of Chaz's picks. Chaz is an absolute like a pro sports team. She honestly hired Chaz. It's like a hero. Alex Hurtado is the other teammate who's also amazing. Shout out to her.
00:03:15
Speaker
But honest to God, like this girl really understood how to get to customers, how to prospect and her methodology around thought leadership, driving ah ROI.
00:03:27
Speaker
How do you beat that, George? Yeah, man. Also, just like really humane, like. respectful of practitioners time and attention and really wanting to move the needle on marketing beyond the spray and pray approach. But yeah, let's get into it. It's, it's great. I curse a lot. I was really excited.
00:03:47
Speaker
Let's turn it over to Jeanette Belashev.
00:03:52
Speaker
Jeanette Belashev, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me I'm excited to be here with you guys. Yes, we have been talking about this since last year, but you know, schedules being what they are, we finally made it work. I'm excited to have you here. The marketing nerd in me is very excited for this conversation, but by the rules of the show, you're on the vendor side, which means CISO gets first crack. So over to you, George.
00:04:16
Speaker
Ooh, man. Got it. And it's just, I've been in this spot. Okay. Opening a show again. Jeanette,
Sales and Marketing Dynamics
00:04:24
Speaker
welcome to the show. i get to say it for once. hear you take a little of a different approach when it comes to demand, Jen. And, you know, and just to focus on, obviously, George and I do share research on guests where they come together.
00:04:38
Speaker
um i want to hand off kind of like the main thought, which is around kind more of the thought leadership piece over to George. So what I want to ask you about is you have started your career in a very interesting time ah in all society. Right.
00:04:55
Speaker
ah You started being a marketer right before COVID hit and then you rode the wave through that. Still maintain employment, still doing really cool opportunities the whole time.
00:05:08
Speaker
Still building up, just keeping up on that you know upward spiral. How did you find the resilience to go through that and figure out a new approach to trying to do this whole demand gen thing?
00:05:21
Speaker
Oh, that's an awesome question. um So I'll give you a little bit of like, little bit deeper before even COVID of how I got into marketing. Obviously I studied marketing and I was like, what route do I want to take?
00:05:32
Speaker
um And I was fortunate enough to go to a school that had a co-op program. So I got to go out and get like, just work full time, get experience, but also on the side, I was taking just side gigs and just doing little marketing gigs for small businesses, for people that I knew and getting more into digital marketing because digital marketing was still the buzz back then. Like everybody was about like, Oh, can you be a digital marketer? Can you not write like, what are you doing on social media?
00:05:56
Speaker
um And then it came during my second co-op, i was at SAP and I got the role of digital demand generation. I was like, Whoa, What is this? You know, like, I haven't seen this. since It's not like a traditional um marketing naming convention for a job. Right.
00:06:13
Speaker
And so I remember I came in and it was a team. i was like me, my one of my managers, another manager between like a digital marketer and like demand gen more so to. And it's funny because at the time we weren't really doing what we call demand gen now, but it was called demand gen. It was just like, let's just think about how we can do marketing a little bit differently you know for this subset of accounts right and focus on them right and start to use intent data right to inform which accounts should our sales team go after.
00:06:42
Speaker
and so at that time, they were like building out um their own intent platform with Bombora data. Bombora started getting buzzy at the time. um And then cool COVID hit, like literally right after that, I finished out, I graduated early, instead of going another year with another co-op.
00:07:00
Speaker
And that was like one of the toughest markets to find a job out of college. I remember like, it was so tough. Everybody froze hiring. Nobody was looking for like entry level positions, right? Things like that. Or like, even so, like I had experience, I could have gone into like more of like ah you know, maybe a step up from entry level, because I was working for quite a bit at that time, and still like interview after interview, application after application.
00:07:25
Speaker
um And then I ended up at the company that was at before, which was also a demand gen role. And it was so funny because I came into it and I was like, hmm, I wonder if this will be the same thing that I did there.
00:07:36
Speaker
Completely different thing than that idea of demand gen, but it still was not the true demand gen that I I believe in and that I think is the, you know, the way forward for for marketers.
00:07:49
Speaker
And it was a typical lead gen job. So I'll just put it that way. It was demand gen masked, right? And it was just pure lead gen. Everything was optimized for leads, for MQLs. And I just got to a point where...
00:08:01
Speaker
was like, this just feels so like wrong. i was like, I feel so wrong to like go back on these huge opportunities and tell a seller that this was a marketing source because this person downloaded a content syndication asset 90 days ago.
00:08:15
Speaker
And for sure, this you know VP of L&D or this VP of IT... t was the the champion because they read a 20-page PDF. They might have not even opened, but just because they fell out of form, you know?
