Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / How to spend $1.5m on marketing to triple ARR with Manny Ataebi, Cybersecurity CMO

Transcript

How to spend $1.5m on marketing to triple ARR with Manny Ataebi, Cybersecurity CMO · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: As the funding environment is getting going again, I thought it'd be interesting to tackle the question of how to allocate marketing funds after a raise.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Many a Teby has been a marketing leader in tech for over a decade.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's been through raises and exits.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in this episode, he takes our Series A raise with Cyber Donut and talks about how to think about allocations and why, types of programs to run, and how to unite sales and marketing under common metrics.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Don't miss this one.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast where we tackle the question: how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Our guest today is Manny Attabi, a seasoned marketing leader at multiple startups, including a couple in cyber.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Manny, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Andrew.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Happy to be here.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Manny, I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: We used to work together a few couple of years ago at one company I was involved, and you were leading marketing there.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we got a good kind of rapport and we kind of know how each other thinks a little bit, which is good.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: But we're tackling the question today for our uh fictitious company, Cyber Donut.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're imagining that they've taken$20 million in a large Series A round, and you and I are going to be discussing what the heck are we going to do with that money?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever our portion of that money goes to marketing, what money are you going to spend and how?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really looking forward to how we we go about doing that.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right, before we get to the business end, we've got a treat coming up at the end of the episode when Manny tells us about his first job as a kid where he's basically doing Uber-like scheduling in his brain.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he's also telling us about the time where he broke his leg and decided just to tape it up as opposed to go to the ER.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So watch out for that coming later on.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's talk about the business side though, Manny.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got Cyber Donut.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing really well.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: They got a sales leader, a marketing leader, they got some sellers, they got 20 real live paying customers, and they're just about to take the Series A for about 20 million.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So progress is going well for Cyber Donut.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: The big question though is what they're going to do to spend the money specifically in marketing.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: So let me ask you maybe an unfair question, but you know, I realize that some of these questions are going to be it depends.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, if they're going to take 20 million, how much would you expect to get as part of your marketing budget?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll specifically not say it depends because you said the answer would be it depends.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: But um, some of it has to do with what's been working, what we've run so far, um, how much of the business has come from marketing and or sales, or is still founder-led.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: If they're getting a series A, I'm probably gonna assume it's about 50-50.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Some of their founder-led sales are still going there.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: You I think you told me there's three sellers?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's three sellers plus a leader plus an SE.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so at that point, I'm gonna assume probably one, maybe one and a half of them are hitting 100% quota.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the way it typically looks at there.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: They brought in their SE.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is obviously gonna be a technical sale if they have that.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and they have a sales leader.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, if I had to ballpark it, it it could probably fall anywhere between, you know, 600K to a million and a half, somewhere in that ballpark, depending on where they need to be.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for the first year or for the whole for the first year.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I don't obviously know the answer to this, but I'm gonna guess just based on the way where the economy is right now, if they're raising a$20 million Series A, I'm gonna assume they got a few million on a uh seed round before that or a couple million on that.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And if they're hiring at three reps, I have to, if they're at three reps, I have to assume they're hovering in the three, four million dollar range of revenue, right?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh, you know, some came from the founder.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is again assuming all three reps are just crushing it, and you know, it might be even a little bit less.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: So in my mind, they're probably in the two to five range or trying to get to that either to five million or to seven million.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So they need to find another few million of revenue.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, in that way, in that case, I'm trying to break it back, you know, do the math backwards.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think you probably need somewhere along those lines of in that spend to be uh to be able to market effectively.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that would mean SDR as well, as well as inbound programs.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how would I spend it?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, first it would be SDR.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have three sellers, you probably want to have one, maybe two SDRs, but you definitely want to have one working.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh, I think you said it was me and another marketer.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think that is okay for now, depending on what that skill set or that marketer is, if they're a content person or a campaign manager.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'd probably want to get one or the other, but I think you're okay with what you have.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: I would really be focused on what are the things that we can run to affect the pipeline over the next quarter or two.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, you know, I'm assuming this is uh, you know, cyber podcast.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna assume it's a cyber company, cyber donut, I think it was the name.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'd be looking at doing custom events to try to bring the ICP prospects into a room and to try to engage them.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: I would be looking at activation events at con at uh a conference.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're not at the point where I want to go spend a ton of money at a conference unless there's a strategic reason to do so.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't mean that you can't get a couple of tickets and try to set up uh a dinner or something along with other vendors, that sort of stuff.