Jeff Aboud

90% of executive roles are filled by networking, but most of us don't manage it well. Ambassadors play a pivotal role in the Phello Executive Community, curating meaningful networking events that align with our passions and are central to career success. As a proud Ambassador, I host monthly events tailored specifically to Marketing Executives. If you’re a leader in marketing, communications, advertising, or product management looking for fresh opportunities and professional growth, I invite you to join Phello’s exclusive Marketing Executive Discussion Group. This dynamic community offers a unique platform to connect with peers, exchange insights, and develop actionable strategies to take your career to the next level. Whether your goals include expanding your network, exploring new job opportunities, transitioning to consulting or board roles, or simply staying ahead in a competitive industry, this group is designed to help you thrive. Visit www.hellophello.com to sign up.

Onum is an early-stage startup data observation and orchestration company. It's based in Madrid, Spain, though it is now incorporated and beginning to grow in the United States. The company competes in a crowded field of competitors, including a market leader that started six years before Onum and already controlled approximately 80% of the market by the time Onum released the minimal viable product (MVP) version of its offering. The company competes with its much bigger rival on two fronts:

1. The ability to provide observation and alerting to any anomalies in real-time (measured in just a few milliseconds)
2. The fact that data enrichment/normalization/reduction is Onum's starting point to solve a wide range of use cases, whereas the major competitor was built specifically to perform those tasks and was therefore incapable of more

Our CEO had previously started another successful company. Still, he always regretted not hiring marketing much sooner, and he always felt like the company was playing catch-up as a result. So, in his quest to rectify this situation this time around, he began looking for a marketing leader much earlier in the company's history. I learned about them from a CMO friend in my network whom I worked with in the past. She previously worked with one of the company's Angel Investors, so he reached out to her, asking if she knew anybody who could run marketing for the new company. She put us together, and the CEO and I immediately hit it off. After two brief video calls, he asked me to come to Spain for a few days to meet the rest of the team and some key investors. He hired me before I departed for home.

When I started at Onum, we had just secured our pre-seed funding. We had approximately 30 people in the company; nearly all were engineers working on the product. We only had a "place-holder" company name, "Signalit." The logo, colors, and other design elements were from the 1980s. There was no formal messaging, so the "message" changed every time the CEO spoke with a different audience, and it couldn't be replicated -- even by the other co-founders. There was no website, no collateral, no other materials of any kind. It was truly just the co-founders speaking with potential customers and investors with nothing to show them.

I was hired to change all that to build the company's marketing presence from scratch. A few months before they hired me, the company hired one local person to do general marketing work. She was a great marketing generalist but had no high-tech experience. Instead, her marketing experience had been in tourism and event venues. So, I helped her learn the industry and put her to work in an area where she could help the most -- PR (working with our Spanish agency) and social media marketing. Meanwhile, I got to work straightaway on developing a formal messaging document and conducting some competitive analyses.

Living on the West Coast of the U.S. and the only employee not residing in Spain, my CEO and I immediately came to two agreements. First, I would start work at 5:00 am Pacific, which is 2:00 pm in Spain, and second, I would spend one week every month in Madrid to be in the office and work directly with the team. This gave me the ability to overlap by a half-day with Spain's workday each day (Spain works later hours than the U.S. does) for three weeks each month and then be physically together with everybody the fourth week. And it worked beautifully. I got to know everybody; we all looked forward to my trips, and I was able to get a substantial amount of work done each day during my three weeks at home.

During my first six months with the company, I was able to take an active part, along with the rest of the executive team and a Spanish agency we hired, in choosing a new name, logo, colors, and other visual elements for the company; developing and gaining approval for a comprehensive messaging document that would be employed throughout the company for all written and verbal communications; working with the product design team to develop our website; writing a datasheet, solution brief, FAQ, and white paper covering the product and underlying technologies; developed business and technical versions of the sales presentation; worked with my marketing team member and the Spanish PR agency to develop a press release; and launched the MVP version of our product. That launch included an in-person event for investors, media, key customers, and prospects. I designed and implemented this event with my marketing team member and my CEO's administrative assistant, and it was considered a huge success by all, based on heavy attendance by the right stakeholders, as well as audience interest and enthusiasm.

In subsequent months, I re-wrote much of our messaging based on customer and advisor feedback and then modified all materials -- from the website to all outbound collateral -- to match the new messaging. I taught the entire company the new messaging so that everyone would understand how to give a basic elevator pitch for the company. I wrote more papers, numerous blogs, and late-stage "Demo2Win" presentations. I worked with my team members to launch the company's PR and social media activities successfully. Again, as the only U.S.-based employee, I single-handedly managed every aspect of a major showing at the RSA Conference (the world's largest cybersecurity conference). Shortly after, I finally hired a Director of Product Marketing, who produced technical white papers and helped me develop in-depth competitive analyses for all major competitors in the space.

In the 10 months from the launch of the MVP product to my departure, I helped grow the company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) from $0 to $5 million. I generated $30 million in the pipeline.  

ActiveState was my first job outside of cybersecurity in many years. Though I loved it at Tenable, the career growth wasn't there -- I was really looking for a true leadership position with a team. ActiveState provided that growth, in addition to allowing me to learn a completely new business and get back to my initial roots of marketing to software developers. My CMO at Tenable warned me that this wasn't a company where I could expect to succeed since they had been in business for nearly 20 years but had only achieved extremely modest growth. They currently had revenue in the very low tens of millions of dollars and only had about 75 employees. They were also private equity (PE) owned, thereby creating an even more challenging environment. Regardless, I felt compelled to try, and truly believed that I could bring about the change they needed to finally grow and reach their true potential.

After starting at the company, I learned they lacked product-market fit. They had once had it, but over the years, the market had changed quite a bit, and they had sold off portions of the company several years prior. So now they were faced with a new market, and they struggled to show an appropriate level of value for potential customers to purchase their tools rather than use any of the abundant free products available throughout the development community. Also, due to this lack of product-market fit, the CEO took the "fail fast" philosophy to an extreme, dramatically pivoting the company's strategy every quarter. This removed the momentum from any campaign the marketing team embraced.

