In the final part of my three part series on Cybermarketing in Covid time, I catch up with my friend, colleague and client Atri Chattejee of ForgeRock, a late stage start up and leader in Identity and Access Management solution.In part one I talked with Ryan Bunker of pre-revenue Byos.io and in part two with Dean Nicolls of growth company Jumio. 

ForgeRock hit 2020 on a roll. With new messaging and a new website, they were truly ready to help their customers “Access the Future”. Hear Atri describe how ForgeRock quickly took their slogan to heart, even when the future changed for all of us, by helping their customers evaluate and navigate the changes brought on by Covid19. Atri talks about how this helped ForgeRock not only help their customers, but built goodwill, loyalty and future business opportunities also.

For Atri, it’s all about engagement, and how to do it in an all digital world, differently, yes, but also successfully.

For reading, Atri says that the Andy Grove classic, High Output Management, has a lot of relevance especially today! And Atri says that Marc Andreesson and Christopher Lochhead as must follows on Twitter.

You can follow Atri on Twitter , and keep up with the latest on Identity and Access Management from ForgeRock at ForgeRock.com

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In part two of my three part series on Cybermarketing in Covid time, I catch up with growth company Jumio’s CMO Dean Nicolls.In part one I talked with Ryan Bunker of pre-revenue Byos.io and in part three will chat with Atri Chatterjee of late stage company ForgeRock.  

Jumio is on a roll in the Biometrics and Identity Verification space. But what happens when some of your verticals hit a pandemic hard stop, while others accelerate for the same reasons. And what if shows are a big part of your plan? 

Dean talks about having to hit the same goals, but having to change how you get there. And why digital marketing has been the key leverage point for Jumio to survive and thrive through these challenges.

Dean recommended reading includes The Tipping Point and anything by Seth Godin! And Dean also recommends following Jay Baer.

You can connect with Dean on LinkedIn, and learn more about Jumio at Jumio.com 

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In part one of my three part series on Cybermarketing in Covid time, I chat with Ryan Bunker, Business Development executive at pre-revenue start up Byos.io In parts two and three we will chat with Dean Nicolls of growth company Jumio and Atri Chatterjee of late stage company ForgeRock.  

Leaving RSA Byos.io was on a roll. Pre-revenue with a unique hardware solution to remote Wifi security, interest was high. Learn how Ryan Bunker has had to embrace the change brought by Covid and navigate changing user behavior, ITSec priorities, ZeroTrust clutter and more.

Ryan discusses some of the unique challenges of having a hardware solution with no physical meetings to have!

Ryan recommends you follow Kelly Shortridge , Paul Salamanca and the ever present Wendy Nather.

You can follow Ryan at all the usual places, Linked In, Twitter and learn more about Byos.io’s unique solution here.

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“We ‘just’ put together a little blog post about the problem, and it went viral…”  that’s how Tarun Desikan and his co-founders incubated Banyan Security. Now four years later, Banyan is a well founded A-round start up with real products, real customers and reaching real scale.

Tarun, who comes from the networking space, talks about selling fear, whether that’s a good thing or now, and how to get past the buzzword buzz.  

“Zero Trust is a buzzword, but finding a marketing strategy that rises above fear and buzzword is a real problem all onto itself.”

Tarun talks about coming at it as a startup, what it’s like to compete with big guys like Palo Alto and others who have more marketers in their organization than you have in your whole organization.

Tarun talks about using the Zero Trust buzzword to both elevate their message and to level the playing field, getting ahead of problems, and timing the problem right.  Tarun asks, “What’s the difference between a good product and one that is too early in the market? - Nothing!”

Tarun has a lot to say about ramping up marketing after early product market fit segmenting, reaching and targeting 3-types of CISOs, segmenting early customers, targeting and the like, and when to attack the install base category or focus more on a niche and leverage the buzz and how recommends “strong beliefs held lightly”.

Tarun recommends you check out Steven Denning’s The Leaders’s Guide to Storytelling as well as the Lost History of Byzantine and that you follow @SwiftOnSecurity and @RickRubin on Twitter

You can follow Tarun at all the usual places, on Twitter at @tdesikan as well as on LinkedIn and you can learn more about Banyan at https://www.banyansecurity.io.

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Part of sales and marketing alignment is having the same goals. Should “High Quality Deals” be one of yours? Hank Barne’s of Gartner certainly thinks so.  

Hank and I chat about everything from educating buyers, to why the 50K deal is no easier than the million dollar one, and how to align and run your sales and marketing.  

Low quality deals lead to longer sales cycles, disappointment in deployment and churn. And while many of the issues have to do with buyers and their process, as Hank says, 

“if it’s a buyers problem it’s sales and marketing’s problem too.”

And what we really learn is it all comes down to confidence, communications and empathy, both between sales and marketing, and between us and our customers. 

This is research driven heady stuff, but can really change the way you think about pipeline, revenue and lifetime value. The last take away, “get the buyers confident in their ability to buy!” 

I’m guessing many of you will hear this podcast and want to see Hank’s full webinar on High Quality Deals. Watch and Enjoy. Hank recommends getting smart about Behavioral Economics. Books like Decisive from the Heath Brothers and the Challenger Customer by the CBO folks.