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then and then I would start to we probably already started this already, but I would start to be thinking about content and how to tell our story better, investing a little bit on our messaging.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's never been a company at 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, 0, 15 million that doesn't have an issue with their messaging.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I would probably it's why we know each other.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's one of the things I would also be investing uh on on those things.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But they got this far though, right?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: They they've they must some of their messaging must be pretty good if they've got 20 real live paying customers.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Could be founder selling, right?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: A founder can get on there and promise anything, and AE cannot do that.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: So this founder may have been uh successful before and been able to uh bring that over.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: This founder may have a VC that throws them business, it's just not scalable.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you're you get your Series A to start to get on the path to scalable.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we're looking for.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen founders be a little bit uh optimistic and have rose tinted glasses on about their success so far?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, this team, I imagine they're gonna double or triple the number of reps, right?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: You get take that amount of money, you're you're trying to get some scale by buying some headcount as well.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Is it that must be a point of of conflict, though, where the hey, it worked for me, why is it not working for these guys?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, that comes down to what we call product market fit, right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I have many a conversation with founders where they're like, we have product market fit because we have 10 customers.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I ask them straight out, like, how many of your sellers were brought in and moved these along?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, none.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Well, you don't have product market fit.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Product market fit is when there's a repeatable process where more than one person that is not the founder is able to do that.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, we got to talk about retention and bring them back.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, that is that is the you know, rose tinted glasses that you tend to talk about.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I do see that conversation quite a bit, or they have one seller that is working with the founder to be able to move some deals across.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: You can get to 20, assuming that your product is something that people would want.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: If it's not, then you have a whole different problem to deal with.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, what you're trying to do with the A is to get to that repeatable process.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we they're coming in through outbound, through inbound, through partner, what we would call any all bound or all any bound.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: And now a rep can take that working with an SC and can close those deals on its own or on our own.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we're trying to get to.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And my guess is you might have a couple of those 20, but there's no way that the bulk is that way.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: It just that just math doesn't make sense.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have three AEs, my guess is you're probably to your point trying to double that because you need to get to four or five that are doing what I just said.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Would you want to delay though the hiring of the AEs to get some more repeatable pipeline coming in?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or would you say no, you could have got to do it in tandem?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it depends on how good the AEs are that are there and and what they're doing right today.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you might have those facts for me in this uh thing, but you know, if I would say if you have one AE that's at 60% quota and the other two have just been hired in the next two months, you probably don't want to go hire another three.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get those three productive.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: If those three that you told me are all at 80% quota and they've all been there a year, different story.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think you have you have enough of your sales motion from top of the funnel to the end working enough that, yeah, let's go concentrate on building enough pipeline.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: What you don't want to do is go burn all through this cache to get a bunch of pipeline in when that middle isn't working, because then all you know, you're just throwing money away at that point.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna get a bunch of opportunities uh with companies based on all of the efforts you're getting to get them to the top, and your motion in the middle is not working, your velocity drops and everything drops off.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's when you get like, damn, we have a lot of uh first meetings, but we don't have many POCs going here.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Or the POCs we have, they're not good ones, and none of them are closing.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: You you want to get out of that situation.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I I would say it would depend on where you are with those things.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: But my guess in the function the fictional company you just said, if they have three and they just raised the series A, I gotta think they're at the point maybe maybe they can hire one or two more.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: There has to be some momentum.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: I have to believe that they're not, they wouldn't be able to get there A if they didn't have any momentum.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is not two years ago.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was gonna say, like five five years ago, whatever, we'd the bottom-up planning would be let's hire some reps to get capacity first and then figure out how we keep them busy.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, this is definitely not three years ago.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that was a very different beast we live in.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Many, let's learn a bit more about you.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: I've got my 35 questions here, and I'm gonna use my very sophisticated next gen AI-driven spin-the-wheel uh device here.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is fully audited, uh, uses polymorphic encryption to protect the IP about how it does it, and it's gonna generate three completely random questions.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna spin this wheel and let's see what comes of it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: All right, number 29, Manny.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: How did you first make money as a kid?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, uh, yeah, we're gonna go ahead going way back here.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so this is gonna kind of be something you probably haven't heard before.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, my very first real job, I believe I was um, I want to say 14 years old.