I had inherited a relatively junior marketing team of five, with one senior product marketing manager, who had a development background and was more like a technical marketing engineer than a product marketer; a marketing operations manager who also ran demand generation; a digital marketing manager; a web analytics manager; and junior-level marketing specialist who assisted everybody else with whatever they needed. When I arrived, the team had largely been producing random marketing acts. It had become accustomed to doing its own thing since my predecessor had been a developer with no marketing experience. As a result, he allowed them to do what they believed was right. So, the marketing ops, digital marketing, and marketing assistant would develop and implement the strategy while the product marketing manager worked on his own technical pet projects.

Once I had an opportunity to size up each team member's skills, I realized I had most of the talent I needed. They just required direction, a strategic plan to get them all pointed in the same direction, and some training on more modern marketing methods. So, the first thing I did was develop a comprehensive marketing plan for the next two quarters. Once I pulled together the strategic direction and main components, I worked with each team member to add the details from each perspective area, including reasonable KPIs that were achievable yet would help the company meet its pipeline and revenue goals. I also hired an account-based marketing (ABM) manager to help sales more successfully penetrate their target accounts. The ABM campaigns were looped into the larger marketing plan to ensure cohesion. Once everybody was finished, I finessed the plan again. Then, we reviewed it as a team to ensure that all components fit together logically to create the desired synergies across the various tactics. I then presented it to the rest of the executive team for buy-in/approval.

Once approved, we began implementing the plan immediately and reported results weekly to ensure that we were on track and to optimize wherever we could.

Unfortunately, four months into the job, my already meager budget was cut by 60%, so I had to get creative with my strategy to make much smaller bets that would yield a positive ROI. It meant I had to pass on many of the proven techniques I'd successfully used in the past and instead work as though we were an early-stage startup with very few resources. Once I made the appropriate changes, I shared them with the team, and we began implementing the adjusted strategy. All of this training -- the modern techniques, working together as a true team that's laser-focused on our goals, and understanding how to make the biggest impact while expending the fewest resources -- transformed the team into a high-functioning, high-producing organization.

Despite the company's quarterly pivots and lack of product-market fit, my team and I helped the company achieve 20% year-over-year growth.  

Tenable is a public company that employs approximately 3,500 people globally and is one of the market leaders in the vulnerability management area of the cybersecurity market. The company had initially made its name with the Nexus scanner, but over time it diversified its portfolio with more robust vulnerability management offerings. When the market started slowly moving toward a risk-based approach to vulnerability management (meaning that vulnerabilities are prioritized based on the real-world risk they pose at any given point in time, and the risk rating is continuously updated as changes occur) in late 2019, the company decided to go "all-in" on a term developed by the top analyst firm, Gartner, and build the company's future around "Risk-Based Vulnerability Management."

I had just left Kenna Security, so Tenable's Senior Vice President of Marketing was very interested in talking with me about joining them since I would understand the market. When we spoke, I explained to him that I had tried to push "Risk-Based Vulnerability Management" within Kenna, but they had been highly resistant to the term, not wanting to follow Gartner too closely. So, with a shared passion for the category and both of us wanting to create and help the company become king of the emerging category, I was hired to own and manage every aspect of marketing related to the "Risk-Based Vulnerability Management" category. In the words of my SVP, he wanted me to consider myself the "mini CMO" of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management. This meant that even though I didn't specifically manage many of the other marketing functions (field marketing, the website, etc.), he would hold me accountable for the results from each of those areas as they related to Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (which we eventually shortened to "RBVM" once the term took hold).

My first two months on the job were like a whirlwind -- it was the first job I've ever had where I hit the ground running so fast that I didn't even have an opportunity to sign up for my benefits until two weeks after I started, and even then it was on a Saturday! The problem was that we had our annual sales kick-off (SKO) meeting three weeks into my tenure, and I needed to complete several deliverables beforehand. I was also scheduled to present two different sessions to the salesforce during SKO. Two weeks after that, we had the RSA conference, the world's biggest cybersecurity conference. I not only had to speak authoritatively with hundreds of prospects about Tenable's RBVM solution and demonstrate our product, but I was also responsible for developing and giving two different booth presentations throughout the show.

Following the RSA Conference, every marketing group from across this global company called me to get my take on their planned activities, review their deliverables, etc. Having the same conversations and making the same edits to every piece every day became so daunting that I finally told my SVP and the rest of the marketing team that I needed to pause things for a bit so that I could pull together a formal messaging document and a marketing strategy that would maximize our efforts. Though they weren't keen on stopping what they were working on, they understood the rationale and agreed to give me the two weeks I requested. I emerged with the promised documents at the end of the two weeks. I ran training sessions (early morning and again in the evening to reach all time zones live) to ensure everybody understood the new messaging and direction. Even though they had been tentative about the pause, everybody (including my SVP!) agreed that it was the right move in the long run, as it dramatically improved the efficiency of everybody's work since we were now all pointed in the same direction and therefore could benefit from our natural synergies.

I then needed to conduct two types of activities simultaneously: developing content such as nurture emails, collateral, white papers, blogs, and webinars and influencing my colleagues from across product marketing, ABM, web marketing, and field marketing to rally behind me by following my strategic marketing plan for promoting RBVM across each of their respective channels. Since none of these other marketing professionals reported to me in any way, they were neither under any obligation to follow my lead on RBVM, nor to prioritize my desired activities over their other deliverables. Therefore, my ability to exercise influence would be key to my success. So, I approached it the way I've approached all other obstacles I've encountered throughout my career that require a human touch to overcome; I befriended everybody and educated them on why my activities were chosen and why I believed they'd be effective. By treating them like the professionals and great people they were, instead of bullying and intimidating anybody, I not only won people over and gained the support of dozens of people who wanted to help me, but I made some great friends along the way!

