Mastering Storytelling in Cybersecurity-A Conversation with George Kamide

Overview:

In this episode, George Kamide joins Kerry Guard to discuss the power of storytelling in cybersecurity marketing. Drawing from his experience in content and community leadership at the CISO Society, George unpacks why most cybersecurity messaging fails, how vendors can bridge the gap between technology and business risk, and why great storytelling is essential for effective go-to-market strategies. If you're in B2B tech marketing, this conversation is packed with actionable insights to help you stand out in a crowded market.

Transcript:

George Kamide 0:00

What's happening is, sure you've slapped it up somewhere, and I saw something, and I randomly filled out a form, and then you get the lead. That's like these people are interested in speaking to you. What that means is your white paper is an open tab, one of 1000 sitting in a browser window that they forgot to actually read.

Kerry Guard 0:20

Hello, I'm Kerry Guard, CEO of MKG marketing, and welcome back to Tea Time with tech marketing leaders. I'm so excited for this conversation. I didn't even know that George Kamide knew who I was, y'all and he did, and it was so exciting. And we just hit the ground running at cyber marketing con about all the things. And I'm so excited to now have somewhat of that conversation here. Live with you all so you can hear it, because it is gold, gold. George, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. So excited. Like I said, little bit about, I'm gonna, I'm gonna read your bio for folks. But really, what we're gonna be looking forward to, forward to is your story? So real quick. Little bit about George. He is the head of community and content at the CISO society, a community of 1400 plus security leaders and counting. He co hosts bare knuckles and brass tacks, a podcast exploring the human side of the cybersecurity industry. And is the co founder and executive director of Mind Over cyber a non profit, helping InfoSec professionals manage stress. He frequently speaks on AI and cyber security advises early stage startups and addresses value creation and risk management for organizations ranging from NGOs to Fortune 500 companies. His disinformation research has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian and BBC News. He has had also briefed us Cyber Command and the congressional cyber caucus on influence operations. What a guest. Y'all, what a guest. George. Ah, so good. Why don't you tell us your story, though, that's a lot of juice in there of some amazing compliments. But how did you get there? What's the journey?

George Kamide 2:04

I don't know. I mean, we talked earlier. I'm gonna curse everyone, because that's how I express my self. So my future memoir will be titled blindly stumbling into fun shit. So I got an MFA in Creative Writing, and in 2013 before Transformers were a thing, I think the papers were just being published. Yeah, they would pay you at a salary to write coherent sentences, because apparently that was in short supply. So I wait, parlayed that into a job in marketing. Worked for a small agency that got successfully acquired until we were a global marketing agency, and I got tired of having ideas that people wouldn't action on because of some bureaucratic thing on the client side, and so I sort of side doored into a cybersecurity startup that was working on social media threats, and then went from there. But I working with computers since I was seven, so like a lot of the how networking works, and the technology and stuff wasn't entirely new to me. And then on top of that, I was an anthropologist by training, and what I like to say, radical humanist by vocation. So I think that it's been very rewarding in the sense that I've been able to apply that anthropological lens to basically everything I do.

Kerry Guard 3:21

Oh my gosh. I like want to dig into all of the things. What do you feel like, from an anthropological standpoint, has been the most useful aspect from your from what you learned to what you're now apply. How are your how you're now applying that in your marketing job,listening and watching.

George Kamide 3:41

You know, I think fundamentally, marketing is the anthropology of your customer, right? You are trying to learn how they behave, how they think, how they talk, and you're trying to meet them there. I don't think you're trying to, like weaponize those patterns of behavior, but you certainly need to learn them. And then what I do at the CISO society is managing that community is like the anthropology of security leaders also the same thing. It's just listening and watching and observing, I guess is really it's it's been in everything, whether I was looking at bots on Twitter back during 2016 to 2017 or whether it's the CISOs, and how they talk about vendors, how they talk about their fears, worries, aspirations, all of it.

Kerry Guard 4:28

I'm going on a tangent, y'all. I'll bring us back to center, I promise. But I have to know, in terms of now that listening you're doing, especially with your audience, your primary audience, what's one thing you're hearing most right now? It almost feels like they're shouting it at you even, but you're probably listening most intently than more than most people. So probably feels like you're over it, but maybe people still need to hear it.

George Kamide 4:56

So what'sthere are two things, I think, from there's a huge divide. Right between technology providers and technology buyers, mostly because of, like, where the priorities are. If you're a technology provider, you're in it, you're in the tooling. You're like, want to sell the widget. So that's like, where the incentive structure of capitalism is around that widget and its features and all that stuff. And that's only like, a fraction of what your buyer cares about. And I think the companies that succeed are the ones that can close that gap the fastest, right? I think you'd be surprised at the number of names of big vendors that get mentioned is rip and replace because poor customer service. They they can't get anyone to answer their support tickets or, yeah, they just feel like they as the customer, don't count. And that's not a technology problem, right? That's a people problem. That's a process problem. And so again, you have to care about kind of all of it. And I think you would only do that if you were really paying attention to your customers.

Kerry Guard 5:58

Well,that's actually a lovely segue. But before we do that, one last question for you around you know, for you right now as a GTM marketer, and for all the clients you're working with, as well as all the communities you're working within, what's one challenge you're currently having, what feels hard and in your way right now?