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was working keeping the books for a car service uh business.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: So um in today's world, obviously you have your Uber, you have your Lyft.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, back in the old days, you had obviously only two choices of how to take a car to work.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: You get in a yellow cap, which is obviously you stand on the street, wave them down, or your company has an engagement with an existing uh car service organization.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that could be a stretch limo, that could be a regular black car.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Those still do exist today, but Uber and Lyft kind of own that.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: So back in the day, this was even before it was computerized.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my job was to price out, you know, based off of a price sheet, what the end up end all cost was.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that could be, for example, you know, you pick someone in Midtown East Manhattan, you you make one stop somewhere up north, and then you drop them off at JFK Airport.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, sometimes there's multiple stops in between that, sometimes there's wait time, sometimes there's phone calls.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: This was pre-cell phone days, so they had a mobile phone sitting in the car.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: My job was to calculate the vouchers for the drivers.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, today it's all computerized.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the interesting thing about that is I had to memorize basically a huge call list of prices.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, back in the day, I could tell you that, you know, Midtown East of New York City to, you know, Trenton, New Jersey was$84.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I still remember that to this day.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Midtown East to JFK Airport was$33.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Midtown West to JFK Airport was$38.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: The reason for that being you have to cross the east side of Manhattan to get to JFK.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to have all of those things memorized, getting hundreds, hundreds of these for different drivers.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was an insane, it was fortunately for me, I was good at math, but you have to do it in quick time.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: You could barely make any mistakes.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: There was no computer to back you up.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And ironic part was it taught you to be very careful.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is in today's world, you make a mistake.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you'll get a red X on the computer, it says error, all that stuff.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: In that world, I make a mistake.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: A week later, I have an angry driver coming and screaming, screaming his head off it.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: But they trusted this to a 14 or 15-year-old.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I I had to uh I had a strong Mac bath background and I just kind of had to prove it out.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they let me do a couple of test runs and I nailed them perfectly.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I knew the guy that ran the business.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, I don't want to say a family friend, but like a work family friend.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, he didn't want to pay for someone full-time to come in.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: So he, you know, he was doing it himself.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So for me to come at first, I was helping, and then I kind of took it over, which is funny because toward the end of that um job, we started to computerize it eventually.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And getting that set up over time obviously made the job job redundant.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't need to do that, I more had to just click through.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I kind of shifted into booking and calling and trying to find new customers, which kind of was like my early SDR work of doing that.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: But it taught me early on, like unlike most people, I wasn't running a, you know, running in a store and trying to do that kind of work.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: I had something that I really, really could not mess up.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is people's livelihoods.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you had the formation of Uber and Lyft in your brain, that's kind of like for a little bit.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh that's fascinating.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: I love the fact that you had a family member who was uh a family friend who is cheap enough to want to employ a 14, 15-year-old and then figure out actually this works pretty well.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, if the alternative is he wasn't trusting anybody else.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So he was either going to do it himself or he's gonna just look over what I'm doing and then just let me do it.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh over time you build up that trust.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like any job, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I basically took 20 hours off his plate so he could go do other things.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it and for me, it was just good.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was good.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: It it got me, it threw me into the fire very quickly.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the stress of that job um just taught me that, like, hey, in pressure time and crunch time, you just gotta be on the ball.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can't just get overwhelmed because that's the kind of thing you make one mistake, then you start to make 10 mistakes, it's not gonna end up pretty.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's not one of these things like in today's world where you're gonna have a talkie to other boss.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can't even explain to you what it feels like to hear an angry driver wanting to just like run over and jump at you.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of what it was like.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: I can only imagine.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's spin the wheel for question number two.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right, number six.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: What is the most embarrassing or memorable moment or funny moment in your work life that you're able to share with us a lot on public airwaves today?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Embarrassing or memorable.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: So that's gonna take like five things off the table right away because I can't share them.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I got something.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh a little bit ago.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this would be around 2011 time frame time frame.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's an interesting story because it paints me in a in a very interesting light in that you're gonna hear this and think like, wow, you are a trooper.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then you're gonna also look at it and be like, wow, what's wrong with you?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how you're gonna end up thinking about it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: So um I worked in at this big company in Midtown Manhattan back in the days when everybody went into the office.