In my quest to position Tenable as a thought leader in the RBVM space, I began developing tons of content: blogs, infographics, business-level white papers, and a technical architecture guide (with an extraordinary amount of help from some of our SEs). In addition to posting these items to our website, I invoked a push strategy that included promoting them via demand generation nurture emails (which I would write myself and then send out after getting help from a marketing operations manager to help me pull the right list and schedule the emails on days that wouldn't conflict with other Tenable mailings). I also got assistance from our digital and growth marketing manager, who promoted my pieces using digital display, text ads, and remarketing efforts. Our webinar program manager helped me find the best date for any webinars I wanted to do, sent promotional emails to advertise them to our target audience, and handled all the logistics of running the webinar.

So, needless to say, I didn't succeed on my own; I had an amazing team behind me, supporting me every step of the way, even though absolutely none of them had to!

I then began tracking the success rate of all RBVM activities across the company, regardless of channel. Since I was going to be held responsible for the success or failure of the new category, I wanted to study the data to understand how each channel was performing as deeply as possible. Unlike many marketers, I don't believe in gauging my success using marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). In fact, I don't put much stock in MQLs at all. Instead, I look at conversion rates. Not just from raw lead to MQL, but more importantly, from MQL to opportunity and, most importantly, from opportunity to closed-won. I also want to determine the efficiency of campaigns from a return on investment (ROI) perspective, so I included the costs associated with running each campaign (variable costs, as well as the sunk costs of the tools required) and tracked the pipeline and ultimately the revenue that the campaign brought in. That way, I could present my SVP with a weekly report on pipeline-to-spend and revenue-to-spend by individual channels and for the category as a whole. I also studied the data to thoroughly understand how, where, and when we performed across all vehicles and used that information to suggest changes to optimize the results.

As a result, my virtual team and I generated $10:$1 in marketing-influenced bookings to spend across all channels. Tenable had also become synonymous with RBVM, which was publicly recognized by customers, analysts, and other industry leaders. And even competitors began taking shots at us, proving that our strategy was working. At one point, Kenna Security even launched an ad campaign, saying they were "the original RBVM solution"! Since they had refused to use the term while I was there, I took this ad as a huge compliment and a testament to the noise Tenable was creating in the market. It was clear that we had successfully become kings of the RBVM category!

With those successes under the company's belt, Tenable assembled a product that matched everything our messaging said about how we handled RBVM. To do so, they packaged several existing products together and removed all of the individual licenses to replace them with one wrap-around license for the entire solution. Given my strong product marketing background and the success I'd had with building the story and case for RBVM, my SVP asked me to take the lead on the product launch.

The major challenge with the launch was coming up with the story. Unlike any other product I'd ever managed, there was no single line of code that was different from what we currently had available; all that had been done was that several publicly-known products had been stitched together and sold under a new license. So, I had to build a true story, not just a message. Once I had developed a solid draft, I pulled together the cross-functional virtual team I'd need to bring it to market successfully. However, since I knew there would be more questions than normal, given the circumstances surrounding this product, I first scheduled 1:1 meetings with each of the major stakeholders to discuss it with them, pitch them on the story I'd developed, get their feedback, and ultimately obtain their buy-in. Once I had met with everybody, I scheduled the kick-off meeting to provide an overview of the launch strategy and rationale and review the tactical components of the launch activities. It worked; rather than getting mired in a thousand questions that would derail the kick-off meeting, everybody was on board and focused on what needed to happen. I then held tactical reviews weekly to keep track of everybody's progress and hold individual owners accountable to the timeline. I also had offline 1:1 conversations, as necessary, to ensure that all was going according to plan and to offer my assistance wherever needed. I also owned my fair share of deliverables, including collateral, blogs, papers, and sales and channel enablement materials.

The strategy worked. Three months later, we successfully conducted this tier 1 launch to a great deal of fanfare from the media, analysts, customers, and partners. Following the launch, I began tracking the product's progress in Salesforce and reporting that progress weekly to the executive team, including Tenable's CEO. Over 18 months following the launch, the "product" had already generated $89 million in the pipeline. It had also generated $15 million in bookings, but I didn't report much on that statistic since sales cycles were quite long, so it was expected to be unusually low for the first two years.   

Now owned by Cisco, Kenna Security was a 75-person, Series B startup with a unique, modern product that approached vulnerability management from the perspective of real-world risk. The background behind the solution centered around the fact that regardless of the organization's size, no business had enough people to manage all of its vulnerabilities effectively. There were too many of them for human beings to process. As a result, most companies dump the results into Excel spreadsheets and try to fix all of the "criticals," as defined by the common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS). This method was fundamentally flawed in two major ways: first, the majority of vulnerabilities received a CVSS score of seven or above (which is considered "critical"), so the list didn't shrink by enough to make it serviceable; and second, CVSS is only an academic scoring system, one that assesses the theoretical potential of a vulnerability to spread. To make matters worse, the CVSS score is typically assigned when the vulnerability is first discovered and is never revisited. So, in addition to security administrators wasting their time fixing vulnerabilities that don't pose any actual risk to their organization, any vulnerability initially scored as low risk will remain that way forever, even if circumstances change. Therefore, if a vulnerability initially considered to be of "low" risk is now being actively used in attacks, administrators would likely miss it until the attack adversely affects their organization.

However, Kenna's platform assesses the actual risk of each vulnerability based on what's happening in real-time. The risk scores are continuously reassessed and change along with changing conditions. This way, security administrators can prioritize their vulnerability management efforts based on the real risk of each vulnerability, helping them reduce the risk their organization faces.

This entire concept was completely new and somewhat revolutionary when I started at Kenna. Hence, a great deal of energy had to be put into educating security professionals on employing this new methodology instead of what they'd always done. When I first joined, the company was Series B and had just over 30 people, so very little had been done thus far other than what sales had accomplished directly via 1:1 meetings with prospects. There was no product marketing -- I was the first hire in that department. As such, there were really only the beginnings of a message that an agency had helped them build. However, as I spoke with each of the executives, co-founders, and sales, I quickly realized that the agency's messaging had little to do with the message our company wanted to convey. So, I interviewed all of them to get their "story", as well as to gain an understanding of what made Kenna unique, compared with the competition. Based on these interviews, I developed a comprehensive messaging document reflecting the company's true story, including its unique selling proposition and why it's important to the market. That messaging document quickly became the company's official story, and all written and spoken external communications followed it to ensure message consistency.

