From Startup to IPO: How the CMO of Varonis Has Kept the Same Job for 15 Years, ft. Rob Sobers

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

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1:32So come and check us out, see this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit five. That's zoom.com slash exit five. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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2:52One, two, three, four, exit. One, two, three, four, exit. My guest on this episode is Rob Sobers. Rob is CMO of Varonis. They're a cybersecurity company that provides automated data security and AI governance platforms. He joined 15 years ago when it was a startup and has guided them all the way through being a public company doing over$700 million in revenue. Hey, the average CMO tenure is something like 18 to 24 months. And this guy's been there for 15 years. This was an awesome one. We talk about lessons from Rob's 15-year run at Varonis, including going from software engineer to technical marketer to CMO, lessons learned selling to the enterprise, why he believes in a lean marketing team with no full-time managers, the power of setting simple goals, the differences between a VP of marketing and a CMO, and just a whole lot of talk and shop with someone who's really sharp when it comes to enterprise B2B marketing, I think you're really going to enjoy my conversation with Rob Sobers.

3:54All right, what's up, everybody? Back on podcast, deep in the throes of summer here, Rob. My kids have been in and out of the house. I'm working at home. My guest is Rob Sobers. He's CMO of Varonis, joined 15 years ago when it was a startup and has guided it all the way to a public company doing over 700 million in ARR, which is crazy on its own. We were just talking about this behind the scenes. So many of the, you know, marketing is, everyone knows the stats, CMOs having this short job tenure. It's not often that I'm talking to a guy who's been at the same company for 15 years, taking them through, you know, startup phage to 700 million.

4:30So if I had a soundboard now, the whole crowd would be like, yeah. At first, you know, we just were talking about this behind the scenes, but you were an early Drift customer, early HubSpot customer, but you started your career in software. Is that guy still in there today? I'm curious as to how that plays into you, you know, having this great run as a marketer. Are you an engineer who does marketing? How do you think of your skill set? Yeah, and thanks for having me, Dave. I really haven't lost the engineer in me. It's like hotter than ever right now to have that back in marketing too. Yeah, talk about a renaissance for someone like me that came, you know, I spent 10 years as a software engineer, you know, I was building software for furniture companies.

5:11And then I moved to Fog Creek Software, where we worked on things like Trello and Stack Overflow. So I really got to see and learn from world-class engineers. And in the early days of marketing at Varonis, I was building the website. I was writing JavaScript and CSS. And even nowadays, I'll hop in there. It's not above me to go and fix a bug on the website or do something cool. And now with AI, obviously, we're wiring all sorts of cool agents together and doing some fascinating things. So I feel like it's a resurgence for technical marketers that come from engineering backgrounds and yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on what the upside could be.

5:50I want to get into like your philosophies, how you do things. I think that's what people are going to be most interested in hearing. But I'm just curious, like if you look back, how do you summarize a 15-year stint at a company? Would you tell others to do the same? we're in a world of job changers. I'd love to hear like, what was it for you? Obviously, great product, great team. Yeah, you know, they say like a CMO has a shelf life of a banana. And I guess that makes me like the hostess cake or something like that on the shelf. No, we've been making, yeah, we've been turning you into banana bread like over and over.

6:23Yeah, so I mean, the thing for me is the job has to remain super interesting. And you have to believe in the mission, right? Like at Varonis, we protect the world's data from cyber attacks. And now with AI, there's like a lot of risk. And I've always loved the product we're building. It's a fascinating product. And the job has changed a lot over the years. Like when we started, you know, it was just like a handful of us trying to figure out marketing. You know, the first head of marketing was a sales engineer that was good at writing. And the CEO was like, okay, now you own marketing. And then he hired me.

6:54And then we sort of built out the different functions. So I learned everything on the job. What did you get hired as? I think my initial title was technical marketer. Just something simple like that. And at Fog Creek, my title was member of technical staff, which is now like the cool title that you get at Anthropic and OpenAI. So shout out to Joel Spolsky for kind of making that fashionable. I think he got that from Microsoft, actually, when he was there. But being at the same company and building marketing from the ground up, it's like stacking blocks, right? It's like, okay, we'll create a blog because I was pretty good at writing.

7:27And then we'll run webinars because I know how to present on a technical topic. and I have some credibility as a prior engineer. And so we have a webinar program. And then you start adding in things like marketing automation and email workflows. And then eventually I got kind of outside of my comfort zone. It's like, okay, now run a big event. Now do field marketing in Japan. Now build a PR team. And it's like, it's fun, but that's, I think what's given me a long track record is that I've been hungry to learn the disciplines that didn't come natural to me and hire great people, obviously. That was such a good one-liner.

8:01I love when the specific, go do field marketing in Japan. Because the thing I wanted to ask you building on that is like, I want you to answer this in a certain way because I want people to hear it. But I feel like so many of the top people that I get to interview or talk to that are CMOs and stuff as part of the show, it's like, no one knew everything. You do not know everything. It's impossible. And so yeah, you had never done field marketing in Japan. Is there some level of like, and marketing is such a hard discipline where it can be so many things? Like, is it not impossible to know everything?

8:33And is there some type of like first principles way of thinking that you've learned that like, sure, I can figure it out. How are we going to hire a PR team? I'll figure it out. How are we going to do field marketing in Japan? You know what I'm trying to get at? Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's like, it's never been easier today because of all the great content, like your podcast, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've sort of like, just dug in, right? Learning analyst relations and the ins and outs of dealing with Gartner and Forrester. But you can actually find people who are willing to talk about it for two hours with you, right?

9:04Or have recorded an hour-long podcast that you can listen to and take notes on, or you can go to conferences. So I feel like the ability to kind of hop around and learn the different disciplines in marketing has never been greater. And now you can obviously just sit and talk to ChatGPT or Claude about it all day and get really good advice, actually. So it's just really the willingness, I think. One of the things I really pride myself on at Varonis with our marketing team is that we have a really lean and elite team, right? Every manager is an expert at their function. We don't have like career middle managers.

