POD00041 Peter Mahoney: [00:00:00] 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 CMO is sponsored by Plannuh makers of the world’s first AI based marketing leadership platform.And hosted by me, Peter Mahoney, the former CEO of Plannuh along with my cohost Kelsey Krapf
In this episode of the next CMO podcast, we speak to Megan Berry. The vP of demand generation at Axonius, the leading provider of cyber security asset management. We speak to Meg about her strategy to market, to difficult, to reach information security professionals. Measuring her marketing results based on quality, not quantity. And even how she manages her marketing plans and budgets with an awesome platform called plannuh.
Kelsey Krapf: [00:01:00] Thanks for joining us today, Meg, we’re super happy to have another Boston company on this podcast. I’d love to learn a little bit more about you and what you do at Axonius.
Megan Berry: [00:01:11] Sure. Thanks, Kelsey. I run our demand gen team at yes. I’ve been with the company for about two years now. And we’re, we’re still a really new company, but we’re in this crazy hyper growth stage.
So Axonius is a cybersecurity asset management solution. And asset management is. It’s a really foundational concept for cybersecurity practitioners. It’s the concept of kind of understanding what you have in your environment so that you can protect it. And what we like to say is you can’t protect what you can’t see.
But even with it being such a simple concept, it’s really this, it’s still this nagging problem that actually keeps getting worse, especially now that Most of the world has transitioned to remote work. People left their offices in March of 2020 with their work machine and went God knows where.
It’s definitely becoming more of a problem. So Axonius helps by seamlessly showing you what you have in your environment showing you where you might have some gaps in your security coverage, and then giving you the tools to enforce your security policies, whether automatically or just by prompting prompting you to take a look at something.
Peter Mahoney: [00:02:19] I imagine things have gotten really busy in the last year then. It sounds like they’ve been busy anyway, to be fair. But given the explosion of remote working, that’s a really complicated thing, all of a sudden to start to deal with that. And have you found that the pandemic has really accelerated your business at Axonius?
Megan Berry: [00:02:38] Yes and no, I think in, in terms of the business sense, like we’re actually quite lucky in that we did not have to take any extreme measures. When everything shut down, we business as usual, we kept all of our employees, so that is something we’re really proud that we were able to do. But we did start getting interest from different types of industries and in a more clustered fashion.
Healthcare became a big one because they were becoming such big targets. Yeah, travel because they were becoming such big targets. So we did see some uptick. In that regard for sure.
Peter Mahoney: [00:03:09] For those of us who’ve who follow your investment stages, you’re a series C company.
So that means that there are at least three institutional rounds in a really short period of time. You’ve got to the point where your so you only do that when you’re growing really fast, which is great. Andremind me was it 2016 or 2015? You started.
Megan Berry: [00:03:31] 2017 actually. Yeah. So 2017. Yeah. I actually just started with the company February of 2019.
So just got to my second year here. And I like to recently been able to tell the story of when I started it was myself and our CMO. On the marketing team. Just this past Monday. Three days ago now we hired our 18th person on the marketing team, which is great. And that’s with just about zero employee churn.
and seven of those new hires have started since January 1st. And we just opened five new positions this week on the team.
Peter Mahoney: [00:04:05] Great. So all of you listening who are looking for a rocket ship Meg is awesome. As we know a really you’ll find out and. And it’s a great company, so that’s really fantastic.
That’s quite a ride. And so it, it actually brings a really great perspective to our listeners, too Meg, because a company going through that kind of growth, not only from the top line and business growth, but also the organizational growth really presents some interesting challenges and opportunities for a marketing leader . For one, you need to figure out, your overall strategy.
She’ll talk a little bit about your marketing strategy at . How would you characterize that? And maybe as you talk about that, tell us a little bit about kind of the target audience, who’s your buyer and how do you get to them,
Megan Berry: [00:04:52] sure. Yeah. Starting with the buyer, our primary target are CISOs.
So chief information, security officers. Really hard people to get ahold of I’m skeptical of the internet. Rightfully hard to find on LinkedIn and we’ve found that there are just some really niche groups that they go to. But there are so many of those niche groups. And so you have to be at all of them, so you have to find them in every place possible.