Six weeks after I was hired, we had a booth at the annual RSA Conference, the largest cybersecurity conference in the world. Knowing the importance of this event, I was able to secure a license to our demo environment for the product and enlisted the help of one of our SEs to walk me through it. I then took time over the subsequent weeks to "play" with the demo and more thoroughly learn it. When we arrived at RSA, I was already familiar with it, but I shadowed another of our SEs for the first 30 minutes to see how he ran the demo. I then asked him to watch me run it and critique me. After a couple of run-throughs, followed by a critique, I was ready. I then conducted dozens of demos for prospects over the next few days. Several months later, HR asked me to run a demo session for our bi-weekly onboarding session for all new hires. I continued that activity as long as I was with the company.

Since I was the first product marketing hire the company had made, in addition to the lack of official messaging, the rest of product marketing was a mess: the data sheet was more like a skeleton of a solution brief; there were only a couple of very technical papers that only data scientists would understand; there were only product-focused webinars; no partner materials or focus of any kind; and the sales presentation was the corporate presentation. So, I scrapped everything that was there and started from scratch. Within several months, in addition to the formal messaging, branding, and positioning, I had developed a robust data sheet, solution brief, and FAQ document; multiple white papers that all supported our branding; various blogs; at least 15 webinars -- either product or thought leadership focused; and a professional sales presentation that was based on the challenges our target market was facing and how our product solved those problems.

I then hired two people -- a Senior Product Marketing Manager (PMM) and a Technical Marketing Engineer (TME). Together, my team and I launched the company's first major product since the initial platform, making the company officially a multi-product company; conducted numerous deep-dive competitive analyses for all major competitors; developed "how-to" videos for users to help them use every major feature of our products; and worked with the rest of the marketing team to ensure consistency in messaging, approach, and focus.  

A10 Networks is a relatively successful but old-school public company with approximately 1,000 employees worldwide. When I was hired, they were strictly a hardware-based company, with 95% of its revenue from its hardware-based web application firewall (WAF). They wanted to hire people with a cybersecurity background because they were in the throes of introducing two new security products that they hoped would lead to new potential growth opportunities. However, there was a small marketing team with old-school marketing activities along with the old-school products.

When I arrived, a small product marketing team behaved more like a cross between product management and technical marketing engineers. Their marketing idea was to produce detailed data sheets and technical white papers. A small team also conducted standard email nurturing programs and occasionally a physical direct mail program. Finally, a small marcom team produced print materials and managed the 1980s-style website. This began to change when a forward-thinking VP of Marketing with a background in modern marketing techniques was hired. He hired me and a few other leaders to help bring the company's marketing into the modern era and help the company grow.

When I was hired, I was initially in charge of product marketing and tradeshows/events. However, as we uncovered the company's additional needs, my responsibilities grew to meet them. Eventually, I managed demand generation, tradeshows/events, field marketing, customer marketing, and marketing programs. I managed a diverse nine-person team and handled a great deal of the traditional product marketing myself.

My 9-person team consisted of:

• senior demand generation manager
• senior tradeshow/events manager
• senior partner marketing manager
• senior marketing manager, telco
• senior marketing manager, web application firewalls
• senior marketing manager, security products
• customer marketing manager
• digital marketing manager
• marketing operations manager

About six months into my employment with A10, the company purchased a cloud-native provider that would help the company break out of the traditional mold of being a hardware-based company. Because of my strong product marketing background and the fact that the company's existing product marketing team had historically managed launches that included four items in the plan (updating the website, writing a datasheet, producing a sales deck, and issuing a press release), my VP asked me to step up and run this launch that was so critical to the company. In doing so, I tossed out the existing broken process. I replaced it with a robust, cross-functional launch plan that promoted the product to all major audiences to maximize reach and included sales enablement training.

I started with producing a formal launch plan with a corresponding tactical "dashboard" that listed all items that needed to be produced, due dates, priority levels for each, and the owner for each item. The plan included approximately 80 line items that covered every marketing vehicle to ensure maximum exposure to our target market. I pulled together an initial draft and shopped it around to each of the key stakeholders to ensure that they agreed with the line items that would be assigned to them and that they could meet the timelines associated with each of their items. Once I obtained everybody's buy-in, I called a kick-off meeting to discuss the launch strategy and review the items and due dates as a group. We met twice weekly as a group to ensure nothing fell through the cracks. In addition to managing the launch itself, I was responsible for developing the messaging, positioning, and branding and then communicating it throughout the organization.

On the demand generation side, my predecessor had forged a highly antagonistic relationship with inside sales. Historically, he purchased lead guarantee programs exclusively, called them MQLs, and handed them off to sales. When sales weren't successful with the leads, he blamed them for not doing their jobs. Once I took over, I met with my colleague who ran the ISR group, and we worked together to redo the MQL scoring. I then worked with the demand generation manager on my team to seek myriad methods for gaining leads and nurturing them until they were truly warm enough to hand off to sales. The two teams also met bi-weekly to work as an extended team and keep the dialogue going. The enhanced relationship dramatically improved the number of customer meetings the inside sales team was able to schedule, which led to a corresponding increase in pipeline and revenue.

I also led the team in its efforts to conduct competitive take-out programs to encourage prospects to move from the major competitor in the market to A10 and upsell programs to entice existing customers to move to more premium products or a higher-level service license. In each of these cases, our salesforce was our primary vehicle. We provided one-pagers and sales scripts to our inside sales reps to encourage meetings with an account manager, and we armed account managers with sales tools and promotional pricing to encourage sales. In the case of competitive take-out programs, we also used (without naming the competitor) digital ads, competitor brand, and product name keyword purchases to lead them to market landing pages that highlighted A10's benefits over (generic) competitor offerings.