George Kamide 6:17

Storytelling sucks, really? Yeah, storytelling sucks. I think the go to market motion of the heady SaaS 2.0 era is what I call it. It's like the time where we had zero interest rates and everyone was just like up into the right exponential sales. That's a particular playbook. And everyone who let me be let me not generalize. Most of the people in positions of authority today came from that era, so they're sort of copying and pasting that playbook, despite the fact that markets are not static, they're dynamic. Things change. I go to conferences now, and I look out and we're talking 38 year old CISOs. You know, it's a different person. It's a different buying behavior. The way they grew up on the internet is different. And so I think we have to change those things. And because there's so much noise, you just can't count on like doing things the old way. And so when I say storytelling sucks, I think technical founders are very necessary in terms of they were either operators, and they're trying to make up for a gap that they couldn't. I've spoken to a lot who are like, look, I worked at such and such company, like big Fang style companies, and we couldn't find a single vendor that did this, and we kind of coded something ourselves. But I saw an opportunity. Great. That's great, but the things that you care about as a technical founder and as an engineer are not the same things that your customer cares about, and that's a really hard mental hurdle to overcome, and the storytelling is just awful. It's like, just read me the spec sheet, read me the roadmap. Okay, that's cool, but, like, I've started asking founders like, what business risk? Do you help cybersecurity leaders draw down? And there's like, maybe one in 10 can answer that question. They're very used to like, what is the cyber threat that you address, or what is the cyber risk you mitigate? DLP, you know, unified endpoint network, whatever. But the but they have to go sell that story. The CISO has to go sell that story to the either the board, the CIO, the CFO. Very few CISOs have the sign the check capability, so they gotta go get the money from somebody. And so the faster you can equip them with a story to tell on your behalf, the better your sales cycle will be.

Kerry Guard 8:39

I'm not, yes, I think when you start putting it against problem solution, which really comes down to what threat you detect or mitigate against the feature, right? That's one very quick story that seems to be where everybody goes when you really pull up and ask about what business problem you're solving. That's a very different story to tell that I imagine in cyber can be both. Can be somewhat easy, but also hard, because it's the same story everybody would tell, right in terms,

George Kamide 9:20

yeah, mean time to detection, mean time to response, whatever. See, all the things, more visibility. What you really need to think about is also the foundation of storytelling, right? So there is a dream in the founder's head, in a certain hubris, it's absolutely required to survive in the market, to even have the cojones that, like, I can make this thing and it's worthwhile and somebody's going to buy it. It takes a lot of pride, but then you kind of got to fail fast and get really humble, because that storytelling foundation is is essential for scaling right where we see the failure is a series. A ramps up, and you're acquiring more customers, the sellers that you are hiring, and you're transitioning out of founder led sales, or network led sales. You have to have taught those people how to sell like you did, to have the same vision that you did. That work doesn't get done. That's a huge, ironic data loss problem in the cybersecurity ecosystem, and then you pay for it later. You pay for it in, so in either churn because sellers aren't getting what they want, or they don't know the playbooks they need, they're not set up for success, or you're getting it in rebrands that are really expensive, website rebuilds messaging workshops from series A to B. This is like a really high friction point. We're talking like a lot of burnt capital, if, if you just took the time to get the storytelling right in the in the coaching, you can provide the solid foundation, and you can easily build on top of that and and scale it up. But it's it's so hard to do, and it's hard to do well, and it doesn't feel like you're doing something, and this is a huge cognitive hurdle. Somebody who's just asked we were, I was talking with Danny Wolf and some others, because there was another vendor that announced another f1 sponsorship, and they're like, why are they doing this when they wouldn't pay for this other thing that was, like, obviously, significantly less than an f1 sponsorship. And like, because it doesn't scratch an itch, right? When you do these big performative things, like, Oh, I got this series A I'm gonna go hire this hot chip CRO and a whole bunch of enterprise sellers cool, it like, feels like you're doing something, and it's performative, but it's satisfying, right? Just like getting your logo on an f1 car, yeah, but it's harder work to do that sort of iron out that messaging, and it's gritty and it like you may be moving an inch, it's a fine margin, but it will pay off in the end. But I think it just doesn't feel like a cognitive relief or something, whatever that is.

Kerry Guard 11:56

So this dovetails perfectly into, really, where you and I wanted to sit today, and the conversation we wanted to have, and it is the the importance of taking that first step of getting the story right. And so I think it's really key that we, I want to double down on just one thing you said around what the story needs to be, which is, and I'm not hearing this really being talked about. This is really the first time doing this podcast. For five years, I've had plenty of folks on who've talked about messaging, left, right, center, up, down and over. I'm having more people on the show this year, both who've already been on, and more people who are coming in where the crux of everything is around content and messaging and getting it right, but none of them have yet to say that it needs to solve the business need. It needs to solve a business need. And so let's just sit in that for a second and talk about we talked a little bit about why that's hard, right? But why? Why business need? How is that not going to like I understand it's going to help in terms of connecting with leadership and board members to potentially get the money, but I'm but my worry, like I sort of mentioned, is, aren't you going to get lost in the sauce, because you're all trying to essentially do the same thing, which is save the company money to some degree. And isn't that really what it comes down to? It's like, yes and no.

George Kamide 13:24

I mean, you're gonna, yeah, you're gonna have, like, your sort of big thing that you do. Like, I don't know, you're an identity, you're a non human identity security provider versus an email security provider. Yes, you're solving the business risk. But I think if you're listening to your prospect and you've done your research, there are subtleties in those needs. So for example, let's take the pharma industry, for example. So people think pharma, they think Pfizer, they think GSK, they think critical IP. So the confidentiality of that information is that's how the company makes money. Pfizer does not make things. They formulate, and then they send it out to people to do. They contract out the human trials, and they also contract out the manufacturing. So like within pharma, you have maybe a manufacturer for whom confidentiality isn't necessarily a need. That's a patented formula. It's available in the patent office, but availability is very high, right? If the line stops going, vaccines stop getting made. So it's about understanding those nuances and being able to talk to the person and the priorities that matter to them. So yes, email, security for the manufacturing obviously, probably less head count, because it's like back office light versus, you know, operationally heavy, maybe different for the way they think about that problem is different to them, right? Like I don't. A virus that stops the machines. I don't want ransomware that seizes my proprietary information. There's nuance there, and I think the biggest place I see this in terms of the disjuncture between marketing and messaging, is just the floor of any conference, like, if you go to RSA and you spot the buzzwords and whatever, which we've all made a big deal about, even though we're sort of all purveyors and victims of it at the same time. But if you, if you are shadowing a friend who's a CISO, and they've actually seen something interesting, you can watch them in the hallway, they'll run into other friends, right? RSA 40, 50,000 people, and somebody is going to be like, Hey, have you seen anything interesting? Yeah, I had a good conversation with so and so. They're pretty new, but it sounds like they could help my problem that I'm having in terms of the backlog and in the log analysis. Or I think it can really streamline our SOC operations. At no point will they use the buzzwords that are on the placard. They're not going to be like, Oh, I'm really excited. I found the next gen zero, trust, turnkey, whatever the fuck. So like, are you? My question is, are you equipping your buyers to speak in the language to their peers that you would like to be spoken in? Because if you're not, you're just what you do is you create a cognitive hurdle. Every prospect has to relearn your story, and you are stuck there. Re explaining it to everyone, whereas if you could, like, latch on that person's and you, you know, give them a good customer experience and implement it, they're gonna go talk the talk.