So that is our buyer and obviously the end-users that, can make that case to their CISO . Our strategy. So again, as a new company last year and the year before was really all about top funnel strategies. We needed people to know us. We needed people to understand that it was a problem.
So we’re actually defining the cybersecurity asset management space. Educating people on the problem and that there actually is a solution to it. So a lot of people and a lot of companies are actually managing assets and an Excel sheet. They’re, exporting data from all of their tools.
They’re comparing, contrasting taking them hours and hours of time. And it’s because they don’t know that there is a solution like Axonius that exists to do it all for you automatically. So the strategy, the last two years was really top funnel. Make sure people know about us gate, everything so that we know who these people are that are looking this year we’re shifting to a mid funnel strategy.
We’re starting to play around with the concept of ungated content which I think is a scary concept because it, it’s going to change, I think how sales looks at marketing. So we’re toying with that idea. But we are taking our top funnel approaches to new markets. So we’ve historically been really focused on the U S only we’re now expanding to EMEA and APAC.
So what we’re really just saying is we’re a year behind there. So in EMEA and APAC, we’re going to focus on that top funnel strategy until we get that recognition like we have here in the States.
Peter Mahoney: [00:06:50] That makes a lot of sense. And I assume that with the desire and requirement to define the problem, to define the space that you’re in, there’s a fair amount of education that you do in.
And in doing that, you have to come up with the model, the concepts, you have to write it down. You have to define the space. You have to do all those things. Who are the content creators . Do you leverage your own team? Do you leverage external people? Do you leverage experts within Axonius or some combination?
How does that, happen?
Kelsey Krapf: [00:07:22] that’s
Megan Berry: [00:07:23] a great question. Mostly right now It’s experts within our company, as well as some analysts. So our CMO, Nate Burke he has an extensive background in the cyberspace. He could write about it all day if we would let him which we don’t, because we’re now hiring content people to do that for us.
We have a product marketing team that contributes a lot. One of our veteran sales reps actually is. Professional on the space at this point, who’s been in it so long. So he does a lot of our content as well. And then we do work with some analysts firms to make sure that we’re talking about the problem in a way that they’re hearing in their customers.
Peter Mahoney: [00:07:59] Yeah. I really liked that you, you create from within, because what you’re doing along the way, first of all, it’s much more authentic when the voice of the company is the company, because sometimes that ends up being pushed out a little bit and it’s fine to. To edit, to tweak, to polish, whatever the terms are.
But the real ideas I think, have to come from inside the company when you’re employing this kind of strategy at the beginning, especially. It’s a little trickier to scale. Because all of a sudden, and you’re going from and hiring all these people. And I assume you’ve got some really ambitious marketing goals and reach that you’re trying to do.
So obviously I guess he can hire six more CMOs, but that wouldn’t make Nate happy.
Megan Berry: [00:08:43] Exactly. And we’re actually I was remiss in saying we are, I think one of the luckier companies in terms of our size we actually have an in-house CISO. So that’s rare at a company, our size. However, as a vendor in the security space, if you don’t, if you don’t have an internal CISO you’re, I think you’re missing something.
So our CISO is our he’s our subject matter expert and he’s not our salesperson. We send him to events not to sell our products, but to talk about asset management and the problem. And he has a whole other content series for themselves, similar to this podcast. It’s called his life as a CISO series.
Kelsey Krapf: [00:09:17] So he interviews security professionals from all stages, CISOs and aspiring CISOs to talk about their problems and challenges too. So he is also a part of our content creation process. Speaking of problems and challenges. You’ve obviously been in the demand gen space for a little while, at least two years that what are some major red flags that you’ve come across?
Megan Berry: [00:09:39] Yeah. So this is an interesting one because the red flags have really changed, I think, in the last year with this work from home and virtual boom I think one of the big ones is just virtual, everything and virtual burnout. Even just on a personal level at the beginning, Zoom happy hours and trivia nights and game nights with your friends, back in March and April were, a nice way to hang out with your friends.
And quite frankly, not have to put jeans on, you’re sitting at home and you’re comfortable and and now I think, everyone is just totally burnt out. We’ve seen such a dip in webinar registrations but we’ve also seen an increase in attendance rates which is very interesting. So I think, one of the red flags is just virtual events in general. Understanding what you’re committing to because every single virtual event is different and I think they all, at least what I’ve seen is.