In addition, customer marketing became a daily activity. It not only included working with sales to ask customers to participate in activities with us or on our behalf, such as joint webinars, speaking engagements, case studies, and reference calls, but every single sales win turned into a customer story that could be used internally or externally. If we had permission from the customer, we would develop a slide that provided an overview of the customer challenge, A10 solution, and a result that could be inserted into the salesperson's pitch deck when they were presenting to a customer in the same industry or with a similar challenge. If we did not have permission from the customer, we provided a generic version that did not name the customer. In all cases, we provided a case study-like write-up for internal use to educate the salesforce on each customer win. This provided them with a cache of "stories" they could pull from when encountering customer doubts. These stories added extraordinary credibility to our messaging and helped sales close more business quickly and easily than before this program.

Finally, I developed and spearheaded A10's first field marketing program, one of my crowning achievements with the company. This was a series of one-day events in various cities. We started the program slowly and deliberately by initially choosing three cities. The first one was held locally, and the second two were purposely scheduled for two months later since we knew that we wouldn't get everything right the first time and wanted to give ourselves time to make adjustments before the other two cities. The first city went exactly as we presumed it would; overall, pretty well, but there is certainly room for improvement. When the next two cities took place, which were held during the same week to minimize travel expenses (one was in the Midwest while the other was on the East Coast), all the kinks had been worked out. Each of the cities cost us approximately $50 thousand. While the first (test) city didn't yield any positive outcomes, a gentleman from a large enterprise stuck in the sales cycle for six months showed up in the second city. The $1.6 million deal had stalled, and sales needed a sponsor from within the company to champion them and push the deal forward. He was that contact. During the networking session at the end of our event, two of our account executives approached him, and he agreed to be that sponsor. The meeting they'd been pushing for six months was scheduled for the following week. Later that week, a prospect was impressed with our offering at the third location and agreed to meet with sales. This quickly resulted in a $3 million opportunity. So, all told, we added $4.6 million in the pipeline for a $150K investment.  

When I first started interviewing for Splunk, I had no idea what a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system even was! However, I downloaded and installed the free trial version of Splunk Enterprise (their base product) and started using it on my home network. I was no Splunk expert and didn't know the Splunk Programming Language (SPL), but I got enough of an idea to understand the basic concepts and appreciate the power of the insights it could provide. I was hired to do "product and solutions marketing." The title confused a lot of people at first, but it simply meant that there were essentially two components of my job. First and foremost, I performed the typical duties of a senior product marketing manager for Splunk Enterprise Security (a paid, premium module that sits on top of the core Splunk Enterprise product). The second component of my job was to market to any Splunk customer who used Splunk to solve security use cases -- even if they only used Splunk Enterprise and not the Enterprise Security add-on module. This is an important differentiator because 40 percent of all Splunk customers use Splunk for security use cases, but only forty percent purchase the Splunk Enterprise Security add-on. This is important because if I didn't have the second part of my job, Splunk would have alienated 25 percent of its customer base!

As you might imagine, the job became quite large. I constantly communicated with Splunk customers with security use cases, letting them know about new capabilities and additional free modules. I also, of course, marketed the Splunk Enterprise Security module to increase our attach rate. I also spoke with many of these customers to get their stories for purposes of writing case studies, securing press quotes, and even asking them to do a speaking session or joint webinar with us. This customer marketing component eventually became a significant portion of my job since it earned us credibility amongst our target market to hear their peers talk about us rather than something our marketing department wrote. It also helped sales by providing them with stories, slides for their sales deck, and customer references they could give their prospects to help close more business.

On the more traditional product marketing side, I was responsible for developing the messaging and positioning for Splunk Enterprise Security; managing product launches; developing product collateral, customer-facing papers, sales presentations, and sales tools; writing blogs; conducting analyst briefings, competitive analyses, and sales enablement training; and working with my corporate marketing colleagues to ensure that press releases, demand generation activities, and product web pages were all on message and highlighted current focus areas in our product marketing strategy.

When it came time to manage my first product launch for Splunk, my manager sent me two different tracking tools: one that would be used to report higher-level objectives to the operations team and the other that tracked more of the day-to-day that was used to report back into marketing and the rest of the business. The two trackers had a great deal of overlap, were cumbersome, didn't agree with one another (they even called the same item or activity different things), and were generally confusing. I asked my manager to explain why we use the two trackers and how to use them. He honestly didn't know, admitting that he didn't truly understand them. So, I proposed the tool I'd developed over the years and used it for multiple successful launches at Cisco. We obtained approval from upper management, and the product team agreed. Using it, I could communicate exactly where we were on all key items to all key constituents and keep the entire launch team on track. This helped us successfully launch the product to all key market audiences on time and with the greatest impact. Following that launch, many of my product marketing colleagues asked for the template of the tool I'd developed (which was just an Excel spreadsheet with programmed due dates and conditional formatting) to help them more easily manage their launches in the future!

Splunk was also well known for its "Splunk Live" events, a series of one-day field marketing events held nationwide and in many international locations. These events successfully pulled in hundreds of customers and prospects at every location. However, after I attended a few of them, I noticed that each of them had vastly different content from one another. When I met with the field marketing team to learn more, they explained that the field SEs for each area typically developed their own content for the events since they were the presenters. While that certainly made sense to me, and we all agreed that different content resonated in different areas of the country (and world), my big concern with the current model was the lack of messaging consistency. So, working with the field marketing team and the SE managers, we developed a list of "approved content" for security. This content was all developed by the SEs, so they were happy delivering something at their level they could get behind, and I was happy because the content was all on message. But that didn't compare to the elation the field marketing team felt by having all of the security content done for the rest of the year, so they no longer had to worry about chasing the SEs at the last minute to get their content finished! So, the solution was a big win for everybody involved. I was able to assert marketing's needs without ruffling any feathers!