You can follow Hank at all the usual places, Linked In, Twitter and at Gartner.com

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In this episode, Axonius CMO Nathan Burke and I revisit his quote, “the next time there is a breach, open your window and you’ll hear the sound of 1 million PowerPoints updating” from our podcast of season 1. 

After the Capital One breach, instead of updating his deck, Nathan asked this question on LinkedIn - “Calling all CISOs and cyber security pros: just for fun, I’d love to know the first time you spot a slide that references the CapitalOne hack”

Well, the post went viral and the comments came in hot and heavy. Not surprising, Nathan is NOT a big fan of this kind of marketing, though he does recognize it’s allure to vendors, it’s pretty clear from the comments that this is a big turn-off for buyers. Instead, Nathan advocates a (return to?) a philosophy of “Value”, and I could not agree more.

I think you’ll find this podcast and interesting counterpoint to the prevailing assumptions around marketing the next breach.

You can find and follow Nathan at LinkedIn.

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Armen Najarian is the CMO of Agari, the next generation secure email cloud.  A relative newcomer to Cybersecurity, that didn’t stop Armen from leading ThreatMetrix as CMO to an $830M acquisition by RelexGroup/LexisNexis.   

Armen says that when he got started in Cybersecurity, he thought, “Wow, this is fricking cool”   

With so much investment and opportunity in Cybersecurity, building the right team is a huge challenge for CMOs.  Armen and I chat about his 3 keys to successful team building and scaling; Attacting, Motivating and Retaining, and he shares his successful strategies across all three of these.  If you’re building a team, you really want to listen in to Armen wisdom and tips.

Armen recommends following Ray Wang, @rwang0; Lora Cecere, @lcecere back from his supply chain days, and the ubiquitous Richard Branson, everywhere!

Armen says he always has LinkedIn fired up, so if you want to follow up with him find him and connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/najarian

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David Gee has over 20 years as a technology marketer - early in his career, David worked on Java and IBM and Sun, productized Yahoo! technology for the enterprise and led the marketing teams for HP's $3bn software and $20bn services businesses.  in 2011 David left big tech to join Infoblox as CMO through their IPO and 4x the revenue, and CMO of Zuora in their run up to IPO and has been CMO at Imperva since January 2018 during which time we took the company private in a $2.1bn acquisition by Thoma Bravo.

Away from the office David’s a technology tinkerer, gadget nut, arm chair Arsenal fan and proud Anglophile.

David and I talk about the IT Security skills gap, the law of unintended consequences and how to get your message to be differentiated and stand out.  Focus on the customer problem seems basic, but as David says, “It’s shocking that we don’t articulate the problem we solve in the eyes of the customer.”   

In the first half of our chat, David says you better tie your value to one of three core issues facing customers.  Listen to learn what those are.

In the second half our our discussion, we talk about how to transition from SMB to Enterprise go to market motions and visa versa.  As a guy who has done this multiple times, David has a lot to share here too.

David recommends Tien Tzou’s Subscribed as a must read for all marketers because of the coming transformation from user-ship to ownership and also @jasonlemkin, @michaeleisenberg and @tientzou as must follows on Twitter.

You can find David himself on Twitter with his handle @davidgee, and learn more about Imperva at Imperva.com .  

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I’ve know Martina Lauchengco for more than 2 decades, and she is one of the smartest product marketers there is.  As the Marketing Operating Partner at Costanoa Ventures she advises the firm’s portfolio on everything go to market.  Costanoa’s security investments include BugCrown, Elevate Security, Kenna Security and others.

Martina and I talk about what it takes to be a successful start-up marketing and what investors look for in go to market approaches and investments.

If you’re 3 pillar messages are “Protect, Monitor, Secure” than Martina will tell you you are in good company, in a bad way!  Martina talks about communicating what you do, how it’s different and why you are different and getting to the next layer down.  We talk about story-telling, why Reddit is a good early radar system for investors to find the buzz, atomic narrative nuggets, category strategy, fitting in and standing out, and how investors check out the “real story” not the one you are telling.

And don’t miss how Martina explains how fundamentally founders and executives don’t understand marketing, creating market pull, positioning, sequencing investments and why spending more doesn’t always equal success, and the alignment and accountability between sales and marketing.

Martina recommends that you check out portfolio member Elevate Security’s website for a shift in messaging that excites an investor. Martina recommends all marketers read Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick and that you follow @BenThompson of stratechery.com .

You can find Martina on Twitter with her handle @mavinmartina and on Linked In here.

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Very few marketers of any kind, let alone Cybersecurity ones, can claim an appearance of the Today Show under their belt, but my guest Varun Kholi of Symantec can.

Varun shares the story of how he got his then small start up Skycure featured on the national broadcast along with some great tips on how to make your story more accessible to a broader audience, and what it takes to succeed in companies as small as a few handfuls and as big as HP and Symantec, and how you navigate your career and change your approach.

You can see the tape of Varun’s Today Show appearance here and hear some of the way he presented to this audience like, “the way not to get sick is to not shake hands with sick people…” not something you’d say on stage at Blackhat, but PERFECT for this broad audience.

Varun recommends that all marketers follow and check out Hubspot’s marketing resources and his two books to add to your reading list are Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing about Hard Things.

You can find  Varun on Twitter with his handle @vk_is and on LinkedIn here. 

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