Every, every person that hosts a virtual event has a different definition of what that means. So the expectation just isn’t really consistent across the board. And then one of the other red flags I would say is the idea of quantity over quality. And this kind of goes back a little bit to what I was saying of us, starting to test out this ungated content approach.
And I think, sales teams and marketing teams can just get really hyped up over volume. You go to an event and you’d say, Oh my gosh, he came back with 3000 leads, but how many of those are like are real and good? Our biggest event is RSA conference. And last year I had someone come up to me and say, I’ll trade you a scan for a scan.
I said what are you talking about? And they said aren’t you must be tracked on scans for this event. Let me just scan your badge and you can scan mine. I said, Oh, if that’s important to you, you take my badge. I’ve been there. But no, thank you. I don’t need to scan a marketing person for my event.
I think getting caught up on that, quantity over quality is a really hard shift in a mindset shift to make. A way that we’re making that easier at Axonius is the marketing team is now not tracked on MQL and SQL, but we’re tracked on pipeline contribution. So my goals for my team directly aligned with our sales and our business.
As opposed to this arbitrary number that we think might help us get to our goals.
Peter Mahoney: [00:12:05] That’s great. It’s that’s music to my ears, Meg is is the real tight connection of your incentives and your targets with a real business outcome, because that’s of course something that we’ve been advocating for a long time.
And we think the most successful companies are behaving that way. They’re really trying to get their team. To do that. And I think even a first step is to get them to understand it. So what is the relationship between a lead and opportunity pipeline, revenue and even profit contribution.
So how does that flow through? And it’s interesting. I’ve seen this funny dynamic happen in fact Dan, our CTO just did a webinar today that illustrated some of this. There’s this strange bifurcation and measurement that’s going on, where there’s this very detailed kind of measurement that happens at the micro level, like MQL counts.
How many scans in my trade show, how many clicks in my email? How many opens. Whatever it is. Because everything is so tightly instrumented, you can measure everything, including every little tactic. And then there’s this stuff that’s super high level. That’s really important by the way, but you’re probably all tracking at Axonius things like your CAC and your CAC payback time.
And that’s your aggregate total view of your customer acquisition cost. And that’s what sort of the investment community looks at in your management team and your board? But the stuff in the middle is actually the most important thing. Th the stuff in the middle is what are the campaigns that I’m building and what is their contribution to ultimate business results.
What’s my cost per outcome for this campaign versus that. Campaign. So what does it cost me to get a dollar pipeline? And how does that vary by campaign to campaign? And if people start to develop a better understanding of that, I think they’re going to make just better and better decisions about where they allocate their limited resources for marketing.
Megan Berry: [00:14:10] I totally agree. And I think the next nuance to that. Is going to be the brand value of some of these campaigns. So while not every single one of my campaigns for my top funnel, 2019, 2020 marketing strategy were home runs. There is value to the brand of just making sure that people know you’re there.
So RSA for instance, because we weren’t tracked on lead scans, you come home with a couple hundred as opposed to a couple thousand. But we had this amazing spot on the floor. We had the highest booth in our section. You could see it coming down the escalator, like there’s value in that too. So I do think the next nuance is going to say, how are we really tracking some of these demand programs to the brand influence as well.
And I don’t have the answer to that. I don’t know how that’s done yet. But I think that’s going to be fun to figure out.
Peter Mahoney: [00:15:00] . And one of the questions of course, that you have to ask when you talk about the brand impact is the to what end question, so why you’re trying to get better brand awareness. It may be because you want more people to understand that there’s this market out there that you’re trying to define.
People are more responsive to your marketing out there and or they convert more because they recognize and respect your brand when they’re in the funnel, trying to make a decision. But ultimately it connects at the end to some business impact and understanding the connectedness between those things is really important. The other thing is, and I don’t know how you do this as , but articulating those things. So communicating internally, what the value of marketing is always a tricky thing because some people have this very activity driven kind of thing. We did a lot of stuff. Look at all these things, isn’t that cool.
And I think the best marketing teams communicate in the form of their business impact. Does that something that you’ve, how do you think about that at Axonius? ,
Megan Berry: [00:16:10] At Axonius, we have one of the better relationships with the sales team that I’ve ever experienced.