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we would take lunch, meet, you know, lunch, lunches, and all that sort of stuff, you know, basically not the way that the real world works today in terms of hybrid and remote.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember going with a coworker to lunch.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: We were just walking down, uh, I believe it was Lexington Avenue.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And oddly enough, on that day, I guess there was construction going on and they were, they were drilling uh holes into the sidewalk.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And for some reason, I didn't see that we had walked into that area.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: There were signs, I just did not happen to see it.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is probably where the like, what were you thinking?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: I was probably thinking about what we were talking about.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a hole in there, and I fell into it uh and rolled, it rolled my ankle and it and it popped.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: I heard the noise, and so did my friend, and so did the people behind.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I could tell I've had sprained ankles, this was a fracture or a break.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: I could hear that.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: So uh when the initial kind of pain uh wore off and the shock of this, so I picked myself up, I pulled myself over.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'm I'm sitting on the side of the sidewalk, and my friend's like freaking out.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, I just heard that.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go to the ER.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember that I had a presentation due that day.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: So this is uh, so what I ended up doing is I he kind of helped like I limped on him with him sort of carrying me.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Walked over to like a Dwayne Weed pharmacy.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: I went and I got medicine tape and I taped up my ankle.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where it's like, wow, warrior and what's wrong with you is kind of where it comes in.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: He was looking at me like I was nuts, like I had a second head growing out of my shoulder.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is kind of like when you grow up as an athlete, you kind of tape it up, you get through the game, and then you figure out what's wrong later.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of had that mentality.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to miss this presentation, it was important.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I taped up my ankle, I limped my way back in, I got a bunch of Tylenol, I made my way through the presentation, excruciating pain.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: I went home, I went immediately to the ER, got x-rayed, was fractured, ended up being in a in a cast uh for a long time.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I always remember that story, not only for that part of it, but here's where it gets kind of funny.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: As a team, we usually did uh monthly, sometimes quarterly, um, like team awards.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, person that brought in the most business, you know, the person that uh you could go to for help the most often.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and they usually either got like a gift card, a monetary prize, or some kind of trophy.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: In that case, apparently the person I was with went and told everybody this story.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I got surprised at this meeting.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: They, they, you know, the award was called the craziest MFR on the team.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: And they gave me a pair of boxing gloves, these red boxing gloves, and I and I kept them for like 10 years.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's just it was just a funny reminder.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, and it's just became an ongoing uh uh joke within the company and with this person that I continue to work with.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: If he's watching, he knows what I'm talking about.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Anytime I run into a crazy or tough situation, he brings me back to that story.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I would say.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: That was the maybe the most memorable and also embarrassing, and I would say somewhat stupid uh memory of my work life.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I love it.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's spin the wheel for the last one.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: All right, number 14.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: What is the story behind you getting your first job in tech?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Not including your 14-year-old uh in the brain.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of tech, right?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: With the computer at the end there.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, uh I would it's actually oddly enough, um, segueing it is the same company I just described.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: As I finished that role, I ended up getting uh my first head of marketing job in technology.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: The the company I was talking about, the one where I broke the ankle, there was tech, but it wasn't kind of a it wasn't a full-on heading up marketing.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the the job after that, I got into what we call IT tech.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the story behind that, and it's kind of funny because that's followed me around.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: I I end up taking head of marketing roles in IT tech, dev tech, whatever you want to call it, cybersecurity, compliance, tech, privacy tech.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Little uh not well known.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Fact is prior to being a marketer, I spent six years as a developer.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I started on the front end, um, I taught myself how to code, I started building websites, I taught myself back end, I started doing PHP, I started uh learning a little bit, uh, I started learning JavaScript, I started learning Java.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was even going into Cold Fusion and JSP, which is Java Server, very not so great technologies, let me tell you.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I appreciated figuring this stuff out on my own.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And where that's translated into the tech jobs uh of marketing is I just I don't want to say it's easier, but I have a pull into those businesses that tend to be over a little bit more technical.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because as a marketer, besides building pipeline and growing brand, the number one thing that I'm supposed to do is take something that is very hard to understand or very technical, very feature focused, and put it into a story and a narrative that uh the buyer is going to understand.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And having that background and coming from that background of understanding the mindset of a developer and engineer, it has helped me in areas where it typically wouldn't.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: So the first time that I got into cyber, I had not been into cyber before.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: First time I went into development tech, I had not known anything.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And 30 days later, I'm basically describing how a public cloud is built in terms of like VMs and the hypervisor and all that sort of stuff.