9:35We don't have big layers of hierarchy. Yeah. You put this, I hadn't seen this quote before, but you put it in our doc. Steve Jobs said the largest org in the world only has four layers of management. That's the Catholic church. Well, five, if you count the highest order, I suppose. Yeah. I know Steve Jobs was very big on this. I know Brian Chesky at Airbnb has talked a lot about how he runs things at Airbnb is very similar to how we do it at Varonis, where we don't have managers that aren't experts at the thing that they're managing. And for us, you still do the thing that you're managing, right?

10:06I still run webinars. I hop in and try to help as much as I can. No job is above me. And our head of corporate events is the best at running corporate events. Our head of PR is, she's phenomenal at PR and she really loves it. So I think that's super important. I think that's the engineer in you that rubbed. Engineers were always rubbed the wrong way by people who were like by business people and like Steve Jobs, like people who are not of the craft. And so maybe it's like you've taken this engineering mindset and you treat marketing like a craft. And so you want to be around other people who are actually doing jobs.

10:39And usually engineers have a low tolerance for like meetings and bureaucracy. And so you don't want a bunch of people managers. You want a bunch of marketers who manage people. Yeah. And I think it's important to understaff because when you overstaff, you kind of get a lot of work that maybe is at the bottom of the priority list and it doesn't really matter. And so I think the companies that are quick to hire and overstaff and overfund projects, they run into communication tax, they get more meetings than they need. And so you really have to fight against it. But you also have to recognize when your team is like, you know, dehydrated and they're like starving for additional help and know when the right time to add more people is because it is a communication tax.

11:17It is, there is a penalty to adding more people when they're not necessarily needed. That's interesting. That was one of those things that made me pull my pen out and want you to come back to it because I feel two sides of that coin. One of them is, I think because of our company and my view, I mean, I've worked in B2B marketing for 15 years now. And so I feel like I see the field. I have a weird pulse on it. It's a very weird skill. My wife and I always talk about it. She's like, you know a lot about B2B marketing. I'm like, yes, I do. But it's like through osmosis of these shows, right? Yeah.

11:49And, you know, I've grown my career. I've seen others. And it's weird. We have this like lust for like more people, more teams, more budget. And like, you're like the wise, you're like Yoda on the other side of that meme where like this guy grew a company to 700 million. It always is this way. It's like the people who have really done it at a high level and grown big companies, they're always like, please trust me. Like less is more, small is better, fewer people is better. And it's just always, there's always a middle point where everyone's like, oh, my team, you know, it used to be a flex. member would be like, oh, how many people are on your team?

12:18And people would be like, oh, I got 75. Whoa. If you say that now, people are like, dude, I have so many people. But then I also feel that I also, I know that someone's going to be listening to this on the other end. And I do know that a lot of marketing teams often feel like they are understaffed. And that's more of like an organizational issue when everyone's burnt out, but we're not hitting our goals type of thing. So it's interesting to hear you say that. That's just my note. Yeah. It's a delicate balance. There's also this thing called Conway's Law, where it's like, you know, your product will evolve to mirror like the structure of your organization.

12:50And so if you have a very siloed organization, you'll have a product that look is very disjointed. And I think that's true of marketing as well. If you have like a lot of siloed teams, your marketing is going to look disjointed and, you know, inconsistent. Your brand's going to be kind of disjointed and not look great. So that's like another penalty. How do you get everybody to row in this same direction? Like, do you have any lessons on compensation or just goal setting in marketing. One of the things I see a lot of people ask about and struggle with is like, marketing has so many different distinct goals, but I want to have a team where everyone feels incentivized to like, help us win.

13:25And if we if the company wins, then we all win, but it can be easier to be like, no, Rob's job is to be the webinar guy. And really, his comp is just revolved around like, can he get 1000 people to the webinar? Yeah, it's a tricky question. So, you know, our North Star metric is opportunity creation, we're the opportunity creation factory i also run the sdr team and so really everybody is trying to create ops for the sales team so we look at stage one ops and then conversion to stage two which is like a really qualified opportunity where the product is installed and we have a high likelihood of closing the business so everyone kind of has an element of opportunity generation in their goal apart from like the creative team you know which it's a little bit more disconnected product marketing is a little bit harder to measure.

14:09But everyone knows that we're here to tell great stories, build a great brand and generate ops. And so a lot of the metrics are directly or indirectly related to those two things. And I find trying to keep it really simple is, you know, I'm just all about simplicity these days, and keeping our metrics super streamlined and easy to easy to remember, right? If you don't remember what your team members goals are, then you're probably doing it wrong. Can you give me just a couple examples of goals right now or in the past? I'll give you an example of like a really simplistic goal. So we have an executive briefing team, right?

14:49You know, we sell pretty expensive enterprise software. And so we run these executive briefings where we built this really nice center in Miami and we bring our best customers in, we show them the roadmap. It's a really awesome program that's run by a woman named Lisa. And she just has a number of executives that she wants to get through the program this year. And so I could see that number ticking up the more briefings she runs. And she runs these sprint weeks where we bring in 10 or 15 customers during a whole week, economies of scale, getting everybody down there in Miami at the same time. And it's just a very easy number to track.

15:19Yes, we're looking at ARR generated from those accounts that attended, but that's downstream, right? She's just focused on doing the leading indicator really well. And there's a really good book called The Score Takes Care of Itself. Great book. I find that if you have a really good leading indicator, you're good, right? Our core persona is the chief information security officer. And so we have a team-wide goal of how many CISOs can we run through our marketing programs, whether that's attending a webinar, meeting with us at a big trade show like Black Hat, which is next week, or going through one of these EBCs, right?

