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SUMMARY:
B2B fractional marketing executive Nick Lagalante discussed why fear fails in cybersecurity marketing, business continuity, cross-department collaboration, and consultative selling. Listen now to the latest episode of How I Made It In Marketing. |
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FUD. Fear, uncertainty, doubt.
I first learned about this sales and marketing tactic – which is aimed at influencing perceptions by highlighting potential negative outcomes – early in my career when working with big tech companies.
An example – nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Then later in my career when I worked with cybersecurity companies, I saw the tactic on steroids.
But I always wondered – is this really the most effective way to treat our potential customers? Is this customer-first marketing? Is there a better way?
So I rejoiced when I saw an anti-FUD lesson in a recent podcast guest application. To hear that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to B2B fractional marketing executive Nick Lagalante.
Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.
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One of his earliest roles in marketing was at Thycotic, a cybersecurity startup now known as Delinea. It was while working at his first RSA Conference booth that Lagalante learned how to pitch the company’s product to prospects. Consultative selling in B2B helped him become a stronger marketer and communicator because Lagalante’s experience at Thycotic revealed how to use language to help customers solve problems.
Learning how to sell forced him to get out of his marketing comfort zone, where they tend to rely on buzzwords. Without his “marketing speak” to fall back on, Lagalante had to learn to talk to prospects in clear language about their problems. That experience has informed his entire career and approach to marketing, brand storytelling, and corporate communications.
While at Thycotic, Lagalante got a crash course in building a brand as an underdog in a hot category of cyber by being scrappy and relentless, creating a really strong product, and not being afraid to be different and stand out. They deliberately chose not to use Fear, Doubt, and Uncertainty (FUD) in their marketing messaging, a common tactic used in cyber.
In many ways, they used a similar strategy and tactics to Wiz, the cloud security company that was recently acquired by Google for $32 billion.
While at PhishMe, they underwent a rebrand to Cofense. That experience taught him how important research is in a brand exercise. It’s easy for strong personalities to take over during a brand refresh or rebrand, but it's crucial to listen to the market and not your own ego or ambitions.
The entire exercise was focused on the brand identity, name, and logo, and far less on the company’s positioning, market messaging, etc. As a result, they lost serious brand equity and value with customers the day they retired the PhishMe brand. They didn’t realize how much PhishMe was beloved by loyal customers.
That was a huge lesson learned, and later on, Cofense added PhishMe back to the branding because of how much value that brand name retained.
via Brian Alberti, current Senior Director of PR at Tenable
Lagalante has known Alberti more than 10 years. Alberti taught him everything Lagalante knows about the art of technology PR, specifically in the cybersecurity industry. Lagalante met Alberti because Lagalante hired Davies Murphy Group (DMG was then acquired by LEWIS PR), out of Boston to be the first PR agency of record for Thycotic.
At the time, Lagalante established the PR/comms program at Thycotic in its infancy, and Alberti came on as his account director, Lagalante was his client. They did tons of great work together, including the kind of guerilla PR tactics at tradeshows you could get away with 10+ years ago (like handing out Amazon cards on the show floor to survey random passersby attendees outside of the vendor booths).
Alberti showed him the value of relationships because he was incredible at building them so genuinely. He never, ever placated Lagalante with BS as a client. In fact, he was brutally honest at times, but also incredibly compassionate. No matter what, he made it clear he was in the trenches by Lagalante and with him. That makes a huge difference.
Alberti showed him the value of true agency partnership, not treating a PR firm as just a “doer” and “order taker,” but an extension of the corporate team. At the time, Thycotic was small, and strapped for resources. Lagalante relied on him and DMG to essentially be the comms team Lagalante couldn’t quite build out at scale internally.
Another lesson Lagalante learned with Alberti is there’s always an angle and story to tell that reporters want to listen to, if you get creative enough! Alberti taught him the value of leveraging proprietary research to tell compelling vendor stories to the market, and if there isn’t any research going on internally, go out and make some of your own with quantitative surveys.
Later on, Lagalante helped to hire Alberti and another LEWIS PR rep at Tenable, and he’s still doing great there.
Lagalante also learned Jonathan Cogley, the founder of Thycotic, during that time. In the early days of building the PR function at Thycotic he worked closely with Cogley, who was instrumental in helping the company grow from a small startup to a recognized leader in privileged access management (the process and tools used to control and monitor access to sensitive systems and data).
Cogley’s leadership and vision helped set the foundation for the company’s brand and market positioning, which Lagalante supported through strategic communications. Cogley was a key figure during the formative years of the company’s marketing and PR efforts.
via Maya Smith, former Senior Director of Creative Marketing at Tenable
Smith was and is the best creative director Lagalante has worked with in the technology industry, and especially in cybersecurity. They worked together for six years. She’s not just a terrific designer with an amazing eye, she’s an adept marketing strategist and people leader who cares deeply about her teams, her staff, and her colleagues.
Smith and Lagalante were locked at the hip during their time together at Tenable. She taught him the power of true cross-collaboration in marketing, especially with the content production side of the house. In the past, Lagalante has either owned or worked adjacent to the creative marketing and design function. When adjacent, during his time at Thycotic, Lagalante never had bad relationships but always felt arm’s length.
When Lagalante owned the function, he wore split hats between being a creative director, marketing leader, and comms director at growth-stage startups like PhishMe/Cofense. Smith was the first creative director to basically make him an adjunct member of her team and treated him like a true peer.
Lagalante had strategic say and input on all creative campaigns, and after a year or two of working together, it felt like the two of them were co-captains of an even bigger ship with creative on one side and corp comms on the other.
