002 | The Translation Layer with Cofense SVP Kevin Fliess | Studio CMO
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The Episode in 60 Seconds
Chief Marketing Officers have the shortest tenure in the C-Suite. In tech businesses, that tenure is even shorter.
How marketing executives handle the first few months sets the tone for the rest of their tenures.
Kevin Fliess, VP of Marketing for Cofense, just wrapped up his first 12 months in the role. In this episode of Studio CMO, we explore the decisions, strategies, and tactics he implemented and the lessons he’s learned along the way, including how to:
- fully implement a rebranding movement, even if your company has tried before
- press a new mission into every nook, cranny, and heart of your team
- bring sales and marketing synergy to your organization, not just alignment
Kevin also talks about “The Translation Layer” that marketing creates between the product team and the sales team.
Our Guest
Kevin Fliess is Senior Vice President of Marketing for Cofense, an anti-phishing platform for global enterprise companies. Cofense provides end-to-end phishing protection to stop attacks in minutes, not days. He is responsible for facilitating Cofense’s global growth by overseeing the planning, development, and execution of Cofense’s marketing strategy across all channels.
Kevin has been a marketing leader for more than two decades in SaaS, internet-based companies, and the event planning industry. Past companies include ATPCO, Cvent, Room 77 (acquired by Expedia), SAP, and HP.
Kevin is a named inventor on six technology patents and holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics at Washington and Lee University.
Show Notes
Who are the three bald, dancing dads? Check it out.
This episode was recorded at the 2020 RSA Conference.
Cybersecurity is an exciting industry. The problem set is always changing.
Cybersecurity is mission-driven. You’re actually helping organizations and people deal with problems and pressing issues.
Check out Cofense’s rebranding: then and now.
Phishing affects everyone and all companies, including these landmark examples:
John Podesta’s campaign affected by phishing
Creating a purpose-driven culture is beyond just a mission statement, it’s about creating something that is integral to the company.
A SCALEABLE MARKETING ORGANIZATION
1. You’ve got to have great people in every role. Give them the organizational North Star, and let them run.
2. Build strong relationships with your sales team. Be aligned on what success looks like.
3. Strategy should follow your goals, however you measure success.
Everything we do has a sales executive sponsor and a marketing executive sponsor. We are clear about what outcomes we’re going to work on together.
4. Establish a clear roadmap, and then have constant dialogue about where we are. (Google’s OKR method) Constant communication is key.
The pace of change in enterprise software companies and in technology is so rapid that it requires regular check-in and communication between teams in order to stay on track.
The Translation Layer
Companies don’t have an unlimited number of arrows in their quivers. Marketing straddles the gap between sales and product. Marketing keeps those arrows pointed to the right opportunities that make the most sense and yield the highest outcome.
Take the gobbledygook and turn it into something your customers care about.
Take important, technically-sophisticated features and functions and translate them into use cases that make sense to customers.
Understand what sales is hearing and what pain points actually exist.
Tailor the message.
What are customers asking for, that they will need in 12 – 18 months, that are not on the product road map?
A special message from John Farkas
Unrelated to this episode, John Farkas wanted to share this message with you:
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Transcript
Hi, this is Mark Whitlock with Studio CMO. Just a couple of quick announcements before we get started. The interview you are about to hear was recorded before news of the pandemic affected all of us, affected our homes, our families, our businesses, and our own personal lives. The content is still worth listening to and still applies to the business that we do as B2B tech marketers. The other thing I wanted you to hear is that we’re here for you. We care about you. We want to hear from you. If there’s anything we can do, let us know.
Mark Whitlock One of the statistics that really stunned me last year when we were doing research is that the CMO’s tenure is about half that of the CEO’s. Oh my word. When you go farther, B2B less tech, even less, so what happens? The CMO role is going to change over, and what happens in those first few months as a brand new CMO? That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Studio CMO. Welcome to Studio CMO. I’m Mark Whitlock. You’re here at the place where we have serious, real conversations about issues that face B2B tech CMOs and learn from them. This is a pure conversation. We’re glad you’re here. Our host is John Farkas.
John Farkas Howdy everybody.
Mark Whitlock The CEO and Chief Storyteller at Golden Spiral. Angus Nelson, my fellow cohost is on board with us today.
Angus Nelson I am the other guy.
Mark Whitlock You’re the other guy. We are the three bald dancing dads, and that’s a story for another time. We’ll move on to our guest. Angus, tell us who is sitting at our table today.