15:55And we just all know where we stand at how many CISOs have engaged in a marketing campaign. That's a good metric for us. So these are nice and simple metrics that are easy to keep track of. This is such a dork thing to say. Can I give you my favorite thing from score takes care of itself that we used to talk about all the time? Yeah. I won't get the quote exactly, but Bill Walsh like comes in, takes over the 49ers, right? And they weren't, they weren't doing well. He comes in and implements a whole new culture. And I use this one all the time. It's like the teams, basically people get so married to like the way it always was here or nostalgia or, you know, well, this person has always done it.

16:31It's It's like the way we've always done it is that that's the easiest way to be disrupted if you keep relying on like, well, that's how we've always done it. And I think, you know, you must see a lot of that, right? You've been at a company for 15 years, but I've joined a company. It's like, oh, no, you know, Debbie's always done that because it always used to be this way. It's like, well, you know, how's that working out for us? We got to move on. You're not allowed to say that on my marketing team. You're never allowed. That's never a justification for doing anything is this is the way it's always done.

16:55Right. And I'm actively hunting for those things and killing them. And our CEO is good at this too, right? Like we're actively de-scoping the things that we do at Varonis. And I have a mantra on the team, you know, because marketing teams, we want to be helpful. Yeah. Right. So we have this mantra that's default focus instead of default helpful. Because the sales rep in Argentina needs a 10-page white paper. And the product marketer is like, hey, sure, I'll help you out. It seems like you really need this thing. And we end up doing it. Right. So. Well, it's human nature, right? It's much easier to say, yes, I can do that versus no.

17:29How do you build a, this comes up a lot. How do you build that culture? Is it just like, no is plenty of good enough of a word? Like, do you tell people no? Do you say the soft no? Like, which marketing teams do? They make the soft no, which is like, well, we'll prioritize that. We're going to put that on our list. And then you never come back to it. How do you do it? Yeah, I mean, that happens a lot. That's a good tactic, actually. I feel like that's what every PM from every company ever has said to me whenever I've had, no one's ever used any of my ideas. I'm not like you. I don't have good product ideas.

17:57It's like, yeah, we'll put that on the list. Thank you. Yeah, we'll put it in the backlog. Yeah, it's on the backlog. The backlog is your best friend, yeah. Awesome. But, you know, it's a quote from Dave Kellogg. You know, he says like, especially as CMO, like you have to get good at saying no, but not too good, right? So you really have to know your counterparts, your CRO and... He's the best. Hold on, can you say that again? You have to learn how to say no. You got to get good at saying no, but not too good at saying no. But not too good, right? That's such a Kelloggism. We had him at our event in March and he was like better in person.

18:27It was awesome. yeah no he is the best been a great mentor to me and yeah he's just talk about wisdom and just being like this wise person who's kind of seen everything and has these really great analogies and metaphors to kind of like live by as a CMO he's the best well it's like you you know you have kids it's like operating in reality oh so often it's it's both things can be true like you have to like push back a lot but there's also kind of some things that like you might have to do because it's the sales team and you want to show them that you're on their side and so yeah you You got to just, you know, make that deck for the 15th time because it's like, you got to take one for the team sometimes like that.

19:02Yeah. And we talked about longevity of CMOs. I mean, the cause of death for a lot of CMOs is the CRO or the CEO, right? You have to know how to manage those relationships, manage up. I mean, you can't always be advocating for marketing. You know, some of the best leaders hate bringing back bad news to the marketing team, right? And my friend Nimi, who's also a great marketing leader, he says, look, if you want to be liked, to go run an ice cream truck. If you want to be a CMO, you know, you got to be able to come back to your team and say, no, I'm sorry. Like, we're not going to do this or we are going to do this for the sales team because, you know, we have we have to build goodwill or, hey, we're focusing too much on our activity, but your sales is missing the number.

19:45Right. And that's how you get so you get fired pretty quickly as a CMO. So part of longevity is about consistency and you got to hit your number. Right. Right. Okay, back to the measurement stuff. So we talked about, you talked about, you know, simplifying things, telling the story about the person who runs the executive briefing center, which I'm coming back to that. I have a question about that. That's an easy one to measure though, to me, right? It's like, if we know that if we can get CISOs through that room, like it's going to lead to pipeline. But so many of the people that listen to this show and just in marketing in general, a lot of what we do in marketing is a little bit harder to measure in that, like, yes, we should have a podcast, but I don't know that, you know, how many downloads of the podcast is going to correlate to pipeline the same way.

20:26You know, you've also built an incredible brand. You've done a lot of content and things that... Can you give me an example of something that's like a little bit harder to measure than like getting people to the executive briefing center? Like how would you set a goal around brand or content? Yeah, so I really strongly believe that you shouldn't try to correlate them to pipeline and revenue. We have this thing, I call it the reasonableness test, right? Running a really high quality podcast for security leaders where you bring in, you know, experts and you have a really great setup, you have good audio, like doing a podcast these days, it's just reasonable, right?

20:59It's just a reasonable marketing strategy. You, me, your audience, like we all know it's a good idea. I mean, you've built a tremendous podcast and community. These are just things that you know are good for your health. Oh my God. I'm going to come give you a hug, man. Because this is like, this is why I love it. I love when people say stuff like this. It's like, yeah, we're just going to do it because it doesn't have to have this perfectly quantifiable goal. like we're going to have, we're going to always have eggs and bread and cheese in the fridge and milk. Like we're going to do those things.

21:28You know, we're going to, we're going to walk 10 ,000 steps a day. Let me give you another good example. So a woman on my team who runs content marketing, her name's Lexi. She'll be at Drive in the fall. She's, she's tremendous. She's running a capture the flag. She built this capture the flag, which is a really fun game for security people to go and try to like solve puzzles online and stuff like that. Really cool thing. And our persona loves these types of challenges. So she built it. Yes, she's counting the number of players, right? Because you have to register to play. And so she's got a metric.