In fact, during one of Tenable’s largest product launches, Tenable One, their SVP of Corporate Marketing and Chief Communications Officer had some family business to attend to and had to miss the final stages of planning for the platform launch.
Smith and Lagalante stepped up to the plate, alongside Susan Nunziata, the Senior Director of Editorial at the time, who is the sharpest editorial mind and one of the best writers in the biz, and they spearheaded the entire launch plan for corporate marketing and comms. Smith showed him that when you treat your colleagues like members of your own team and give them that trust, the productivity and results are typically pretty astounding.
They had one of the smoothest and most impactful product launches that quarter and in the years Lagalante was at Tenable because of that working style.
Maria Nardi was a key collaborator at Tenable as well, where she ran the events function. She was part of the highly collaborative marketing and communications and contributed to the success of major marketing initiatives, including large product launches such as Tenable One. Her role in managing events helped amplify the company’s brand presence and engage customers effectively during these campaigns.
via Michela Stribling, former Chief Communications Officer and SVP of Corporate Marketing at Tenable
Stribling hired him at Tenable six years ago to build out an internal communications function, which eventually became the corporate communications function at Tenable. Internal comms was something Lagalante had not done formally before, as he was always focused on external PR and marketing.
She saw the potential in him and gave him the runway to approach internal comms the same way Lagalante would run external marketing and comms programs. Lagalante applied similar strategies internally and treated employees as a valued stakeholder audience similar to customers, partners, and investors. Stribling taught him so many lessons, but two stand out in his mind.
First, internal communications is a critical component of brand building, as it taps into your workforce in a way that not only fosters productivity but generates brand ambassadorship at scale. Internal communications, when done well, provide a similar awareness and engagement effect that really good PR can achieve.
Second, internal communications is a culture driver and helps steward the soul of the business, especially during uncertain periods of macroeconomic insecurity or a global health crisis like COVID. Stribling, who ran internal communications at Google up to and through their IPO, shared lessons with him about using employee engagement and comms as a strategic lever to steer the culture through ups and downs so it doesn't go off the rails.
Lagalante was leading internal comms at Tenable during COVID, and was able to put those lessons directly to the test. She was right all along. If they didn’t have an air-tight internal communications strategy that was deeply in lockstep with HR, as well as marketing, sales, finance, and legal, things could have gone pretty badly. Tenable was able to steer through that mess diligently, and swiftly, with minimal disruption to their day-to-day.
While Lagalante had Stribling as a guiding light during that wild experience, she also trusted him completely to trust his instincts, allowing him to experiment and make the final call on how they handle things. It takes tremendous trust from a boss and an executive leader to do that, and as a people leader himself, it inspired him to operate that way with his own team.
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Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.
Nick Lagalante: And in a global pandemic in unprecedented circumstances, we needed to make sure that there was business continuity that we were addressing questions, that we were being transparent, that we were outlining the business because we needed everyone to link arms, hold tight and shoulder through this uncertainty together, and, and I learned a ton of lessons during that period there and how welcome the other departments were.
H.R. was an incredible partner to us, welcomed our ideas, welcomed our perspective, and taught us a lot, along the way about the people management organization and how that down stream impacts employees and what challenges they have.
Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing. From marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz. Real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the Senior Director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Burstein, to tell you about today's guest and.
Daniel Burstein: FUD fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. Well, I first learned about this sales and marketing tactic, which is aimed at influencing perceptions by highlighting potential negative outcomes. Early in my career, when working with big tech companies here, I'll give you an example. Here's an example of FUD. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? But then later in my career when I work with cybersecurity companies, oh my gosh, I saw the tactic on steroids.
The world was falling apart according to cybersecurity. So I always wondered, is this really the most effective way to treat our potential customers? Is this customer first marketing? There's got to be a better way. So I rejoiced when I saw an anti FUD lesson in a recent podcast guest application. Joining me now to share the lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories is Nick Legoland, a B2B fractional marketing executive at Legoland Consulting.
Thank you for joining me, Nick.
Nick Lagalante: Daniel, thank you for having me. Stoked to be here.
Daniel Burstein: All right. So let's take a quick look at Nick's background. He knew who I'm talking to. He was a marketing and public relations matter manager for ith iconic, which is now part of millenia. He was a head of global corporate communications at Cofins, the director of global corporate communications at tenable. He's currently a volunteer on the board of directors for the Public Relations Society of America, for the National Capital chapter, and, he now works for his own consulting company, where he works with startups that have raised anywhere from 3 million to over $100 million.
So, Nick, give us a sense. What is your day like being a B2B fractional marketing executive?
Nick Lagalante: Yeah. So, what's interesting, especially being a consultant, is you're, you know, you're balancing a little bit of everything, right? You are your front office. You're your back office, you're your own marketing staff, sales staff, financial staff. So it's very different from, you know, what I usually have done in my career, which is in-house corporate role team leader, you know, in the corporate mix.
But what I think is really interesting about that is it gives you the benefit to have certain levels of freedom, certain levels of access, and it doesn't restrict you, the way working in a corporation, might restrict somebody. So in my day to day, it might include prospecting, networking with potential clients, obviously engaging current clients, carving out time for project work, carving out time for, for the actual service delivery, but also doing back office stuff.
Taxes. So I try to block my week out and have certain days where I dedicate just to admin, and then I have days where I dedicate to my services so that my clients are getting 100% of my attention, because the way that I structure my consulting is, it's not so much it's Nick on an island. Let's send Nick some work and then he sends it back to us.