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: I just picked up on it having that background.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of how it all ties together.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now you mentioned the first two things you said you would do were all run events.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: You said I think customize events and then activation events.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: What why events?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that uh where you would go first?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's the quickest uh return that you can get.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, if if our ICP is to find, you know, people on a threat team or or the people who run the cloud team or whatever it is, um, it's a lot easier for me to get them where they are right now than to try to throw out a bunch of content that it may take them several months.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: You want to do both, but I'm not gonna see a return on that right away.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: And what you don't want, you know, this is you know, in this cyber world, this isn't a type of space where I can go pay a bunch of Google ads and they'll come in tomorrow.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't seem to work that way.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: The things that are, you know, in terms of bringing them to you inbound take several months to start to work.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: In this scenario, we just raise money.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: We may or may not be wanting to increase capacity of rep count.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: I want to get some at bats in front of these guys so we can we can uh these guys or gals so we can see what's working and what's not working.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because in this world, I'm probably changing messaging, I'm working on messaging.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Without it, bats, how do we know it's gonna if it's even working?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right, you don't have any evidence again.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Except for, you know, just in your gut feel at that point, I guess.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And and you want to exclude all the stuff that came from the founder, because you know what?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: If uh if they came from a relationship with the founder or the VC, it's not your normal situation.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Your messaging can stink and it'll they may still close.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: You get through power of will, relationships, trust, things like that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: You brought an interesting idea though.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you gotta think about the short term and long term.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking at, again, spending your budget you get from this, how would you allocate between, I don't know, short-term, long-term, and then any experiments or things you want to go try and see if things actually work?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it depends when you get into the company, but you know, rule of thumb is 602020.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, 60% of your budget needs to be about what's going to happen in this quarter and next quarter.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: So this a lot of the stuff I just mentioned, that's you know, SDR type stuff.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's stuff that's gonna affect the pipeline as of today.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: 20% should be what I call brand long-term thinking.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: The reason for that being at a certain point, you don't want to continue to be grinding to get your pipeline number every single month.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's fine for the first six months to the first year.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Year and a half from now, uh like that's gonna be very expensive.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: Your CAC will be through the mood.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, in the beginning, I always say it's not about optimizing, it's about just get them in.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's about optimizing.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you need to have your brand have some input on how that works.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: That could be things like um, I'm not saying go out and get a billboard on a highway.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like, that's not what I'm talking about, brand.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about content that can that spread through word of mouth.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's using LinkedIn the right way.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's things like videos, that things, that things like uh Gartner Cool Vendor, things that is isn't is going to help you in the sales process, things like that.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other 20% is what you call experimentation.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: That could be campaigns and that could be tech.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, let's try intent.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, let's see if that works for the solution that we have for this market.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Let's try, let's try comedic videos.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see if we can get one to take off.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: Let's try, you know, let's create a game on the site.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'll give you a great example.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I forget the name of the company.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Did this video.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of those password ones where they created a um, it was Dashlane.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: They created a YouTube video series where it was called like password something.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it was funny.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: It it was basically you're on a boat and uh there's a person like you're going into this thing that they don't say is heaven, but it's like an opening in the sky.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And this guy's like dressed like the Grim Reaper, he's got a hood on.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, you're getting closer to the thing, and he's asking you questions like, Do you want to get in here?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the guy's like, Yes.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, All right, what was the name of your dog?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what was the first street you lived on?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he didn't remember any of that and he couldn't get in.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, We make password projections, so you don't have to go through that.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a funny, like, that's the kind of thing you're gonna share with your friends because this is hilarious, right?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of stuff you want to play around with.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that cannot be your overall campaign strategy because you know, that's brand play.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's like, oh yeah, those guys had that funny video.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Let me check them out.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of stuff you want to play around with, uh, if you can.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I pre I preface that that if you go into a later stage company, you're probably gonna be spending more on brand.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm at 50 million ARR, I better be doing a lot more on brand because you're not grinding your way to the next 50.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's funny you mentioned that.