Angus Nelson He’s the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Cofense, a security company formerly known as PhishMe. They provide phishing threat management for organizations concerned about human susceptibility. Cofense’s intelligence-driven platform turns employees into an active line of defense by enabling them to identify, report and mitigate spear phishing, malware and drive-by threats. Please welcome to the show, Kevin Fliess.
Kevin Fliess I’m happy to be part of the bald brotherhood.
Mark Whitlock That’s right, baby.
Angus Nelson Come on.
John Farkas We’re loving it.
Kevin Fliess It’s good to be here. This is actually my one year anniversary at Cofense today. I started at RSA last year.
Mark Whitlock Wow. No easy place to debut. Right?
Kevin Fliess Talk about jumping right in with both feet, 40,000 people coming at you, and all the noise. How do you rise above it? It’s crazy.
John Farkas I’ll just preface by saying, Cofense is certainly one of the industry leaders in the space — tremendous offerings. If you look at the conspicuous presences on the RSA floor in the cybersecurity industry, Cofense is certainly a recognized leader. For those who are not in the space, we’re talking about somebody in a company that is really making some waves and doing some things that are really exciting. I would love for you to come and to intro us, give us the fly by of Cofense and what you all do.
Kevin Fliess Sure. I’ll use my opening pickup line.
John Farkas There you go.
Kevin Flies Do you use email?
John Farkas Well, yes. I do.
Kevin Fliess Well, okay then. We can help you. Cofense is the last line of defense when stuff gets past the perimeter firewall. There are lots of vendors who provide “secure email gateways” to catch malicious email. What we find is that even the most sophisticated AI-powered, ML-powered secure email gateways are porous, as we like to say. All nets have holes so the fish are able to swim past those nets. Cofense helps organizations, mostly global organizations condition their users to identify malicious emails and report them with one click, and then helps security operations teams get those emails out of the inbox as fast as humanly possible. Just to zing you guys with a data point, most of our customers see about three to 4,000 malicious emails per year that get past those perimeter controls and end up in inboxes. Our mission is to give employees and SOC teams everything they need to get that stuff out of there as fast as possible to prevent a breach.
John Farkas Got you. Give us a little backdrop, because you’ve had quite a journey in your marketing universe. What’s brought you to this point? Tell us a little bit about your biography. What brought you here?
Kevin Fliess Grew up on the East coast, but spent 17 years in Silicon Valley and moved back to the East coast in 2014. I’ve done B2B and B2C. I’ve been an early stage CEO and founder. I’ve been head of marketing. I’m a recovering product manager, so I’ve worked with engineers. I’m this weird utility infielder kind of CMO who’s done everything from manage a P&L to rebuild brands. What brought me here is that cybersecurity is just a fascinating space. If you think about it, every day you get up the problem set changes, and that’s so cool because it forces organizations to be innovative. For a guy who drank the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid for the better part of a decade and a half, it’s cool to be working on stuff that is really mission-driven. Because when you think about cybersecurity, you’re actually helping organizations and people deal with problems, pressing issues. That’s what drew me here. Cofense is just working on some really interesting and big problems that aren’t going away anytime soon. As a marketer who’s also been a brand builder, to me it was like a great fit. It’s been an exciting and challenging first year, and I’m really excited to see what this year brings for us as well.
Angus Nelson We want to jump into that first year on this trajectory here. You came from a hospitality background.
Kevin Fliess Right.
Angus Nelson Being focused on serving the customers, serving the human being behind all of it, it’s really refreshing to hear you talk about how there’s a mission behind all of this. You’re actually protecting people. Can you talk about like in this first year, what’s that look like for Cofense in terms of how you connect, how you communicate, how you engage with your customer in a way that you can then articulate in a way that meets their pain and their challenge?
Kevin Fliess When I got to the company, the business had previously rebranded from PhishMe to Cofense.
John Farkas Which was a big industry move. That was very well-known and recognized movement.
Kevin Fliess It was. I think the reason for doing that made a lot of sense. The company was no longer a one-trick pony. We had a whole platform that went beyond the PhishMe product, but the company didn’t really put a lot of muscle behind the actual rebranding after changing the name. The first thing I had to do was resurrect that rebranding project and put some meaning behind it. In the spirit of total transparency, the PhishMe name was pretty self-evident about what we did. Cofense could be anything, right? We said “how do we create meaning and how do we do that?” Because I think brands that endure are really good about creating purpose and meaning behind the brand. We said, well, “what do we do?” We help organizations prevent phishing attacks. Well, “how do we do that?” We get millions and millions of end users to be human sensors.