Aligning Sales and Marketing
00:08:27
Speaker
The attribution battle. Yeah, which we'll get into later, but that kind of describes how i I just kept like, I was like, I'm not feeling challenged. And I was like, I feel like I'm doing the, like, this isn't right. Like, it felt wrong to go to my, like,
00:08:40
Speaker
best like sellers that I knew and be like, hey, dude, like I'm going to change this opportunity to marketing. And he'd be like, well, why? like I like started the whole conversation. right And so I kept like thinking, like oh why like why why are people doing it this way? Why am I being forced to optimize for MQLs?
00:08:57
Speaker
And that was around the time where Refined Labs started to get a lot of buzz, Chris Walker. um And I remember i started seeing his content on LinkedIn and I was like, whoa, so you're telling me like people aren't optimizing for this stuff. And so all that to say, I think it was my hunger and my curiosity of always like there has to be a better way.
00:09:18
Speaker
so like I have to keep looking for it. So how do I keep looking for the place to work and the job and the leader that's going to give me the freedom to go and do things the right way? Right. And that's how I kind of ended up where I am now.
00:09:32
Speaker
That's brilliant. There's so much. There's so much we're going to get into. i know i like so so, as you know, this is the bare knuckles portion, which is sort of the airing of grievances, which you have started to open a few doors there.
00:09:48
Speaker
So let's use some of the words that you just used. Um, and I want to give you the space to talk about. Or let me say that again, give you the space to air those grievances. So you had this feeling it feels wrong. Let's talk a little bit about that.
00:10:06
Speaker
And then this wasn't the way forward. So it strikes me as you already had an idea of, a for lack of a better term, a progressive relationship.
00:10:19
Speaker
way to do marketing. You also mentioned in there, and we'll get to this also, the friction between sales and marketing's frequently at odds, even though they're both parts of the revenue generation.
00:10:32
Speaker
So pick your battle here, Jeanette. What do you think is like your, your biggest bone to pick with the,
00:10:45
Speaker
where you understand marketing should go and where you see it being quote unquote the wrong way or, or where it has been held back.
00:10:58
Speaker
um Great question. um And my answer might sound quite typical to what you hear out in the industry, but I have kind of a different backstory on it. So I will say the biggest bone to pick I have is the lead gen MQL mindset.
00:11:14
Speaker
Which is like, again, comment, everybody talks about, then they're like, okay, well, what are you doing differently? And I think there's two sides to the story. There's one part that matters to the marketer and there's one part that matters for your buyers. So like this goes to you, George, as like a CISO, right? Like what is what is your buyer experiencing when they are interacting with your brand, when they are interacting with the campaigns that you're targeting them with, when you're serving content to them?
00:11:38
Speaker
um But the reason think that's the worst thing is when you optimize for um MQLs or you optimize for leads, right? You're basically boxing yourself into a situation where all you want is numbers rather than touch points or engagements or relationships with buyers that are human at the end of the day, right?
00:11:58
Speaker
So like you're basically reverse modeling like all of your all of your programs and your planning to be like, how can I spend this much money to get this amount of leads so that an SDR can cost one that just filled out a form. Like you're to buy? Like, let's go, dude.
00:12:12
Speaker
You want a demo? I want to book you right away, you know? um And you got you get a ton of those.
Advanced Marketing Strategies
00:12:18
Speaker
It's really easy to source a bunch of leads like that and be like, oh yeah, they did this and they did that and they're ready to go.
00:12:24
Speaker
But what does the conversion look like that over time, right? And are you making that person that's engaging with your content happy are they having a positive engagement with your brand or are they going to be like that's so annoying like why would they call me i've never even heard anything about them i just read some random blog somewhere and i know this is super prominent obviously in cyber too that was like one of the biggest things that um me and like chau's my leader right now like clicked on when i first met her she was like yeah people have been burned by bad marketing and sales for so long here like we need to change something
00:12:55
Speaker
And so I think that although it's an over that like over said grievance for marketers, I think it's still very relevant, but not a lot of people talk about how it's bad for like, it's bad for your your strategy, but it's also bad for your buyers. And in the long term,
00:13:13
Speaker
they're just going to resonate and be like, okay, that brand and that company did this to me. And like, I don't want to like, why would I want to read something from them? Why would I want to walk by their booth and go talk to their team at a trade show or a conference? Right. So I think that's my, that'll be my answer for that one.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's really humane, right? Because you keep asking yourself, like, how would I feel if I got this way? um there's a There's a little bit more to peel there, which I think George is going to get to.
00:13:42
Speaker
um Yeah, I'll save my question. We'll turn it over back over to you, George. Yeah, that was like a lot. And I'm so thankful, by the way, that like I've been doing this show for like three years. It was like there was a lot of just like marketing speak in there. And I'm like, oh, man, this is going to be. No, he likes it when we get nerdy. He's really he's here for that.
00:14:06
Speaker
It's pretty cool. Anyways, I appreciate that. My apologies. So the question, you got to explain to me, using this kind of more, and I love what you're saying, like taking a more i authentic approach to creating relationships, which then drive demand generation. that's That's a beautiful logic.