I embed myself within the organization as a fractional leader. I find that given my corporate background, I've been doing this close to 20 years. I understand how startups work. I understand how growth stage kind of that mid life cycle, pre-IPO pre acquisition stage works and and the public sector public corporations. So being able to come into an organization as a fractional executive allows me to weave into the fabric of where they are.
So I can be as effective as possible. And I think breaking the time up throughout the week and treating it like I'm sort of an extended or augmented member of their leadership team allows me to be so much more effective, and we get a lot more done than if I'm just ship and project sort. So I try to structure my week that way, and set my, my days up in these blocks.
So I'm giving 100% of my attention to the right people at the right time.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah, I interviewed someone who had where literally where different hats be like, okay, this hat, this is my focus now, right? Because you got to kind of do everything. All right. You talk about a 20 year career. Let's unpack it. Let's see what we can learn. Yeah, I like to say that, you know, in more I've never been in another career, but in marketing, you know, we get to do we make things right.
We're not, you know, like, I've never been a podiatrist or an actuary, but I don't feel like they make things like we do. So let's take a look at some of the things, you made and some of the lessons from them. You said consultative selling sharpens your message. How do you learn that lesson?
Nick Lagalante: Yeah, I learned that lesson. Working at a company called iconic, which at the time was the small IT software company. It wasn't even sure it wanted to be. Or was a cybersecurity company. Part of the work that I did there was, a lot of brand work and positioning work to sort of transform this. It software company into a true blue cybersecurity company in the privileged access management space.
So kind of managing passwords and identities at the machine level. And when I joined the company, they were really small, you know, bootstrapped, no funding, about 25 employees. And it was the first company I had worked in the past, early in my career, my first full time marketing job. I worked for an insurance company, and the insurance company was split between B2B and B2C products and services.
So while I got a touch of B2B, I would say that the insurance company was like probably 60% consumer lines of insurance. So psychotic was really the first company that was truly B2B. That was my first foray into the B2B business world, specifically the B2B technology world. And I remember I was going to RSA, which is the largest cyber security conference in the world.
It still is to this day. And it was my first cyber trade show in which the psychotic was an exhibitor. And so I was there helping out with the booth, kind of learning the ropes. And this is where I learned the power of consultative selling, using it as a marketing and messaging tool. When I was in the booth, I was kind of observing how, sales reps and even some of the marketing folks were engaging in talking with customers.
And rather than it being just this, as soon as someone comes to the booth, this like pure play product pitch or just screaming out features or yelling about features, it started with questions. Hey, what your tell me about your role. Tell me about your pain points. What are you working on today? What are your biggest challenges in your team?
Do you have challenges around identities? Do you have challenges around, password management? Do you have challenges around password security? You know, things like that. And as the prospect would start to talk, you would see the wheels spinning in the consultants. In the sales consultants, mind, you would see the wheels spinning and you would, you start to notice that the way that they interacted with, the prospect after that was much more effective because they were able to tailor their message, their sales pitch.
You know, you're at a trade show, you only have a few minutes of attention for each of these prospects. And because they took that consultative approach, they asked questions first. They really understood the pain and the needs. First, they were able to weave a story together that wasn't just a laundry list of product features, but really a value first driven message to talk about how that product or how that service solved an actual problem.
And when the lights went off, when the light bulb went off on the customer's face, it was clear, and they were able to get tons and tons of leads. Whereas, you know, there were companies that were, exhibiting right next to us with 2 or 3 times size to boost all kinds of bells and whistles. And they were not able to get nearly the amount of quality leads.
That psychotic was because psychotic started off as a consultancy before it became a software company. So as a marketer, we're so focused right on the message, and we're so focused on reaching those audiences and engaging with them and getting them excited that sometimes we forget, especially in B2B, that we are there to solve a problem. We're problem solvers, and so we need to understand their pains and speak to them directly rather than just, you know, machine gun, a ton of product features at them.
And so that lesson in those early days of psychotic at those trade shows actually made me a better marketer, maybe a better writer. It made me more effective at reaching those audiences because we took the time to understand their pains, and then we can craft a message and deliver it the right way that it really speaks to the prospect, and we can move them along that funnel.
We can move them along to that demo stage. And once we did a demo, we knew we'd have them hooked because it was a great product. And it kind of sold itself at that point. So that was a huge lesson and frankly, something that I carry with me and implement to this day.
Daniel Burstein: Are you said you carry that forward as a marketer, but I want to ask you this. Have you ever given any examples? Have you used consultative approach as a PR person in PR? Because yeah, because I'm sure like for me, like here's an example. I interviewed Stacy Grissom, the director of content and communications at Bach, and one of her lessons was a viral moment can tie in to a PR sprint.
She told the story of they had a birthday for the last surviving dog rescue dog from 911, right, threw a birthday party. He did something, did something of value, and it got picked up by her. A New York Times Atlantic. They had all this pick up, right. But that's I get a ton of PR pitches. Right. So for the article that I'm tracking for the articles, I actually do track the applications for how I made it marketing podcast because, you know, sometimes I have to tell people and usually the PR reps, hey, this person was not selected.
It just helps to kind of give them the numbers and have that big understanding there. And so for example, we've gotten 4107 podcast guest applications and we've published 131 episodes. Right. So just shows like that volume and what I don't see, I see the machine gun, I don't see the consultative broach and PR so I want to ask, do you have an example of using that consultative approach because I'd love to be receiving it occasionally I do, but it's mostly the machine gun.
Hey, here's the thing we want to talk about. Talk about our thing. Here it is. Here it is. Link to it.