We’ve got about 21 million people who are actively reporting phishing emails every day. We said, “so our higher calling is how do we make that 200 million users a billion users?” We came up with this mission-driven statement. It’s not a tagline. The first time our agency came up with this, I chuckled because it seems so audacious that it was like, come on guys, you can’t be serious. No one is going to take us seriously if we say this. But the more I thought about it and when I shared it with our CEO, he was all in. We knew that this is what we had to stand for, and we set our mission. Our purpose driven statement is we’re uniting humanity against phishing because this is a problem that affects everybody. It sucks. We’ve all gotten phishing emails and we understand now the consequences of falling for one can be monumental from the Target breach a few years ago to Equifax, to election security.
Look what happened with John Podesta in 2016. Somebody on his staff fell for a phish and the rest is history, so to speak. We said our mission is uniting humanity against phishing. By doing that, what we said was now we can create a connection. Everybody has a role to play. Our employees are part of that exercise. Our customers are part of that exercise. Our partners are part of that exercise. I think that was priority one when I got on board was how do we create meaning around the brand and create that organizational North star so it’s super clear what we stand for. Then everything we do cascades from there.
Angus Nelson How did you communicate this almost manifesto into a culture? I mean, I was going to say intent. We know what the intent is, but what was the execution of getting everyone to buy-in?
Kevin Fliess I think it’s an ongoing process. I think we’re about a third of the way through that. I don’t think we’re ever really going to be done, but it was really to be as inclusive as possible in coming up with that statement. We interviewed customers. We interviewed obviously our C-suite and lots of executives. We got employee buy-in and input. Then we basically did an internal brand launch where we came up with really simple messaging that everybody can understand. We walked the company through it. It sounds pedantic, but you plaster the walls with that and you come up with a new brand identity. You roll out new desktop wallpaper. You create new swag and logos. All of a sudden people start to take hold of it.
What we want to do now is get into small groups with our employees and say, what does that mean to you in your role at the organization? How does your position and what you do every day help us in that mission to unite humanity and try to create that personal connection? Now the second thing we’re planning to do is take that out to the community and say, hey, we want to empower things like small schools, elementary schools, middle schools in this mission. Because if we figure we can educate the next round of Gen-Z who’s coming up, we can have an outsized impact beyond just what we’re doing here. I think creating a mission-driven or purpose-driven culture is beyond just a mission statement. It’s about creating something that is more integral to the DNA of the company.
Angus Nelson I’m also seeing like someone reports phishing and then the thank you for them reporting is your part of uniting and actually getting your clients to buy-in. Now there’s this crowdsource movement and community that now they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. That’s pretty powerful.
Kevin Fliess It’s a great idea, and I’m definitely going to borrow that.
Angus Nelson No charge. You got it.
John Farkas That’s what we do. That’s what we do.
John Farkas I’m really excited to hear how you were able to in a fairly short amount of time find that call because that is something that a lot of organizations work for for a long time to try and find that. As you have seen that, as it’s played out in this first one year movement that you’ve had, what have you done structurally inside the team? What other elements have you brought to bear around this initial movement that’s supporting that idea?
Kevin Fliess It’s our galvanizing theme for the year. Everybody in marketing, everything we do is supposed to support that end goal, but it goes beyond that now to our product organization. Cofense, like many organizations, aspires to be a platform business. Platform is just one of those terms that gets thrown around. I think we actually have the trappings of a platform company because we have producers and we have consumers of this information. Our product team has really rallied around this concept of now how do we actually unlock this data? How do we unlock this information from those 21, 22 million end users? It’s permeated the organization from starting in marketing through this inclusive process, now helping to shape product, mission and strategy.
From a recruitment standpoint, I think it helps us as well because if you look at today’s workforce, obviously people want to be compensated fairly and all that stuff, but I think they really also want to be part of something important. I think that especially in almost like a zero unemployment situation where people can go pretty much anywhere they want, if they feel like they’re part of something bigger, that we’re actually going to have an outsized impact, then I think that helps us.
John Farkas When you came in, did you have a mandate? Were you handed, here’s what you have to do and where did that come from? How did you address it? What did that look like?