00:14:25
Speaker
But then what it means is less numbers, right? Mm-hmm. So how then do you quantify ah ROI in this approach? right Because in my experience as a buyer, spray and pray seems to be the cyber industry's weapon of choice.
00:14:42
Speaker
who You are talking about something that goes completely against the mold that pretty much everyone else is doing. yeah How do you convince your CRO? How do you convince your board?
00:14:57
Speaker
Great question. I could talk about that for an hour. Let's schedule more time for it. um But I'll try to answer in a pretty concise way. So instead of optimizing for leads and optimizing for how many people can you get to fill out a form,
00:15:13
Speaker
We use basically a hybrid attribution framework, right? Where we can see when people come and they convert on our website or they come through anywhere. we They have a how how did you hear about us form? we can be like, where did you guys come from?
00:15:26
Speaker
Let's figure out. but we do optimize everything for people to come to us to the website and book a demo. But how do you how do you quantify the ROI before that happens? Because those numbers aren't super high compared to...
00:15:38
Speaker
running a spray and pray approach and being like, Hey, I bought a hundred leads from a content syndication vendor, or I wrote, I ran a lead gen program on LinkedIn and got a crap ton of them to come in. Or I spent six figures on an RSA booth and scanned every, every carbon based, whatever that walked by. is so weird I know.
00:15:58
Speaker
um So we optimize, we have retribution, which we'll take, we can talk about later. But also what we do is we measure the touch points and the engagement via what I like to call signals that we serve to the sales team. And we say, Hey, we've identified which accounts are your priority. We know which are in our TAM, which are in our SAM.
00:16:16
Speaker
Based on these account lists, let us pick out the ones that are showing this level of engagement that are showing this level of engagement. And when you go into those accounts, you can actually see all these signals of like, what is that account doing?
00:16:29
Speaker
Right? Are they engaging with our campaign for a certain like a sim that we support? Let's put it that way. Are they engaging and showing intent for certain keywords that tell us that they're looking at Splunk or they're looking at Sentinel, for example, right?
00:16:44
Speaker
um And so we use signals to inform our SDR outbound machine and make it way easier for sellers to go after warm accounts and without like spraying and praying random leads that filled out a form, but rather saying, hey, this account has done so much with us. They've engaged this much.
00:17:02
Speaker
Here's exactly what they've done so that you can customize your approach when you reach out to them and it's timely for them. And the content is also personalized to them. So like if I knew that you were a Splunk shop, I wouldn't reach out to you and be like, here's everything we do for Microsoft Sentinel shops, right?
00:17:19
Speaker
Like if I had that intel and I saw that engagement, I wouldn't Why would I waste my time and tell you about a completely different offering that we have? Right. um So we try our best to create those signals. So it makes their job just easier.
00:17:31
Speaker
And it makes the accounts that we're reaching out to not be hit like out of the blue, because we know they've come to the website, they've engaged with things, they've followed us, they've attended an event somewhere. They've registered for detection dispatch. Like there has to be some kind of threshold, I think, before you start that approach. And that also protects from spray pray as well.
00:17:52
Speaker
So hopefully that answers your question. It's a little bit, it's different. I don't know if a lot of people do it that way, but that's how we do it. Yeah. I mean, for the audience, what you're talking about is what is now commonly called ABM or ABX, which is account-based marketing or sort of dynamic exchange.
00:18:10
Speaker
And just to be clear to the practitioners listening, they don't actually have like de-anonymized data on you. yeah This is like the closest thing to radar that you can develop, right? So the story of marketing was like, oh, we have websites now. So if we just convince people to fill this in, we get the data to do the outreach. That was like the old school way.
00:18:33
Speaker
And now what you're talking about is, well, one, ain't no one filling out that form anymore. Because the my behavior changed. And then like to what can we use to personalize the approach and I will take a second here to read it an email that was shared in ah in the CESA society I can anonymize it but this is literally I'm reading it word for word.
00:18:56
Speaker
oh Hi there. Following up on the chat request you sent while our team was away. I don't know. This may be a chat bot or something. I wanted to follow up to see how we can assist you with, I kid you not, this is word for word, bracket, specific inquiry or solution we provide, end bracket.
00:19:16
Speaker
Do you have any time on Wednesday? Right. So literally the field didn't get populated. But like what you're saying versus Splunk versus Sentinel, like I could attempt to sell you on all the things we do. Look at all the things on the cart.
00:19:29
Speaker
Or I can try to suss out based on your behavior. And again, for our listeners, by the time they hit your website, most companies have done 70 percent of their research already. Right. They've either asked their friends they've done They've gone to Google.
00:19:43
Speaker
They've gone to Gartner, whatever. So you're really not trying to like convince them on the website. You need to start like measuring that experience. so There's nothing new. No, but there's nothing new presented in those. When those emails get sent to you, yeah the problem is there's no narrative or education that comes with it. And I feel like demand gen should come with net new information that becomes compelling.