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: I interviewed uh David Klein, who's the CMO at Kentic, a network visibility company.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we had this conversation about something that he'd done.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he had the same ideas experimentation, but you know, this is uh this is when you have time and a little bit of extra money lying around, not your core thing.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: But they created one video which was the an advert for Kentick in the style of a perfume advert.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it was all about the sweet smell of network visibility.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's funny.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at their YouTube channel, I think their their how-to videos were getting a few hundred views, and their perfume had about 35,000 views or something like that.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of interesting.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, you know, him and one of his guys did it in like an afternoon with a you know their iPhone cameras or whatever, and it was very simple uh how they went about doing it.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it and it's and you said that like extra time and extra budget.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: The reason why I think about that in cyber is I mean, you go to RSA, every single booth has the same messaging, no matter what they do, and you need to stand out in other ways.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: I can't tell you my product is better than that product because we have this one feature that's 20% better than this one feature within the other nine.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's just not going to work.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if there are ways that I can make us stand out.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, sometimes it's the person that's running the company.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can build around the presence of that founder, CEO.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you can't.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, sometimes you have thought leaders within the company.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, you want to use those.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you have to get creative like this.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the most creative kind of campaigns I ever seen, um, not even in cyber, was it basically was uh it was a company called Vidyard that does videos for prospecting.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the campaign was they had a bunch of the people sit there and read the most god-awful uh cold emails and be like, you know, is this what you're doing?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you're expecting this to work?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and the whole concept was it was humorous.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now you've got to, it's very tricky to use humor uh because you know, there's a very fine line between funny and unfunny.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: But this really tied into their message because that is the world they were selling against.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, do you want to send one of these emails or one of 500 emails, or do you want to send a video which is personalized?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I could be like, hey Andrew, here's why I'm reaching out to you uh in 30 seconds.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that was kind of the um, that was the hook.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it was good because it got it got word of mouth.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: That company grew based off on word of mouth of all that stuff.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: So in cyber, it's even more necessary because everybody is either giving you visibility into something or stopping something, and and it's like, okay, we need to find other things that we can try.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I call it experimentation.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: That can't be your whole strategy.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: You still got to grind your way to the other 60% and build a pipeline.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to be okay with a bit of polarization, right?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you want to be in the middle for everyone, you're gonna be boring.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to be a little bit more bold, some people won't like what you do, and you have to be okay with that.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: And some people are gonna love it, which is the payoff that you want to get.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and the and the and the thing with cyber, and I think we all know this, um, word of mouth is key.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Most CISOs or other people will buy what their friends buy.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're not, and this isn't like Martech where I can get into those spaces.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm you and I are probably not gonna join the secret CISO Slack groups, but they will share, and they're also not gonna share your press release.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're not gonna share your uh product-specific one pager, but they will share something they thought was interesting because it's uh, and if that's enough to get another set of eyeballs to the brand, then you did your job.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's even better if it ties to your message, obviously.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, we'd all just do silly videos that didn't have no point.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: I like that idea though, Manny, because you know, these uh these secret Slack channels and secret societies of the systems that all talk incredibly hard to get into.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can get into, you can't buy your way into them, you can't, you know, barge your way in.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: But if you think about your content like that, at least they might say, I saw this today, I thought it was kind of funny or stupid or whatever it might be.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: At least you're getting into them somehow, right?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it it's about that.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's also, you know, when they engage with it on social.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: I I want the ideal, the idea of doing this is when your reps or strs engage.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: I prefer if that's not the first time they heard the name of your company.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, if you're an established brand, if I'm calling and I'm Palo Alto or I'm CrowdStrike at this point, their brand is probably well known.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's very rare at this point that you're not gonna know that, but most companies are not there.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not an easy thing to pull off because you you have, you know, it's basically showing a personality uh within your company, but that's experimentation.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna do five of these things, four of them are not gonna be great.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the one that works that you're gonna want to do another one of.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I always leave a little bit of room that you want to try that.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, every company doesn't do that.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it seems like it's an easy thing to do, but it's not.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I can name off top of my head like five amazing cyber campaigns that I've seen.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably 5,000 that I, you know, I wouldn't even know of because I never got to see them.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: You brought up SDRs.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Should SDRs report into marketing or sales?