021 | Strategy, Clarity, and Content with Neal Conlon | Studio CMO

Mark Whitlock: Welcome to Studio CMO. I’m Mark Whitlock, and you’re listening to the podcast where we talk about the real life issues that B2B tech marketing leaders care about the most. We hear biographies, we break down the marketing wins and a few of the losses along the way. Angus Nelson is my fellow cohost, and Angus, we’re going to be talking to a friend of yours today.

Angus Nelson: Yeah, very much looking forward to it. He’s one of the only guys you’ll ever meet that actually has his own beard beer.

Mark Whitlock: Beard beer?

Angus Nelson: It is a beard lager.

Mark Whitlock: And let me introduce you to the host of our podcast, John Farkas, the CEO of Golden Spiral and John, we’re going to be talking today about one of the issues that companies struggle with, alignment.

John Farkas: At the end of the day, one of the crown jewels of marketing is clarity. You have to have clarity in what you bring forward in the market and clarity comes with unity. I mean, unity is the precursor. You have to have everybody together. You have to know what each other are saying, and it has to complement and reflect each other really well so that it creates a unified, clear picture to the market.

John Farkas: And right now, in most B2B technology companies, because of the fast pace of evolution, product development, marketing, and sales have to come together in a very tightly integrated form. Without that, the things get disjointed very quickly, because of the product changes that happen, because of the market trends that are evolving quicker than we can keep track of them. And those conversations, if they’re unified, it can be very powerful. If they get disjointed and incongruent, it can create confusion in the marketplace that you can’t afford.

Mark Whitlock: And that’s one of the things that’s incredibly powerful about Golden Spirals Foundation Package.

John Farkas: Mark, it’s one of the most fun things we do as a part of our work.

Mark Whitlock: That’s right, yeah.

John Farkas: It’s a opportunity to get the stakeholders of an organization together in one place for a day and work it through. We work through the primary point of view of the organization. We come alongside it with unique value proposition. We explore the products and the offerings and how they come together to form a picture in the marketplace that’s clear and unified. And we do that using a number of experiential elements and getting people to talk, getting people to explore ideas together and come to a point of understanding of what they’re in the business of and how we’re going to clearly communicate to that. That’s the market. It is a magical day followed by some really exciting work and positioning and messaging that we’ve seen some tremendous success in.

Mark Whitlock: And it’s so powerful that when clients come on and take advantage of the Foundation Package, we offer a guarantee.

Angus Nelson: Yeah, Mark, our foundation guarantee we put in place because it’s kind of an effort of good faith and confidence in our process. And if you agree to commit to engage with us, we guarantee that you’ll be convinced of the value and our approach to all of this foundation workshop. And if you’re not, well just tell us within 48 hours after the workshop, and we’ll stop, and you won’t owe us a thing.

John Farkas:We can offer this guarantee because we’re convinced of the value. It’s there and we’ve seen it every time we’ve ever been through the process. And so we’re confident, and we can carry that confidence forward in the shape of this guarantee. It’s immensely productive. It’s a fun day and immensely valuable.

Mark Whitlock: And if you want information on the Foundation Package from Golden Spiral, head on over to studiocmo.com/foundation, that’s studiocmo.com/foundation, to find out more.

Mark Whitlock: Now let’s dive into this interview. We had a chance to sit down at the RSA conference in February with Neal Conlon. Neal has had a long history leading marketing and sales for a number of SaaS organizations, including being the CMO at ACME Growth. He headed up marketing and business development for 2, and among a number of other leadership roles, he was most recently the head of sales and marketing for AppGuard, and that’s where we caught up with him at the RSA conference. We start this interview with his first job coming out of military service.

Neal Conlon: So I got out of the Marines in 2003. I really wanted nothing to do with it. There was no veteran badge of courage at that point, there wasn’t the support system that exists nowadays, and so there was no pro or con to it. And so I got a job at a security company, and I was at 135 East 57th street. I go back and visit the building once a year, but this was the building where, post 9/11, where all the world trade center financial services firms went into. So you had Cantor Fitzgerald, you had Galleon Group. All of the companies that took the biggest losses were all put into this building and it basically was a 5 or 10,000 person building full of PTSDers.