00:20:08
Speaker
when i don't know. Go with that. No, 100%. I agree. And this kind of leads into... Demand gen is one part of the go-to-market engine, right?
00:20:18
Speaker
We can do everything right, but if the outbound engine still has a spray-and-pray approach, if they're not empowered with the right messaging and with value-led content, you're going to get emails where you're not getting any new information, you're not getting any compelling information, and the use case they're talking to you about is like, I don't give a crap that you're telling me about that. that um'm like I'm CISO. Why are you telling me something that matters to like someone completely different, right?
00:20:43
Speaker
So like are you catering that message to them? And so a big part of my job as well, and that I focus on is, are we are we helping the sales team and are we providing the sales team assets, content, experiences, messaging that is not fluffy. It's not buzzwordy. It's straight to the point. And also enough of it to cover our bases to where when they see these account signals, they're like, okay, like I can kind of tell that this account might have this SIM or this repo, right? They might have
00:21:14
Speaker
I did some research. They do have a tech engineering team. So I know there's practitioners there. I can reach out to the practitioners with this message, with this program. I can reach out to the security leaders with this. Like, I think it's, that's a really, really important thing that sometimes marketers, I feel like don't talk enough about.
00:21:30
Speaker
They talk a lot about like, yeah, we'll write emails for, you know, our sellers and we'll write messaging. But like, Are you actually like walking your team through and telling them like, hey, here's this program we have built. Here's how you can leverage it with that specific persona.
00:21:45
Speaker
Here's this piece of content that would be really, really good on your third touch point with a VP of InfoSec, right? Here's here's something else and like training them on it, not just handing it off and being like here, but it's like, here's how you can go use it so that when you go and reach out to them, that person on the other end isn't going to be like,
00:22:04
Speaker
Okay, don't care. Cool. Heard that before. give me something that's useful,
Effective Social Selling in Practice
00:22:08
Speaker
right? That makes sense for them. Yeah. I mean, this is a it's all really refreshing. I have this sense when I talk to marketers that most want to be here.
00:22:19
Speaker
Most have your understanding
00:22:25
Speaker
But they're running into some sort of cultural inertia. Either somebody's whispering in the CEO or the CRO's ear. I don't know if it's a VC or an old buddy or they're just trying to copy. And so it's like I was telling some folks, all the marketers are living in 2025 and they know where it needs to go.
00:22:44
Speaker
they're running programs from 2018, not because they want but because they
00:22:50
Speaker
but because There's just some like tractor beam kind of like holding them back, right? Somebody's just got the CEO convinced this is the way to do it or whatever. So um as we close out this section, what is your favorite bone to pick about that friction that occurs between sales and marketing?
00:23:09
Speaker
a That's a good one. I know we only ask good questions. and just Spoiler alert. know No more questions here. um i think my biggest bone to pick with the friction is When like sales thinks that marketing is coming up with some, like, just because they're marketing, they're coming up with some crazy idea and like, they're just doing it. Cause like they're marketers and they think it's fun. And I'm like, no, there's actually thought behind a lot of things that we do. I promise.
00:23:40
Speaker
Like there's, there's a strategy behind it. And then one example I'll give is social selling. I talk so much about social selling and like preach and correct me if I'm wrong, but in cyber, um,
00:23:52
Speaker
I think that out of my experience here, it's only continuing to grow more, more security practitioners, more security leaders are posting. They're talking about their point of view. They're sharing what they want, probably more than ever before. so like if I don't know if it was like that five to 10 years ago, I'm not sure because I wasn't in cyber.
00:24:10
Speaker
um But I think that the biggest greenfield for sellers is like, don't just like repost what the company posts and just post when we have some kind of event like, oh, come hang out with us. go and post like story tell what you're experiencing with buyers right have a point of view have a point of view and i was like you don't have to copy and paste and you don't have to sound like the company sound like yourself be a human i was like the biggest the biggest you know thing that sellers have to do is build relationships and be human with others and so i i have a one of our one of our sellers here actually is a really really good example of a social seller
00:24:45
Speaker
He would do kind of these like storyline posts of like what he's hearing from CISOs in the industry. And I'm like, share that. i was like, you've talked to how many CISOs in the past few weeks? What are they all challenging? Like what's, what's challenging to them right now? What's, what's top of mind for them right now Other people are going to relate when they read that and they're going to think, oh, you really get it. Yeah. Like when you reach out to me, I'm going to know that you're talking to other CISOs in the industry and they're relating to you too.
00:25:09
Speaker
And I think that goes back to the whole, a lot of, a lot of the buyers do their research before they know people that know people. So if you know, on internet that you're, you're, it's just like, yeah, I love it. I love it. i So first of all, that's how this guy and I met is just yeah basically on social. And then, um, you know, I, I filled a black hat suite without sending a single email.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah. it's ah ah it's a long tail process. And I think people don't want to see that quick win. It's like, Oh, how many leads came from your fucking LinkedIn post? Yeah. like Zero. The answer is zero.