Nick Lagalante: Yeah, I think that's a really great question. And it actually comes back to I would argue that it comes back to a bigger philosophical question that you see a lot in our industry, which is what is the relationship between PR and marketing? Should PR be a part of marketing should be a standalone thing? Is comms PR you know, where does it all sit?
Who should report to who? And there is a lots and lots of very, sharp opinions about this. I think it depends on the industry, but in my industry and B2B tech, especially in security PR, for a vendor is a marketing function in my opinion, because it is another way to take your message and deliver it to your audience and your audience.
Your most important audience are your customers, your prospects, the people that keep your business running and afloat. And so from a PR point of view, if we're not, if we're not looking to generate earned coverage and tell those stories through the press, through media relations, through those PR mechanics, understanding what the customer needs, we've missed the boat entirely.
We need to understand as a as PR people in B2B, we actually have to understand and the business in order to tell the best stories, earned the best coverage, and really have the strongest partnerships and relationships with the journalists that we know will reach those customers and those audiences. And it means understanding what the customer needs and understanding how the business truly operates, because the stories that are data driven, have the best hooks and you can't get that data, whether it's research data that your company's generating or customer data, you know that your leveraging to tell an interesting trend line if we don't actually understand the business.
And so I've actually been talking with, PR practitioners right now in this current market who are looking at ways to strengthen their, their profile in this sort of uncertain job market. How do I how do I land that next job? How do I be as strong of a PR person as possible? And I always tell them, make sure that you know, that whatever industry you're working in, whatever company you're working for, understand their business top to bottom.
Understand how their products work, what their customers, who their customers are, what their needs are, and what their pain points are. Because if you do that and even listen and talk to customers and listen in on sales conversations, it'll give you ideas and help you think about the right hooks that not only will impress the editors and the journalists you're influencing, but ultimately will be the most compelling stories for those reading those articles, those intended audience.
It's those intended customers. So it's super, super important. I think that, you know, when PR sits in its own world and is kind of treated just as a news engine at a, at a company or just a crisis management engine, you lose the value, the total value and capability of that function when it's not more deeply integrated into, engaging with and moving the customer along that, that journey.
So I'll give you an example.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah.
Nick Lagalante: Like when I was, when I was at psychotic, I'll bring that psychotic back up again. That chaotic actually did not have a PR function. Right. Because when I joined, they were super small. The marketing team was a small handful of people. We all wore lots of hats over time. While I was there, I recognized that there was a missing piece, some missing link here in in that, PR and communications function.
But because we started off kind of wearing lots of those hats and marketing and had that consultative energy built into the equation, I remember when I stood up our very first PR program at Psychotic One of the first things that I did was I went to our head of sales. I said, give me the list of our happiest, top five happiest customers, and I'm going to go and talk to them with our agency partner.
So I hired a PR agency and the two of us, my agency director, myself and our sales leader, we got in front of five customers. We just talked to them. What are you seeing? What's important to you? Why do you still work with us? What are your pain points? What? What's happening in the market? Where do you wish things were going?
And just from those conversations alone, we came up with, like, dozens of pitch ideas, story ideas. Then we would map those story ideas to say, okay, what do we have to show for it? Went to the engineering department. What kind of research can we share publicly? What kind of data can we share publicly? And are any of these customers willing to go on record with us?
And out of 5 or 6, maybe there was 1 or 2, but we use that to tell stories. And as a result, we would get tons of coverage, really strong coverage. And slowly this tiny little company that no one had ever heard of that wasn't even in the security space started to move it's way from a reputation standpoint into being recognized as a leader and one of the category defining leaders of privilege access management.
As that segment of security became hot. I'm not saying PR takes all the credit, but I think the way that we took that consultative approach, listen to our customers. We knew the business inside and out. We knew what data we could share. We were able to tell much more effective stories than just spraying and praying a bunch of ideas off the wall, hoping journalists write about it, hoping the CEO's background is strong enough to get published or, you know, when a speaking opportunity.
And that lesson, is something that not only I bring into all of my roles and have brought into my role since then, it's something that I teach. It's something that I mentor my teams on. Because I think it's the way that you become the most effective in B2B PR is that consultative approach.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah. So let me push back on one piece. Or do you feel free to disagree with me because there's something I share here. So when you talk about a consultative approach, isn't the journalist and the editor the customer? I mean, I hear you, you say understand the business. I hear you say, understand the end customers a story they need I hear you.
But the biggest gap I see at least being on the receiving end is a lot of PR reps or people pitching PR they don't understand the journalist and the editor that is your first customer, and that's where you need to take the consultative approach and have a value proposition for them. And have them understand why of all these different pitch they're getting, it's this pitch.
And this is right, not just generally, but for their audience, for their publication, for whatever you're going after versus, as you say, the much more common thing is a spray and pray approach. So am I wrong on this? Isn't isn't that the first customer?
Nick Lagalante: You're not wrong. But maybe you and I have different terminologies around customer. Sure, but but that aside, Daniel, I completely agree with you. That's where the spray and pray comes in. That happens a lot. And to me, part of that consultative approach, understanding the customers, understanding the needs of the business, understanding what data we can share that is all in service to understanding.
To your point, who are you pitching? So when you think about, okay, ultimately if I need to reach this audience, right, that's the end goal. I need to get this message here over to this audience here through PR, through Earn Media. Now I'm going to pick okay, whether it's a series of podcasts, whether it's publications, trade, pubs, business, pubs, whoever.
And I make a list of my journalists, what journalists, what editors, what pubs are doing the best job reaching the audience that I need to. I need to engage with that. To me, understanding the journalists needs their beat, their reporting styles. That's just table stakes research that every PR person should understand. You should not be taking a pitch, and bringing it to a journalist that you haven't actually really thought out.