Another major project I spearheaded was to introduce a 15-day trial version of Splunk Enterprise Security, primarily aimed at current Splunk customers with security use cases, to show them the value of Splunk Enterprise Security. As a core team member, working with engineering, product management, program managers, and platform administrators, I provided marketing and demand generation best practices and the customer perspective. I helped the team decide how and when to send email reminders to customers. I wrote all email content to ensure the trial primarily functioned as a demand-generation tool. I ensured it followed sound product-led growth (PLG) principles before PLG existed! But bottom line, I considered anybody who downloaded the trial to be a hot lead who needed to have a rich experience and be led to a salesperson's inbox as efficiently as possible. If they didn't take that action, I ensured that an alert was sent to our inside sales team a few days before the trial expired so that inside sales could follow up on the customer to convert them to a paying customer.

After successfully launching the trial, I ensured it was prominently displayed on the company's homepage, the security solutions page, and the Splunk Enterprise Security product page. I also promoted it via a blog and worked with our corporate marketing team to promote it via email and digital channels. But my biggest idea, which turned out to have the most significant impact, was to promote it at Splunk's annual user conference, .conf. I realized that we would have thousands of Splunk security customers in Las Vegas with us for three days, approximately 25% of whom use Splunk for security use cases yet didn't use Splunk Enterprise Security. So, I pitched the .conf team and my security management team to give me a large room and a one-hour session on the schedule, where we would have customers download a trial copy. Then, one of our SEs will lead them through a live training session on using Splunk Enterprise Security. I won my pitch and was awarded a double-size ballroom that could house 200 attendees. I recruited one of our top security SEs to run the session, promising to work the room to provide real-time assistance.

Our bet paid off (Las Vegas pun intended!). The session was full within a few days of posting it, and the room was packed when we ran it. I did a lot of running to help set people up, but it otherwise went very smoothly. By the end of the 15-day trial, more than 40 (20% of the 200) attendees converted to paid Splunk Enterprise Security Customers! 20% is fewer than the 40% attach rate that Splunk Enterprise Security had, in general, but remember, this was an additional 20%, over and above the 40% attach rate since the pool of users who participated in this event were from the 60% of security users who were not already Splunk Enterprise Security customers.   

Despite the strange title, this was a senior-level marketing position in the newly-formed Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies Group within the Enterprise Networking Division. It wasn't considered traditional product marketing because Cisco had no IoT cybersecurity products. However, research had told us that security concerns were the number one inhibitor to IoT adoption. So, it was my job to get customers to start understanding the security ramifications of IoT and to think of Cisco as a thought leader and trusted advisor in the space ... so that when they came around to securely adopting IoT, they'd immediately think of Cisco.

This was a completely different audience for Cisco. Since its inception in 1984, Cisco has served information technology (IT) administrators. They know this audience well. What their challenges are, what they need to resolve them, what's most important to them, what their buying behaviors are like, and how much they are willing to pay to solve them. However, this group's charter focused on the needs of operational technology (OT) administrators -- people who radically differ from Cisco's traditional IT audience. For starters, the OT audience is an average of 20+ years older than the typical IT admin. That means they have completely different levels of life and professional experience and radically different methods of handling challenges. Also, IT equipment is replaced every 3-5 years, whereas most OT equipment can be over 50 years old.

However, arguably the most relevant difference, because it drives so much of the attitudes and knowledge levels toward cybersecurity, is that OT equipment and best practices predate the Internet. There was no such thing as connectivity when the OT equipment was manufactured, so cybersecurity was never built into any of it. Similarly, connectivity didn't exist when most OT administrators started their careers, so the need for strong cybersecurity hygiene was never ingrained into them. The first thing I had to convince many of them of is that the "air gap" most of them believe exists between their OT network and the outside world is a myth -- it disappeared several years earlier when somebody in the OT environment added Wi-Fi capabilities that connected the IT environment to the OT environment!

Once they understood that the OT environment is connected to the outside world, I focused on explaining the fundamentals of sound cybersecurity hygiene. My colleagues and I realized that OT administrators were in the same spot their IT counterparts had been 20 years earlier -- at the beginning of understanding cybersecurity threats. We started studying their behaviors and attitudes and realized that we needed to teach them such concepts as:

• Security is not the same as safety.
• Line of sight (being able to see the thing you want to secure) is not a security strategy.
• Putting a Post-It on your workstation with the password is like not having a password at all.

I began by presenting these topics internally to other Cisco employees so that they'd understand the audience persona and how to approach them from a sales and marketing perspective. Working with my manager, I gave more technical presentations that included comparisons of the two network infrastructures and discussed the fundamental differences between each, including how they drove the attitudes and behaviors of each audience. Then, I began presenting to the OT and IT audiences to teach them how to adopt IoT without sacrificing security. At first, I would present to audiences who visited the Executive Briefing Center (EBC) and other local events such as tradeshows and conferences. But then I started to be invited to present at partner events internationally. In addition to teaching OT that the airgap doesn't exist and how they can maximize their security posture, I also learned that I had to take my message to IT administrators, as well, because most of them didn't seem to realize that they needed to pay as much attention to OT as they did their IT network. The reason was simple. OT networks couldn't "connect" all on their own; they connected through the IT environment! And since a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, IT admins needed to look across the entire hybrid environment to truly understand its full security posture. As a proof point, they didn't need to look any further than the then-infamous Target breach, where hackers had reached the POS systems via the company's HVAC system -- which was part of their OT environment.

After many such conversations, IT and OT finally understood how and to what extent they relied upon one another. OT started to learn its role in establishing strong cybersecurity best practices to keep the entire company safe.  

I was initially hired to take over the product marketing efforts for the cybersecurity division's first enterprise-class firewall. The launch was underway, but the team was already six weeks behind schedule. Though extremely talented in many areas, the employee in charge of the launch had an operations background, not a product marketing one. I came in, and nothing had been done. When I questioned why certain items were on the list, nobody could tell me why or what they were. So, I took over the process, rewrote the entire launch plan, and gained the team's trust. I worked with the product manager to develop the messaging document and assigned all deliverables (including many to myself). I managed the cross-functional team to complete the launch on time and within budget.