00:25:49
Speaker
That's not how you measure it. That's not what it's for. yeah. but um Well, this is, ah, we can keep going, but we can't. So we're going to take a break here and we will be back for brass tacks.
00:26:02
Speaker
um
00:26:05
Speaker
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00:26:25
Speaker
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00:26:41
Speaker
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00:26:54
Speaker
Now, back to the show.
00:26:59
Speaker
But here's the thing. You can tell as a buyer that goes to multiple shows, you're being sold a routine. It's like going to a comedy act that, you know, the tour is happening and they're testing out the material.
00:27:11
Speaker
You're seeing it in different cities, but it's the same routine. So like, who is authentic? What you're talking about, like that draws attention. um And I want to start with some basics here. And this is more a question for people.
00:27:26
Speaker
folks who are thinking about getting in marketing or folks who are early in their careers as marketers, right? How important is product research or at least understanding your core client products when creating content, right? Because i think theres there's a slight, um we'll say disconnect.
00:27:48
Speaker
Between folks who are especially technical, either on like, you know, the solutions engineering side, ah the SOC side, or even like the CISO side, if you're little bit more on like the technical engineering kind of background folks.
00:28:02
Speaker
Right. And they don't, they absolutely have, you know, zero patience for marketers. Right. There's no relationship there. Right. They don't want to deal with them. And I feel like because there's ah that there's this tension, there's this misnomer that marketers don't do research on products, so they don't actually know what they're talking about.
00:28:24
Speaker
There's I don't know, it's kind of vapid. How important is it to dispel that and show that you actually do understand the products that you're trying to sell? Super important. I love that question. I actually, that's a really, really big point. I think that I've learned. i remember when i hit my one year at Envilogic, I was sitting down on a journal, like what are my biggest learnings from this year?
Rethinking Marketing Metrics
00:28:48
Speaker
and especially like, I mean, being in cyber for a year, it feels like 10 years, you know, like, yes. It's like you go to a startup and you go to cybersecurity, you're like, crap, like I'm gonna need like Botox and like sooner than I thought, you know, wrinkles from work.
00:29:04
Speaker
a quantum zone. Yeah. Yeah. um But one of my biggest learnings being in cyber has been, you cannot be a successful marketer here and you cannot do things differently unless you get down and dirty and you go in and you learn and you talk to people that are doing the job day to day that are going to be using your product, understand their pains, understand what they hate, what they love, even if it's about mark like how they've experienced other cybersecurity vendors and marketing and sales. Right.
00:29:32
Speaker
But to to your earlier point like for me it was really tough in the beginning i would like go to some of our um some of our scs and I'd be like I'd be like what the heck is this? It was like ah all these acronyms in cyber. I'm like, why does this matter? Like, why is this coming up on a customer call?
00:29:49
Speaker
And it's like not being afraid to go and ask those questions and also just go and do your research on your own, right? See what's out there. Like Google stuff, go on Reddit. I've learned so much on Reddit. And then the other piece of that is like, you need to go and familiarize yourself with the product. What are like what exactly does the product do? Not just like high level messaging, but like go and understand how it actually works when you click on this. What happens? Right when we're talking about this feature, how does that person going to experience it when they're in the product?
00:30:17
Speaker
If you don't get that and if you don't spend time understanding your market, understanding your buyer. how are you even marketing? So like the question to me is like, how is that even like a, like that shouldn't even be a question to like, do like any marketer. Like if you're not doing product research and if you're not understanding and taking time for that, I feel like you're just, you're not doing like, you're not doing your job to be honest. Like maybe I'm a little bit not able to say it that far, but like,
00:30:46
Speaker
But it's like, if you don't know how the product works, do you even market, bro? and No, but I think you there are a few things there. First of all, I'll say, you know, we've interviewed your boss, Chaz. She's amazing. And she believes in that. So she's given you the time and space to do that. Sometimes.
00:31:05
Speaker
Very. If the CMO isn't there and I don't know if the culture isn't right, they're not going to let you have that curiosity or you got to do it all on your own time. And it's not like kind of part of the job of learning the thing that you're trying to to market.
00:31:21
Speaker
um I have a ah ah few. Rapid fire questions for you because they're all related and ah I am half of the show, so I'm going to cheat and like squeeze three questions into one. so um All right. I want to, i these are brass tacks, right? So actual recommendations from your experience. And i want to focus on the alignment between sales and marketing because the way you have built it only works if they're both on the same page. So ah talk to us a little bit about like how you get sales and marketing working together rather than ah in sort of pulling in opposite directions.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, a great question. i think there's a lot that has to do with like executive alignment. You need to have leaders that are kind of top-down aligned and are like, okay, we understand this approach. We're aligned on it. And that kind of comes down to all the sellers.