Kevin Fliess Yeah, I think the company was at a really interesting inflection point where we were approaching 100 million in revenue. The way you run an organization from like 10 to 25, 25 to 50, 50 to 75 looks very different. The next inflection point for us is obviously North of that. How do we get to 200? Whatever the goal is. My mandate was build a scalable marketing organization, build an organization that can help us grow quickly, but also thoughtfully, not at any cost. Right? This is the data-driven piece. I don’t want to get into the weeds, but chief marketing officers increasingly it used to be five years ago, how much awareness did we create? It’s like, that’s important but ultimately it’s like we’re there to grow the business. My mandate was get the right people on the bus, build the processes, the technology, the analytics and the systems so that we can scale.
John Farkas What’s the anatomy of a scalable marketing organization? What does that look like?
Kevin Fliess Starts with people. You got to have great people in every role. Boy, that is… No man, it is so difficult right now. I think cybersecurity marketing in particular makes it that much harder because this space, there’s like 0% unemployment in cybersecurity. I think for us there’s a handful of key roles. Once you have the right people, then it’s about giving them that kind of organizational North star and letting them run and saying, my attitude is I’d rather you ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. I’d rather pull you back from the brink than have to push you. Just go do great stuff. Easier said than done, but that was job number one. I think job number two is building a really strong relationship with your sales team, being aligned on what success looks like, and figuring out that then the strategy should follow whatever those goals are. Revenue, EBITDA, however you measure success. That way you create really strong interlock.
I’ll share one example. One thing we’ve done to do that is all of our campaigns now are deeply integrated between sales and marketing. I think one of the challenges that we’ve worked really hard to overcome was those were very siloed organizations maybe a year ago. Now everything we do has a sales executive sponsor and a marketing executive sponsor. It’s really clear about, this is what the outcomes we’re going to work on together. For us as an enterprise software company or as enterprise SaaS company, we are increasingly focused on how do we drive more business within our existing install base. It’s not the days of before where it was spray and pray and just spend as much money as humanly possible and get all the leads.
Now it’s about what’s the use case, what’s the story we’re going to tell this account in order for them to buy into this concept that Cofense is more than PhishMe, that we have a lot more to offer them today, and that we can actually help them solve their pain. In order to do that, you really have to have a deep understanding of the customer. Sales is the tip of the spear, and marketing needs to be working with them hand in hand. I think after we got the team in place, it was really solidifying that relationship with sales and marketing. Then we’re starting to see the fruits of that.
Mark Whitlock Were there some bumps in the road? Was that sales and marketing alignment difficult?
Kevin Fliess Yeah, it’s been challenging but we’ve had a lot of changes. I mean, I’m not the only new leader at Cofense. We have a new sales executive. Whenever you have transitions like that, you have to work that much harder to build rapport. With the new leadership team, and I think Cofense, more than half of the senior leaders joined in the last 18 months. I think we really have a very cohesive unit.
John Farkas Give me a little bit of practical insight on what that looks like. I won’t say day-to-day because there’s probably not day-to-day but week-to-week as you guys are looking at having sponsors for different initiatives and things like that. What does that interchange look like where you’re fostering that alignment?
Kevin Fliess Well, we used the Google OKR method. I don’t know, you guys are probably familiar with like management by objective and KPIs, all that stuff. We have clear corporate objectives and then we let the teams come up with what are their goals. Marketing and sales have shared objectives. I think that’s what it starts with is everybody understands what success looks like and then it’s what’s everybody’s individual role in that. We meet a lot. I think constant communication is key. The question is: what’s the best method? I would say it’s an all of the above approach. We use Slack for internal communications. We’re a very virtual company. We’ve got about 70% of our workforces remote. We do a lot of things via Zoom. There’s no substitute for face to face.
We try to spend time together in the field visiting customers together. For me, it’s establishing the clear roadmap and then having a constant dialogue about where we are. By constant, I mean we have weekly senior leadership calls between sales and marketing to review what’s in flight, how are we doing, where do we need to course correct. Through that constant communication and regular checking on performance, we keep things moving along. The pace of change I think now in enterprise software companies and in technology is so rapid that it requires this really regular check in and communication between teams in order to stay on track. That’s been working for us.
John Farkas One of your most recent tenure was with Cvent, which is an industry leader, hardly any competition in that universe. You own that space. Coming into Cofense where cybersecurity is one noisy, loud, competitive universe that’s changing so fast. Talk a little bit about that shift for you. You already said it, that’s an exciting visceral component that intrigued you, but what did that look like for you to adapt in that movement? Because that is a very different stance, right?
