SaaStr 811: Marketing in the Age of AI with Wiz's CMO Raaz Herzberg

0:00Welcome to the official Sastr podcast where you can hear some of the best Sastr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Sastra Podcast. It's such an evolving landscape. And so I want to be humble here and say, like, I don't think I know anything. But if I had to turn my perspective. I think when I say superstar, I never thought about it from being, you know, a super hyper domain expert, but rather being a person that is extremely curious and just gets the job done. And I think that type of personality thrives right now in the AI landscape. One of the things at CMO, I did a lot, because again, the product is so, like, the domain is so technical.

0:42And one of the things that was so important for me is that every security person that reads something or hears something that comes out of Wiz is like, oh yeah, like they know what you're talking about. I would spend so much of my time, like, reviewing things, making sure that everything's, like, accurately technical. Now I built like a super easy GPT that we call like the Wizz spell checker that is used by every single person in the organization. What it does is it makes sure that it's like according to our brand and tone of voice. Like you write a customer email. You put it there. Technically accurate.

1:12Use as the right to your goal. So it checks every customer communication. I think it's great. If it does, I'm a super fan. It helps you like write everything, right? But I still believe that at the end of the day, the people who are most successful are hungry and curious people. Because to your point, I really don't know anything. Like the tools I used six months ago are not the tools I use today.

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2:1936 % CEOs and founders. And 25 % were AI first professionals. It's the very best of S-tier attendees and decision makers that come to Saster Annual and AI Summit each and every year. But here's the reality, folks. The longer you wait, the higher ticket prices get. They're cheap now. They're cheap. So just get them. Early lock in your spot today. Use my code Jason100 for exclusive savings. Get your tickets at podcast.sasteranual.com or just use code Jason100 when you check out. See you there. Saster Annual and AI Summit 2026. It will rock. We're going to talk about AI a bit with Roz. A lot of topics to get into, but we will start with a quick background and introduction.

3:02So for those who don't know, today's guest with us today, we've got Roz Hesberg. She is the CMO of Wiz. Roz, thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Great to have you. For those who don't know Roz's background formally, maybe you read it a little bit with the announcement of the Google, intent to buy Wiz. But for those who don't know, Roz was actually appointed CMO of Wiz with a product background. So no prior experience in marketing. Just by way of introduction, how did that go? How did that actually work? Just as like, I feel like that's a good place to start off for the day. Yeah, it's still going.

3:43Yes, just for context, like being the CMO of Wiz was my first marketing role. At the time, I joined Wiz as one of the first five employees, and I joined as a first product role. And for the first two and a half years of Wiz, I led the product organization. And I still remember the day that our CEO, Asaph, asked me to kind of take over the marketing function. And my answer was like, no. What are you talking about? I mean, just to put it into context, I have never been on a go-to-market org before, right? Like I was always on the engineering side. I did not know the first thing about marketing. I mean, when I took the role, I have never heard the term MQL or I knew what pipeline was, but like very high level, right?

4:28I've never heard of like PM or PR agency, like nothing. What I didn't know was I knew our business inside out. So like building the product for the first two, two and a half years, what I did was, you know, work with customers from the beginning. I sold to a lot of customers in some ways like I helped shape the selling process in Liz like I helped you know what is the first step what does a successful POB look like I knew the customers and the product in our business inside out but I knew nothing about marketing I mean Liz blew up right I mean but in general I think it did like one to a hundred in 18 months or 20 months or Something like that.

5:07How did you, as an engineer turned marketing, what data set did you focus on initially? What did you try to... I'm sure your brain initially is, what can I optimize, right? What can I hack? And so, because I'm actually seeing this more and more often. More and more folks are approaching marketing from an engineering perspective. So what were the first couple of things you attacked? I think not knowing marketing really shaped the way I came to think about it, because I knew exactly what I was trying to solve. Our problem at that time was nobody heard of WIS. at all nobody heard of when we had rate product market fit right but what would happen to us is we would meet a customer right it's a big enterprise we would meet a customer and we would you know have a great first meeting and they would be like oh my god this looks so good i wish i heard about it like three months ago when i just signed with one of her competitors they did not know this existed even and that's like you know it's like a knife to your heart because we know that had he heard of us had we been part of that process we believed that he wouldn't have bought Wiz, right?