00:32:15
Speaker
And then a lot of it, I think, is relationship building with the sellers and like taking the time... To not just like Slack over or email over something new that came up or some new signals that we're serving in our platform for them to be able to prospect better, but to take the time and be like, hey, we're going to walk you guys all through exactly how you use all the tools that we give you, not traditional like training. and we're going to give you live examples of how you can use it. And then we're going to pass it over to you. We're going to do it together, right? And create this culture of like,
00:32:45
Speaker
Let's figure it out together, but also ask me questions and give me honest feedback rather than just being like, oh, yeah, Jeanette, this is great. I hopefully will use this. um So I feel like a lot of it is is relationship building to alleviate that alignment.
00:33:01
Speaker
But I feel like without the executive alignment, especially like even at the start, if you don't have from the CEO down, even like what is your what is your tam, for example, right? Like, what are the accounts that we're going to align on?
00:33:12
Speaker
Are we being clear on the ICP is marketing and sales going after the same accounts like a lot of that? as an IC you can do and I can implement, but if that's not happening top down on the other side, it doesn't really mean much, you know? Yeah. I think that it's like a two-sided approach from like what I can do as an IC versus what needs to be done from an executive perspective perspective.
00:33:34
Speaker
Okay. The next one is if not MQLs and leads, then what? signals, selling signals, I'll call them, right? So we um use a platform called HockeyStack where we're able to actually show these account journeys to our sales team.
00:33:51
Speaker
And instead of optimizing for only these MQLs, right, and being like, hey, team, here's a bunch of MQLs that aren't ready to buy, but you should go call them, old mindset. Here are all the accounts that we've identified that we aligned with you guys on, right? We know your top accounts. We also know which ones are in our ICP, which ones are in our serviceable, addressable market.
00:34:11
Speaker
Out of those accounts, here are the ones that on certain levels of engagement and how you should prioritize. So when you go into that account, you know who your buying committee is and you have messaging for all those different buyer personas, as well as content to amplify that message, as well as value-led programs that you can reach out with and not and build that trust, not just be like, hey, let me tell you about Animalogic.
00:34:35
Speaker
Read this PDF. But hey, here's something that's going to be valuable to you and your team. Here's what we do to give back to the community. i'm a human. You're a human. I want to give you something that's worth your time and not just waste your time.
00:34:47
Speaker
Nice. Okay. And then last question is, let's talk about attribution. Hmm.
00:34:54
Speaker
I'm just going to leave it at that. Like, I'm going to give you that space to talk about that attribution, because, again, for our listeners who may not be aware, it used to be that, well, and still is in many shops, ah sales and marketing always wrestling. Right. So marketing pays for a big event.
00:35:10
Speaker
One of those leads that gets scanned actually takes a meeting that seller wants sales, wants credit for that against their. Revenue target marketing is like, well, you wouldn't have had it if it weren't for us. And then and there's like all this like kludgy math in the back end of Salesforce that is not worth talking about because it's fucking bullshit anyway.
00:35:30
Speaker
But people are just fighting. It's like, why are these two sides fighting? Like, it doesn't make any sense. Anyway, I was at a shop that abandoned and MQLs and we decided like, quote unquote SQL, sales qualified leads. It was like sales and marketing were get behind this idea that the metric that mattered most was meetings because that's what was going to operationally move so moves, move something from a casual conversation into a sales cycle.
00:35:55
Speaker
And that actually alleviated a lot of stress once we were like, Oh, we're not like trying to translate marketing leads into whatever leads. We just sort of, yeah anyway, it was a big, it was a big mental shift, but I and think it worked. But so what are you guys using in terms of thinking about attribution or why it it matters or it doesn't?
00:36:15
Speaker
For sure. I'll answer first of what we use and I'll give you my point of view. So we do measure SQLs. We do have MQLs too. I think that MQLs, we don't optimize for them, but MQLs are a good guardrail to have as long as your scoring is set up in a very like smart way. If you're like scoring is set up to a point where someone actually like did enough to be like a decent contact that account and that account has surged up as like, hey, they're showing a lot of engagement.
00:36:41
Speaker
That MQL can act like as a guardrail to identify people that we have in our database, right? That have done enough with us. And if you have the right approach, you can do that. But we don't, like, it's just kind of there to be there, if that makes sense. so SQL is what we basically measure across marketing, across sales, across partners, across SDRs, things like that.
00:37:01
Speaker
um and That's like our that's like our indicator. right That's like our North Star of like where does everything start. basically and But my point of view on all this, I see everything as
Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:37:12
Speaker
guardrails. You need to have the numbers because there's always going to be people outside of revenue operations, we'll say marketing and sales combined, that need to see trends of numbers. They need to see how they're tracking. And that's important to look at.
00:37:25
Speaker
But to me, attribution is like the biggest like load of BS credit game ever. Like I could care less if an SDR booked a meeting that I have been warming up an account for like six months before that. And they attended like four podcast episodes and came to Black Hat and they viewed our demo video and then SDR booked it.