Is this the right pitch? Is this the right story for this journalist, for their editors, for their audiences? Because it's very relationship driven and it's trust driven. And if you're new to that game, or especially if you're a new vendor, you have to be able to come correct right out of the gate. Because to your point, being on the media side, you're receiving tons of pitches all day long from corporate PR people, from agency people, from consultants, you name it.
How do you sift through the noise? And there's a lot of noise out there. And so I think that the consultative mindset that applies as much to knowing who your, media partners are, knowing these journalists, understanding, reading through their be reading through what they like to talk about, what's important to them. Same thing for the editors at the publications.
And, but I see them less as a customer and more as a critical stakeholder in order to reach that customer. So it's terminology, you know, slight disagreement or slight differentiation. But at the end of the day, broadly speaking, I agree with your point. It's on us as PR practitioners to know and understand our journalists needs. But that's why matching that, that story right with the right journalist is, is it's better to go out with just a couple of pitches to the right journalists and the right pubs than to just take a story and try to get it in every publication possible.
And sometimes PR people feel pressure from the executive suite. Well, we want to be everywhere. We want to be here, we want to be there. That's why it's up to us knowing the business, understanding marketing, understanding how to demonstrate that value. We can communicate that back up to the executive suite and say, actually, for this story, it's better that we go to these three journalists and here's why a we're going to have a better opportunity and chance at influencing either a mentioned inclusion or a byline or whatever the intention is with the pitch be, we're going to strengthen the relationship and the trust with that media partner and see it's going to make their audiences
happy because it's a story that's relevant to them. And ultimately, that audience is our customers or our prospective customers or our investors. These are the people that we're trying to reach. So if you in that, in that consultative approach, understanding the media needs the journalist's needs and thinking through that and making tough decisions about the execution of the pitch is critical.
And it's as critical as talking to the customers now.
Daniel Burstein: I mean, I can't disagree with quality over quantity. So we're on the same page there. So speaking of that, speaking of really understand your customer, you mentioned you don't need to scare people to sell them security. And I love how did you learn this.
Nick Lagalante: So, you know, in the cyber industry, and I've spent a majority of my career now working in the security space. It's, it's an obvious, I think, low hanging fruit marketing mechanism is to use fear, uncertainty and doubt to drive interest or, you know, drive demand for a certain product. And to a point, there's an understanding as to why.
Because we are securing organizations against bad actors, against malicious actors. There's a lot of bad, energy out there. And we're protecting against attacks, right? Companies are under active attack, or they are actively being exploited for any manner of reasons. It's causing all these issues. And that's the root of of what security does. But what I think has happened over the last 10 to 15 years is that it's kind of become the default tonality.
When you go to a trade show or you have like new season or throughout the year, different parts of the quarter where you have vendors just, you know, lambasting audiences with marketing campaigns. There's a lot of default on fear driven, messaging, scare, tactic driven messaging uncertainty, in order to drive that excitement and demand. But I think there's actually different ways that you can do that without having to always live in the negative.
I'm going to go back to dichotomy again. Something iconic did not start off as a security company. Psychotic started off as an IT software startup who was trying to make IT administrators lives easier by handling their privileged passwords in an automated fashion. We're here to make your life easy. So the company that wound up becoming a category defining leader in the security marketplace and in privilege access management, started off selling their products and building a customer base around the idea that we're going to save you time, we're going to save you effort, we're going to make your life easier.
And that resonated especially with the practitioners. You know, security, is often one of the most, underrepresented technological resource groups in an organization. You still have, I think, a gap in education gap in terms of, you know, people that are coming out of, university level education with security degrees versus I.T. degrees versus the other parts of the business, finance, marketing, etc..
And, and these teams are overworked. They're stressed out. And so there's ways, as marketers, as communicators to demonstrate the value of the security product and platform beyond just, hey, if you don't get this, you're going to get breached tomorrow and your whole world is going to end and everyone's going to get fired, and your CISOs go to jail.
While that might be a reality potentially for some, there's a broader story here. Your product is so much more than just anxiety. It delivers business value. It delivers operational excellence. It helps create speed and efficiency. Something that we're seeing now, especially in the ops space, is this explosion of AI conversations around a genetic AI, agent based AI.
And what's interesting is you have a whole series of security startups now, that aren't really going to market with a fear based message. They're going to market with an efficiency based message with, hey, if you have a team of two cops, analysts that are just getting bombarded in your SoC (Security Operations Center) and your security operations center with, you know, false positives and not and, and anomalous behaviors and weird stuff that could potentially be threats.
How are they managing the solve and not burning out? Burnout is real. And so the selling point is not, hey, you're going to get breached and your world is going to end. The selling point is, hey, we need to take care of these people better. We need to give your team better efficiency force multipliers in their capabilities, operational scale.
And this is where a AI is like huge. And there's tons of security companies as big as Sentinel one and as sort of startup as companies like torc, which have amazing marketing and doing amazing stuff out there. But it's amazing to see that the new kids on the block are starting to take a different marketing approach, because they're realizing that the same old scare you into buying our stuff doesn't work as much anymore.
It's kind of become that, yeah, we get it. Breaches are real. We got breached four times last month. What else have you got to say? Rather than when I started, you know, 15 years ago in this space, it was all about, you know, the fear of what could happen because security was just becoming this sort of more pervasive topic, this national topic.
So what I learned at psychotic, I've applied at Fish Micro Fence at 1,000%, at tenable becomes a more business level conversation than just a fear based one.
