Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Investments with Norman Guadagno, CMO of Mimecast

Peter: The next CMO podcast explores topics that are on the minds of forward-thinking marketing executives from leadership and strategy to emerging technologies, and we bring these topics to life by interviewing leading experts in their fields. The next C M O is sponsored by Planful for Marketing. A leading marketing performance management solution that automates marketing, planning, financial management, and R O I optimization and hosted by me Peter Mahoney, an experienced C M O C E O board member and executive advisor.

In this episode of the next C M O podcast, we welcome Norman Guano, the C M O of Mimecast. Back to the next C M O podcast. Norman joined us a couple years ago when he was the C M O of a company called Acoustic, and he shares his insights on how Mimecast adapts their marketing for. The strategic thinking that Norman is bringing to bear his approach of mixing the tactical needs of marketers with the long-term strategic efforts at the same time.

And he shares some really amazing insights about some cheat codes around how to get the most out of agency relationships because Norman himself has spent time both on the agency side as well as the client side. I’m sure you’ll get a lot of out of the show, and thanks for listening. Here’s Norman. Hey Norman, welcome back to the next C M O podcast. Really excited to see you again, and to educate the audience here. Can you tell them a little bit about Norman and a little bit about Mimecast?

I.

Norman: Sure thing. Well, first of all, Peter, it’s great to be back. Always appreciate when I get a chance to talk with somebody like yourself who’s spoken with so many CMOs and other marketers and try to slot myself in. So I’m excited about this conversation and. I am currently the C M O at Mimecast.

Mimecast is one of the leading email and collaboration security providers that is, we’re in the cybersecurity space. We help protect your email. In fact, many of you who are listening, you may already be one of the 42,000 plus customers Mimecast has around the globe. That is protecting your email against the endless onslaught of malicious attacks.

I’ve been there for about nine months now, so I’m relatively early. In the gig or at least as we marketers think of it, I know that all the things I’ve done in nine months won’t really pay off for a little while. As my boss thinks of it, of course, is like, it’s nine months. What have you done? So, that, that’s where I’m at right now.

Peter: Yeah, it’s funny, marketers often do this, right? The tenure of A C M O, depending on the reporting is anywhere between about 18 months and three years based on the data set you look at. And some of it is sort of playing that dance between accountability and the long-term impact of your work and figuring out, all right, well, I have probably 12 months to figure out if I have any impact.

And then if I know it’s not going in the right way, I guess I should start looking for another job.

Norman: It is an unfortunate reality and you know, I try to be upfront. When I joined I was very clear. I was like, there are things that I’ll do. That will have short-term fast impact for sure. And I recall like I saved a hundred thousand dollars in the first month by just canceling something that we shouldn’t have been investing in.

Right. So we’re able to do that very quickly. But then there’s the, and then there’s other stuff. Takes three or four quarters to start to pay off and you have to counsel. Patience through that process. And frankly, it’s counseling, not just the people around you, but you have to counsel yourself.

’cause I’m impatient too, and I wanna see the results. I wanna see the impact, but I also know it’s like it takes time.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. It, it does. And it’s interesting. I wonder, speaking of time, the time horizon for. Mimecast may have changed a little bit recently ’cause you joined probably a few months after, a couple of quarters after the company went private. So the Mimecast was a large public company and it ended up going private with, I forget the name of the PE firm, but a big PE firm who can write a big check.

I think I remember the number was $5.8 billion was from the press release. So, I’m sure you got half of that. Oh wait, you joined

after?

Norman: I joined after. Yes. So, so I did get half of the press releasing and it to me and said, here you go. Here’s an excellent press release. We did.

Peter: So given the fact that the company made this transition do you think Mimecast is now a little bit more patient? Because they have the ability to be more strategic and they don’t have the same kind of quarterly reporting kind of thing. Obviously there’s a lot of operational rigor that comes in with private equity ownership, but there’s sometimes the ability to add a more strategic lens into the timeframe.