Kevin Fliess Definitely. I mean, I think every role I’ve had has been different, because the business context has been so different. Cvent is a juggernaut that’s just cleared the decks like they’ve bought everybody. There’s nobody left. In a situation like that, it’s growth at all costs. This is a moonshot and we’re just going to win. They’re at a different point in their corporate trajectory or their organizational life cycle. Cofense is at a different point where we are pivoting from being a single focus product company to a platform company in a very competitive space. What I would say, when I say competitive, I mean cybersecurity, but when you wind that down to say email security and what we do, there’s really only a handful of players. We are by far the market leader when it comes to enterprise. It’s how do you go from being a single product organization to a platform business in a relatively short period of time, reeducate your existing customers, and continue prospecting.
I think every situation is different, and you have to approach it that way and say, is this a turnaround? Is this a steady state? Everything is hunky-dory. We’re growing 12, 15% a year, and we just want to continue to do that, or is this a juggernaut where profits and EBIDTA don’t matter as much? We’re just going to grow at all costs because the hope is for another strategic exit in a short period of time. What I’d say is I’ve been able to draw from each of those experiences and tap into them because every organization, and hopefully Cofense is in the same boat, go through that kind of life cycle where there may be peaks and valleys. As we look to the future, back to one of your earlier questions, the reason why I was brought in and my remit was how do we build that scalable organization so that we can have a Cvent-like marketing machine.
I mean, marketing at Cvent was almost 400 people when I was there. Sales organized over a thousand people and was just hammering away. Cofense has a market opportunity that is vast as well. When you think about it, every organization runs email, every organization faces phishing attacks — from SMBs that are sub a hundred people up to the large enterprise. We’ve made a conscious decision to focus on supporting enterprise organizations, because those organizations typically have the most to lose when there’s a breach. Whether it’s personally identifiable information, financial data, IP, trade secrets, and so forth. As I think about my career arc or trajectory, each experience has been very different from the last. I think the red thread for me is change in organizations and innovation is key. Really trying to bring that to the forefront has been something I’ve been really excited about.
John Farkas Kevin, as you look at your role in the context of the company, in particular, your relationship with the CEO role and your role, how do you see that interplay?
Kevin Fliess Marketing is a strategic function. I’m really fortunate to be able to work closely with my boss and the entire C-suite on helping to shape the future of the organization. I mean, sure, we’re running demand-gen programs and we’re doing a lot of tactical marketing stuff, but ultimately it’s about really helping to figure out what the customer needs, translating that into something that’s meaningful for our CEO and for head of product and helping them understand which markets we should be approaching. Like I said, I always think about marketing sort of straddling sales and product and being that translation layer for product market fit. Making sure that in a world of limited resources, we don’t have a lot of arrows in our quiver and that we’re pointing them in the direction of the opportunities that are going to make the most sense for us and ultimately yield the highest outcome.
The role of marketing is really figuring out what is that value zone where we should be operating and where we want to win, then figuring out how we align the organization. Everything from product strategy to messaging to go-to market. That’s what’s cool about marketing. I think that’s why I, kind of late in my career here, sort of realized over the last 10 years that that’s really what I love doing — helping to shape that strategy from a marketing perspective.
John Farkas You said something a minute ago, I want to pick up on you described marketing as the translation layer between product and sales. I love that idea of translation layer because I think it’s really true. I mean, we’re breaking down those silos and helping hone the focus. Talk a little bit about how you see that translation layer.
Kevin Fliess Well I think, cybersecurity, I’ll just pick on it for a minute, can get pretty complicated pretty quickly.
John Farkas Very technical.
Kevin Fliess I think that translation layer, one aspect of it is simply in product marketing, taking a bunch of technical, in some cases, gobbledygook and turning it into something that customers care about. It’s like, sure, we use machine learning and YARA rules to help you identify indicators of compromise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who cares? Sorry.
Mark Whitlock No, you don’t have to apologize.
Kevin Fliess We do all those things and it’s true and that’s important. At a certain level of the organization, fingers on keyboards, threat analysts. You have to understand your audience. Speaking to them in that language is important. But as you move up the hierarchy and you want to, let’s say, penetrate the C-suite at a large enterprise company, it’s like we help you protect your most precious brands from the number one cause of breaches, phishing, right? We do that by helping you solve attacks in 10 minutes or less versus seven to eight days, which is what’s normal. By the way, the cost of a breach is four million dollars. So, how do you take really important technically sophisticated features and functions and translate them into use cases that make sense to customers?