00:37:48
Speaker
That's awesome. That's what I want to see happen. Right. Like, I don't care to be like, nope, marketing source that one. Like, I think that's so backwards. Like, why do we think about where the credit goes at the end versus thinking about how do we optimize to create frictionless buyer journeys for our target accounts?
00:38:09
Speaker
So they can engage with us over and over and over again, and either come to us on their own and be like, hey, now I'm ready. I'm a hand raiser. Like, I'd like a demo because I've done all this stuff and I've researched you guys.
00:38:19
Speaker
And I've attended your podcasts. And I've also saw you guys at Conf and here and there. Like, why don't we think about what is the secret number to all those interactions versus...
00:38:30
Speaker
What do we need to do to make sure that that person books that meeting at that time? Right. I just I think it's so backwards that a lot of us had to think that way in the past. Agreed. And it's backwards. People still think that way as well. So it's like it's also not a realistic measure of, as you said, the experience.
00:38:47
Speaker
It's not everyone is everywhere. They're talking to their friends like what you how are you going to measure that? Like, yeah, it's impossible. marketers, is it a quantifiable metric that CROs hold you against?
00:38:58
Speaker
I mean, yeah, for sure. They'll hold you against like, are your SQLs like, are your, for marketing, are your inbounds up to par of what they need to be? So like if someone projects that, like if we we we have a revenue ops on director too, it's like, there's a projection of like how many inbounds should we projecting for the year in order to stay where we are right now. Right. So like those kinds of numbers are still looked at and like, they're an important thing to look at, but if they dip for some reason,
00:39:25
Speaker
I don't know when it's like a fire. It's like there's there's typically reasons for why it dips. And it's like, let's look at like what's happening behind the scenes right for that to happen. But that shouldn't be like you're leading like your your North Star, the only thing you want to do. It's like as ah as a team, are we building pipeline with the accounts that we are aligned with together between marketing and sales?
00:39:46
Speaker
RSDR is booking meetings with accounts that marketing is actually working on at the same time, right? Is that engine working in lockstep? I think those are the two most important things. Yeah, I would say, George, um the way that they're doing marketing, it's sort of near impossible at the inbounds or like rando Gmail accounts.
00:40:06
Speaker
um Whereas before when it was just like, oh, I'm going to, my God, I hate content syndication. I'm going to pay this organization to like publish this white paper against their quote unquote qualified list, which is like spam a database. And then you get randos who are like, I downloaded this white paper. And then you get this big lead file and you're like, they love us.
00:40:26
Speaker
Go get them. That's high bullshit. I see from content syndication. I literally like. it's such a It's such a racket. It's such a racket. It's dumb. Anyways. All right. but Enough of me. CISO, over to you.
00:40:40
Speaker
okay So my question is this, and it's a question for. new marketers or again, folks who are trying to make their way up, because you're you're kind of you know making your way up to a senior level now at this point, you've gotten there, right?
00:40:55
Speaker
How much time should a marketer spend interacting directly with buyers or prospects? And I mean, even to the point of like like if not directly marketing to them but some kind of a friendship at least or like you know a relationship where you're sharing knowledge and it's friendly and when you run into each other it's like it's cool right like there's a lot of like very cool peer-to-peer relationships that happen where There's exchanges of information. It's kind of like the the the whole point of going to a conference is actually this.
00:41:27
Speaker
It's interacting. It's getting together, just grabbing it and like, hey, you're pretty interesting. You work somewhere cool. What's going on there? How are you guys doing this? Right?
00:41:38
Speaker
So how important is it to foster those relationships early in your career and start building them and start building your market intelligence you know based off them as well?
00:41:50
Speaker
It's great question. Obviously, like depending on what industry you're moving into, I'll give you my my experience in cyber, which has been one of my favorite experiences, i would say. i went to Conf this past year.
00:42:02
Speaker
um i was filling in for someone. So I wasn't supposed to go to it, but I went there. And I remember I was like, we were shorts. We didn't have enough people at the booth at the time. There was a lot of traffic. And I just started like, people were walking up and I'm like, okay, like Jeanette's going to have to step in. Like the sellers are all busy. You know, all the SCs are busy giving demos.
00:42:20
Speaker
And like, you just start talking to people, you start asking them and telling them about obviously, like they ask you questions about your company, but you start asking them like, well, what do you do? Like, what are your biggest challenges telling about your day-to- day to day? And that was that was really eye opening to me in person to see that and to interact with security practitioners.
00:42:36
Speaker
But one of the biggest reasons I think I love working in cyber and that's grown my love for it was actually one of the first things I did when it came EnvoLogic was I was asked to build a biweekly like workshop, live workshop program aimed for security practitioners. So I i kind of market it as for security practitioners by security practitioners. Right.