And do you think Mimecast is gonna be able to benefit from that Norman?

Norman: Yeah it’s a great question, Peter, and I think there’s a lot of things going on dynamically. So, as you mentioned, we were taken private in May of last year by Premier, and we had been a public company previously. I joined it the beginning of November. So, you know, came in after the engine had started.

But you know, the first year of being private in a private equity situation is usually a lot of the, you know, they send a swarm of consultants in to understand the business, to help the management team figure out what the priorities are and to really get you set up so that as you move into. Usually year two, that really nice operating rhythm starts to pay off and you start to get all the value associated with that.

You combine that with the fact that we did add quite a number of new members of the executive team over the past year and a half as we not unusual in a situation where a company we’re a 20 year old company. We’d been public, a lot of people were able to benefit. From the upside on that across the employee base.

We went private, other people got to benefit from that. Now we’re on the private company journey and a fresh team is in place combined with a, our co-founder, c e o. So it’s a really nice mixture there to start this strategic journey. And you’re right that we have some breathing room. In that there’s a strategy, there’s a clear guidance as to where we need to be, and we don’t have that relentless drumbeat of quarter by quarter numbers.

Now, internally, we still have the relentless drumbeat of quarter by quarter, make sure we produce, make sure we deliver and so it’s a, it is an interesting situation. The second part of this, of course, is we’re. To a year and a half out of Pure Pandemic land. We’re a year into macroeconomic turmoil.

We’re all of these things also impact the ability to feel like there’s stability and I think that right now we are probably not alone in feeling that the landscape in which we operate is still. Very dynamic and it’s hard to see exactly what the next quarter is gonna bring. So we’re trying to balance that strategic planning, being thoughtful, get all the pieces aligned with also being very agile and being able to adapt to a really dynamic marketplace.

Peter: Yeah it’s interesting because you are right a lot of. People are going through a lot of change right now of the things that you brought up coming outta the pandemic. The economic condition is strange, I think is the best way to think about it. Right now. It’s a little hard to get a sense for what’s going on, and you’re in this new world of private equity ownership, and so there’s a lot of internal change going on.

So as a functional leader, as a C M O, have to. Sort play at a couple of different horizons. You have to keep the trains running. You have to do all this very tactical stuff. Like saving the a hundred thousand dollars that you came in and did is probably like, Hey, I gotta go, you know, unplug that thing that got plugged into long, or something like that.

At the same time, you have to balance the strategic. So how do you think about kind of goal setting? Around how do you set priorities as a functional executive in marketing, who is who’s trying to make sure that you have this strategic horizon? At the same time, you’re trying to make sure that the day-to-day works

Norman: Yeah you hit the the core of what I confront every single day and the core of anyone coming into my situation, but I’m particular, you know, realize that. We have to have that engine that’s producing revenue, just working, right. It really has to. And so, when we think about the goals that we have in marketing our first goal, just sort of at a high level is simply feed sales.

And we never want to take our eye off of attaching what we do in marketing at any level to revenue coming out the other end. And I think that’s important that even in the most strategic of businesses, you can’t lose sight of connecting marketing to revenue. And I think when I came in, The connection may not have been as tight perhaps historically.

And can Marvin, you may, marketing may have over-indexed on pipeline and pipeline as you and I can talk about and I know you’ve talked with many can be a deceptive metric sometimes. And so I really made it very clear we have to ultimately drive revenue. We have to feed sales. You know, another thing that we also have to look at is we talked a lot about.

Balancing our investments across the funnel and across the pipeline. Right? So we started to think strategically about, hey if we are over-investing in performance marketing, which I suspect we were, I’ll claim we were, but we wanna. Reallocate that investment more to top of funnel brand awareness and brand perception.

You just can’t do that overnight. You can’t pull the plug on, you know, performance marketing and say, okay, here we go. So that becomes more of a strategic play. I. That it takes quarters of activity and then you realize, well, maybe I need a different media agency partner to help me, and that’s a quarter of finding one, and then onboarding, and maybe I need fresh messaging or a new brand story.