Kerry Guard 16:40

For you,it's so interesting, because when we talk about messaging in a way that people internally can regurgitate it right from sales and marketing, but we've never heard again, it's gold. George gold. We've never heard anybody talk about saying it so simply that your audience can then go share it.

George Kamide 17:00

And I think it's because we silo a lot of functions, right? So customer success in its best format early days is you just have somebody in the room, kind of following your design partners and your early customers, and just like being their best friend, they're there all the damn time. Customer Success in its worst format is like, just collect payment for these invoices and hit them up 90 days before renewal, see if they'll buy more. But if, even if you're doing the best case scenario, and you got this kick ass Customer Success person who's taking a lot of notes, like, how well are those notes getting fed back to engineering, and then product marketing and then like, can you translate that into sales enablement? It's all the connective tissue. It's not the superstars in each silo. It's how well the pieces are connected. It's the it's the through line. It's the sinew, not the not the muscle itself that matters.

Kerry Guard 18:00

All right,let's start breaking this down a little bit, because we're you're jumping ahead, giving the game what in terms of your story and not and and getting that down against the business challenges that companies have, and being able to speak to that so thoughtfully. You gave one instance around pharma, it sounds like knowing the industry of what you're going into is a really big opportunity. Is there any other opportunities in terms of how to position your messaging that sort of find helps people find that nuance so they can go look at my industry. What else you got?

George Kamide 18:37

Well,I would say like, you know, Account Based Marketing is a big hullabaloo these days, right? Like, how can you focus on the accounts that are showing intent versus just sort of, like, I got this list of the Fortune 100 and we're just going to work down from one to 100 right? How can you get smarter about where you put your money and your time? Well, I would say it's not just that account, right? Because we talk about account penetration, but from the sales perspective, that's like, how many people are you emailing in that company or reaching out to? But I would say that within those industries, like you also need to learn who are the end users, right? Because I can't tell you how many startups I've seen that have, like, the dark mode dashboard. That's like, basically designed for the CISO, but they're cool in a demo, but like, day to day, I don't know, a lot of them are hands on keys in the tooling because they're stuck in budget meetings and audit stuff and whatever else. They are relying on their team leads and their operators. And if you don't know what those people care about, I don't, you will never You mean, great, you can speak in the language of business, but then you sort of have to, like, push it down into the stuff that those people care about. You know, is it? Are you the SEC ops team? Are you talking to detection engineers? Are you talking. To security engineers, AppSec engineers, I mean that that matters. And I think you need to go and meet those people and find them. And those aren't the people who necessarily get to Black Hat or RSA or whatever, but they're at regional conferences. They're at B sides, they're at Issa chapter meetings, and you just kind of get time on the ground and and get to know them again. It's the anthropology of your customer, or, I don't know, so you could go spend some time and read it, and please don't say anything, just listen for alittle bit.

Kerry Guard 20:27

Yeah, I love that, and I think it really helps, because, as you know, we at cyber marketing con when we there was actually a CISO, very kind human who stood up on, you know, in front of everybody, and was very clear, we are not your audience. Please stop marketing to us. And I think, yeah, it's a yes, and we, we to your point of the business. You know, what business problems you solve that's still going to come up through the CISO to get to the board, to get to the money, but the relationship you need to be building day to day, is that end user and understanding where they are and how to connect with them, I think, is key. And the way and the problem you solve for them does come back to, I don't know you, you tell me, George, but I would imagine that's where a little bit of the product solution

George Kamide 21:20

message, yes, it's it's Yeah, and it's also like that first thing I said, which is, like, you really care about the product, but they also care about the process. I've seen tools that look incredible, but when you ask them, like, okay, so walk me through this, I've heard leaders say, like, this is gonna, like, 3x the amount of time my team has to do this, like, this is, like, cool in the gang, but like, I can't do that to them. Like I was gonna, like, they're all I'm already being asked to do more with less. Why would I ask them to do more with less time that they have? Right? So that's pretty brutal, but you wouldn't know that unless you spend time with those SEC operators and you talk to them and get to know them. You know, we interviewed Meryl Vernon, shout out to her, and her favorite thing was like, does it export to this file format? And if it was a no, then it was like, I can't use it, because it's gonna take me three hours to convert your stuff to make it talk to this other stuff. Again, it could be super cool. It could be super slick, smooth, whatever. But then it could also look like that. And your operator gets in there and it takes 10 clicks instead of two, and it's like, God, no, you're like, gonna exponentially increase. But so like all that UI, UX feedback, that's customer success. That's like, please tell me what you hate or what you love about this product and stuff like that. And, yeah, I just think that's that's a missing component, like, if you don't understand the process side, like, your tool looks cool maybe, maybe it's like, some revolutionary way to do something, but it doesn't integrate with, like, the top part of the stack that most of your customers would use. And you're going to tell yourself, well, we're just going to go to market and we'll build that as we go, man. You're going to spend six months trying to convince people to buy a roadmap, right? Like, if it's ready to go, it's ready to go, it can't be like, I'm going to sell you on this, and then you can wait three months like, no one's got time for that. No one can justify that kind of spend these days. Like the budgets are not again, as heady as they were in the zero interest rate period, the