Neal Conlon: So very secure infrastructure, more than enough security guards, part of the job was really just making people feel physically safe, because nobody did.

Mark Whitlock: Because nobody did.

Neal Conlon: I ran security for that building and after six months, I was like, “There’s got to be more to life than this. There’s just got to be more than just kind of going around and making sure people feel safe. If I wanted to do that, I would have stayed in the Marines and humped a pack for another bunch of years.” And so I wrote this rudimentary resume, which is still hanging on your wall.

Mark Whitlock: That’s still hanging on your wall.

Neal Conlon: And so I went floor by floor and handed it out to every single HR person. And finally I get to this one floor, the HR guy wasn’t there, and so I was walking out and I see this guy in a suit and tie, and I had more years with a pack on my back then days with a tie on my collar, and handed him the resume, and he looks at it, he laughs and he looks at my name on the resume, and he goes, “Neal, I don’t know what we’re going to do with you, but you’re hired.” I went downstairs to the security desk, quit, because I didn’t have the job skills, even though that you’re supposed to give two weeks notice and I went home.

Angus Nelson: Yeah.

Neal Conlon: And so it would kick off this whole thing where they put me in the mail room, and there was already two people in the mail room, which thought I was now going after their jobs. And so for about a year, I watered the orchids, made sure that all the printers had enough toner and then filled the refrigerators with soda.

Neal Conlon: And so a couple months later, because I had such familiarity with the printers, I’m walking around with the CTO, and they’re doing an inspection of what they had bought for compliance purposes, because this is a giant hedge fund. I’ve got the clipboard and I’m just checking off boxes and we’re going around checking all these numbers and serial numbers. And we get to like the fifth or sixth printer. And I’m like, Hey, CTO guy, just out of curiosity, do you think these printers retain any of the information when they’re printing stuff? And the CTO of a major hedge funds goes, Oh shit, Neil you’re right. One of the skill sets and expertise of veterans is that we become these very sophisticated tacticians, but the hard part for us is getting over the hump and taking the actual rifle, the pack, the parachute, the boots off your back, and then applying those tactical skills with different tools.

Neal Conlon: So I was in the Marines for a bunch of years, came out, had some really amazing experiences happen, got fascinated as a military veteran who was used to operating on everything in my backpack that through X’s and O’s and zeros and ones, you could actually make things move around in the world. Financial markets do it. And then I was right at the cusp when LinkedIn was really becoming more than just a online resume thing. I was at NBC when out of home advertising was starting and we’re starting to use digital retargeting stuff. And then because I’d come from financial services in between my military time had done a bunch of stuff around Forex trading and saw how they were bringing in all these different disparate data feeds in order to make decisions. I used to think it was super interesting when I would get to talk to salespeople and Hey, if I just find the decision-maker, if I just buy them a bunch of scotch, if we play enough golf, they will buy from me sooner or later.

Neal Conlon: And I was at a company before I got into cybersecurity and I was the product marketer and the sales guys were having some hard challenges and so I took a bunch of spreadsheets, aggregate them together, started making phone calls and reach out to people on LinkedIn and started handing them deals left and right. And I would end up becoming the head of sales of that company within 12 months. Knowing nothing about sales, other than being like,

John Farkas: Well, you knew something.

Neal Conlon: Yes and I used to go blow for blow with salespeople where I’m sure all of you seen the Wolf of Wall Street or the classic sales pitch. It’s like, here’s the pen sell me the pen. The guy walks around and pisses off 12 people and then someone goes, it’s the nicest pen, it’s the, pen. It’s pen.

Neal Conlon: Right my version of that goes with standing in front of a room with people, especially in 2020 and going, how many people in the room still use a pen? Three people raise their hands, you walk over to that person and you go, would you like to buy a pen? By just asking that one question, changes the life cycle of the entire experience and that’s where we’ve gotten to with marketing nowadays, where it’s because the average person, because of the devices, the mobile phones, me playing candy crush, me playing on my Delta App because the Delta app really is amazing. And my text messaging competes with every other piece of real estate of my attention. So how do you keep on doing that? And you have to find ways to constantly be getting quicker, better, faster at keeping people’s attention.