That’s another quarter. So all of a sudden, a bunch of tactical things actually get nested into a strategic play. Right. So the feed sales goes on every single day that, hey, we’re gonna balance the investments that we make, that actually ends up being a year of activity to get a completely rebalanced portfolio of investments to drive marketing forward.

Peter: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think this tension of trying to. Juggle the urgent with the strategic is an interesting one. And you’re right, you illustrated really well. The fact that sometimes doing something big that has a big impact, it’s complicated and it takes a long time. And it’s also damped by the effect that it takes a while for.

A brand to build as an example or a message to stick that type of thing, which is an interesting dilemma to to get through. Now, the other thing, and we were talking about this briefly when we were prepping for our chat today, is that Mimecast is also. 20 year old company and a multi-product company.

So that’s something that’s always a really interesting thing to think about as a marketing executive, is how do you start to think about multi-product, multi audience kind of, kind of marketing. So how do you think about that inside of Mimecast today? I.

Norman: Yeah, and it’s interesting because I actually had the, I think first in my career, good fortune of the. Today I started at Mimecast. We introduced a brand new product family. And so I was like, oh, boom, here we go. Right from that start. And there was a lot of work the team put in to get to that moment in time.

And this was an instance of, I was immediately confronted with, okay, we have this new product suite that is very, in fact is very similar to our existing. Product suite except the model for deployment and some of the characteristics of how it’s used, essentially who it’s aimed at are slightly different.

So we went into, we were already in market the day I got their launch, and the go to market motion was new and different for this new product. It was more of a, Direct push with a free trial versus more classic tech sales with a longer process for the existing product. And I immediately had a look at that universe and figure out how are we gonna rationalize all this?

How are we gonna think about the investments we’re gonna make? And from my perspective, it becomes, as you and I have spoken about, a, it does become a portfolio management process, but it also becomes a an internal. Evangelism and education enablement process almost more than anything else. Getting the people in the business to understand the reality of yesterday we sold this one thing.

Today we sell these two things and frankly, customers need to make a choice based on the customer’s need, and not necessarily based on what you think is the best thing or the thing that will make you the most money. And turns out that when you have those dilemmas you get lean heavily into, well, it’s actually about the customer experience and you reorient much of what you’re doing to that customer experience model of let’s make sure we’re mapping to the needs of the customers.

And I actually think that having a multi portfolio. Set of products, forces, the discussions internally of are we really aligning with our customer needs? Because when you look at it through that lens, you say, oh, well this one fits really well here. This one fits here. Let’s make sure we start to build the programs appropriate.

This is for tall customers. This is for short customers, this is for blue customers, this is for red customers. However, you start to think about it and that I think eases some of the conflict or tension that may emerge when you think it’s like, oh, we just have to sell everything right away and to anyone.

And it turns out that’s actually not reality.

Peter: I can tell Norman that your your. Your history is in your experience, especially early in your career I noticed that you were a a UI engineer or a user experience engineer, what you call it back then, right? Is probably informing some of your thinking all the way through your C M O career, right?

Because it really is about that customer experience and sorting that out. And you’re right. I think there’s often a. A attention on marketing leaders and sales leaders a about, hey, how do I sell the right thing? Is it a simple merchandising kind of discussion where I put the right offer in front of the right customer?

Do I give people some level of choice? What makes the most sense? And then how do they want to consume it? Is another interesting thing. In fact I just had a discussion with someone this week about the idea Of high touch support for customer success organizations for the best customers.

And it’s interesting because it, you know, of course your customer base in, and Mimecast has a gigantic customer base, which is a huge opportunity. A customer base like that is, is really valuable. And there’s often this. This view that, oh, I wanna give this high touch sort of experience talk to a real human being.

And sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes you really have to understand what the customer wants, and they go, no, I just wanna buy some more licenses. Gimme a little clicky thing and make it be done. And don’t make me talk to, you know, Marvin, the the marketer. I don’t want to get there.

So d does that sort of, I, I think I packed 17 questions into

Statement, and it became a speech, not a question.

Norman: into that. Let me answer question number three

Peter: All right. Good.

Norman: the 17. You just asked, which I think is, you know, silly one, so I did come from a background of trying to, you know, think about the user experience, right? That what it is. It turns out that actually has carried through to sort of everything I do, which is ultimately every customer.

At some level as a human being, whether it’s a giant corporation or a small business there’s a human being and a set of human beings that, that want and need things and they’re not just waiting. They’re constantly being shaped and influenced by the world around them, right? We see a cool new way to do something on a consumer app on our phone.

Our expectations are immediately reset, so we want that in all the B two B Tech. That we buy if that’s something that we deal with or the B two B Tech we use. So our expectations are constantly going up, and I think it’s incumbent upon the business to look holistically at the experience that you’re delivering and for marketing to take a broad perspective on that, certainly so that it aligns with those ever changing expectations of the humans.

That we serve. And I do believe that we sometimes forget that even as we’re chatting in the hallways about ai, about, you know, new types of interfaces about this, that, and the other we somehow think and our customers are still there with their mainframes, with punch cards, and we’re just, you know, helping them out.

Right. It is like, no, they’re chatting about all those things too. And when they turn to their computer, They somehow, magically expect it to all work as well as the best thing that they do, that they use and that’s a dilemma that we often forget, right? Think about the best experience that you have with a product that becomes the benchmark that you want in every product, and you immediately denigrate your ex.

Your your appreciation or perception of every other product when they don’t meet that experience. And I think as a company, we have to realize that’s going up, and we have to think holistically. And as we deliver new products with new experiences, we do that to ourselves, right?

We delivered a new product. It had a I think a better user experience. And then we had to make sure we deliver that user experience to the existing. Product family. And that constant one-upping is something that’s become so critical to the business and to make sure that you’re aligning with those expectations.

So I answered 12 of the 17 questions. We can hold on the five.

Peter: Perfect. The other five we’ll have for Norman part three of the next C M o appearance, which is great. So, one of the things I wanted to chat about too is your experience. We talked a little bit about the fact that you early in your career worked for, I noticed it’s Ashton Tate.

You have to get, we need to have the And the tech historians out there. I, you know, I was a big dBase person

back in the

Norman: Oh, congratulations for being a dBase person. Yes. This is old timers day though. In, in, in tech.

Peter: That’s right. So I think I’ve lost half the audience already here by talking about dBase. But from there, and you’ve done some really interesting things with some great companies, but one pattern that you’ve had is you’ve gone back and forth during your career between agency con experiences and client experiences like your now client side as a C M O.

You’ve done B two C. You’ve done B two B, so you’ve done the matrix, right? You’ve got all four of those cells that you’ve filled in. And I guess the question is how does that inform you as a marketer? Does it make it better for you? Does it make it harder? Does it make it, is it just about, Hey, I just wanna mix it up.

How do you think about the, that diversity that you’ve had in your

career?

Norman: Yeah, it’s it’s definitely something that is a combination of in intentional and sometimes accidental and I and things that I do accidentally often enough, I just say, are intentional. And so it, it makes it a little bit, I meant to trip over that. There you go. It’s it’s indeed I think for the client agency side that one.

I as a client, ’cause that’s where I started out. I was, I worked with a lot of agencies and I was fascinated by how they worked, what they did and the way in which they approached the problems they solved. And I came to a realization at some point that I’m gonna spend the rest of my career if I’m a client side marketer at any level.

And certainly as you get to be vp, S V P C M O, I’m wanna spend the rest of my career hiring agencies and spending a ton of money on them. I’d really like to understand better. What they do, what makes the best, how they actually operate and think about the world. And when I did that a few times, I realized that it actually is a little bit of a, I hate to use the term sort of secret weapon or superpower but it is, as a client side marketer of being inside agencies multiple times over, you understand what, what drives them, how they think, how they operate.