Kerry Guard 23:22

buyers changed, and their resources have definitely, definitely changed. All right, you've brought up customer success now like 400 times. Let's get into it. It sounds like George, your first hire after you figure out your messaging and your story, needs to be a customer success person, or maybe they are, yes, let me,

George Kamide 23:42

let me, let me back up. Okay, so you have, there is a role for like a CMO, Head of Marketing, Director of Marketing, but what I see is, we get the money. We got seed. We pay an agency to do our branding, pay an agency to kind of build the website, we hire some inside sellers, or maybe we're just still doing founder led sales, and then we hire like a junior marketer to post on LinkedIn and literally do all the things, right? Because that's what they do, is they hire the junior person. You're like, you're the field person and the whatever, right? So I would say, like, you know, set the expectation you get the story right. So, yes, you need to bring in a senior marketing person who kind of has a sense of that stuff. Their first role is not like, download a lead list and demand gen. It's, let me work with you, founders and or ELT. Let's get this story right. Let's get the messaging. The sales hire is that hybrid sales, marketing, anthropology hire of customer success. It is that marketer's job to interface with that person all the time, be in the calls. Get the downloads, understand, make sure that there's a process built for that feedback to get into the engineering team, whether it's JIRA tickets or whatever the hell, and quarterback that that is the marketer's job in that very early days, and setting that expectation of the 90 day plan we're going to sort of build out to here, and then, yes, after you got that flywheel going for customer success, and you're getting that feedback, and you built that engine, and you're and you're again, coaching your founders on how to because they're probably still in the role of the CTO is really like a sales engineer, and the CEO is really, like the first seller, cool. And then, like, once you start to see that success, and you want to start scaling a sales team like, really, really own that story and that dissemination and scaling that in terms of training playbooks. I hate the word playbooks, but I understand what the nomenclature means. But the sales enablement program too, and then you can, and you're sort of using that story to build the brand, because brand will eventually create demand. But if your first step is like content syndication, random lead list, dial for dollars higher, outsourced agency, Junior, BDRs, bang, phones all day. I mean, I think that worked in 2016 but it's an uphill road now and again. You will pay for it later. I have never understood why you would want the first interaction with your unknown brand that no one cares about to be an outsourced junior person who's working three accounts they don't care about you. So now you have, like, two degrees of not caring, right to just like spoof phone numbers and cold call senior leaders and be like, Hey, I'm calling from this company that you don't know anything about. Can I try to cram two minutes worth of content into 16 seconds before you hang up on me? I don't like that brand. I hate you now, and I'm never going to talk to you. You know, I might pay attention a few years later, after I've heard some things about you, but like, Good god, no way,

Kerry Guard 27:04

yes. So let me unpack some of the things that you said, because you Yes. So it sounds like founders, generally, once they get a seed round, their first seed round, the first thing they'll do, from a marketing perspective, is get right into the visual aspect of it. They'll get a website up, they'll get a little bit of branding. They'll maybe hiring agency for help with that, and then they'll get a junior person to start. And you're saying, Hold the phone. Be Kind Rewind. Let's take a step back and start really with understanding your audience.

George Kamide 27:39

Yeah, if I had time with them, I would be like, I'd be like, you had an incredible idea. You had an idea that was worth funding. Do you believe this can, like, change the market? Yes. Do you believe it's absolutely necessary for cybersecurity? Yes, cool. Let's unpack why, and then let's go talk to our design partners and understand why they believed in you. Was it literally because a VC was just like, Please test this thing? Okay, that's a data point. Or is it because they were willing to go out on a limb, because they also understood the gap that you were illuminating? Let's step a little bit away from the technology how? How is the workflow in their team today? What is it doing for them? What would they like to see in the future? Like all that is like, very juicy data that's very valuable, right? And this is my counter intuitive marketing stance that might be anathema to some, but I don't care if you have to schedule brainstorming sessions, you have already lost the plot. And I let me qualify that, a brainstorming session where you sit down and you just sort of pull ideas out of the ether, because marketing is about creativity. Ideas, great, but I would say, like, if you're pulling ideas out of ether, then you have stopped paying attention to the market you're trying to attract or be a part of. So I'm saying there's room for creativity, but it better be from the seeds and the kernels that are in both your prospects and the people who are paying you right now, if you've got ARR in the books, you have ideas. But I don't think that we look at that place for ideas. We think, Oh, well, look what these folks are doing. What if we could do that? You don't have Sentinel one money. Stop trying to be Sentinel one. You know. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Creativity thrives in constraint, and you need to think that way, and you need to be a little scrappier, yeah, but I also think the source of those ideas are different than where people think they are,

Kerry Guard 29:52

yeah. I think just

George Kamide 29:53

to, just to hammer home the point you and I talked to, sorry, marketing con. I think the vast majority of. Marketers already know this. I think most marketers live in 2025 right? They're talking to peers. They're sort of seeing best of breed. They're probably reading industry trades. They're just sort of a it's like in the industry to keep a pulse on things. They're trying to ideally, they're pulling ideas from other things, like they're watching Super Bowl ads, and they're kind of like playing letting things germinate, letting things turn in their head. Ideally, they're looking over the fence, not just in cyber, but other things crate. I think the problem is that somebody else is in the ear of the founders, and they are running a playbook from 2018, 2019, so I think it's really in those early stages. How well can you grab CEO, founder, CTOs hand and be like, Here, come with me to the present. Let me show you why this is rather than please stop listening to the person who last sold something in 2017 because I promise you, the market is changing. There are three distinct forces at work, confluence of things that are rapidly changing. Those things, and it's just it's not going to go back that way. So stop trying to, like, copy pasta, your old your old methodology.