6:06So our pain point was nobody heard of Wiz. So I did not know anything about marketing, but I came into with like, okay, what are all the things I can do to solve that problem? I just want the right person. Like I want security buyers with the security product. I want security buyers. I want cybersecurity buyers to hear about Wiz and ideally know that Wiz does cloud security so that if they need something for cloud security, they think of Wiz. That was a problem I set to solve, I was not focused on building pipeline because I did not even know I was supposed to be focused on that. I was just like thinking in terms of how do I solve this problem as fast as I can, whatever it takes.

6:47That's a good one. One of the points you brought up and something we talk a lot on SASTR, I know Jason has some takes on this as well, is how technical do you need to be, right? So this is a fairly technical product. obviously you had you had more of the technical background than maybe a more traditional CMO would have had like how do you feel like that also helped make it work right and then how did you maybe evolve that to say okay now that I know I have to own this marketing function how can I actually make that exciting because security is a little bit traditionally a bit more boring than selling like a marketing or now an AI piece of software yeah it's it's a really good question so again i go back to like the core problem nobody heard of us and so my solution to that was making it exciting like i wanted to stand out because i was just trying to make people hear about me right so like whatever it needs i want to stand out i want to look different so that if you see with somewhere you remember it and you can come back to it because it stands out so much and being in the security domain for being technical but specifically being in the security domain.

7:56And being a security practitioner, I knew how everything else sounded and looked like. Security products typically were like black and red type of thing that really most of the marketing was done on like scaring people. Hey, I will help you prevent this bad thing from happening. And as an actual technical practitioner, first of all, it's never what I want to hear. It's just not. I like to hear like positive things. I don't like people stressing me out. my job is hard enough and also because i understand the reality of how complex it is to protect an organization that's also never resonated well for me so what i was able to do was kind of like take those two things and be okay i want to sound different i want to look different and i want to make it fun like i know it's funny for my audience i know the jokes i know the inside jokes i know like where they read i know what they like to read so how do i kind of combine those things to make it fun and stand out and specifically talk to them like for example right like you know in april day we april's full day we did like we released the meditation app for cyber practitioners it has like guided meditation sessions because cyberspherity is stressful with like really deep cyber jokes right that's funny thing that can get shared within my audience and it's just like weird it's like out there and it's funny it's like deep and good so So those are the types of things I did to stand out fast, but also catch exactly my right audience.

9:26And the second thing was like, I knew I was really focused on grabbing attention because that was my problem. So I always thought like, what is interesting for my audience? You know, I don't believe ever hearing about product. That is because you're caught up in your own doing. Even as you know, like even I like Instagram, right? I'm never going to read a blog about the new Instagram feature. so why would somebody who does not use my product read the blog about my features right so it was more about i know it's interesting for my audience because i am my audience yeah and how do i like release things fast that speak to them just on finding early traction in marketing and a little bit about maybe you can share what's working now a bit is how did you find the right buyers initially yeah it's a really good question And I do think that obviously a lot is changing and a lot is also changing fast and a lot is still changing.

10:23So definitely I don't have like all the answers, but I think it's important to always be attached to today and tomorrow. And I don't think like two days ahead. I still think that a lot of the core principles we incorporated is at least for our audience, which is a very deeply technical audience. Right. I'm selling like a very technical product for security people, for engineers. you have to go very deep so shallow content was never enough but really deep content still requires a lot of work and it's not something that can be easily automated around but you really need that core expertise for example one of the things we that works really well for us right now is um really releasing um they're called ctfs in the cyber security world but releasing really complex challenges that teach people how to do security hands-on like you can think of them almost like websites that are like security riddles teaching you cyber security but making it fun and engaging and gamifying it there's a lot of work that goes into it it's like very deep content those things always work for me because I think the reality is you are truly just giving somebody really good value and you're speaking in their language and you're being very specific in what you do and that I feel still works for me really well and it does it is able to it is able to shine in the sea of SEO type generated content which I agree is now overflowing.

11:55Yeah yeah especially because AI has made content creation both easier and harder. As you were just related to as you were building out the marketing function at Wiz because how did you build out that team right Like who were the first 10 hires that you made? What did you have them do to build out this function? Yeah. So I built what I still to this day call like the growth marketing team. Those were like my first personal hires. So I hired that team of like brilliant people. Some of the best marketers out there. They're just like doers. They do a ton of crazy things like people who made things go viral in whatever domain.