Neal Conlon: And so I just was in a position at that point where I was like, Hey, the way that I’m thinking about this is cliché marketing term out of the box thinking, but I was able to take that skill set and then kind of manifest it in a direction that really paid off for me throughout the years.

Neal Conlon: And then I would go on to a bunch of different corporate enterprise companies and then I got to a startup and the sales team was struggling with getting new deals in the door because they just figured they would just go after enterprise clients, this big avatar profile, map out the customer journey, all of that type of stuff, and then go the traditional sales cycle. Instead of as today’s CMOs and digital marketing teams are getting to where it’s like rule number one is sales is location, location, location, but because we’re not brick and mortar anymore, you just kind of go where your customer is and then dig in really deeply using some ideal data points. And then on top of that, building the right rapport, the right trust, the right relationship, the pillars and stuff like that.

Neal Conlon: I think that it’s funny because people who have been around in this space for a little bit, we tend to get distracted by the cool, shiny widget object thing that’s out there, which is important, new color, new user experience, new cool clicky thing that I go on, new way to subscribe, go after my shopping cart when I leave it and try to get me back engaged, but the fundamentals of like, Hey you and I connected Angus on a commonality.

And we’re obviously using similar words in our posting, which then even though it took us a long time to make this happen, we made it happen. And that is a foundation that folks in today’s age and from a marketing perspective, people are looking are having struggling with. It’s like, this is why the big brands, the Under Armor’s, the Nike’s, Chase bank, the bank of America, they’re struggling to maintain their brand authenticity because everybody looks at them and goes, I don’t know what your brand is even about anymore. Other than data breaches and stuff, that’s going to go wrong.

Mark Whitlock: We’ve been listening to an interview with Neil Conlon, a long term marketing and sales executive in the B2B space and now a consultant for B2B tech companies and SAS companies. And John, one of the things you talked about in that segment was the necessity for there to be an understanding of what brand is an understanding of what you must accomplish through the marketing function in order to meet your company’s goals.

John Farkas: It’s really critical. When you look at how nuanced and how sophisticated the current marketplace is. If you’re coming at a scattershot without a clear focus and racing after tactics, first of all, it’s very tempting because the pace of things are moving so fast and you want to be able to get in there and respond. But if you do that before developing a clear, consistent strategy, it can really be a problem. Because part of what needs to happen is you need to get clear unity and clarity with all the pieces moving forward.

John Farkas:And without that, without that clearly declared and put in a framework where it’s transferable and other people can pick up that baton and run with it. You’re going to create confusion in the market. So having that alignment, having that clearly articulated in a strategy that makes sense and then moving, I’m not saying that the strategy needs to take a year to come up with. We just have to know where it is we’re going and why we’re doing it. And that’s the critical nature of strategy.

Mark Whitlock:Angus. You’ve worked with our clients as they’ve gained clarity for the first time or the fifth time or the 12th time. What’s something that stands out to you about that moment when clarity comes into focus?

Angus Nelson: Well, I think the first thing is just excitement. It’s like you finally have that thing, that thing that you know compels people and when a company finds out the thing that gets their customers to pay attention, that gets them to engage, that gets them to get on a phone call or sign up for a demonstration or a webinar. You know that, that’s the one thing that becomes the hinge and in your messaging to be able to speak with empathy, to their pain or problem and offer a solution that becomes super compelling.

Mark Whitlock: So let’s get into the next section of our conversation with Neil Conlon, John and Neil, get into it over the true nature of marketing.

Neal Conlon: There’s an ongoing challenge in the cybersecurity space. From a marketing perspective, I talking to some CISOs last night and the amount of shelfware that’s being produced in this space is very, very interesting to me. And what I mean by that is that with 4,000 vendors in the cybersecurity space nowadays, there’s only so many adjectives you can use to explain it. And therefore it’s undefeated, unbreachable, secure, safe, zero trust compliance, and probably 10 more. And a lot of their technologies they’ve raised significant amounts of capital and they’re pushing really hard to get these brands and logos, into their investment decks. But the marketing is done so wishy washy on the top of your marketing funnel, that by the time the CISO buys into it and then tries to deploy it, there is something lost in that kind of human element along the way that as a vendor, I’m going to walk this path with you.

