Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing

Building Cyber Community with Luke Tucker

In this episode, Luke Tucker, VP of Marketing at Lightspin, joins Maria and Gianna to discuss building cyber community.
 
To begin, Luke unpacks his cautious optimism for the current market and shares why startups need to celebrate even the smallest wins. Prior to his current position, Luke held leadership roles in marketing at HackerOne as well as an executive role in the community side. As his very first VP marketing role, he is focused on making the lives of end users and cloud engineers better. Lightspin understands that the most efficient way to secure a cloud is to think like an attacker, then build like a graph. This is how they make their mission, to best support cloud engineers along every stage of their journey, possible.
 
Community is a popular topic within cybersecurity lately. Luke explains Hackerone’s flywheel model. It is the outliers on the fringes of communities that need to be focused on at all times. Having moderation, best practices, and onboarding experiences early on will help to instill company culture. Luke defines community as people who consistently show up to collaborate together on a common cause. It took a physical location to really collaborate on the platform. Luke recounts what it was like seeing the security team face-to-face with the hacker community. It all began with allowing collaboration as bounty sharing and reward sharing within the platform itself. Thankfully due to some of the early adopters, Hackerone was able to build some momentum As the business began to scale, it became necessary to stay up to date with the CFO. The next step was asking users what they wanted to see next on the platform. The majority of users were there to further their careers, so they were given Hacker 101 and CTF. Luke shares that the majority of these hackers just want to have a safe space to share their discoveries with other people. Another key component of community, and where a mission really accelerates, is to give your community members the stage.
 
Before wrapping up, Luke encourages listeners to join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society.  Finally, he engages in a fun guessing game and reveals what career he would pursue outside of the cybersecurity field.
 
Links:
 
Follow Luke on LinkedIn.
Keep up with Hacker Valley on our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.

Meeting SDR Goals as a Marketing Leader with Cami Ragano, VP Marketing at SightGain

This week, Cami Ragano, VP of Marketing at SightGain, joins Maria and Gianna to share her expertise as a marketing leader managing SDRs so that SDRs over-achieve their goals!  In fact, Cami’s SDR program has helped SightGain achieve significant increases in: 
 
Demos Booked: ⬆
Demos Complete: ⬆
Pipeline Growth: ⬆ 
 
From Washington DC to Australia to London, Cami has led digital demand generation and brand campaigns that touch nearly every corner of the globe. With a focus on start-up cybersecurity SaaS enterprise software, she has built a career around innovative digital marketing campaigns and customer-focused events that drive revenue. Prior to joining SightGain, Cami was a marketing and business development leader at Cybrary, Endgame, Invincea (acquired by Sophos), and Risk Analytics—where she developed go-to-market strategies that disrupted and dominated the cybersecurity industry. Cami graduated from Radford University with a B.S. in Communications specializing in Public Relations and a minor in Marketing. In her free time she enjoys spending time with her wife and three golden doodles in Richmond, VA hiking, exploring, and brewery hopping.
 
Connect with Cami on LinkedIn.
Visit the SightGain website or the company LinkedIn page. 
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Creating Digital Experiences from Prospect to Upsell with James Kessinger, CMO at Hushly

This week, Hushly CMO James Kessinger joins hosts Gianna and Maria to talk about the "bowtie" funnel and marketing's new(er) role in creating upsell and cross-sell opportunities. They discuss ABM, the unique buyer in cybersecurity, and tying experiences across the digital journey. James also gives them a peek under the hood into how Hushly uses their integrated experience cloud to market to marketers like us, and shares the data that Hushly has aggregated from their platform on ABM for cybersecurity buying.
About James: James Kessinger has been the CMO at Hushly over the past 5 years.  He’s expanded his responsibilities and taken on the title of COO with overarching responsibilities for Marketing, Customer Success, Sales, Partnerships, and Revenue Operations. James has built a 20+ year career working at global enterprise technology companies in hardware, software, security, virtualization, SaaS and Cloud. He has held leadership and executive roles across marketing functions such as brand, demand generation, corporate marketing, digital marketing, segment marketing, product marketing, services marketing, along with field and partner marketing where he has led both large marketing organizations and smaller teams.  
Connect with James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbkessinger/
Reach out at james [at] hushly.com 
Grab the Hushly cybersecurity marketing report, and learn more about how Hushly helps marketers improve demand generation and ABM results: https://www.hushly.com/solution-cybersecurity-marketing/
Learn about the Cybersecurity Marketing Society Party for Marketers at RSAC2023 here: https://cybersecuritymarketingsociety.com/event/party-rsa-2023/
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Demand Gen: The Most Misunderstood Marketing Title

Welcome to Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing, where we explore the hottest topics in cyber marketing, interview experts and help you become a better cybersecurity marketer! In this episode, Tom Kish, Director of Growth Marketing at CardinalOps, joins Maria and Gianna to discuss demand gen and more!
 