12:36I was not looking for cyber experts. I know cyber. I needed people that know how to make things like go viral and deliver them end to end. So that was like my first hire. It was like those kind of like doers on the growth marketing team. It's not a traditional function, I think, but to this day, it's very, very impactful. I also brought design completely in-house. So there was like a lot of contractors. I just I really love design and I think it's a core part of a company and an identity. So I brought the design team in-house. today in with the marketing team is actually structured untraditionally so like about a year ago i actually split the marketing org so that the field marketing org is under the sales org with because to me it's so attached to regional and to sales and it's not that domain specific and everything it's like domain specific reports to me so it's a very untraditional structure which again marketing is so diverse i have to say somebody who has not come from marketing it was always so confusing to me that everything has to live you know like nothing is that similar to anything else within the marketing war so i think there's a lot of ways to structure marketing teams if we're on the constructing the function of marketing what i've seen ros just relatively recently with hyper growth companies like wiz and i've seen this a lot is i am seeing more and more CROs and revenue leaders build what I call parallel marketing organizations.

14:05Like they're tired that either marketing is getting me the wrong type of leads, right? Or I need more enterprise and marketing is giving mid-market or I just need, and they are not, I haven't seen any CROs say, Hey, I want to take over brand collateral and building booths. Okay. I've yet to see that, but I am seeing more and more CROs build a parallel marketing org mostly around demand. And I don't just mean hiring SDRs. I mean, building a parallel org. Have you seen that? Have you thought about whether those lines should blur or change when there's hyper growth? Very interesting. I think blurry lines are a good thing.

14:37I mean, I have to say in WIS, I think we've always had a lot of blurry lines. I think really being involved in sales processes, which I am still to this day involved in deals. I think it's meaningful. It's really meaningful. It keeps you in touch with the sales org in a very meaningful way. I can understand why. Let's put it this way. If our CRO started building a shadow marketing org, then I think it's a great learning opportunity for me. I believe people should do whatever they need to succeed. So it's a good chance to understand, like, what are they doing that the marketing team did not do?

15:11But it doesn't matter. I think there's many ways of having structures in orgs. And I think orgs are very different. So not necessarily seeing it as a problem. I think it could be a good opportunity. At the end of the day, I work for the sales team. That's how I see it in Me2B, right? I do. I work for the sales team. Either I'm helping them close deals and get customers, or I'm not helping them close deals and get customers. I mean, if I was a CRO and I was unhappy, I might have done just that. It's not so much that I, some of it's probably unhappiness, right? What I'm seeing as the best just grow faster, right?

15:43Is a recognition, look, the reality is some CMOs are more passionate about certain functions than others, right? Some, maybe from an engineering background, you may love the quantitative side. You may love campaigns and demand gen and staring at spreadsheets. There are CMOs who are great at brand and whiz is so big today. You could probably just do brand, right? Because that's your goal is to reinforce deals. Like you get into deals, right? There are CMOs who love field as crazy as they love, they know that they're really good at events and their competition isn't. So they know that 40 % of pipe in the enterprise.

16:15So they just hustle field, but they ignore smaller customers. Like I've never seen a CMO that's great at field and great at like the low end. So what I'm seeing is CROs say, listen, let's keep everybody in their lane and I'm going to backfill my organ. If you're good at content or event or fields or brand or demand gen, I'm going to do the other stuff. You're a CMO. You don't like getting out to events. I'm going to do it myself. Like I'm going to get on the road. It's just a new theme because I just think most CMOs have like two or three things they like to do and the rest they sort of hand off to their team or are mediocre.

16:50I think it makes a lot of sense. I also said like our software is not traditional. I don't do field anymore. I mean, and I think it's part of it. Like it is a very, very, very diverse role. Like there's so many things in marketing and it's not even just in the marketing or like, I would argue that as a B2B enterprise product, our salespeople own a lot of the brand. Like at the end, they meet the team and it's about how they interact and how they behave and, you know, the culture that they put out there. If I'm like a very fun and approachable brand, but then, you know, you meet my salesperson and you have a really bad experience, it does not matter.

17:24So the whole thing to me is like one task for the company. I just, I personally to, I mean, I know being outside of the marketing org, right? I know how almost like scary it was to hear CMOs talk because they would use all those things like the demand gen and the top of funnel and like brand versus this versus that. And I mean, now I know all those terms, but I still try not to think about them too much. I mean, at the end of the day, if you don't split it into those categories, then the problem CMOs have to solve for is I want to make sure the right buyers hear about me and feel positively about me.