Neal Conlon: And one objectives come up within your platform. The empathy of this is going to be hard for you to deploy within your infrastructure, not because of our technology, but because of how your company is probably set up. And some of those controls are out of your control. And we’ve got to figure out ways to work together because you trusted me enough to spend some coin on my company. And therefore we’ve got to walk this walk all the way through.

John Farkas: It’s been a meta-theme that we’ve encountered in our work. You can’t just be a solution provider. You have to be a solution relationship. And if you’re not willing to do that in today’s world, because the sophistication of the integrations and the things that need to happen in order for something to make meaning within an organization and prove value are not just simple equations.

John Farkas: So part of what we work with in the context of our clients and how we want to help people position themselves is you know, if you’re purchasing a B2B solution, you are not just buying a piece of software off the shelf. You are buying a partnership and the organization that’s providing the solution better be ready to walk a mile with you. You’ve got to have the sophistication, you’ve got to be able to help. Come in, make it make meaning, and be ready to walk with them because it’s all going to start evolving and moving and you’ve got to be with them in that process or else you’re not going to be competitive in today’s world.

Neal Conlon: And that’s one of the sexiest things that I like about me.

John Farkas: I liked that about you too. So sexy.

Neal Conlon: But it’s one of the things that I find super sexy about me being in cybersecurity. How do you have that conversation from a marketing perspective, with the avatar and profile of a CISO or any cyber security guy when their whole entire job is to think everything’s broken, everything’s scary, everything’s going to be breached into and I might as well just set my alarm for 1:59 AM every night, seven days a week, because somebody is going to email me and say something just broken. Because of I’ve got some technical chops and a high level of integrity, values and beliefs, it became, Hey, why wouldn’t you want a military veteran, who’s got a high IQ, very situationally aware to put his hand on your back and walk this walk with you throughout this experience? That’s my marketing pitch because if you tell me you don’t want that, then we’re not supposed to work together and you just saved me so much time. I appreciate it. I’ll see you next time. Bye.

John Farkas: How are you seeing that play out in a lot of what you’re seeing happen in the market right now?

Neal Conlon: One of the interesting things from marketing perspective on cybersecurity is most industries that I know of had some period of time where they were able to benchmark or baseline out on what the standard is for selling into that or marketing in to it or life cycle or something. And cybersecurity is just this endless gerbil on a wheel that just rolling forward. And it’s like tools are going on the market, raising a bunch of money and becoming obsolete before they even spend the money.

John Farkas: Before they even get out there.

And if you look at some of the companies that are raising massive amounts of money, are making really aggressive moves in one direction or another in smart ways. So if you look at CrowdStrike, their moves last year, phenomenal approach to it all. If you look at some of the other companies that are out there though, that are racing to the bottom and are now becoming the two buck chuck, offering of cybersecurity, it’s a land grab, but they’re willing to do it but it goes back to your point about the companies that are really holding steady are the ones that are tried and true partners. We’re going to walk this with you and when something new comes up.

John Farkas: They are going to be there?

Neal Conlon: They’re going to be there and be like, Hey, here’s the new CVE thing that just came out last week, or here’s the stance on this and here’s a stance on that.

John Farkas: And better yet when something new comes out, you’re hearing about it from them first. That’s a partner. That’s somebody that’s going to help you elevate your game. You travel like 300 000 miles last year. Your’ face to face was so many people in so many places. Obviously this is something that you guys have chosen as a strategy. You’re the evangelist, but how many times are you connecting face to face with your clients and making that personal touch, hearing their personal stories, and then bringing that back to your teams?

Neal Conlon: I would think that’s probably, and I don’t mind even saying it out loud, that’s our secret sauce. Last year, 300,000 miles on an airplane. Every Monday morning I would kiss my daughter, take my wheelie into New York city. We do executive management meetings all morning and afternoon, and I’m at JFK or LaGuardia in the afternoon and I’m around the world and at home in time for dinner with my daughter on Friday. Every week for the whole year. Spoke at parliament on how they should be prepared about cybersecurity infrastructure. If Brexit ever happened, spoke with the Israeli prime minister in India about their relationship and how they need to be concerned because 27% of the world’s credit card transaction data flows through India every single day. So it’s like, why do I need to be concerned about Chase in Maryland when all the data’s flowing through India, with a very weak infrastructure at all.