Kerry Guard 31:13

So what are the three things? What are the three things in your in your visibility, that have changed, that marketers need to walk over to the CEO and take their hands say these three things have changed, and it's time to move with the buyer. What are those things in your the financial outlook has changed, right?

George Kamide 31:25

So you can't just sort of get the zero interest, like the money is just is running, but it's not as flush and as heady as it used to be. Insane valuations I can afford to burn in churn a sales team three times as long as I'm just acquiring new logos, right? Like logo churn is a huge problem. I think more VCs are accurately looking at, how long are you retaining those customers? How are you upselling? What is the proportion Do you have? Like, 10 million ARR and eight of it is like this, one giant account, and you're having hard time repeating success in other accounts, the buyer, as we've pointed out, has changed, right? So that age, the generation, like how they interact, has changed, and the technology has changed, right? Like Google, straight up, will not let domains send more than 5000 emails a day, so you can't blast 30,000 without your server getting listed and blocked, and that is a huge problem. And also, I think we do not, and have not reckoned with the trauma that was the COVID lift and shift to remote work. So like before, when I was in an office and I would get cold called, I sort of had that context like, oh the shit. This might happen. Like somebody's gonna call my office phone, and it's rarely gonna be somebody in the office, fine. But once you're at home and people are calling you and they're spoofing your area code, and you're like, Oh, is it the school? Is it the doctor? No, don't ever do that. And that's what I hear repeatedly, like people just straight up, do not answer the phone anymore. So all those three things are conspiring to form what I call like the Sas 3.0 era. Like, we're just gonna have to adapt to that. But if you're pulling in the tactics from 2.0 it's gonna be pretty hard. I mean, you might brute force your success to some degree. Oh, and also, in terms of the buyer behavior, like just CISOs, talk more now, right? I mean, the CISO society didn't exist in 2018 and there are other associations, other communities, WhatsApp groups. I have people who show me their inbox, and they're like this, vendor has emailed me 60 times in the last three months. I have blocked their domain and told my team we will never do business with them just because they find the outreach abusive. So that poor, that poor sales rep or account executive has no idea they burn their entire territory because they've all been talking and they're like, That guy sucks, you know? And I just think you now need to think very carefully about how are you being spoken about in the communities you're not in, because they all talk

Kerry Guard 34:06

and I would say, you know, I know we're talking a lot about cyber, and that's a lot of the folks who are here. I see you. Danny Wolf, nice to see you. Michael LeBlanc, thanks for joining us. I do want to call out that this is across the board in terms of B to B Tech, especially in SAS like the all the different C levels have their own communities now, and they're all sharing what's working and what's not, and they're all in the boats together. So being very intentional about how we go to market is so crucial now than than ever. And I do think that marketers get it, where you and I talked, and what I think is so critical about the conversation is that they get it, but they don't know yet how to get there or how to execute it. And there's this chasm of like, I get it, the buyers change. They hired us less resources. We have to talk about business outcomes. Great, but. But how? And so let's talk about, let's get to those. Let's, let's pull this apart for people and actually make them feel like they can go do the thing. All right, we've given up 2.0 George, we get it. We're here for 3.0 now tell me how on earth to get after it. And so the first step is to figure out your messaging, and from the conversations we've had, it's very much about hiring somebody who can help you get after it you as the marketer, don't have to know, oh, this was such a hard lesson for me recently. I'm a figure, it outer. I've grown up as a figure, it outer, right? I will fit. I will turn and turn and turn until and iterate, iterate to get the thing right. We don't have that kind of time, money or resource anymore, so I have to go find somebody who knows how to do the thing to tell me how to go do it now. And so I think that was such a great sort of aha moment when we were talking of like, don't, don't feel like you have to be the one to go cultivate this messaging. There's people out there, wonderful people, who know how to do it right. And it's interesting, because who you think this person should be is not who people might think it should be. So who is that hire that's going to come in and help you define your story, that's going to then fuel everything else from that point on?

George Kamide 36:18

Yeah, well, I think we don't put enough value on outside perspective, right? And like that sort of tunnel vision that comes from being on the product side. Is the thing that is our Achilles heel. Because, of course, like, if you're hired and you're like, there for the startup ride, and you want to build with the team like, it's very it's just so easy to lose air in the room, right? It's just you're installed talking to one another. So I do think again, if you think of the first CMO or the first marketing hire as kind of the quarterback, one of those things is you would bring in your outside strength and conditioning coach, which might be a communications specialist, because it's your job to manage up. Like, look, this is why this matters. This is why brand matters. Because if we just have the same shield and red and whatever else language that everyone else has, like, you know, defend your system or die. Like, it's just not going to work. Like, how are we possibly going to stand out? Okay, great, so you're on board with what brand means and, like, really talk about that. And then I'm going to bring somebody in to work with us so that we have a clear story, because I can use that to take you to the moon, right? I'm not just doing this because I like to sit around the campfire and sing Kumbaya like we're going to do this because it's necessary for success. You are you founder, CEO, are going to be really frustrated when we get a sales team in here and you listen in on a call and they're promising things that we don't do, or they're saying things that you're like, where did they get that right? So I need to take what is in your brain, and if you got to praise them, go do that ego massage, like you have the juice. But eventually your role changes. You go out of founder led sales, and you got to, like, get this rocket ship going. And I have to take what's in your brain and put it in others. So I need that storytelling coach. I got a lot of friends who are former actors who are doing this work. There are a lot of communications consultants, but you need to look at the ones that have helped craft those stories, not just like, train them to be a keynote speaker or whatever. That's a kind of different kind of coach, but somebody who can, like, really, I guess, put your heels to the fire, really, just ask yourself the question, like, talk to me, so what? Why? So what? And like, if you cannot thread, if you can't answer those questions, it's a huge problem. And then once you have the answers, you're checking back with your design partners, how are you talking about us? And you just sort of like, pull all that in, and you got to put that in the cauldron, and you got to test it, and you got to those customers. Look, if I told you we did this, does that cohere with your experience of our product? Great. And then like, Hey, do you have someone else you could recommend, another peer that we could talk to? And it's not to sell to them. It's like, Hey, we've been working with so and so, and we are doing, and you're testing, you're constantly testing that message, and you just, you got to get that. I I can tell you, I mean, I think we all know the consequences, but it's very clear, you'll bring in a sales team. They won't do it. The VCs will complain. You'll churn them out. Oh, it's so expensive. You'll pay for the rebrand. You'll redo the site $400,000 later. Like it can just be so costly, and it feels performative, and it feels like, oh, marketing is doing something, but God, that's expensive, and you're eating away at time.