21:58She's looking at the player count and she wants to get that number as high as possible. But you don't want the CMO knocking on her door and saying, look, Lexi, we have to try to correlate these players to deals. Like, are they members of target accounts? Like, are they, you know, I don't see any meetings on the calendar from the CTF players. Like, let's never do that again. When you try to apply this pipeline filter on top of things that are just reasonable to do and hit your target audience, you're just asking for trouble. You're asking for frustration. You're going to get frustration on your team.

22:30So I think it's important to apply the reasonableness test. Love that. Did you make that up? Is that the name, the reasonableness test? Actually, I got that from my former VP of demand generation. He kind of came up with that. It's really good. Okay. I love that. That's such a Kellogg thing too. That's why he's a genius marketer. When you name something, You already hit me with the Cockroach, gave me a principal before. It's like, I love that. Conway's Law. Yeah. Yeah. And the reason why you have to have the reasonableness test is because if you kind of let people go wild, then you start doing things that are outside of your target audience, or maybe just a stunt to pull off a stunt.

23:03But the capture the flag example, it's giving our target audience, it's like catnip for them. Like there's a really strong reason to do a CTF because our audience really loves playing them. Right. We could give them all free iPads and that wouldn't be past the reasonableness test. It's not sort of playing into a thing that they love that lends credibility to Varonis. How does that play into long-term strategy and planning and budgeting? Because I think I totally agree. That's a great way to frame it. People will agree with that. But everyone also then asks, okay, Rob, but how do I, when I budget, I've read this law that you want to budget 70 % for things you can measure and 30 % that's stuff that's harder to measure.

23:4480, 20. Does that fit anywhere here? How do you think about this playing out so you have some money in the budget to do things that don't go directly back to a dollar? I mean, there's so many ways to do this, but the way that I always do it, and I know others do it this way too, because you've had, I think, Peter Maloney on the podcast talking about this a lot. Mahoney. You got the second, same country, same Irish last name, but he's Mahoney. He would be upset about that. He's a model. Sorry, I've never met him, but I know that he talks a lot about reverse engineering the number, right? So we always take care of the pipeline first, right?

24:19We know how much of the pipeline we need to hit our revenue number. We know what the contribution for marketing and SDRs needs to be. We back into a budget based on that, right? We know the cost to generate an opportunity. So you always want to take care of your number first and then fund the other programs afterwards. That's kind of how I look at it. Especially as a public company, we can't miss our number. So this guy, he's got a million dollars in here for blimps. What is that? Actually, that might be a thing in the enterprise. Okay. So basically you're going to act like you need to make sure you're asking for or have at least enough money covered to feed everybody and then you can work in the fun stuff somehow.

24:59Yeah. And it gets kind of complicated when you look at cost per opportunity is different per channel. So you have to think about the channel splits. You have to think about geos. You have to look at conversion rates. So it's not like an easy problem. And this is where the engineer and kind of like mathematician in me kind of like geeks out on that side of marketing and having really good ops people who can help you with this is a great, a great thing and to align with your sales leader and your CFO, you know, to build the model and agree on the model. Are you able to make more confident or like gut driven decisions because you've been the CMO there for so long, because you've been with this team for a while?

25:33Like there's got to be like, you must have a longer leash than someone who comes in new, right. And has to try to prove their worth. Yeah, I think, um, I think I do. And I, you know, another Dave Kellogg is, um, and this is advice for anybody who wants to go from VP to CMO is that the job of a CMO is to run marketing, but also help the CEO run the company. And I think in helping the CEO run the company, I have a much wider lens. And from being here for a while, I know the business fundamentals. I know the behavior of the sales team. I know the trends in conversion rates and ASPs and like the sort of underlying mechanisms that are true here.

26:10You know, now things change, right? We acquired three companies in the last 16 months that introduces a whole new set of challenges and operations and opportunity for us. So yes, you know, for the things that remain the same, but things are always changing. So you have to always check your assumptions. I was going to go back to that one, but because we had it in our, doc, but you eloquently weave that into your answer there. But I want to just rewind to that and just talk about it again. What is the difference between, we were actually having this discussion internally because we were thinking about like our community and stuff, and we were trying to, you know, some companies have a VP of marketing, some companies have a CMO, some companies have an SVP.

26:46But then when I do talk to CMOs, there is a difference in their minds about, yes, there is a difference between a VP of marketing and a CMO. What is your answer to that? Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases. And McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2 ,000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes.

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28:01Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit5. That's optimizely.com slash exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep, before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search.

28:38And they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. Well, regardless of the title, like there's the head of marketing job, right?

29:13Like if you're reporting to the CEO and responsible for the brand and the marketing generated pipeline, you know, you're effectively the CMO, regardless of what your actual title says. But I think once you get to that level where you're top of the food chain and we're reporting to the CEO, you have to get really good at managing up. I know you're a big fan of this and you talk about it a lot. And I learned this from you is that you have to get really good at internal marketing. And I think you've called it like merchandising, right? Like, cause you just assume that everyone knows what marketing is up to.

29:50But if you don't do that enough and you don't communicate up, then you run the risk of someone saying, what is marketing doing anyway, right? Can I tell you where I learned that, by the way? You've done marketing at a bigger level, bigger company than I have, but I learned it because just quite selfishly, very early days of drift, I was like one of the early marketing people and we had this thing on Friday, it's called Show and Tell, where you go around and show what you worked on. And it was like nine, and I'd never been at like a really technical company or early stage company. So I was like, this is so cool.

30:18I'm like the only marketing guy here and it's like 10 engineers and designers and they're all doing cool shit with the terminal. I don't even know, right? And we have to go around the room and they're all like, you know, demoing things. And like my very first week there, they're like, all right, Dave, why don't you show us what you did this week? And I like pulled up a blog post that I wrote and I was like, I wrote this article and no one understood it. And I was like, oh man. And the next two weeks, so two weeks later I came back and I was like, okay, you guys just all shipped this new feature.