Daniel Burstein: Okay. So just kind of maybe channeling the listeners, I hear like the one that the listeners are using FUD right now. I think this is the challenge I would give you, and I just wonder how you answer it. But how do you get their attention? Right. So yes, you've got really good point. I love what you're saying and I agree with you about have an actual value proposition and some of the value propositions you're talking about, about efficiency make a lot of sense.
And I've actually given this feedback before when I've coached on, you know, cybersecurity is that most companies and this is more a small business cybersecurity, those small business people, they're not sitting there. They didn't go into business to worry about cybersecurity. Their message should be, hey, the cybersecurity company for people who don't care about it, right? Because 99% of the time this isn't going to happen.
It's not going to be your issue. You want to focus on other things, right? So let's have usability and some of the other things. However, I think the reason we get to the FUD approach, yes, is to close sales. But as you said, it's a noisy world. And so I think they use it to like, okay, grab attention.
So I could see like in the middle of that conversation. Customer. During funnel, a lot of the that messaging you're saying work but can you grab attention with it still like can you actually get into the market? Someone notices you and you can start that conversation? Or do you have to scared the living daylights out of them?
Nick Lagalante: I think it's a great question. And I think that this is an interesting we're at this interesting evolution point in the cyber market where you're starting to see marketing shift really depending on the vendor at every vendor has a different sales motion. So you have some vendors that are really large, really established, that tend to do a top down sales motion.
We're focusing on the C-suite first, and then we'll move our way down to the practitioner pool. In terms of the buy in and the sale, you have other vendors. A lot of them are startups that are actually taking a bottom up approach. They're starting with the practitioners and addressing the practitioner need, getting the buy in and excitement from the practitioners, and then leveraging that practitioner relationship to sort of work the sale up to maybe to middle management and up through the executive suite to ultimately get the sale.
So I think getting that attention without using FUD really depends on what kind of vendor you are. And what you're selling. Motion is, for example, there's a company out there right now, that does hyper automation, agenda, AI, a lot of cool stuff in the tech up space. I mentioned them. They're called talk talk. Q what talk is doing from a marketing point of view, in my opinion, is actually quite fascinating because what they're actually doing is they're creating, this amazing rock and roll like, reminds me of 80s Iron Maiden heavy metal rock brand that I think is just crushing it, especially with the practitioner into like the mid middle management community security,
security professionals based on, you know, their personal interest in music. They listen to the sort of cultural pop culture IP that they like. And none of that has really much to do with fear. It's kind of like this empowering, kick ass rock and roll skulls with lightning bolts and monster trucks. None of that. It's very different departure from the hoodies and the you know, the bad actors are coming to get you.
And this is like, hey, we got our, like, rock horns in the air. We got our guitars, we have our lightning bolts like, come talk to us. We're approaching this in a real different way. Hyper automation, AI faster, better, stronger. And they're using that to build a very, very highly engaged brand for themselves. And they also have a great product to boot.
And the practitioners are going nuts. They're loving this stuff. They're building lots of hype around RSA. They're approaching it from a different point of view. They're building a different brand. They're standing out in the crowd because no one else looks and sounds like them. And then when you actually listen to their podcast, you read their marketing materials. They've got the technical chops to back it up.
They're just packaging it in a way that is invoking in an excitement and kind of like an empowerment of like, hey, like let's say goodbye. Like their tagline is soar is dead. Soar stands for security, operations and automation. It was like this whole hot marketplace maybe 5 to 7 years ago, kind of was the precursor to AI automation that we're seeing in ops now.
They're saying soar is dead. Automation is the key. Hyper automation. AI is the key. And they've got skulls and lightning bolts. That's how they're getting attention. Not a single piece of that message, not a single piece of that visual brand has anything to do with scaring you. It's exciting. You and the product and the technology backs it up.
Now, when you do the flip side, you look at brands, another brand I admire, which is totally different, Sentinel one, for example, massive endpoint detection response Company, one of the critical dominant category leaders in ETR, one of the hottest cybersecurity companies and brands in the marketplace today. They have a different approach because they're taking a much more executive down, top down approach.
So when you look at their content, you look at their corporate messaging, their campaigns, their PR, it's very much, hey, we're going to help be a partner to your C-suite so you can show at the board level, look at how we are protecting the organization and how managing, endpoint security, managing, threat detection response actually translates into business value.
The way they package things, even their earnings reports in their earnings communications. It's very similar to, to how, let's say, a high end business publication would package up a financial report. They're speaking to a different audience, they've got a different sales motion, and they're not using FUD, they're not using scare tactics. They're translating security into business value in a really artful way.
And it's still hip. It's still very fresh. I love their brand. I think they have a great approach. But once again, it's not the hoodies. It's not scaring you. It's demonstrating we are the right partner to help your organization scale and deliver board value. And so these are the things that are starting to to change in the security marketplace.
And I think the vendors that are still super focused on fear as their primary driver, they're not it, you know, they are going to get left behind on the desk pretty quickly. The last example that I'll make is Beyond Trust, which is a great company in the privileged access management space. They're a De Linea competitor. And Beyond Trust just announced their RSA campaign, and it's all about their calling themselves Beyond Trust Outfitters to kind of reminds me of like Patagonia meets ROI.
It's outdoors. It's let's go through we're going to enter the wilderness. But don't worry, we have the tools. We have the carabiners, we have the ropes. We have all the tools to help you navigate the uncertainties. But it's also adventure driven. So it's not, hey, there's a dark, scary pit. You're going to get swallowed up by these attackers.