Kerry Guard 39:47

So Joel bench is going to be on Tea Time in just a few short weeks here. And so he will, yeah, so he's one of he was at cyber marketing con. He did a wonderful workshop. Yeah, he's gonna sort of unpack. That here with me on the show for more people. So if you're still sort of scratching your head, of like, cool, I could bring somebody in, but I still don't understand what it is that they do. Wait for that show. He's going to show us exactly what he does to help

George Kamide 40:11

us, and it's great. He uses, like, an Aristotelian framework, which is to say that messaging has not changed in 2000 years, but it's still it's still effective, like, it's still effective. Yeah, Joel is great. He's awesome.

Kerry Guard 40:23

He's gonna bring his cards. So, yeah,

George Kamide 40:25

that's really good, that he did that too. It makes it very accessible. It

Kerry Guard 40:29

does, it does. So stay tuned on that. I know that we probably still feel like this is the messaging is the hardest piece, and we're all being very clear that you don't have to solve it, and that there are experts, and you're gonna get to see one of those folks in action.

George Kamide 40:43

And like, like a Richard Feynman, right, the quantum physicist who was very famous for being able to distill like, complex subatomic particle physics to like high schoolers. And his technique was, like, he would explain it in very plain language, and then he would, like, basically write it down. I think his litmus test was a 12 year old. I like to think about, like, just call it the Mom Test. Like, can you explain what you do to your mom? And yes, you might need to explain, like, non human identities to your mom, but you got to be like, hey, you know how we think of identities as people? And you know how there's, like, that printer over there? Well, like when computers anyway, can you do that exercise? And then he would write it down, and he would like go through and strip out anything that felt like a little experience. Just keep testing it. Keep testing it. And his idea was that you have not truly mastered a topic until you can explain it to a 12 year old. And I think everyone listening to this has had the experience if you were in college and you had a brilliant professor, and they had this storied, prestigious reputation, and you're like, I don't know what they're talking about, because they couldn't pull it down to 101, they were really good at high theory. They were really good talking to their peers, but you were just like, glazing over because they could not get it to your undergraduate level. But then you might have had professors who like it clicked, like that's what you loved. You took that 101, class, and you were hooked. And that is, that is a very valuable skill, yes,

Kerry Guard 42:07

to great examples and all things we can start. It doesn't mean that you you shouldn't understand how they do the process or or go about it, or being able to test it yourself and trying it. Bring in an expert.

George Kamide 42:23

Bring in an expert 100% because you're still going to be quarterbacking Right? Like we talked earlier, all that sinew, building the connections between like, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of process, building, it's a lot of SOPs, and whatever you want to call it. So yes, to your point, Kerry, you can't be the person micromanaging the messaging workshop. That's a lot.

Kerry Guard 42:44

You can't do everything. Yep, totally. All right, let's talk about the next piece. We've talked about it in terms of the customer success. So now you bring in as the marketing leader you got, you're getting your branding dialed in. Now you're want to bring in customer success. And you mentioned in passing, sort of what the ideal scenario is for that customer success person does. Can you just relay that for us one more time, and how the marketer sort of plugs into that to bring it home, back into the branding piece?

George Kamide 43:11

Yeah, early customer success, and I think it scales out also is just they got to be your customer's best friend. You know, later on, when you're bigger, it's going to be more like QBRs and annual reviews, but they need to have regular touch points with the customer in the early days, when it's design partners, it's really like, you're sitting in there with the product team, and you're like, What do you like about the UX? What if we did it this way? And and then, but that's a lot of engineering and a lot of product for customer success. I'm very interested in, like, how would you describe what we do? How would you talk to a peer about us? What would you say about your experience if they're like, it was necessary because we had this data problem, but like, the UI is super kludgy. Like, that's a problem. Let's go fix the UI. You know, implementation took a really long time. I would really like that to be more of an API than this, like Hard Eight, I don't know, whatever, but you need to know that, and you need to sort of constantly be iterating that, but you're really trying to ask. What Danny is very good at is those open ended questions. You just get them talking, because when they start expressing themselves, whether it's like, I really love this, I think you guys are really on to something or whatever, like, those are the nuggets. Those are things you got to pull at, and you got to save them for later.

Kerry Guard 44:30

Yes, and with, you know, with AI, it's like a little easier now to take, to aggregate those conversations and be able to then pull those nuggets out and really form a story across the board. So, you know, being intentional with your with you know whoever you're interviewing that you're recording it for these purposes,

George Kamide 44:51

but that's sort of just my my idea. Yeah, ideal customer success, psychology majors, sociology, people who observe. Right? Because that's what you need them to

Kerry Guard 45:01

do. Okay? So you got your your branding messaging is just about figured out. You have your customer success person relaying information, so you're honing and iterating both the product and the messaging. Now what? All?