To begin, Tom unpacks the difference between the titles demand gen and growth, both of which he has held at various points in his career. Demand gen is a time-consuming role and requires balancing quick wins with long term strategies. Typically, a marketing team will come in to build some foundational elements before demand gen enters the scene to scale up. Since demand gen is so closely tied to pipeline, it is also easily and quickly measured. Tom shares the benefits of working for organizations who were operating with a tight budget and how he has carried that mindset with him to larger organizations. While the goal of demand gen is to create opportunities and revenue, the process of getting there is still part of demand gen, too. There is no one size fits all when it comes to demand gen. Marketers should be constantly adding new things to their toolbox and know when (and when to!) not apply them.
 
Next, Tom shares the strategies which he has found most successful in his demand gen roles. They all come back to finding the proper balance among the fundamentals goals of creating demand, identifying demand and capturing demand. A successful framework not only finds the proper balance of these things, but ensures that they all flow together seamlessly while covering all of their bases. Checking your social engagement is also really important. Tom’s team has designated people who manually identify the individuals who regularly interact with their posts. Building off this, he elaborates on the lack of innovation and creativity he often sees in marketing as a result of the rise of automation and data. His most successful marketing campaigns have been those that were totally creative and were not based on previous engagement.
 
Before wrapping up, Tom reveals his favorite thing about being a member of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society now that he has been a member for two years. Finally, he engages in a fun guessing game and reveals what career he would pursue outside of the cybersecurity field.
 
Links:
 
Follow Tom on LinkedIn.
Keep up with Hacker Valley on our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Building Relationships with Security Practitioners in Cybersecurity with Samara Williams

In this episode, Samara Williams, Senior Manager of Security Engineering at New Relic, joins Maria and Gianna to share her insights on building relationships and making strategic partnerships in the cybersecurity industry. She talks about the importance of trust and transparency in building successful partnerships, and how working with vendors and other industry players can help organizations make informed decisions and stay ahead of emerging threats.
Samara also shares her perspective on the role of VARs and how they can serve as an extension of a security team, providing valuable feedback on tools and partnerships. She emphasizes the need for VARs to understand an organization's goals and pain points in order to provide the best possible solutions, and stresses the importance of transparency in the VAR-buyer relationship.
This episode provides valuable insights and practical advice on building successful partnerships and collaborations in the cybersecurity industry. Whether you're a security practitioner, vendor, or partner, Samara's experiences and perspectives can help guide you towards more effective and mutually beneficial relationships
 
Follow Samara on LinkedIn
Keep up with Hacker Valley on our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Driving Business Value Through Field Marketing with Michelle Radlowski

In this episode, Gianna and Maria interview Michelle Radlowski, Sr. Director, AMS & EMEA Regional Marketing and ABM at DigiCert, Inc. (former Director of Regional Marketing at Zscaler). Michelle shares her experience of working in the IT tech space for over 15 years, starting in a small startup that got acquired twice and ultimately became part of Dell Software Group, before joining Zscaler as employee 240, and now the company has almost 6,000 employees globally. She explains that field marketing, which she started doing at Zscaler, is not just about planning events but driving campaign execution in-region, focusing on account engagement, and landing campaigns from corporate marketing. Michelle discusses the misconception about field marketing being solely administrative and event planning, and how her role has evolved to encompass much more. 
 
Michelle talks about the importance of aligning with the sales team and building relationships with them to drive business value. She explains that it is essential to understand the sales team's objectives, pain points, accounts, and personas to align marketing plans with them. She also emphasizes the significance of tracking data to measure the success of field marketing programs. Michelle shares her journey of transitioning from being a marketer who focused on lead generation to a marketer who aligned with the sales team's goals of revenue and pipeline creation. Michelle also highlights the significance of partner ecosystems, and she talks about how Zscaler has a large partner ecosystem, including strategic alliance partners, service providers, and system integrators. She emphasizes the need for a strategic approach to partner marketing that involves sales leadership alignment, account mapping, messaging, and training. Michelle concludes that a better-together story with partners that focuses on bettering the customer experience is a powerful message.
Follow Michelle on LinkedIn
The Concert in the Clouds
Michelle’s Non-profit Experience
Keep up with Hacker Valley on our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Empathy and Marketing Soft Skills with Kelsey LaBelle