And I think it comes with the fact that we, every company starts this way, but our marketing and sales teams have grown comparatively. There, there wasn’t an influx of sales reps when there was still three of us on the marketing team. We’ve grown proportionately together, which I think has helped.
But we, it was definitely a shift in mindset when we said, MQL and SQL aren’t the metric anymore, but we’re going to be fueling your pipeline. It’s very, a common, psychological trick is using I statements, but for this, it’s this is all about you. I’m doing this for you. And that really helps frame the conversation.
We meet with our sales teams twice per quarter as a marketing and sales group. So marketing participates in sales QBRs. So we have a 45 minutes session which isn’t nearly enough, but it’s enough to show the activity and the impact. And then in the middle of every quarter, we actually just had our call today.
We have what we call a smarketing call, which is a mix of our sales and marketing teams. So there’s about 50 people on those calls and it’s framed around marketing initiatives and sales challenges. So it’s definitely more of a marketing presentation than a sales presentation. But it’s, here’s, what’s coming down the road for you, that marketing is working on.
We’ve. We heard you at the last QBR based on that conversation. Here’s our plan, open it up for questions. So what we heard at the last QBR was the need for vertical content. January 4th, we hired a vertical marketing manager. So today is February 25th. We were able to deliver on what our vertical marketing plan is for the rest of the year.
So that’s the kind of relationship we have here is we always participate in each other’s conversation. There’s no silos really.
Peter Mahoney: [00:18:10] That’s fantastic. And it’s a great, it’s a great way to talk about, and also really demonstrate alignment between marketing and sales. And obviously the most successful marketing teams are the ones who are one really good at demonstrating their business impact, but two have a set of advocates in the sales team.
Who will actually concur that they have delivered business impact and they’ve filled the funnel so that they can, that can help close sales and move on and things like that. So that’s really great. And I think the you’re in an interesting role because you really, as a demand executive really have to have that tight relationship with the sales team.
And how do you balance the tactical with the strategic. Because one of the challenges that you often run into when you’re, if you’re too tightly aligned with the sales team, is that how I’m going to focus on this quarter, but the reality, sometimes things take, and I’m asking you this, the question, cause I know that you’ve been thinking about things strategically, so this is not a gotcha.
I wouldn’t do that. But the, how do you balance the whole idea of, I gotta hit my number this quarter, but there are really important, long-term initiatives. Especially if you’re doing things like, Oh I’m actually defining a space in security, security asset management didn’t really exist before.
And that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in a month or a quarter or two, it happens over a period of years. So how do you balance that?
Megan Berry: [00:19:42] Yeah, that’s a really good question. And the answer truthfully comes with the team. Hiring really great people to help with the tactical stuff. My first hire at my previous company I hired her as a marketing programs coordinator.
I believe it was her title. I left that company two years ago, six months after that she joined me here. She, I wanted her on this team. She, she said, I’m interested. We did it. And she’s the specialist for our campaigns. She can run a campaign with her eyes closed. She is now a manager and just hired her first person.
I have a team of there’s six of us on the demand gen team. So for me, it’s, if I hadn’t hired any of these people I wouldn’t be able to think strategically, the last four or five months was trying to think through a vertical strategy. And when we finally came up with some sort of plan, it wasn’t a hard and fast plan. It just, we need it. Here are the ones to focus on. We need to find a way to get there. That’s when I hired the person to come in and specialize in doing just that stay. And we’re now, at that point with our channel marketing efforts we have someone here running channel marketing.
It’s becoming a bigger commitment. So I need to put more time there to say, this is where we need to get strategic and figure out our next steps there. So I truly believe the balance between being strategic, all the tactical is the team that is built.
Peter Mahoney: [00:21:08] I love the structure that you have campaign managers.
I’m a big fan of that because what it does is it helps you transcend the concept of just focusing on a channel. Because a lot of people get stuck on that. And that’s one of the things Dan was talking about his webinar today. It’s one of his favorite things is the difference between a channel and a campaign.
And if you think more broadly and strategically and think in, in campaigns and broad thematic campaigns, of course can spend multiple channels. You can have a social element, you can have a digital element. You can have a physical virtual event. You can have PR all related to a single campaign concept.