And you also are good at distinguishing the real from the, perhaps less real when an agency is pitching to you when an agency is talking to you. So I saw it as a, oh, I, I wanna be the best at x, I need to really go learn how X is made, right? I, and so I got great value from that. And I also saw that when I was on the agency side and I got to do a lot of B two C.

Customers at work that I hadn’t done before that. Oh wait. The problems are actually often the same, just with maybe a different name or a different timeline associated with them, but the problems is repeat again and again. And that allowed me to do the thing that I think I, I actually sometimes am good at, which is that sort of thinking about something I’ve seen somewhere else and figuring it out, how it applies into this, that pattern recognition.

Oh, this is just like this. And to me that starts to, I think, make it just more interesting and I’ll acknowledge I get bored like the next person, you know, doing the same thing over and over again. So I look for ways to make it interesting and ways to create that variety. And I feel good about having been on that journey.

And you know, for as long as I’m at Mimecast I’m excited. Maybe that’s a. A five year journey. Maybe it’s longer, maybe it’s less. Will the next piece be back to an agency work job to another client side job? Will I, you know, go move to Italy and have a little book cart that I push around and sell books, maybe.

But it, it does create diversity for me

Peter: So it slipped out what you really want to do, by the way, Norman is the book

card thing,

Norman: And I promise that a copy of the next C M O will be right there on the book

Peter: Excellent. There are plenty extra, so that should be fine. Exactly. So you were talking about this cheat code you have with agencies and that you can determine which ones are good and which ones aren’t, and you understand the way that they work. And the other thing that I’ve noticed, so I’ve not spent time agency side.

But one thing that I’ve definitely noticed that I bet you’re really good at is getting better work out of agencies because the reality is that I. That not only is there a huge diversity in capability of agencies, every single agency has a huge diversity in the quality of the work that they can put out.

And a big part of that is the client. And so h help us who have only been on the client side, how do we do a better job briefing, engaging, getting better work out of agencies?

Norman: Yeah, so you hit on something super critical. There, there is a little bit of a cheat code and it’s one I’m gonna, I’m gonna give you and everyone right now, absolutely free. And, or maybe it’ll be in my future book, and you’ll have to get

Peter: On the book.

Norman: full that’s right on the book. Here’s the thing.

And this is not meant to be a you know, this is the way it is or isn’t because every marketer and every marketing team is unique and different and approaches these things differently, as does every agency. But more often than not, marketers either treat agencies as a them. Or marketers treat agencies as in us, and it seems ludicrously simple, but as long as the agency is of them and you limit the flow of information to them, you sort of have a rigid, okay, show us this.

I’ll show you this. Oh, you don’t need to see that, or you don’t need to talk to this other agency. As long as the agency is a them, I think it hampers their ability. To absolutely do their best work. When you make the agency in us, hey, we’re gonna share everything even crap you may not have wanted to see.

We’re gonna let you talk with our other agencies, even if you may overlap with some of their services. But we need you to work together. We’re gonna sit you down with our top executives and let you hear what they say. So it’s not just the marketing people that you’re talking to. We are gonna involve you in meetings with customers and hear what they say.

So it’s not just the 10 interviews you get to do as soon as you make the agency in us. I think the level of work that they deliver goes up. And if you can do that regularly, if the agency really starts to say, Hey, wait, they’re treating us as part of them. We need to do our best work. They’ve embraced us.

We need to do our best work for them, and that becomes this mutually beneficial process. And it’s a simple cheat code, if you will, but I have seen it again and again on both sides of the equation.

Peter: I really appreciate that. And it rings quite true. If you think about it, if you’re sitting there on the agency side, and I know I haven’t been in an agency, but I’ve done a lot of consulting work as an example will you how you engage with that client and the people you engage with, that client is gonna be very different based on that.