George Kamide 45:15

Right, so now you've, if you've got a brand to stand on, or some sort of identity, that's what that marketing hire is really going to work at, whether it's outsourcing some stuff to an agency, like just asset creation or whatever, some PR, you know, getting your people speaking in the places that matter. Great. The next marketing hires product marketing, because then you got to start, you will have gotten through the design partner phase, and now you need to start being able to translate some of the technical stuff into the language of this the operators who will be using your tooling, and then eventually the leader and the product marketer understands those two differences. Like this is what I would tell the executive buyer. This is what I would tell the operator, what can we create around that that's more compelling than I mean, yes, sure, you can use a PDF or a one sheet or whatever, but are there more exciting ways to think about how we get that information across and then, like, you know, if the product marketer isn't comfortable with social or whatever, I mean, you're at least getting the ideas that can then again, quarterback roll. Let me take your great ideas. I hear you saying this about technical buyers. Cool. Let me go feed it over to this creative agency. Or, I don't know, maybe you have a different content marketer, like, really, like, push up against the limits of of where you feel comfortable, but you will only know where those limits are because you have that brand right. Like, there are things that torque can do because they've established that brand that you know, CrowdStrike ain't ever going to do because they got a different brand, but they know where those limits are because they've done that work both, both those two particular companies.

Kerry Guard 46:53

Where does video fit into this? Do you think in terms of those great ideas from a marketing perspective? Are you seeing video become more and more important, or is, is with a technical audience, those, those more technical papers, the portals, those sort of places for technical content, is where it's at. What's What are you sort of seeing in the landscape these days of of how technical audiences are absorbing that content?

George Kamide 47:18

Yeah, death to white papers. So, I mean, maybe somebody says, give me a white paper. I don't know anyone who says that anymore. Does anyone read white papers? Do you want to read a white paper? Anyone got time for that? I mean, maybe it's in an open browser tab that you're never going to get to until your computer crashes. But you have to think about, like we talked about the buyers changing. So that also means, like, how do you want to consume information. So, yes, I think video is very important. I think video is extremely important when it comes to, like, case studies, if you can get your customers doing the talking, rather than just some block quote, like CISO fortune 500 said this, if you can get them talking about the problem that they were facing. Oh, my God, that is, that is the gold, and we have more video creation resources than ever before, right? I mean, look, look, we're on stream yard, the Riverside. There's all sorts. It's really like the level of lift is very low today compared to what it was when I started. I mean, you definitely had to go to like, a specialized agency, and video cost a fortune. I think that videos, I mean, I've seen a lot of brands doing really good work in terms of trying to get regular stuff out there, whether it's like user group content. Let's talk about this thing this week, to the stuff like anvil logic is doing with trying to talk directly to detection engineers. I think that's really great. It's like trying to engage that audience in a format that matters to them. I think in terms of, like, white papers and printouts and stuff. It's like people will ask for an architecture diagram. Always, like, literally, how does this work? Great. But like, you paying a copywriter to write 3000 words where you casually slip in, like, I fix all the problems, like No, nobody's doing that,

Kerry Guard 49:08

and they're not signing up to download them either. So they're definitely not downloading them. Leads are going to be a struggle, if not already, if not. I mean, I think that's a whole different conversation we don't have time for that.

George Kamide 49:24

I promise you that. Sorry. Content syndication, folks, when you say that you're going to get me in front of people, what's happening is, sure you've slapped it up somewhere and I saw something, and I randomly filled out a form, and then you get the lead. That's like, these people are interested in speaking to you. What that means is, your white paper is an open tab, one of 1000 sitting in a browser window that they forgot to actually read. That's probably what's really happening there. So, and then you call them up, and they're like, I say you read our white paper, and you're like, who that's that experience? Ask any marketer. I mean, I don't know why we keep doing the same things over and over, expecting a different result. I.

Kerry Guard 50:01

Yeah, I've only seen one report. I don't have many at my disposal, but I have seen one report where content syndication does work top of funnel, but they had an unbelievable nurture engine behind it. So sales was not immediately picking up the phone, right? These people, they had a way of communicating that was then working through a nurture sequence that was educating and then it was ending up in sales. So I do think that there we are. Do we do need some mechanism to be able to connect with the right people who are interested in what we have to say? But there has to be I got on my high horse, and one of my LinkedIn posts this week about it, of like the I think the seller is going to change drastically in regards to selling, the seller can't just show up to sell anymore. They have to show up to cultivate relationships in a really thoughtful and meaningful way. And if the White Paper is the open door or the download or the contents, indication is the open door to start having those conversations, not meetings to understand where people are and what they need, and back to your point of listening, then I think there's a point for it. But no, if you're just doing content indication, they immediately call up and start selling you are,

George Kamide 51:13

yeah, and once you start getting those indicators, like a particular account has gone through several steps, and they're like, looking like they're more interested in somebody's salivating over it, like they better be doing their research on that account. Like, yes, you know, when I interviewed Cecil Pineda, he says, like, when the people get to me, sometimes I ask them, like, how did you even reach me? And honestly, those the best sellers are like, well, I did my research. I knew who on your team was in charge of this particular function, and I got to know them, and I saw who they report to. I mean, it is the anthropology of your customer that is a kinship network, if ever there was one in the in the academic parlance, it's just an organizational framework. It's the same thing. So, same damn thing. Where's the power sit and how is it dispersed?

Kerry Guard 51:59

All right, well, let's talk about this. Because now that you've hired the product marketer, the next step is that selling team, right? Of like, Okay, now we can get out and really talk about this thing. So talk to me about, I think we started to pull it apart. But the ideal seller in your standpoint, is that person who's, yeah, that's the relationship.