And what it takes is a strategic view of planning, but also an organizational element because you really need someone. You need that person, who is responsible for owning the campaign. And so I love that you’ve done that. And so can you talk a little bit about that role of a campaign manager at Axonius?
Because I think it’s something a lot of people are trying to get to, know, it would really help to understand what does this person who seems like a superstar, so don’t stay her name. So people try to poach her. What are the things that are on her plate as a campaign manager?
Megan Berry: [00:22:19] What’s nice is to have been able to see her grow like she has. Like I said, she’s now a manager and the person that we’ve hired is her two years ago or three years ago. So it’s been fun to see that transition. So the person that she hired is, newer, she’s a specialist level just starting out in her career.
So she’s really focused on a lot of the logistical aspects. She’s actually helping me a lot in Plannuh, which is really exciting. But the campaign role that we have, she knows now what we need to do in order to show success.
And be successful. And I did notice that yesterday we had a webinar and it was one of the lower registration numbers that we’ve had, but it was also our first attempt, our first real attempt at a mid-funnel webinar. And I saw it, I saw the numbers and I fully expected her to be disappointed by the volume.
And she wasn’t. And for me, that was, I was like, yes she’s got it. . We had a 50% attendance rate. We had great questions, great engagement. So those are the kinds of metrics I see her shifting to, but in terms of what her role looks like, I give her a budget and I say, we have to get to this pipeline number with these dollars.
Help me figure out a way to do that. So she is looking at vendors, she’s looking at media kits and she’s having hundreds of conversations a week to figure out where we’re best to spending those dollars with vendors that we need to do. Do we have the timelines and the infrastructure internally set up to do that?
Do we have time to. Make a new piece of content. What can we repurpose? So she’s less about bringing it through all of our different channels and more about strictly like that one campaign. But she, she knows how to get from a to B and finish the campaign, but also make sure that there’s follow-up, which I think is the.
The one of my other red flags, Kelsey was thinking your job has ever done a marketer’s job is never done. It’s not completed with a list upload into the CRM. So making sure that our sales team does their job giving them templates that they need. So in making sure that the attribution is working and that contribution to pipeline is coming in.
So she’s able to see all of those bigger picture pieces, which has been really fun to watch her evolution there.
Kelsey Krapf: [00:24:51] That’s incredible. And yeah your job is never done and it’s from a strategic point, you also have to understand, what can I do to make this company go to the next level and bring it to to new potential.
But speaking of campaigns, I’m obviously really happy that you’re, you guys are using Plannuh and you’re helping build out your campaigns. I’m curious, what is one of your favorite campaigns of all time?
Megan Berry: [00:25:13] Oh, my favorite campaign of all time. It is not something I’ve done in cybersecurity. So I don’t know if that’s a taboo to mention on here, but not at all.
Gosh, I think it was in 2015 or 2016. I was working for a company called Virgin pulse. Virgin pulse is one of the Sir Richard Branson Virgin group companies. And we had this idea to say, let’s do an in-person event, which sounds, what seven, eight years later sounds like not this cool idea, but this was HR marketing.
So I went from HR marketing to cybersecurity and there’s. There’s a lot more red tape in marketing to HR folks than there is to cybersecurity folks. So all of the conferences we would go to, were just a little a little bland and a little to suit and tie focused. And working for a Richard Branson group the theme is disrupt.
So everything we do, we said, how can we disrupt. This conference, how can we disrupt this industry? So we said let’s host an event. And for me seeing that event come together, that was the first time I really felt like a true marketer. Working at Virgin for the Virgin group was my first like real job in demand gen and I love event.
Past tense. I used to love event planning until I had to do it all the time. But event planning used to be what I wanted to do. So to be able to mix those two, demand gen and events to combine those, to have this flagship event for the company, was my proudest moment in my most fun moment, we had Arianna Huffington as our keynote speaker.
And it was just a day, we had a hundred people, we expected maybe 30 and it was just a huge success and that conference still goes on today. That’s probably my most proud campaign and moment.
Peter Mahoney: [00:27:17] That’s great. And it’s always amazing to to do something , that is that kind of impact when you get a really.
Famous recognizable person. It can really draw in pretty senior people obviously to to try to get some wisdom imparted from someone who’s successful and famous. And of course, whenever you have something like that, you really have to make it come off without a hitch. And especially when you’re dealing with the the Virgin brands, I assume there’s a pretty high standard for the way it all has to come together.