Kind of approach. So if you’re saying, Hey, I want you to sit down and and talk to the c e o are you gonna put the junior project manager in front of the c e o? No. You’re gonna put your best strategist, the person who can really get the best out of that. And then all of a sudden, you know, you’re creating that better insights, better connections.

People like to be on those accounts because they’re working on strategic stuff instead of, you know, wrote busy work and things like that. So that’s,

Norman: very true. And you hit on something really key there. Everyone says, well, I want your best people when they talk to an agency, right? And they’re like, of course you’ll have our best people. I. And yeah, and I want your best people to just take orders from my marketing manager.

I was like, whoa. You know, you have your best people at this level as opposed to that engagement where of course you wanna bring your best people to sit down with the c e o and talk about their vision. You want to be able to engage appropriately. And and I think if you really understand that dynamic and you figure out a way to, to say, Hey I know that ultimately we’re paying you.

Agency for the work that you do, but we wanna make this successfully something both of us can walk away from feeling great about. And I think it pays off. And I tell my teams all the time, I want our agencies to see us as the best client that they have. And it seems, Tri trivial, maybe even a little bit self-congratulatory, but it’s it puts a mindset in place that’s like, we actually do wanna be a great client.

We want agencies to say, yeah, we want to come back and work with you again. And I feel fortunate that, you know, even, you know, at Mimecast now, I’m have the agencies that we put in place that, this is the third time I’ve worked. Some of them, right. And to me that’s a mark of the fact that we’ve built a strong relationship that is mutually beneficial.

Peter: That’s fantastic advice. Really appreciate it. And I think you have this unique perspective because you’ve played on both sides of the field in in a number of cases. And and I think you probably see that I. Clearer and in a deeper way than other people would because of that experience. So thanks for sharing that, Norman.

Well, believe it or not, we’re actually at the end of our time, you may be saying finally

Norman: I’m saying I, there are five questions I didn’t answer and

Peter: yeah, I know I’ve

Norman: for part three.

Peter: exactly, but the last question that I always finish up with is, what advice would you give Norman to current or aspiring CMOs?

Norman: Yeah, and you know, I’ve given this advice or I’ve been asked this question, you know, in various forms many times, and the advice continues to evolve, right? And I actually think right now this is an amazingly interesting time for someone who wants to go down. That path of being a future, being the next C M O.

And I believe that’s because, you know, we can’t get out of this podcast without talking about AI and things associated with that. But I think it opens up new opportunities for rethinking how we tap into. Resources like generative AI and use them to get better at marketing. And I think it changes the landscape for us.

I think that notwithstanding all the the hype over the past decade or more around the availability of data from marketers, we’re actually seeing it pay off now when we have insights we’ve never had before. And we can use those insights and frankly, I think that we’re about to enter a renaissance.

Truly coming out of the past few years where, let’s admit it, life has been a little difficult for all of us in one form or another. Whether it was the pandemic, whether it’s economic uncertainty, anything that’s going on in the world, it’s been a little hard for all of us and historically that’s usually followed by a real period of exuberance and a creativity.

And I think for marketers, we can be right at the center of that. So now is the absolute best time to figure out the path for someone to be the next C M O.

Peter: Well, excellent sage advice from Norman. So really appreciate that. Appreciate you being on the show for a second time. And we’ve never had a third, so, so maybe someday we’ll see.

You could

Norman: I, look, I look forward to that, maybe talking to you from the book cart, walking through the streets of Italy, but I’m, game

Peter: That, that sounds fun. That’s fun. Maybe I’ll do an in-person interview ’cause it is a beautiful country, so that sounds good. Well thank you all for listening to the next V M O. If you have ideas for guests or for topics, just send them on to us at the next cm o@planful.com. Make sure you follow us on all those social media things and thanks again for listening and Norman, have a fantastic day.

Norman: You too. Thank you, Peter.