30:46Here's what I did. I made a video about it. I wrote an article about it. Check this out. We had nobody that came to our website before Or 718 people came, six people checked it out. Three people said this new feature you built is awesome. And it was like, we all like click that same day. And ever since then, I was like, oh yeah, it's this. And then I saw it at a bunch of different scales, which is just like, oh yeah, it's the same thing. Like you need to get people to believe, like they need to be involved with you. And it's to your advantage if as a marketer, you can get all the smart people in the company because you're not the smartest person in the company.

31:14You want product, you want, I want to work with the product team. I want to work with the engineering team. I want to work with the sales team. But it's like that type of culture is like what makes a job really fun. And you have to do that. And so many people have the arrogance of like, you don't know what marketing does. It's like, dude, that's your job. If you can't get the people inside of your company fired up about what you do, how do you think you're going to get strangers to care? I've always like, somebody told me that years ago and I've really felt that. Yeah, and that is the job of the head of marketing.

31:40And if you hire well too, like you'll have other people on the team who lead functions, who are super proud of their function and want to always share. And I have some great examples of that internally here at Ruronis, leaders who are just always sharing, especially now with AI as well. Everyone is encouraged to show and tell what they're working on. We have a Friday session called AI Show and Share, and everyone's coming and showing the skills they made and what boring process they automated away. And it's been really fun to see everyone kind of sink their teeth in and get excited about it. Where are we at with how we feel about AI in marketing?

32:13What's it going to do? What's it going to change? Tell me. I want your perspective. Yeah. I don't know if you saw this because I I think it's relatively new, but ClickUp, you're aware of that company, like a project management software. My friend Tom Wentworth tagged me in a post last night and he wanted me to comment on it. Is it ClickUp is hiring a CMO for a million bucks a year or something like that? Yeah, to run the entire... So basically a one-person marketing team. I think that is taking it to the extreme. My lean team philosophy, I think, is it's built for this AI era because we all have leverage, right?

32:45Especially with things like... You know what my dream is with AI is it's such a struggle to get the company to stay on brand, right? Some companies are really masterful at this. I think Salesforce is really good at it. ServiceNow is another one that I feel like whether I show up at their offices or I get an email or I see them at a trade show, the branding is just always on point, the voice and tone. Getting brand compliance is just a nightmare as you scale. And I think AI... why did that matter? Just you have, you got to look, you got to have the company uniform. Like what's your, what's the why behind that?

33:20I'm a big fan of no rough edges, right? I think everything you do as a brand says something about you, about you, you know, let me give you an example. I was talking to a CMO who's in like the AEO space, but their company has been around for like 15 years. And there's a lot of like hot new startups doing like AEO, right? You've got profound, you've got air ops. These are like cool new companies. And I was looking at their website and I just like put it up side by side with these like hot new Silicon Valley startups. And I'm like, oh, I could just like see, right? Your problem is that people think of you as legacy, but like, you know, your website looks like it's from 2020, right?

34:01So like, if you don't get those things right, then no messaging, no strategy is really going to help you overcome it, right? It's like you show up to a fancy dinner and you're in a logo t-shirt. People will immediately assume things about you. I always say that marketing is a game of perception. And I think people often read that and interpret it in a really negative way. They think it's like some evil, like the evil capitalism way. But I'm like, no, it's just literally like if you walk into a place that makes sandwiches, Rob tells me this place makes really great sandwiches, but I walk in there and it smells like piss on the floor.

34:37You know, it's like, I do think all those things matter, how you show up. So it's cool to hear you talk about that. I pulled this post up. I was typing while you're, Melissa Rosenthal, she's going to come on this podcast. I met her once. She's cool. She posted this from ClickUp. The 100x CMO job is real. ClickUp is paying a million dollars for one person to be the entire marketing department. No team, brand, positioning, campaigns, creative. They lay off the whole marketing team and now they're going to find one person? I have no idea. Yeah. Anyway, why is this? I have no beef with ClickUp. I know Chris Cunningham was on my podcast.

35:10He's hilarious. But let's poke holes in this. Why would this not work? Why can you not pay a million dollars for one person to be the CMO? What does that mean? I actually think in some businesses, you can get away with one. I think you will be able to get away with one or two extremely well-rounded and technically-minded marketers, maybe paired with like one or two engineers, someone with really good taste, really good marketing sense, right? Like just like a killer marketer, like a Seth Godin type person. I think you can pair like a Seth Godin with two engineers and probably run a full marketing team for a certain class of company.

35:50Now, the moment you work for a company that needs to have a big events motion, it breaks down completely, right? Like we run hundreds of field events a year, like hundreds, maybe even over a thousand, right? There's no AI that's going to help you scale that. The executive briefing program that I talked about, like you cannot get the leverage for that type of marketing strategy like you can with a blog, with webinars. Like there's a lot you can do, but it starts to break down when you do a lot of physical world stuff, right? It just does. Like Red Bull couldn't do their marketing with this type of CMO because they're out there, you know.

36:23Well, neither could you guys. Like, you know, your company's like a perfect example of that. You sell to, I don't know anything about enterprise, but you sell to really high-end CISOs of probably Fortune 500 companies, right? You need to get people to an executive briefing center in Miami. You're not going to win them over with just some AI-generated drool. But the answer is somewhere in the middle. I totally get what you're saying, which is someone like Seth Godin, because you understand how to move people, how to tell stories, how to build a brand, how to get people to feel something. power that up with two people who can actually like, you know, run some ads and build some funnels or something.

36:59Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, but if I were back Trello, for instance, if I were, you know, selling a$20 a month product that you can buy with credit card and there really is no events motion in the strategy, everything is about online marketing, ads, organic funnel. Like you can really, I think you could run a company like that with one or two marketers and they could do a lot of the traditional marketing functions. You know, they could build, brand ads, they can run LinkedIn campaigns, they could run Google ad campaigns with an agent. I think you can get a lot done. I think this is great for startups that are typically starved for marketing resources, because I think you could do a lot more with less.