I soon became responsible for product marketing for all of Cisco's cybersecurity products. I remained the lead and mentor as additional PMMs were hired. After 18 months, Cisco ended my contract and insisted that I come to work for them full-time instead of consulting.  

PayCycle was a startup in the financial services industry. It focused on two key audiences: small and mid-size businesses that wanted to do their own payroll using an intuitive, web-based app and accountants who wanted to do the bookkeeping and payroll for their clients using the app. The company had approximately 100 employees, split between these two audiences.

I was hired in a pure marketing role to develop marketing programs for small business audiences. However, it's notable that we quickly gained Bank of America as a major customer/partner in this space. The bank was interested in making the service available to their small business customers as a perk for having their business accounts with them. At first, PayCycle thought we would help the bank market to their customers, so we offered marketing proposals, materials, messaging, etc., that they could use. However, after a while, it became clear that the bank had no interest in co-marketing with us, nor did they want to use any of the materials we provided. They knew their customers better than anybody else, and they knew their desired strategy ... so they opted to do their marketing in their way, without our assistance. And since our agreement with the bank was to offer the service exclusively through them (other than the side of our business that focused on accountants), there was no more marketing to be done.

Instead, the job quickly morphed into a partner marketing position, serving Bank of America's needs by providing them with weekly reports and analyses on our progress with their customer accounts. Pretty soon, all I did was run and analyze reports and then present them to the bank each week, along with my thoughts. And since they didn't want any help marketing to their (our) customers, there was nothing more that could be done other than present the information. 

So, while I learned a great deal quickly there, I wanted to remain on a marketing career path.   

This was my first job in the cybersecurity industry, and though I loved it, I had no idea at the time that it would shape most of the rest of my career! When I was interviewing, the title of the role was "Outbreak Marketing Manager," meaning that my job was to react by performing some essential marketing communications functions whenever a malware variant reached an "outbreak" level, which meant that it was spreading and affecting a large number of customers. I got the job because I saw a broader vision for the role and shared it with the hiring manager, who agreed with my assessment. While the job sounded great, I told her that it also sounded reactive, and I wondered if there were things I could do during non-outbreak times to help market the company and help it stand out from its competition. As a result, the job title was changed to "Threat Response Marketing Manager," and I was asked to develop the role.

The first thing I did was befriend the threat researchers, most of whom were in our "Trend Labs" group in the Philippines. I knew immediately that having a close, personal relationship with this group would be key to my success. Plus, since I was new to the industry, I didn't know what I didn't know, but they could educate me. I have a strong technical aptitude, but like most marketing people, I'm not technical. So, as a non-technical marketing person working in a technical firm, I knew that I had to put my ego aside and shake off any fear of sounding stupid. Just ask the questions! That's the best advice I ever gave myself, because not only did they not think I was stupid (or they were at least polite enough not to tell me!), but we started to mutually understand one another better -- which set us up for a highly successful venture!

As I started to understand the different types of malware, each with its own set of variants, as well as transmission vehicles, payloads, and hashes, I began to hone the types of questions I would ask them. I realized that the key to educating our customers and partners was determining what made each threat unique or different. Why do I want to talk about "this one" compared with all the others we'll see throughout the rest of the week? Does it work? If not, why not -- and what if those pieces were fixed? Once I had all these answers, I could make a judgment call on which ones to talk about and at what level of intensity to talk about them. And soon enough, my threat researchers in the Philippines also started to understand my line of questioning. Sometimes, when they called me, especially when they had to wake me up at night, they'd already answered many of my questions because they knew what I was interested in! It became an amazing symbiotic relationship!

I then began to fine-tune the process of outbreak response to make it more efficient. I recruited a cross-functional team of threat researchers, PR professionals, and product managers worldwide to assist during outbreak times. I then formalized the process and gained approval from my management. With a PR manager in Europe and much of the threat research team in Asia, we had a true follow-the-sun model, whereby the team could alert me immediately anytime, day or night. Once I received the call and conducted a quick initial analysis, the call went out to the rest of the team. We assembled via conference call to discuss what was different/special about the malware, how it worked and spread, and any payload it included. Based on the analysis, the team would make a go/no-go decision, and whenever it was a "go," we got straight to work to be the first out with the new information. We were careful to take an educational position, rather than one of "gloom and doom", like so many of our competitors. I would write the copy, run it by my threat researchers to ensure accuracy and disseminate it to the PR team to get to the media immediately.

As a result of these improvements, I was able to cut the time required by this process by two-thirds while beating our established (and much larger) competitors to move Trend Micro from a distant third place to first place in several key PR measurements -- the share of positive reach, percent of positive impressions, and a total number of media mentions. However, the true testament to our success was the night we responded super late. Our competitors had beaten us to the punch, so there was nothing new we could offer. But all was not lost because that variant didn't work, yet all of our competitors acted like the sky was falling. So, rather than going out with a "me too" story, we again took an educational slant and explained that the malware didn't work, so there was nothing immediate to worry about. However, we did warn that with just a few improvements to the vehicle, this one had the potential to go far and wide. That evening, another variant of the same malware did exactly that. The problems with transmission vehicles have been fixed and had widely affected the U.S. government and the media. As a result of our work in the early morning hours, we were soon inundated with inbound calls from across the U.S. media spectrum, including one of our key spokespeople being asked to go on air live for 30 minutes with Wolf Blitzer!

In addition to the outbreak times, I started other marketing activities during "normal" times, including a regular blog, email campaigns to customers, articles for well-known antivirus trade journals, and bi-weekly newsletters to customer and reseller audiences. These activities raised our company's overall awareness and positioned us as a trusted thought leader in our space. As a result, during outbreak times, customers, partners, and the media turned to us to get the information they needed.   

Continuing on my journey to truly understand and effectively cater to the software developer audience, I moved back to the company's SunService division. Based on everything I'd learned about software developers over the past few years, a former VP of mine asked me to come over to develop a new services portfolio aimed specifically at developers. He explained that even though developers accounted for a relatively small portion of our revenue, they were responsible for $62 million in technical escalation costs each year.