This week, Kelsey LaBelle joins hosts Gianna and Maria to talk about marketing soft skills and returning to empathy in the workplace. Kelsey, who is the VP of Marketing at DomainTools, also shares how she works soft skills in her role at the company. Along with the emotional skills, Kelsey goes into creative ways to generate lead pipelines, why you should build trust with an audience, and shares the nuts and bolts of podcast production. Listen in for some deep talk on marketing—and lots of puns!
 
Timecoded Guide:
[07:28] Wrapping uniqueness and empathy into marketing
[15:26] Building lead pipelines with domain blooms 
[32:00] Podcast workflow and process of production 
[34:45] Can you be happy at work?  
[36:04] Closing with the guessing game  
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Definitions: 
DDoS: DDoS or DDoS’ing stands for ‘denial of service attack.” This is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator attempts to render a network resource unavailable to its users by disrupting the services of a host connected to the network. 
SANS: SANS stands for SysAdmin, Audit, Network, and Security and is the world’s largest cybersecurity research and training organization.
DNS: DNS stands for Domain Name System which makes the internet accessible by allowing the use of domain names.
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Links:
Spend some time with Kelsey on Mastodon and Twitter @punsandrosess
Follow Kelsey on LinkedIn.
Visit DomainTools on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Check out the DomainTools website.
Tune into the Breaking Badness podcast.
Keep up with Hacker Valley on our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Building A Media Program with Claire McKenna and Michelle Rawlings

This week, Claire Mckenna and Michelle Rawlings join us from BARR Advisory to talk about their roles and how they work with numerous people in the field to bolster their company’s goals. Claire is the senior writer and researcher at BARR while Michelle is the media coordinator. Together, they discuss communicating with SMEs, connecting experts in the field, and how they get everyone in their company involved with outreach through a curated media program. 
 
Timecoded Guide:
[06:09] Incentivizing SMEs and finding content
[10:46] The Media BARR Program
[14:12] Choosing content for the program
[18:43] Challenges met with the BARR program
[23:45] ROI on the Media BARR Program 
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Links:
Follow Claire on LinkedIn.
Spend some time with Michelle on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Visit BARR Advisory on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Check out the BARR Advisory website
Go back and listen to our previous episode on recycling brand content.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Be a Pro at Generating Demand with Chris Spellman

Joining us this week is Chris Spellman, Senior Demand Generation Manager at SCYTHE. Chris has been in cybersecurity marketing for over six years and has also worked in marketing operations and analytics. Gianna and Maria ask Chris about his marketing expertise as they cover gated vs ungated content, demand gen, analytics, and much more. Also, listen in to hear about Chris’s fantasy novel trilogy that he authors with his wife!
 
Timecoded Guide:
[06:49] Creative ways to generate demand
[09:58] Gated or ungated content?
[11:51] Big failure or success in cyber marketing
[16:26] Where Chris does analytics
[18:32] How Chris does attribution
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Links:
Follow Chris on LinkedIn.
Check out the Spellman Books website, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Keep up with SCYTHE on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Visit the SCYTHE website.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

From Broadway to B2B with Joshua Gonzalez

Along with your hosts Gianna and Maria, this week we have Joshua Gonzalez joining us from Beyond Identity to talk shop in creativity. Joshua comes from years of experience as an actor on broadway and on screens—you may have even seen him on the Travel Channel! As the Media Producer, Joshua and his team put a twist on marketing at Beyond Identity and he shares some tips that you won’t want to miss. This is also the record number of times the word “corn” has appeared in an episode here: tune in to find out why! Hint: it has to do with creative marketing.
 
Timecoded Guide:
[04:21] Applying an acting background to marketing 
[06:59] How to sell a product with a story
[11:05] Tips on pitching story ideas
[14:29] Things learned while catering to a cybersecurity audience
[25:47] Advice for companies taking on creatives
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Links:
Spend some time with Joshua on Twitter.
Check out Joshua’s memoir! 
Tune in to Joshua’s podcast.
Pictures of Joshua performing Midsummer Night’s Dream on broadway.
Joshua and his team’s latest cyber ad music video.
Visit Beyond Identity on LinkedIn and Twitter and on their website.
Follow Gianna on LinkedIn.
Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.