So I’m sure it was pretty impressive. Absolutely. So I have to ask you, of course Meg is a Plannuh customer. So thank you by the way. And I’d love to get your sense for how Plannuh has changed your job in effected marketing at Axonius overall.
Megan Berry: [00:28:09] Plannuh it has not changed just my job. It’s truly changed my life. We had always been tracking in a Google sheet. Everyone would have access. Someone would mess up, not know they mess up and the whole thing is done and over. So it was actually a really interesting journey in finding Plannuh. There are a few kind of big players that I knew about and had reached out to, and they both said, no, you’re not big enough as a company to use us. But one of them actually said, you’re not big enough. Go talk to Plannuh. So I said, okay, if everyone’s telling me this, I, hopefully Plannuh doesn’t have the same story for me. And it could not have been better. The sales process was seamless. The setting, everything up it, I don’t have a finance background, the fact that it’s easy to set up without having that finance background. I used to spend hours every month reconciling with finance, going through our budget, going through our credit card statements. And it’s now maybe an hour. I’ve actually loosened my reins a little bit. I used to be the primary user of Plannuh and cause I have control issues. And I know that of character flaw I’m working on it, but with 18 people in the marketing team, more budget, more people spending the budget. It’s not becoming a scalable thing for one person to own anymore. So our team has all been trained on Plannuh. It’s now part of our onboarding process and everyone’s responsible for tracking their own tracking and managing their own spend.
At the end of the month, end of a quarter, we’re able to show finance and say, here’s everything in Plannuh and they get to match it up to their NetSuite and say, okay, everything looks great. . So it’s been. Great to say the least. And the fact that I now have my team working in it is even better.
Peter Mahoney: [00:30:03] That’s music to my ears, obviously, Meg, but especially the idea that you’ve been able to, to start to distribute authority and accountability, which is really a design point of the system is to be able to allow people on your team to safely, without losing visibility and transparency and flexibility and all that.
Yeah. The ability to control the overall plan? No. So it’s great to see, and I appreciate that. Appreciate the kind words and those poor other people who who said this company is too small clearly missed something, which is interesting. And it’s one of the reasons that we decided to really service the a lot smaller to mid-size companies and growing companies, from the beginning all the way up through big growth, because we just didn’t see that there was anything else there that it was solving the problem.
So it’s great to see. So I think we’re running into the end of our time. And just quickly, how would people learn more about Axonius? Where should we send them Meg?
Megan Berry: [00:31:02] Yeah, absolutely. Axonius.com. You can request a demo on our site.
We also offer a free trial to qualified prospects. We have a ton of informational videos and what’s actually really neat is we have a documentation site that’s open to the public. Docs.axonius.com. Anyone can go in and learn anything about our use cases. You don’t have to be a customer.
There’s no forms on our documentation site. So we really do put it all out there of how to learn more and let people know that cybersecurity asset management really tend to be solved.
Peter Mahoney: [00:31:32] Great. And we will we’ll put a link in the show notes too. And I think with that, Kelsey probably has one more question.
Kelsey Krapf: [00:31:38] Yes, Meg, obviously you are looking to be a CMO someday. You’re a marketing executive. What advice would you give to those people looking to become a CMO?
Megan Berry: [00:31:50] I would say, be yourself. Be yourself. Is the biggest one? Be visible, never say, I don’t know how always say yes and learn later. I think that’s a very common thing, but that was something that.
Really stuck with me again, from my time working with Richard Branson and his company he would always say, I got to where I am today, cause I never said, I don’t know how I always said. Yes and figured it out. So those three things. Are my advice to, to get to that next level.
Peter Mahoney: [00:32:20] Fantastic advice, Meg.
And it’s been a pleasure having you on today and thanks for everything. Thanks for sharing your great wisdom and for for being a great planet customer. And without I think, Kelsey, we’re ready to take it out right.
Yes. Thank you so much today may such a great conversation with you. Make sure to follow The Next CMO and Plannuh on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Kelsey Krapf: [00:32:42] And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email us atthenextcmo@plannuh.Com. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks
Peter Mahoney: [00:32:51] Meg. Thanks man.
nextcmo
30 Mar 2021