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that that's the behind them.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you it depends.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it should be a marketing function, if marketing's function is to build pipeline.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: If the head of marketing is a brand focused marketer, then absolutely not because they won't understand.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I think I was telling you like it's whatever bound, right?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: To me, if you own pipeline, inbound, outbound, partner, all of that sort of stuff.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I as a marketing leader want to be on the hook for those things.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of hard to only have one of them or only two of them.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Job has uh sales has enough of a job about also marking those relationships, moving stuff through the pipeline, managing that all that stuff, and closing.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, cyber is not a one-stop uh shop of a sale.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna take multiple touches with many stakeholders.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's enough to do there.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: But if I was a if my skill set was the videos that I talked about, and I believe that that's how you build pipeline, I wouldn't even be know how to do a comp plan, much less to be able to handle that.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: When you work with campaigns, when you work with demand gen, and work with messaging, uh, that's all, and and when you are a technical marketer and you probably control the stack, those are the four tools the SDR need anyway.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it's good to have it all under one.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get your SDR trained up?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'll ask a question like this as well is you know, the downside that I've seen in that situation is the SDR becomes someone who just parrots the marketing message as opposed to how sales will interact and engage with someone.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: So they become a bit more of a I I saw this on the brochure, I saw it on the website, I'm gonna say this thing and not realize, well, that's not actually how you might do it if you're actually talking to someone live to one-to-one, which is what sales does.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it shouldn't be that way, right?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you're marketing shouldn't just build a message on its own and be like, here, have fun with it.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: They should be working in tandem with the sales leader, um, listening to customer calls or seeing a gong or whatever they have, and and crafting them the messaging that way.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think you know this uh in our time together.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: When you work on your messaging, you start with the sales messaging before you even look at the website.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and that that's the key.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if you work on the sales messaging with the sales team and or with or without someone like yourself, then that message should be in tandem.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: Then you give it to your STRs to test out, you give it to the A's to test out on the market.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's how, you know, it's not like, hey, say what's on the website.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's you're doing something terribly wrong if that's how you're doing it.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: What's on the website should reflect what's been working in the sales and STR messaging if if you're doing it the right way.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I usually do that, and if it's working, then I'll put on the website.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of times, what's on the website and what's in the discovery deck are not gonna even be close to each other because I'm testing this out before I start putting it all over the place.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because what if we put the messaging together, we get on the calls and the prospect's like, I don't have any idea what you're talking about?
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Or they're just like, yep, uh-huh-uh-huh, and they're just nodding along.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, clearly we're not reaching them.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, uh, we sound like everyone else.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I I've heard this five times already today.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you hear that sort of stuff, or even worse, when you hear nothing and you go into one of these recording softwares and you see the talk time is like 80% rep, 15% prospect.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I wouldn't even go anywhere near the websites.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's how you don't do that.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Other way around.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen a much better world, let's say, in the last couple of years than 10 years ago, where there was a lot of conflict between sales and marketing, right?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: There was, you know, arguing about credit and all this sort of stuff.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like it's got a lot better.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, in in for Cyber Donut with their 20 million, what sort of metrics should the sales and marketing team rally around to see these important things that we should be really tracking for?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting because there's a couple ways to look at it.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: One, and not every a lot of companies do this, but in terms of, let's say, board, when you're at the board, uh, I actually would prefer if marketing and sales had one uh presentation rather than two separate.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Many companies still will do them separate, but you have to work with that person to make sure it's telling the same story.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Metrics like leads, doesn't matter.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's an internal marketing metric.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Start it at discovery meetings and pipeline.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you start there, you know, it's like, okay, this is how many disco meetings we set this month.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: This was the target because we set this target together because this is what we thought we needed based on the conversion metrics of what we have.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Start at discovery, then the different stages across.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it and then it's kind of like uh where if there are different presentations, then the sales leader is usually gonna start with here's what we close, they always do, and here's what our pipeline, which is usually very in the middle, those numbers should match.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that story needs to match.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: And if it doesn't, you're gonna have issues.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: In the old days, you talked about what would happen is the marketing be like, oh, I ran a bunch of webinars and I got thousands of leads, and then sales would present and be like, I don't really have any pipeline.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: You just can't do that.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like internally, you want to measure the leads number uh between a marketing team because you want to figure out how many of those it takes, and that's only one metric of inbound.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's also outbound and all the other stuff, how many of those you need to get to that pipeline number?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the pipeline number is kind of the end all be all metric.