My job would be to develop a services portfolio to eliminate or dramatically reduce these costs. So, I did an extraordinary amount of legwork to determine how best to accomplish my goals. I spoke with developers, as I had for the past few years. But then I had conversations with numerous groups within the company, including developer relations and technical support teams, to get their thoughts and opinions on how to close the gap.

After weeks of these conversations, I developed three support packages—"low, medium, and high"—that development teams could purchase ahead of time at a discount so that professional support was ready and waiting whenever they needed it. I estimated that these three service packages could mitigate most of the company's costs while generating $20 million in new revenue.

Once the packages had been completed, I shopped them around internally to ensure I had gone down the right path. After a few minor adjustments by key stakeholders, all agreed that I had the makings of a great service offering. Unfortunately, this is when I realized I'd taken the most frustrating job ever.

Sun Microsystems felt the pinch of hard times by this point in history. Sun was historically a hardware company, so hardware sales accounted for over 90% of its revenue stream. But these days, the margins on hardware sales had become razor thin, so the company was in financial turmoil. Making matters worse, many of the company's recent "bets" had failed to pay off, sinking the company even further into financial despair.

In response, the company initiated a strict Six Sigma program called "Sun Sigma," through which all new projects had to pass before gaining approval. Potential new products and services had to have written plans in specific templates—including the correct version of the template—and had to be accompanied by a series of spreadsheets meant to "prove" the financial viability of the proposal. Not only did it have to be financially viable, but it also had to clear a certain level of margin.

Once everything was completed and peer-reviewed, the proposal author had to present the plan to an approval committee, which could then choose to "accept," "reject," or "redirect" (which meant that they still needed more information, so more work was needed, and the author needed to come back later, once it was completed) the proposal.

The problem was that because of past failures, nobody wanted to be the one to approve a project that ended up failing. So, nearly all projects were either rejected outright or redirected. I was redirected because I couldn't guarantee that my project would be profitable and achieve the desired margin. So, I put more work into it, spoke with more stakeholders, made the necessary adjustments, and returned a month later. Again, I was redirected. So, I went through the modification process again and returned once again the following month.

Because, at this point, I'd spent more than six months on a single project that had yet to see the light of day, I begged the committee to either approve or reject the proposal. My rationale, which I explained to them at the beginning of the review, is that if they still weren't convinced, there was no more I could do to convince them, so I'd like to find a different project that would meet their approval. However, their decision, yet again, was to redirect. On that day, I decided to look for another job.   

By the time American First Mortgage Services failed, the company's owner had started a new business in a completely different industry -- as a franchisee with International Television Productions, a high-end corporate video production company. His initial idea was to follow the franchise model precisely. He hired two telesales reps and wanted me to develop our marketing materials. He assumed that he would start getting corporate video contracts nearly immediately. Over time, he got one or two, but not enough to justify what he'd spent buying into the business.

So, he decided to supplement the business with more budget-friendly video production he'd do on the side. So, I was now in charge of all marketing -- both for the franchise business and the side business. However, he needed additional help for the side business since he didn't know anything about the video production business. As a result, another person he'd hired and I started researching cameras and video equipment: what we could afford, what would do the job, how to use it, etc. We then went out with the owner to purchase everything that was needed and even prepared one of the rooms in the office by painting a "chromakey" wall (a blue wall, which pre-dated today's green screens).

Before I knew it, the other guy and I were out filming events and coming back to the office to edit the video via a mixing console and software program we'd purchased. This was my first foray into managing all aspects of a business at the ripe old age of 24! I was having a lot of fun, but I quickly began to realize that it was a major deviation from my goal of having a professional marketing career. So, I began looking for more professional work to grow my skills and lead to a more productive long-term career. 

This was my very first job out of college. American First Mortgage Services was a private lender that served the needs of mortgage brokers all across California. We competed not only with big banks but also with private lenders. Like most B2B businesses, some purchase decisions were made based on relationships with the salesperson. Still, more than anything, the business was driven by price competition -- a model doomed for failure from day one.

However, this was a period we called the "refi boom." Since mortgage rates had been in the double digits for the past 10 years and had now dropped to six and seven percent, every homeowner in the country wanted to refinance their home. All a broker needed to do was hang a shingle saying they were there, and business started rolling in. Many liked us, and our rates were good, so we got a good deal of their business. It was that simple ... while it lasted.

The company needed somebody to market to their customers proactively to close as much business as possible. They chose me because they wanted somebody who understood the financial services industry to manage marketing. Even though I had no experience in the field, my major was business, with a concentration in finance, which worked to my advantage! I managed all aspects of marketing, including advertising, media placements, tradeshows and events, and daily (frequently more than once per day) advertisements for special rates and programs for our network of mortgage brokers.

But one of the most memorable things about this job was having to explain my job to others at networking events. That's because I was one of the first marketers in the entire mortgage industry, so it was a totally foreign concept at the time. In fact, most people in the industry confused my role with the "secondary marketing" function, which is the people who buy and sell loans in the financial markets!

As mentioned above, we referred to this time as the "refi boom," and every business in the mortgage industry was making unprecedented profits. By 1995, though, rates had returned to normal and the refinance market dried up. As a result, nearly 80% of those in the mortgage industry went out of business. We were one of the last to hold on but eventually succumbed to the market, as well.

It was a great first job, though. Not only did I learn a ton about how business was conducted and how to work hand-in-hand with other groups who had conflicting priorities, but I also learned a great deal about the mortgage industry -- something that helps me in my personal dealings with my own home, even today. And I also learned a valuable lesson about price competition. Despite it being talked about in business school, it's hard to truly appreciate and fully grasp its dangers until you've seen its destructive power first-hand. Since moving into marketing leadership roles, I've warned companies against this behavior and point to my personal experience with it to drive my point home. There's no doubt in my mind that I've saved numerous companies from this fate due to this particular experience.