It's the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the trees are green. Let's go on this journey. Let's go on a hike together and we're going to be right by your side. Like a like a wilderness guide, helping you understand what might be around the corner, but discovering really cool things along the way. So we're starting to see such a shift.
That's how you get attention. You get creative, and you think about all of the other ways that your product adds value to the organization, and then you tailor it to who you're speaking to, who you're driving that selling motion for.
Daniel Burstein: I love it. It's aspirational. It's not the Hamburglar, right. The Hamburglar was a traditional campaign we saw. And really, you can be aspirational any industry. I was interviewing the CMO of Hjalmar, which makes, Tarn Ax and clear, like these toilet cleaning products. She was telling me about this aspirational campaign. They did. And I was mentioning, like, I see that week and I was cleaning the toilets with my wife is clear.
There's nothing aspirational about this. You're you're diluting yourself. And then she talked about this research. They did. And they found out like, hey, a real key thing in relationships is to feel taken care of. One spouse, direction to cleaning. That's a key thing. And the other spouse loves it. Valentine's day don't buy chocolates. Don't buy roses, upcycling and clean the toilet.
And I just like this. Like, wow, the brilliance of that to go for the aspirational thing versus, hey, you've got this messy house. So speaking of research, as you mentioned, research driven rebranding preserves value. So tell me the story of rebranding from fish meat to coffins and where research would have helped.
Nick Lagalante: Yeah. You know, I think every brand exercise has its, has its lessons. What worked and what what worked. Well, what didn't work so well. And every opportunity is a chance to sort of tweak and learn so that the next time you help a company go through that journey, you sort of learn from those, from all of those experiences.
And I think what was interesting about Fishman comments is that we knew that, that the company needed, some kind of a rebrand. The company started off a little bit of history. Fishman started off as, as the company that essentially invented the technology to, to fake fish your employees for the purpose of training immersive behavioral change by actually putting them through the motions of a real phishing attack, and not just making them watch a 15 minute computer based training where they're falling asleep at their computers and they don't retain any information.
Computer based training really is not as effective when it comes to preventing phishing threats at the employee level. So if you're if a phishing email makes its way through all your security controls, your email security gateways, and lands in your employees inbox, that is as it is ought to do. How are your employees spotting it, reporting it and flagging it, immersing them in real attacks and teaching them the markers and what to look for, getting them to think like a security professional.
That's where they started and they dominated that category. They sort of created that category. They sort of evolved a new version of awareness training with this immersive technology, and they were doing really well for a while. But then what happened over the years, that category became saturated. You have lots of companies that started entering that space. So Fishman wanted to differentiate with other products, get more into the threat intelligence space, get more into managed services around like proactively defending around phishing with, you know, a team of 24, seven analysts that are in your environment helping you spot phishing attacks, maybe where your employees aren't able to spot them, getting into, triaging of attacks in
the SoC. So when there's an attack, what happens? How do you respond to it? How do you coordinate your incident response team with your security operations people and your, you know, your other security folks to to kind of identify that attack and address it in real time so it doesn't become an issue. But the problem was, is that everyone just thought of me as the awareness training company.
While all you do is the phishing simulations, the phishing reporting. And so the company knew that it had a bit of a brand issue because of its legacy success. And like many companies that often were one of the first movers and shakers in a category, you find that category saturated and you need to change the game. I think where we could have done a better job around research is understanding, I think, a little bit more about what that market really wanted.
What was the appetite for some of these other elements, right, that the company was building around, around threat Intel. And how do we actually build a cohesive brand, a cohesive story around that without losing the power and the equity of the fish me name? Because it was super, super, resounding with the community at the time, people just loved the brand, super recognized, and the customers loved the product.
They were really loyal. And I think that if we had better research around our own customers and the market, I'm not sure the company would have gone full bore with the new name change and a new logo. I think looking back, the, the, the things we could have done differently working on that in that world and working on that project is we probably needed more of a brand positioning refresh than a total rebrand.
Because one of the challenges that happened is once we launched as Co fense, there was confusion because we retired the fish name pretty much completely. We shifted it from a corporate brand to a product name only, and there was confusion in the market. You know, the market thought that a company called Co Fence bought fish me and acquired us, which wasn't the case.
There were other confusions. What happened to fish me? And it definitely caused some challenges, for the company. It caused some challenges and go to market and with our customers. And when you have that some of that confusion and those challenges, the whole point of the rebrand, which is a shift in the perception, a shift in our message and our value add, hey, we're more than just this work with us for X, Y, and Z that gets lost because then the attention completely becomes, well, what is this?
And I'm confused by this, and I need to learn more and learn about what's going on here. Even at like the trade shows we were getting customers coming up to the booth saying, hey, explain this to me again. How did that work? So I think stronger research would have made us, I think, make some different changes in the approach.
And I think we would have messaged it and handled our go to market, our comms, enabling the company, enabling customers in a different way. And later on, well, after I had left, they realized that there was such brand power in the fish, meaning they actually brought it back into the corporate brand. So I think now they're going by Fishman comments, or it's some kind of combination of the two.
And if you look at a lot of their marketing work now, the Fish Me logo and the comments logos often side by side to sort of pull back in some of the residual value of the power of that Fishman name. And so if we had a little bit different or better research from the market, from our customers, maybe we wouldn't have made that same choice.
Maybe we would have. But certainly the biggest lesson that I took away was really understand what you need to do. Not every rebrand needs to be an entire brand new everything. Sometimes. Is this as simple as a little bit of visual tweaking and a lot of messaging tweaking, and that's all the market needs. In order to embrace the new version of you, embrace the products that you have to sell now and, allow you to enter new markets, new items, new categories in a really efficient way.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah, you're going to learn it one way or another. Better to learn before.