37:38This is so random. It's going to take us off topic, but I meant to share this earlier. You made me just think of it. Have you seen this, by the way? Do you still follow the company? Have you seen Stack Overflow since ChatGPT is really interesting? Yeah, it used to be. We couldn't live without Stack Overflow as engineers. And I got a cool behind the scenes look being there while it was being built. I didn't work on that team, but yeah, it was like the Bible for all developers. And now just, I think they sold it to a PE firm or something. So I'm sure they made it really great. It's an example. It's like the perfect example of what CMOs and marketers are struggling with when it comes to web and search and what matters in the world of digital.

38:17Oh, this is what I wanted to come back to in my crazy notes all over here. I don't know anything about the enterprise. You guys built a briefing center? Is this like you rented some space in like a Regis conference center? This is like a country club where you bring CISOs to show them. I have no idea about what a$700 million enterprise cybersecurity company, how you do marketing. So can you please tell me? And is there like good snacks in there or something? Great snacks. There's a barista and everything. So we moved our headquarters to Miami. And when we built our office in Miami, we built like a section of the office.

38:49That's a really nice briefing center with a big conference room and a nice kitchen and everything. It's a really nice space. So we bring people down to Miami and customers have a good time and they read, they sort of go through with our exec team, a roadmap. They bring up, you know, it's like a customer advisory board type situation. Yeah. But we also do them remotely. We'll get a conference space in Southern California, so that's local for the customers we have down there. Pretty common playbook. I know I've been to EBCs at Salesforce and service now at HubSpot. I was on there. If we crack into that, what's the timeless marketing principle in there?

39:26Because there's some... Why would I want to go to that, spend some time? Is it about status? Is it about a feeling? It's almost the same as inviting someone to a dinner or a webinar just at a bigger scale. What's the timeless marketing lesson in there? I think it's that people want to be heard. People want to feel like they're super valued as a customer. I know when I was an early, early HubSpot customer and Darmesh and Brian brought me up to Boston and I was with their entire executive leadership team talking about the bugs that I was experiencing and, oh, I wish you guys can do this. And why do I have to buy this other tool for SEO when you guys are, you could easily build it into your software.

40:05And they just, they listened. And if you felt like you had a voice as a customer and you got to meet people and you got to kind of know them as humans. And I feel like it's kind of a lost art in software. You know, so much of, so many software vendors that we use at Varonis, like you buy and then they're just gone. And you get a CSM who might be okay, might not be, but you lose connectivity to maybe the leadership team that sold you on it. And we're very maniacal about treating our customers extremely well at Varonis. And, you know. So it's not too dissimilar than, other than like, oh, we know the lady who runs the bakery down the street and our kids go to the same school and like we feel like we know her and we're like, we want to give feedback, but we're vested in her business.

40:47There's something that there's a human principle there. As long as we're selling to human, this will be okay. Yeah, and there's also an attention span thing. Like Varonis, we're a big product. You know, like I mentioned before, we acquired three companies in the last year. We're doing some really exciting things. And for a decision maker to keep up with all that stuff, it's unreasonable. But if you're sitting down in a conference room for a few hours and you get to see the demos of everything and ask questions. That is focused time with your best customers. Really, how can you beat that? You know what I mean?

41:17Let's talk through some of your lessons marketing to a skeptical crowd, which is selling into cybersecurity. And I'm asking, obviously, you don't need to help. You're not doing this to help any other cybersecurity marketers in this. I'm asking this because I think it's a great lesson in just what works in marketing. I'm going to learn from someone who has to market to a really skeptical buyer. So number one is like your ICP, which is CISOs. This is in our doc here. It says CISOs are zero trust buyers by training. They're deeply skeptical of marketing claims. So how the heck do you do marketing to these people who are very skeptical of marketing in the first place?

41:54Yeah, it's a great question. I think part of it is hiring people who have technical backgrounds on marketing so that they can do the sniff test of like, hey, does this sound like it's something that's coming from a peer or does it sound like it's something written by a marketer? Say more about that. Like, what does that mean hiring someone with technical backgrounds? Were they former engineers or marketers who did work at a technical company? How do you crack that? Yeah, sometimes, I mean, this is my background, like a former engineer who can write really well and can understand the customer and is curious and doesn't mind working with salespeople.

42:26Those are great fits for a technical marketing team like at Varonis. But you can also learn it. I actually have a lot of people here, you know, our best copywriter. She didn't work in cyber before she worked at Varonis. and I thought she wrote some really authentic copy that passed the test for me and for a lot of our customers. Like she didn't use a lot of jargon. She just had like a really good voice and tone for our audience. I think the other thing is like a lot of our marketing is actual pretty hardcore content. Like we do a lot of threat research. We build capture the flags. Like we talked about our webinars.

42:59We don't just run them with marketers. We bring in like, you know, our best hackers and our product builders. And so I think that's, those are kind of the easy, easy things. Wait, I want to try to articulate that. It's like, you're not just doing content for the sake of doing content. You're doing a few things that are really interesting and unique. And that is your content strategy, right? Did I interpret that right? Yeah. You're not going to find a lot of fluffy eBooks. Like you're not just doing a webinar every week because you should do a webinar every week, right? Yeah. Well, some of our best webinars, we call them attack labs.

43:31Basically, you show up and we run an actual attack simulation live. And then we show you how the Varonis product is either alerting or fixing the problems that are coming up. So we show the attacker and then the defender. And people love it because it's real content. It's stuff that's actually happening in the real world. It's not just top 10 things CISO should care about this month. I just got an idea. I take notes during these because I like to put my notes in with the show. But Attack Labs is sick. That's such a good, it's a perfect idea. We're doing this thing on webinars next week or whatever.