18:00And that should help the sales process. And so that's when like that is what we do. So in my mind, that's a focus. And it's not broken up into those like category. So bluntly, in a sense, like a year ago, I broke off the field marketing org, which is CMO. and it now reports to our sales leaders. That's interesting right there. You broke it off, right? It reports, right? Exactly because I really felt that like, first of all, I found personally, I think being a very successful field marketer has more to do with having very tight alignment with your regional sales director. I mean, that's the KPI for me is, are they happy with them?

18:38And the way I like our field marketers was to ask the regional sales director, have you worked with somebody you liked before? Because that will make it successful. so like in some ways i did not have a lot to give there right like it's not something i felt like it's so important for them i want the sales or to choose them and like them and work with them i will still give the content i will still tell them how they eventually look like what to do but it's more important that they work closely together things are very regional so in my mind that belongs with sales it also works that way when you hire like you hire x sales person in y region, you get the field marketer.

19:16So like, put it there. Yeah, well, that is interesting. It makes sense if the CRO is up for it, right? You have to make sure you have a great VP there because there's no way a CRO wants to go into the minutiae of ordering the popcorn cart for, they just want to influence pipeline and maybe generate leads, right? That's all they care about. Yeah. But also, of course, it's not like I went anywhere. We were there to build a good VP there and like to make that work. But yes. Just one nerdy question on it because we can spend, but I do think that's a really interesting story. Just from a budget perspective, when you move it over from marketing to sales, does that become part of, does sales get more heads and more budget?

19:56Does it stay in your budget? Like how did you guys just figure out how to allocate? Because even at Wizyscale, budget's fixed, right? It's going to be some percent of revenue that you get to spend. Yeah, moved it over with the heads in the budget, of course. Well, the budget too, right? So yeah. Not everyone wants to release, not every CMO wants to release any budget. There are fiefdoms out there in the world. There are a few folks who run fiefdoms. And the last thing they wanted to do is release any budget. You know, I do think that one thing that can be underplayed in the fact that I didn't start with as a CMO is that I exactly have always had a bit of the privilege to not live and die on metrics and have a lot of trust.

20:36So I was never afraid to let go of budgets or numbers or saying, you know what, this measurement of pipeline, I know it looks good for my team, but I actually think it's like completely meaningless. And I'm going to focus my energy on what I actually think closes deals and help sell Wiz because that's what I'm here for. It enables you to do things very differently. I think it's very hard as marketers to work because you have to gain that trust and you have to show the numbers. But in a lot of ways, they can also lead you in the right direction sometimes. So that's another core advantage I had by not starting as a CMO, but by starting from a place where I had all the trust in the world by the exec and founding team.

21:22Because I was almost like part of that before I took over the marketing role. Got it. Let me take you a different way. Curious what you're thinking today, because this is probably the number one question everyone has, right? How do you think AI is going to change the roles of specific marketing functions over the next 6, 12, 18 months? I mean, we're already seeing it faster. I mean, we already, every time, like, look, we're tiny, okay? But every time someone's left, broadly speaking, we've replaced them with AI. Interesting. And then marketing. And what we call marketing, how dynamic do you think it is?

21:59What jobs do you think are at risk, right? How are you thinking about how it will change the human side of marketing? Yeah, it's a good question. And really, I have to say, like, I don't feel anywhere near a marketing expert, right? So, like, truly, I am still learning marketing. We're all still learning. Still learning, right? I really think that, I mean, if I look at my own team, right, which is the only thing I really understand and know about. I filled it with my own team. Every single person on my team has dramatically transformed the way they work. And that was also something that I would not compromise on.

22:33Like when we do team meetings, right? When we do like quarterly summaries where people present where they work, every person has to say like, what am I doing with AI? And show cool things to the team. And we've been definitely over a year. So it upscaled the capability of people to be effective a hundred, a hundred X. I mean, I've definitely, honestly, I'm slow with hiring, but I think amazing people are just now a hundred times more amazing and a hundred times more effective. But I still need the amazing people. I never had or believed in like big teams and hiring a lot of people for, I was always about like, I think a superstar can do so many things.