Neal Conlon: It’s that curation of my being on an airplane, being in a Slack group or something like that and being able to push that into our content constantly and then being able to evaluate that stuff. It’s probably one of the most underutilized things. Roles and responsibilities of a marketing team is how do we get the evangelist or how do we get the SME to distribute content to the sales team in a way that doesn’t take forever to do?

John Farkas: So CMOs listening right now and saying, what does that look like?

Neal Conlon: First it’s like I think your establishing your pillars of what you really want to focus on. Like go back to basics. The second piece is the iteration piece where I think that marketing teams that have adopted more of an agile approach or design thinking approach to how they do their marketing. I think is very, very compelling.

Neal Conlon: It’s like you have these marketing teams have these great ideas and they set up this kind of waterfall approach where it’s like, we’re going to build a big plan, we’re going to get all the fancy colors, we’re going to create hundreds and hundreds of pages of content in cybersecurity. Especially by the time you get that out to the market.

John Farkas: It’s not pertinent anymore.

Neal Conlon: There’s already 14 new things that, it just kind of cascades from that. So I think being super agile and just recording everything and then I think the secret sauce is getting somebody who understands how do you take that long form content down to the short form thing.

John Farkas: And you guys brought in a specialist for that.

Neal Conlon: So we use a third party and we have a very close relationship with them and I think for this example, I think the only way you could do it as a third party. You bring in somebody and they are too much in the weeds right away, because they’re trying to be successful for the team.

Neal Conlon: You need somebody who’s way outside of the sphere, who has the practical skills to do it, but isn’t going to get stuck on something.

John Farkas: And the objectivity to make it make sense to the market, right?

Neal Conlon: It’s like George Madis. He was such a matter of fact guy that he would say something that if came out of anyone else’s mouth it’d be so inappropriate and taken the wrong way always.

John Farkas: But could get away with it.

Neal Conlon:Because he was so frank and because you’re so matter of fact, and because he operated from such a high level of integrity and values and beliefs, they were like, okay. And you just had to walk away from the guy.John Farkas:Kind of the E.F. Hutton thing, right.Neal Conlon: In this C-suite that we’ve talked to over the past couple of years, everybody is so overwhelmed with all of the marketing glitz and glam is that we’ve gone in with very tactical campaigns, very meaningful campaigns, instead of just trying to get the whizzbang of what happens from like the mad men agency perspective. And that’s worked for us as well.

John Farkas: What do you do to help them? How do you speak into them or show them and guide them in a way that they can actually connect to what emotional intelligence really looks like?

Neal Conlon: Yeah. So getting the technical folks into a conversation sometimes is definitely a challenge. I mean, because they’d rather be wearing Yoda t-shirts and playing video games and kind of checking out. I dial it into really, what’s the thing that makes them happy. As cliche or Ted Talkish that sounds, it’s like whenever I get to meet with the CISO and we get some time together and it’s like, we’ll get to the technology and we’ll get to the part where you argue back and we get hypothetical and hyperbole and philosophical on what should in quantum computing and other stuff like that. But really what’s your agenda here? And I think it’s super interesting because you meet two types of CISOs. One who probably came up from IT infrastructure and then got some business chops stuff going on.

Neal Conlon: And then you find ones that either came in from compliance and risk and then got technical enough to bear risk. And then they came on that side. That’s really most of every CISO I’ve met and just figuring out what really makes them tick a little bit more, like they have a very high successful marriage rate in CISOs. They’re all married. You go into sales, everybody’s divorced in sales. You go into marketing, everybody’s on their second or third marriage. In cybersecurity, everybody’s married forever and so, Hey, look, there’s a data point for marketing right there and so you say what’s the most important to you? Getting a phone call one o’clock in the morning, listening to your wife complain why you got to work on a Saturday or this? And they’re like, you obviously know what you’re talking about. Let’s talk some more and it’s stuff like that where like, let’s dial it away from the cryptic, scary, I like to think that we’re over the days of everything sounding like it’s a level of Dungeons and Dragons for the new cybersecurity.

John Farkas: I would like to think we could get there.