00:42:56
Speaker
And so we have security practitioners come on, protections during dispatch. And a lot of the times there's a specific topic around what we're we're going to discuss, but you hear their story, right? And like early on, because I didn't come from a cyber background, it was very, very hard for me to like articulate and to sit there and be like, okay, like I understand what you're going through. Like I understand what you're saying, but it was what good challenge to have. Like I would sit there and talk to like We have like a threat hunting engineer and like he's extremely technical, so knowledgeable, and he would explain things to me that I would have to go back and Google and research.
00:43:32
Speaker
But that was the fun of it. like I would sit there and i'd be like, okay, I have no idea what this means, but I'm going to go figure that out so that I can talk about that better later on and I can relate to more people that are in your role. um But i to answer question as a whole, i think it's super important. It's like kind of said this earlier, I think you might have dropped off the off the link, but it's like if you're not you're not spending time, product research is one thing, you asked that earlier, but if you're not spending time talking to your buyers,
00:43:57
Speaker
reading Reddit threads. Like if you don't to talk to someone, go on Reddit, you know, like you can read all the things they hate about anything and everything. That's like one of my favorite things to do actually is just to go down like detection engineering redit Reddit threads.
00:44:10
Speaker
um If you're not doing that, like you're not doing your job. Like how are you doing your job? You know? I love it. I love it. I, we have said repeatedly on the podcast, it's curiosity and initiative are going to get you pretty much 90% the way there.
00:44:25
Speaker
um And I have also said that, I my ideal marketing sort of milieu culture is one where you're basically doing the anthropology of your customer.
00:44:38
Speaker
Right. It's not just like I have all the answers and I put it on the billboard and I try to do song and dance and get your attention. But I have to try and understand you and ah the thing about your booth duty is that you did not say hey i'm with anvil logic i want to see a demo it wasn't as it wasn't that question it was an open-ended question about them not yeah you know a yes or no question or when we show you this demo all right so you we started with your story coming out of college so i want to end there and ask Given what you understand now, right, and what we've said about how most marketers are living in the now, but they're trying to like, drag others up to the present, what is your advice for college kids who might be interested in marketing, thinking
Reflecting on Innovation
00:45:22
Speaker
about it? And so not just what we talked about, but...
00:45:26
Speaker
Things you might've thought you missed out on or trends that you're now seeing? Like yeah what's, what's that advice to marketing? That's a great question. i would say i'll give the advice of what I, why I did first and the second piece, but just go and like,
00:45:42
Speaker
do your research and get your hands dirty with it. Like, don't wait to get out of college or don't wait to have like a program to go get a job. Like, go, go do side gigs, go tell a small business that you can do X, Y, and Z marketing for them. Right? Like,
00:45:58
Speaker
start Start little. I started on social media. I started like... I was watching like YouTube videos on how to set up like meta campaigns. Literally. like I was like, how do I go into campaign manager and do this? you know And it's like, how do I create pretty content so that it looks good for this? like I did something for like a cabinet business once. Literally kitchen cabinets.
00:46:17
Speaker
And it was like... Paid for my books, right? So I was just trying to make ends meet there. um But the second thing I would say is The biggest shift that's happened since when I was in college versus what's going on now is there's this obviously boom of LinkedIn influencers.
00:46:32
Speaker
There's a boom of information. You can find loads of information on the internet, on YouTube, on TikTok, like a bunch of creators. But LinkedIn, from a B2B marketing perspective and B2C, there are so many creators out there with a lot of different points of views. And so my biggest piece of advice is go follow as many as you can, read up on their content and start to kind of chip away at which content do you read? And you're like, that's interesting. Like, okay, like I, why are they thinking of it that way? Like, oh, that's cool. They do that every day at their job. And that way you can kind of trickle down, understand where in marketing do I want to focus my time and where do I want to start out in? Right.
00:47:12
Speaker
And like you have it at your fingertips. It's no longer, um it's no longer like a shooting in the dark kind of game where it's like, I'm just going to go find a general marketing job and just hope that I learn as much as I can.
00:47:25
Speaker
a lot of like new, you know, entry level positions have, have the power to be able to decide, do I want to do demand gen? Do I want to go into marketing operations? Do I want to go into product marketing and spend a year with security practitioners or go learn how to code, you know, like everything is at your fingertips. And if you want it, you can get it just have to put the work in for it, you know? Wow. What a great, yeah. What a great place to end.
00:47:52
Speaker
Goddamn Jeanette. This was awesome. Thank you for your time and your attention. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for geeking out with me. I can talk about this stuff for hours, but I think there's there's more we can talk about in the future and there's more cool things that will keep happening. So that's what will keep us on our toes.
00:48:08
Speaker
All right. Well, yeah, thanks for the time.
00:48:14
Speaker
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00:48:27
Speaker
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00:48:42
Speaker
I know it's hard for me to like resonate sometimes when I'm listening to like the big security vendor speakers. And I'm like, you have been doing it for a while, but I'm like, y'all are playing the same playbook you've been doing for a long time. And I'm like, the ones that are doing the most innovative things are the ones that have nothing to work with. Creativity thrives in constraint, right? Exactly.