George Kamide 52:21

Yeah, the relationship selling. So, like, the classic way is, let me hire the big gun CRO they'll bring in all their past buddies, and they're all enterprise sellers, and they're ready to go, because they used to sell into Goldman Sachs or whatever. And if you think Goldman Sachs is going to buy your series a whatever, the hell. Good luck. Also, the sales cycle is so long. I mean, maybe they will, but it's gonna be an 18 month sales cycle. Come on, let's do it faster. Also, those reps are going to expect a lot of stuff, and you have to cultivate a sales team that's also a that are also builders. If they come in and they're like, cool, show me the drive that's got the case studies, and then whatever, and then they're ready to go. And you don't have any of that stuff, because you frequently don't at that stage. They tend to get frustrated or whatever. So you have to really vet the sales folks that like build those relationships, and they just have a constant discipline level of activity, because you can't be the person who's got like, three deals in the pipeline and you're like, that's it for the quarter, and then something trips the last month, because, you know, all that's outside of your control, and then suddenly they're not hitting their numbers. So you gotta sort of be constantly moving, constantly circulating, constantly asking those questions, getting out. And so I think when you're interviewing that sales team, what you're looking for is essentially an entrepreneurial spirit, like, are they willing get in the car and drive over to the ISSA chapter meeting and sit in the back and not pitch anybody? But maybe they paid for the coffee and the donuts and they just start putting time on the ground. And I, I'm a big proponent of every rep having kind of their own little field budget, and you can, of course, vet how they're spending it. Please don't spend it all on a golf outing. But you know, like you need to have a you need to have that Hunter and farmer spirit, right? It's going to take time, and they got to be curious. That's super hard. It's super hard to find, because you can't train curiosity. I've tried. You sort of either are or you aren't. And you say you're gonna have to look for that sales team that can do that, you know, and also they're supportive, because if they're curious, they want to know that story that you've built, and you want to train them in that product marketing team is also going to be part of the sales enablement process.

Kerry Guard 54:37

Yes, a lot to all of this. Yeah, no, it is a lot, but I think it's just so nice. So my last question for you, George, because we could go all day, and I was as much as I would love that we could. Joe Rogan, this would be great, but we got jobs.

George Kamide 54:49

Kerry, we got jobs.

Kerry Guard 54:52

My last question for you around this is, then, if you're not bringing in the sales team until the end, essentially. Actually, and scaling that up, then how are you selling throughout? Are you or are you putting sales kind of on hold until you get the lead?

George Kamide 55:07

Yeah, I don't think sells on hold. I think I think you are probably the transition from the founder led sales into sales is going to be a very close shadowing of your first two sellers, right? And they're those curious hunters that they got that entrepreneur drive, and they're going to shadow the hell out of those two founders as they try to do the Indiana Jones and switch out the founders and put in the sales team. But they have to be close listeners and they and you really have to drill them on that story, and you have to get that discipline. You can't just be like, I hired sales teams. This is what we do. Go like you, if you care about the story and all this world building that you're doing, you're going to coach them and set them up for success. And you're also going to try to set sure KPIs, but KPIs only look in the rear view, right? You're going to work on what are the leading indicators, not how many dials are you making, but like, where do the levers that you can pull when you're trying to adjust the numbers here. Does this mean you we need to adjust your field marketing strategy to reach a different audience, a different number of people? Do we need to spend less on this, more on that? I really think you've got to work with that team. And I think if you do it this way, and you've taken your time, ideally, you get this beautiful thing where sales and marketing are marching to the same sheet of music, because most of the time it's like this, right? You hired sales first, and they're just going out and saying whatever they want because they weren't equipped with a story. And then marketing is like, Oh, we got to pivot, and we got to, like, change our messaging. And they go do the website, and it says this, And these people are promising that, well, it's a lot of friction, right? Because I was promised this, and I finally booked a demo call, and this isn't what I signed up for. Like, wait, what? Like, it's very discordant. It's very it's a very hard entry, and that is very hard to recover from, because as soon as you start creating that friction, you sow doubt into the prospects mine, and they're like, I don't know if these people know what they're doing. And then it's then It's uphill from there.

Kerry Guard 57:05

I have so many thoughts, and I'm trying to prioritize them, because we are at time. I think we're just gonna have to pick up this conversation. George, this is so helpful for folks to start thinking differently. Of not hiring that sales team first, but thinking about how to hire marketing first. Get that messaging in lockstep with your founder, as your founder gets out there and continues to sell and honing that well as you bring in customer success, getting that messaging dialed in, bringing in product, and then bringing in sales to take that off of the founder and being able to go and run with it. Oh my gosh. We are flipping the whole playbook. Y'all 3.0 is here, and we are here for it. Thank you so much. George, where can people find you?

George Kamide 57:45

Yeah, only on LinkedIn, because I ain't got time for anything else. But so that or you can listen to you. Can you listen to me rant with my co host on bare knuckles and brass tacks?

Kerry Guard 57:55

Yeah? Style on into that one for sure. I know that I do. It's so good, so so good. You got a taste of it here today, but just, well, double whammy over there. It's great before we go. George, my last question for you, because you're more than a marketer, you're more than a co host. You're more than all of these amazing things you do, what's currently bringing you joy outside of work.

George Kamide 58:19

Oh, yeah. I mean, obviously I like books, because these are all real books behind me. So this year, I have started to do book projects, which is like a more intentional way of reading. So I wanted to read Percival Everett's new novel James, but I reread Huckleberry Finn first and then James, which is the retelling of the story from Jim's perspective. So that was really fun to hold those side by side of my head. The next one is, the full year project is I'm trying to work through all of Shakespeare's plays by taking them with me so that I don't check my phone when I'm standing in line at the airport. So we'll see.

Kerry Guard 58:55

Oh, I need to follow up with you on that. I sort of a moment of obsession through high school and college on Shakespeare, so we are gonna circle back. Oh so good Georgia. I'm so so grateful. Thank you to all of our listeners and the people who joined us today. We see you, Michael and Linda and Danny and Elijah for holding down the four we appreciate you all so much. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share this episode was brought to you by MKG marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads. This episode is hosted by me, Kerry Guard , and co founder of MKG marketing. Music Mix and mastering done by Elijah Drown, my podcast sidekick, and if you'd like to be a guest, Jamie, I'd love to have you on See y'all next time.

George Kamide 59:36

Thanks, all you.