44:06But yes, it's a webinar. But when your packaging is really good, like Attack Labs makes it feel like you're going to go to that. You're going to learn something. You're not like, I'm going to a Varonis webinar. Exactly. So we could do like marketing labs or something. That would be so cool. Or like, you know, someone comes on the show, something specific. Yeah, I think I've seen you do like teardowns and stuff like that. It's kind of a similar concept. It's like, let's, you know, let's open someone's marketing budget file and like scrutinize it. Like people love to see the real stuff. Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong.

44:33You can do some like topical webinars that are interesting or panel discussions that could be really interesting. But the point that I'm trying to make though is like, I think it's like, I think you have this built in and it's just like, if you, I think a lot of people do the webinar for the sake of the webinar in that, like, this is a marketing manager on the team and they need to generate 15 MQLs from webinars. And so they need to go do the webinar versus like you're operating from the like, no, like Let's create something that someone would actually want to go to. And that's kind of like the 99 % of what it takes to be good at marketing.

45:04Exactly. Yeah. And our numbers show like it's one of our better tactics. And it's always has been. And we have a great team that knows how to put on good webinars, knows how to get great guests and listen to the audience and understand what they want to see next. So yeah, not every webinar program is built equally. I want to come back to this. You mentioned this earlier, three acquisitions in the last 18 months. This comes up a lot. How do you integrate brands? People ask that, hey, we just, my company just got acquired or we acquired this company. You've been in the thick of this the last three months.

45:36Any lessons that would be related, relevant for this audience based on your experience doing these? Yeah. What I've learned is, you know, as a marketer, you want to maximize these opportunities. These are marketable moments, right? It's a reason for people to pay attention to your company. It's a reason to get people to look at you again if they haven't looked at you in a while. So I always think about it like, how can I squeeze as much juice out of this as possible? So you've got the actual announcement. And if you could disclose things like how much you paid, people love that, right? If you're making an announcement that we acquired a company for an undisclosed price, it's not as sexy as saying we've acquired so-and-so company for$100 million, right?

46:11So you want to think about the initial news. And some companies even do a good job at getting multiple bites at that apple, right? Maybe there's a leak, a rumor of an acquisition, and that gets some attention for your company. And then it's, oh, we signed a letter of intent. And then, okay, the deal closed. And you get kind of three attempts at kind of keeping that news alive. And then you make your big acquisition announcement. Hopefully, you've got a cool price tag attached to it or whatever, something exciting. Maybe there's like a really smart founder that's coming along, right? We've had that twice.

46:42We had actually all three times. Really interesting people. and in the most recent acquisition, someone who's really well-known because he had founded two kind of foundational cybersecurity companies before and everyone kind of knows and respects him. So the fact that he's coming along and joining Varonis, it's great for marketing as well. There's a lesson in there too. Marketing is like, you're like at the beach and you put a bunch of sand and you kind of shake it out and you see and you're like, huh, all right, that's a good one. That's a good shell. Like you're trying to find these like one or two ingredients.

47:11Like I heard you kind of talk to her, like maybe this, maybe this, maybe this. It's like, you're trying to find one or two things that could be a hook to tell a story. Absolutely. Yeah. And then do your acquisition announcement. That's hopefully gives you a nice spike of attention, right? It's an attention game. And then you integrate the product and then you relaunch it, right? So we acquired a company called All True. And we, within a couple months post-close of the acquisition, we relaunched Varonis Atlas. And that's the product from the acquisition. And then we kind of get like a second wind of that.

47:41Yeah. Do you guys have a philosophy on that? Like, is you're trying to acquire, Does everything become like Varonis blank versus like, what do they call like a house of brands or like all separate things? You know, Salesforce does it. I don't. Yeah. House of brand versus branded house. Yeah. Yeah. We're branded house. And that, you know, it's tricky. Like, so the acquisitions we made, it was an easy call because they were smaller companies that didn't have brands really and didn't really have marketing teams. So it's not like I inherited this sort of like generational company. We didn't acquire Splunk or something like that.

48:15When Palo Alto acquired CyberArk, CyberArk was a very well-known company with a distinctive brand in cyber. And then they had to make a choice. Do we keep the CyberArk brand that everyone knows? Or do we now make it Palo Alto something or other? Which they eventually, I think, did. So for us, it was an easy call. It's Varonis. Varonis Interceptor was from an acquisition. Varonis Atlas from an acquisition. The house of brands seems like a nightmare for marketers. branded house feels like you could probably figure that out. Yeah. It might be different in B2C. Yeah, true. I know the CEO of Liquid Death, he's a big fan of the branded house, even though a lot of beverage brands go with a house of brands, right?

48:55Or you may not even know that two beverage companies are really the same part of the same conglomerate. True. He's really big on making sure that Liquid Death Energy Drink feels like the same brand as Liquid Death The Water. So do you take responsibility for like the marketing of those, like when you make those three acquisitions, they have marketing people, do they get folded into your team? Do you guys now have to like drive pipeline for that? How does that work? Yeah. So in the three acquisitions we made, there really weren't any marketers. So we didn't, you know, we didn't have to deal with like big team integrations on the marketing side, but yeah, now that you have a new product line, you figure out the packaging and pricing, you have to come up with a marketing strategy.

49:37Luckily for us, it's all the same persona. It's the CISO at the end, buying all of these products. But we've evolved from the company where our mantra was always, Varonis, we protect data, right? That we were the data security company and still are in our DNA. But we'd also now do a few other different things, right? We do social engineering defense with Interceptor. We do AI security with Atlas. And so that's always a challenge. And you've seen this. I think Salesforce has done it quite well, right? They're no longer the CRM. That's still their DNA, their core DNA, but they also do a lot of other things now.