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: And by pipeline means you've got the right person at the right company, and you know, you're doing a deep dive demo, they have multiple people on the call.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there is a use case there.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh not like I just got on a first call.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: So qualified pipe, right?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's something there's a there's a problem we're solving, and they agree, and we agree to go solve it.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if we if we all agree on what that qualified pipeline should look like, then we both should be working off of that.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: My job as a marketing team is to get enough of those in there.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, sales' job is to make sure to do what they need to, following up and all of that, you know, and closing them, right?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like obviously we help the messaging and all that stuff helps throughout.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, goal is to get them into, let's say, in many cases, a POC.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then the product's got to do what it needs to do, right?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the way by doing that, then you kind of you don't get as much of the leaky bucket.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you're getting a lot of people into POC and people are not converting, then it's one of two things.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Either your product is just not showing any value or your qualification of what you allow into a POC is off.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: First one, very hard to fix, you're gonna have to go back to the drawing board.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Second one is fixable.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: You could put, you know, you could put a medic criteria in there and figure out, you know, if they don't check these five boxes, no POC or whatever that number is.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: In the old world, and even as what I described, if you have an agreed criteria, and it doesn't even need to be an SLA, if the metric of reason is pipeline, you don't really need the SLA that you did in the old days.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do you get these leads?
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: They need to be followed up by this much.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's nice to have that, but it's not as critical because you're you're managing that internally now.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and the goal is like, we've seen we need this many first meetings that are of this quality.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Get that number, we should be able to do the rest.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Miss that number, we won't do the rest.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: Overhit that number, we should be doing better.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: That that helps the conversation a lot.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's look at uh cyberdonauts done very well.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Your first investments and your 60% and your 20% of are starting to pay off.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: One of the experiments is paying off.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: How would you expand the team?
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: You've got yourself plus a generalist, let's say.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: What sort of heads would you be looking to add as as you're getting success?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, the I want I want to keep the one to two ratio of SDRs.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: So if the A team grows to 10, uh, that one SDR is probably not going to work, right?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you want to grow that to five.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: And you want to do it in a way, and at that point, you probably want to bring a leader in there because uh after about five STRs, it you know, it becomes a little bit too much.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's on that side of the house.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, depending on what the generalist does, you would start to specialize the the functions.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: So because if you're now going, you know, if you're if you're at 10 AEs, you're probably hovering the 10 million AR.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're you're you're beyond the traction, or you you're you're either at product market fit or you're very close to it.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's when you want to start going a little bit away from uh generalists and breaking marketing down into like the four functional areas, um, which is you know demand generation, which is brand and uh, you know, brand and buzz, you know, about the company, which is product marketing.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, SDR is its own thing, and you would be doing it around those four.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: As you even get larger than that, then you're gonna break out brand into just like pure brand and stuff and break out ARPR, you know, because at that point, when you're at like, you know, that's when you really got to start to work the PR presses.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need it early on, but you're gonna really have to work the gardeners and the foresters and all that sort of stuff.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: And probably that's where you take it another level.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: You want to build a demand gen team.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, you know, somebody to do revenue operations, uh, to start to optimize all the processes and the systems and the metric reporting.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you're not kind of doing it all on your own.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you want to have people run campaigns.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: You obviously want content, depending on how technical it is.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: You might want to have two people doing content.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're gonna start to break that up over time.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: So initially, I would just start to look.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need the heads at that point because you're only up to 10, but you're gonna start to hire with those buckets in mind.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, manny, this has been a fun conversation.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, appreciate you engaging with us and giving your your help to Cyber Donut, who are desperate to succeed.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: They feel like they're on a good track, and and now we've got a plan to go forward with our marketing uh group.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Let's rocket ship it.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's do it.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Was it uh Rocket Ships and Rockstars?
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's what that's what we're into.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if someone wants to get in touch with you, well, what's the best way to do that?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, LinkedIn.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: LinkedIn is the best way.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just hook me up.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and um, I'm more than willing to connect with anybody.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you spell your last name so that everyone gets that right?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's A-T-A-E-B-I.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, many enlisted one of fun, and I wish you all the best.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, man.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Have a good one.