To do that, you really have to understand that sales is hearing. What are those pain points that they’re hearing? Almost tailor that message now to each account because there are obviously going to be patterns and similarities across industries and across customers, but the more personalized and targeted that message is to that customer, if you understand what their pain points are, the more it’s going to resonate. That’s a big dimension of it. That’s the realm of product marketing is how do you translate technical information into messages that resonate with the market. I think then maybe the flip side is the translation engine in terms of looking to the future, saying “what are we hearing from customers that they’re going to need six to 12 to 18 months from now that maybe isn’t on the product roadmap?”
Marketing, helping to communicate those market requirements, competitive intelligence in a way that’s helpful to the product organization so that they can help then shape their roadmap in a way that yields the best results. It’s a two-way translation engine. Messaging is a one-way kind of strategy, the other direction.
John Farkas What are you doing to proactively position your function in that translation layer? Because I think you did a great job of describing that. I don’t think that that’s true of every marketing organization I’ve seen that they’re positioning themselves in that active role to make sure intentionally that that’s what they’re doing. What have you done to facilitate that?
Kevin Fliess Well, this year at our sales kickoff meeting, which was about a month ago when we presented products to the sales team and we said, hey, this is what you need to know as you go out and you’re kind of talking to customers. We deliberately limited those product presentations to three slides. Here are the top three pains. Here’s how we address those top three pains. Here’s a couple of examples from customers who’ve deployed it and just stripped it down to just the bare essence. I think that’s important because one of the things I have to remind myself of, sales teams can be quickly overwhelmed, right? They’ve got lots of things they have to do. In a complex organization where you’ve got lots of products, they can only remember a certain number of things.
We’ve just tried to simplify it, I guess, is the best way I would describe it. In the same way that product organizations are looking to simplify their user experience, I would say we’re trying to simplify our messaging. If we can boil things down to two sentences, fantastic. I think that’s something we’ve been trying to do. We did do that this year. Then I think it’s just you have to be disciplined to stick to that messaging and not fall into the trap of-
John Farkas Coming up with something new. Right?
Kevin Fliess Right, or other things creeping in that strip attention away. You have to build that organizational muscle memory. Keeping it simple and being conscientious about repeating those things I think is really important.
John Farkas That’s a great point too, because we all want to think that we say something once and the organization adopts it.
Angus Nelson Everybody understood it. They all know. We don’t need to say that again.
Mark Whitlock What kind of discipline do you have in your organization to instill that repetitiveness, that consistent message? What are you doing to help pull that through?
Kevin Fliess I mean, I have to remind myself to do it and then remind the organization. Coming to a conference like this, there’s always this big discussion and planning. What do we want to put on the signage? What do we want the booth to say when you walk up? The nice thing about going through that exercise late last year to come up with this new purpose-driven statement was we already figured it out. It’s like, let’s do that. We have to remind ourselves, for the folks at Cofense, we’ve been saying this for six months, but the rest of the market doesn’t know yet. It’s like, give it time to germinate. You’ve got to give things a year and you’ve got to stick with it. I would say it just transcends all of our marketing touch-points.
The way we do that is I would say, from our homepage of our website, which is the front door to the company, to every trade show we attend, to the way we brand our business cards, everything has to reinforce that message. When we launch a campaign for the sales team to go drive demand for a new product, everything has to ladder back to that message. We’re just trying to keep the train on the track and not get distracted by the next shiny object. Of course, as we test that message with the market and if we get feedback from customers, and we have, that it continues to resonate, we may iterate. It’s just that, it has to be omnichannel, always on. You can’t say one thing here and then something different over here. It has to permeate the organization, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
Mark Whitlock Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us here on Studio CMO.
John Farkas We really enjoyed the time and grateful that you have found this spot in Cofense and been able to really bring that mission-centric focus to the marketing efforts that you’re putting forward. It’s an exciting thing to watch.
Angus Nelson I can’t wait to see the thank you page to all the customers. A small thank you in the lower right hand corner, it says thank you Angus.
Kevin Fliess Credit Angus Nelson.
Mark Whitlock You’re not asking for your commission? I’m confused, you haven’t asked…
Angus Nelson This one doesn’t need commission. This needs notoriety and brand building. I’m all about it.
Kevin Fliess Well, thank you. I enjoyed it, appreciate it very much. Thank you. We’re all going to bump elbows here. All right, take care. Thank you guys.
Angus Nelson Remember, understand your buyer’s problems.
Mark Whitlock Lead with an empathetic understanding.
John Farkas And make your buyer the hero.
Mark Whitlock We’ll see you next time on Studio CMO.