50:12Many other things with the acquisitions they've made. I forget that I use Slack every day and I don't ever think that that's Salesforce. Yeah, again, well, that was actually, I think, a good call to be like a house of brands in that situation because Slack's brand was just so good, I think. I think it was smart. Instead of calling it like, I don't know, even putting it, making it Salesforce Slack would have been kind of goofy. so I'm kind of glad they stuck with Slack what do you think? Yeah, Slack to me is a brand I know it's like a silly answer but it's like I feel like I remember using Slack early on when it was cool when it was a startup and I've used it at every company since then and lots of people complain about it but I think that's what happens with any product as you get scale Slack has been awesome it's changed how I've been able to work and we have a remote company and that's our office and they used to have a cool brand it was cool I used to think it was cool to have that little, like the knocking sound, but now there's no notifications.

51:06That was back in the notification era. Yeah. And they also achieved a marketing feat of becoming a verb, right? You know, I'll just Slack me. True. You know what? Now that you mentioned Slack and marketing, I used to, they used to be really good at like a product mark, like in-app, like they like cute little like copy, you know, you'd go to upload an image and it failed. They'd have some like good witty copy, almost like MailChimp type of vibes that I'd like. Like that is what was part of their early brand. I don't know if that's true now, but. Yeah. And, you know, I think you wrote something.

51:36I think I saw in your newsletter of B2B brand should have a mascot. Yeah. I'm a big believer of that. So we have Protector22814 is like our robot kind of character. Our team's going to be so pumped. I can't wait till we hear this clip because like the newsletter is great. Like, oh, we got another guy for mascots. Nice. Yeah. And we have, you know, Protector, who's this like big robot, right? Who's like the defender of data. And a big thing about Varonis is automation, right? Like automated outcomes is our thing. Like we don't want our customers to have to lift a finger. We want their security issues to go away through automation.

52:07But he has a mascot called Pixel, the cat. And it's a robot cat. And actually at Black Cat, next week, we have a big robotic Pixel in the airport. So when you arrive, like Pixel is going to be there promoting the capture of the flag, which is called breach at the beach. And there's going to be like cool beach towels and stuff like that. And you can take a photo, a selfie with Pixel. but you have to have a remarkable brand. And when you go to one of these cybersecurity trade shows and you look around, it's just boring. And then you have like, there's a couple of vendors like CrowdStrike is doing a great job.

52:38Like they have their big adversary characters. Like, so they have like the villains and then you've got a couple of other companies doing some pretty cool stuff. But I mean, I don't know. I'm a huge fan of having a remarkable brand, which means that people want to remark. I love it. Look, I think so much, we spend so much time in marketing talking about this automation and this workflow and this nurture and this, like this is what I feel is like the 80%. It's like, no, is there, if we just zoom all the way out and like there's 10 companies that all look and sound the same, just logically, our job is to get awareness and attention from people so we can tell them what they do and solve their problems.

53:13Like wouldn't we want to like stand out or be different somehow? You know, everyone's like, whoa, did you see, literally Seth Godin, right? Like, no, did you see that purple cow? Yeah. And I think the art is like knowing when to use your mascot. You don't want to plaster it everywhere, right? You're not going to do an executive briefing and have stuffed animals all over the place. No, I think it's cool. It's like a secret, you know, like in consumer, it's kind of like a secret kind of drop or something. You don't always going to use the cat, but when you use the cat, you use it wisely. Exactly.

53:45Okay, last question. We're going to let you get back to defending the world from cyber attackers. If you weren't doing this job and you had to make a living, what would you be doing? Ooh, that's a good question. I've been talking to my son about, I've been teasing him like that. I'm going to open up like a wood shop in Vermont or something like that and do woodworking after I retire. But I've never actually like done any woodworking. It just sounds appealing and very zen. And after being a CMO and, you know, building pipeline and, you know, worried about numbers and brand and everything, I feel like I just, I need to be doing something that's totally disconnected from a computer.

54:19Yeah. It's totally zen. I don't know, something like that, I think. would be my choice. I love that. I could see that appealing to you. My father-in-law is a carpenter and just seeing how his mind works. It is constant math and problem solving and angles and ideas. I guarantee you would figure that out and love it. Yeah. And I'd be fine if I made crappy stuff just for myself, just the process, right? It doesn't even have to be good. I like that. I don't know if you'd be able to maintain your level of living unless you socked away a lot of money from from Varonis might not be fruitful in the bank account, but hopefully it can be like a retirement activity.

54:57Yeah. Maybe, maybe it could be like a 10 year plan or something like that. Post retirement. 10 year plan. All right, Rob, you are awesome. Matt is going to be so happy. Matt, Matt's like your biggest fan and he's like, you got to have Rob on, you got to have Rob on. He's great. He's great. He's great. He's great. And you did great. You over delivered. So give it up for Rob. Great job. Bunch of notes. Thanks, man. Appreciate you coming on the show. Appreciate it. And I'll talk to you later. All right, man. Catch up soon. See ya.

55:21Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit 5 and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit 5. There's nearly 5 ,000 members now in our community.

55:52People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100 % free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk-free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more, exit5.com, and I will see you over there in the community.

56:31Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Customer.io. They're one of our longest running sponsors. Customer.io helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. What we love about Customer.io is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft. They just get marketing and understand our audience. Molly, Rosie, and the team bring something creative. Every time that we work together at our exit five event in Austin, they handed out cowboy boots in our newsletter.

57:00They shared an AI prompt cookbook. And at drive last month, they were giving out Airbnb gift cards and AirPods. They believe marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought and taste. And no, AI can't do this part for you. The best teams treat AI as infrastructure and built the right way. It actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. customer io helps product teams build personalized campaigns across email sms push in-app and web hooks using their own first party data and today more than 9 000 brands trust customer io to send their messages including notion less mills and angie so if you need a new vendor to power your customer messaging or you just want a great marketing team to follow it's time to go and check out customer io go to customer.io exit five that's customer.io exit five

57:48Thank you.