Neal Conlon: Correct

John Farkas: Footage of hoods and shadows and bad actors. So Neal if you were to kind of distill your experience and perspective and say, if there was one thing you could impart to a marketing leader of a edge prone technology company, what would you want them to know? If you don’t do anything else, do this.

Neal Conlon: In these spaces, like the future innovation stuff. I think it’s just for marketing, you can look at the trends and you can just manifest the whole thing over and over again. And what I mean by that is, is like, if you look at MarTech. MarTech saw this huge surge, they put out the [inaudible 00:27:20] chart, there’s 4,000 tools. Then there’s a consolidation going on right now, then the cyber security one came out, now there’s a blockchain one, now there’s an AI one. Starting off with the basics first, staying super with the basics of marketing and then once you master that, then taking it to bells, whistles, cool tools, stuff like that.

John Farkas: Right. Just really good example. I really thought that when Drifts came out with its chatbot and I know them really well, that they had cornered the market. And I think for a while, they did, and they took their foot off the brake and took a key and stepped away from the basics of marketing for a little bit. And then there it goes. Taken out right from underneath them. And so it really comes down to, at the end of the day, marketing is about taking what you have and figuring out how you connect it to the people who need it. I mean, in the real world at the very basic relational level of understanding what people need, understanding what their problem set is and how you identify it clearly and walk a mile in their shoes.

Neal Conlon: The walk a mile in their shoes piece, I think is very interesting because the other thing I would say is what’s hard in cybersecurity especially because of the lack of adjectives and verbs that we can use to describe what these things actually do.

John Farkas: There is that.

Neal Conlon: Is the quality of the content. It’s super interesting with all the data privacy laws on marketing. It’s like, because I have to opt in 1400 times in order to get it to anything and because I can unsubscribe from everything and do stuff like that. What’s amazing is that when the content is really good, your customers never go away. They keep on opening the newsletters, they keep on reading the blog, they keep on listening to the podcast and you just got to really focus on that, walking in the mile side by side and then being able to push that content out to people is the most important thing.

Mark Whitlock: You have been listening to a conversation on Studio CMO with Neal Conlon. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the podcast and as you’ve listened through this, you’ve heard us talk about strategy and clarity and we want to remind you about the foundation package from Golden Spiral. You can go to studiocmo.com/foundation, and read more and find out more about that foundation. And John, over the years, as you’ve worked with clients and taken them through our foundation exercise. What’s been the biggest block to gaining the clarity that these companies need so much?

John Farkas: Often, it’s just the chance to get in a room together and talk about it. So much is going on. It’s moving so quickly. People are in their silos, getting it done, making it happen, executing and they’re typically having some pretty strong mandates of things that need to happen in tight timeframes. And it feels a lot of pressure and taking time for these conversations is, I mean, first of all, it’s valuable time and it’s hard to coordinate.

John Farkas: And so often just having the conversation, getting everybody on the same page, understanding what’s happening together is a block. And then sometimes the challenges of some fundamental understanding of the importance of that unity and clarity. Because if you’re a organization accustomed to working in silos, it may seem like things are going along, just reasonably okay. And yeah, there’s some discontinuity, but nobody’s stopping to think of what that’s really costing and the fact that your marketing might be saying something slightly different than what sales is saying and product is heading in a little bit different directions still. That can be a really hard thing to bring together. So getting them all in the same room, having a clear understanding of what we are really aiming for and agreeing together on what needs to happen to make that happen.

Mark Whitlock: So if you’re looking for that kind of clarity in the marketing efforts for your organization, head on over to studiocmo.com/foundation, that’s studiocmo.com/foundation and check out golden spirals foundation experience. Neil talked a lot about content creation and the necessity of it. We’ve put together a strategy guide. There’s no cost for it. So when you come on over to studiocmo.com, click on the Neil Conlon interview and you can download the content strategy guide from Golden Spiral. And until the next episode, we leave you with our three charges, understand your buyer’s problems, lead out of an empathetic understanding and make your buyer the hero.

Mark Whitlock: We’ll see you next time. I’ll studio CMO.

Neal Conlon: My departed grandmother. When I was eight years old, she looked at me one day. She goes, Neil why do you have to be so disruptive? And it obviously never stops, right? It was-

Mark Whitlock: And the rest is history.