23:14And now a superstar can do really endless amount of things. Yeah. So that's how I see it. So superstars for sure, right? But in my limited experience, sometimes the folks that were superstars in 2021 are not always superstars in the age of AI. Do you think you can reskill people? A lot of folks are talking about reskilling go-to-market people in the age of AI. But honestly, just between us and whoever's watching on streaming, I think reskilling is tough. just showing up with a recipe that you got on ChatGPT to your marketing team doesn't count as being an AI native. We had a CMO summit at Sastra Annual this year.

23:56I mean, come next year, we had hundreds. And this, Amelia led it. It was the quiet theme backstage. I don't know if I'm reskilling myself enough. I don't know if I'm AI. I can go deploy clay and buy some tools, and that's great, but I'm not sure I understand this stuff. it's such an evolving landscape and so i want to be humble here and say like i don't think i know anything but if i had to turn my perspective i i slightly disagree there right like i think when i say superstar i never thought about it from being you know a super hyper domain expert but rather being a person that is extremely curious and just gets the job done and i think that type of personality thrives right now in the AI landscape.

24:41One of the things at CMO, I did a lot, because again, the product is so like, the domain is so technical. And one of the things that was so important for me is that every security person that reads something or hears something that comes out of Wizz is like, oh yeah, like they know what you're talking about. I know for me on the other side that oftentimes I would read something and it would not be the right tone of voice, right? Like you can see that the person writing it was not using the right jargon, like the inside jargon. So I would spend so much of my time reviewing things, making sure that everything is accurately technical.

25:11Now I built a super easy GPT that we call the Wizz spell checker that is used not by marketing. It's used by every single person in the organization. What it does is it makes sure that it's according to our brand and tone of voice. You write a customer email. You put it there. Technically accurate. Uses our idea of going. It checks every customer communication. I think it's great if it does. I'm a super fan. Yes, it helps you write everything, right? And it also makes sure, for example, one of the key things is one of our brand core principles is being humble. Like, I will never tell somebody, let's say we lost a deal.

25:48I never want an AE to write and be like, I want them to write back and say like, we'd love to learn more. Like, we want to learn from you, right? So this also helps me with those types of things. So you can build a tool and give it to everybody. And you can do that with AI tools today like you could have never done before. but I still believe that at the end of the day, the people who are most successful are hungry and curious people. Because to your point, I really don't know anything. Like the tools I used six months ago are not the tools I use today. And the tools that we'll use two months from now will be new tools.

26:18And in every subdomain, there's so much to discover that they just need curious people who are not afraid to like figure it out. And that I think those people thrive. What percent of folks do you really think are that curious? a lot a ton and with i i don't i i believe you you're much more successful than me i want to believe like a lot of people are this curious today but i feel like it might only be like 10 or 15 well oh that's very possible but when you hire you hire for that 10 15 i mean look i hiring i said it at the beginning i am obsessed with it because i do think i know nothing around it like I want to hire for that 15%.

27:00And I'm willing to do whatever it takes to hire for that 15%. And honestly, I want to say that in which we've always been focused from day one on hiring people that are humble, have a growth mindset, and are obsessed with growing. And we have, of course, the privilege of being able to hire for that. But that has always been a key priority. So let me ask you related to this, because I just think the world is changing, right? Expectations for marketing and sales. I was on a sales call this week for an AI tool where I'm a power user. I've been a user since day one. This is a company that's two years old.

27:34I've been a customer for like 20 months. Okay. So I know this product pretty good. Okay. But I don't actually know the new enterprise edition that's coming out. And I got on a call, a Zoom with the head of sales. And I just instantly knew the product better than he did. Everything. It was 80 minutes of torture. And my point of the story is, I mean, it's pretty funny. is I think before AI, you might tolerate this. You'd roll your eyes. I think the customers are too smart in the GPT area. We won't, I just can't tolerate that. I can't tolerate a marketer, a GTM, a salesperson that's not smarter than me.

28:10I just can't stand it anymore. I agree. So how do we enable our GTM teams to, I think they have to be smarter than their customers in 2026. I think they always have to be smarter. I think from day one, like I never aimed for mediocrity, honestly. So you're right. Like, I think there is, I think the bar is getting higher. Right. But I also think that you should never aim that low. So like, in my opinion, like that salesperson who joined the call with you, right. That was never okay. It was not the day before AI. And I agree with you. That's the thing. I think like mediocrity now is not hard to automate.