Nick Lagalante: Exactly.
Daniel Burstein: Well, in the first half of the episode, we talked about lessons from the things we made. And that's one of the things that we make brands. On the second half, we talk about lessons from the people that we collaborated with to make them. But before we get there, I should mention that the how I Made It a marketing podcast is underwritten by Mech Labs.
I, the parent company of marketing Sherpa. You can get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry in our AI guild, along with a community to collaborate with, grab your free three month scholarship to the AI Guild at Joint Mech Labs ai.com that's joining Mech Labs. I talked com to start getting artificial intelligence working for you.
All right, let's talk about some of the people you collaborated with and what you learn from them. You mentioned Brian Alberti, the current senior director of PR at tenable. And from Brian, you learned genuine partnership to redefine tech PR. How you learn this from Brian.
Nick Lagalante: Yeah. Oh man, I love Brian. I just had dinner with him recently. He's he's not only a, a very long time trusted colleague. So he's a super close friend. Brian was the first PR agency person, agency director, agency leader that I worked with, like officially in my career. So going back to my days at psychotic, when it was time to build out that PR function, stand up a communications team, stand up, a communications function I hired, I interviewed with lots of different PR firms because I knew I couldn't do it on my own, and I needed scale, and I needed the pros, to help us build those stories and break into the into
the market the right way. And so I interviewed a bunch of different agencies, all of them focused on tech PR in one way, shape or form. Some of them were a little bit more security focused and others which at that time was kind of a new thing in terms of building, vertical practices at a PR firm, security was starting to emerge as its own practice, not just technology.
And Brian at the time was working for an amazing firm, a boutique firm out of Boston called Davis Murphy Group. The founders of that, firm are just amazing, amazing people. And after I had spoken with very large agencies owned by publicist, owned by MSL Group, I was talking to this boutique firm, and I loved what they had to say.
They had an energy about them. That was just amazing. They reminded me of how I thought about things, and for the tiny little company that we were and the the pittance of a retainer that we were able to to muster up budget for at the time they BS Murphy group, they were not shocked about that or scared about that.
And they were like, let's do this. We love working with small companies. We love, you know, building the brand. At this stage, we think we would be a great partner. So I decided to move forward with DMG, and Brian was assigned to our account as our account director, and he led a small team. I think it was like 2 or 3 people on the agency team, led by Brian.
And Brian was a strategist, PR leader, writer. The guy literally just does everything and he got his start, I believe, at Weber Shandwick and really cut his teeth and started specializing in tech PR and really specializing in security, which was this hot emerging market. So working with Brian in that capacity where I was the client, he was the agency lead.
And we we had a partnership, we had a true partnership. And it really it taught me the lesson that any time that you hire, contractors or outside third party support, whether it's marketing firms, PR firms, agencies, solo contractors, whatever the case is consultants, it's really important that you weave them into, the inner workings of the team and give them the information that they need so they can be as effective as possible.
You treat them like an extension of the team. I learned that from Brian because he treated me like his colleague. There was no sales pitch. Brian was always super honest. He was. He never gave me B.S. he was very straightforward. If he didn't think something would work, he would tell me why. And frankly, he taught me a lot about PR.
He taught me a lot about how to how to leverage PR in the tech space in this noisy world. Effectively. He was part of that, that, sort of experimentation around the consultative approach, talking with customers, talking with the engineers, talking with the sales team. He wanted to understand every single element of the business and be brought along that journey.
And as a result, he and I did that together. And so he taught me that valuable lesson agency teams should not just be treated as service providers on an island. They should really be woven into your company, treated as equals, extensions of your team. And given more information than you. I think initially think you would want to give them.
I mean, once you sign an NDA, the partnership is there. There's really no reason not to open the kimono completely to them and let them in on what's happening with the business. When we did that and we were small and we were not super well known, it was only a matter of time before the flywheel started spinning. We started getting coverage.
Our founder, Jonathan Coughlin, started speaking and getting published in larger publications and magazines. And all of a sudden, now this little engine that could is starting to be a real threat to players that have been in the space much longer than we were. And I attribute so much of that success and that effectiveness to the relationship dynamics that I learned from Brian Alberti.
Daniel Burstein: So that's a great example with, vendor. But as you talked about, you know, there's also the inner workings of the team. And you mentioned that collaborative creativity sparks breakthrough campaigns. You learn this from working with Maya Smith, the former senior director of creative marketing at tenable, along with Suzanne, Susan Nunzio, the senior director of editorial. So why don't you kind of take us into the room where it happened?
And how did that collaboration go off?
Nick Lagalante: Yeah, for sure, I, I was so lucky working with some of the best marketing and communications professionals of my career at tenable. Tenable has this amazing knack for identifying and hiring incredible talent. And once you're in the mix, they put such an emphasis on that that if you know people, right, if you have folks in your network, they're always looking for great people.
And, and it's a great culture. It's an amazing place to work. And I'm very thankful for the time that I had there. And one of the reasons for that is collaborating with incredible leaders like Maya and Susan very, very different from my background. Susan came from the editorial world, the IT technology publishing world. She was a journalist, she was an editor.
And so she came from, I believe she did a stint at SC magazine. I could be wrong. SC media. So she was really from that cyber trade it trade pub world. She's she had done it for so, so long. One of the best writers, I've ever worked with, one of the best editorial strategists and minds I've ever worked with and really understands the audience.
Because, like I was saying before about PR, you know, the, the media audience for The Right Pub is the same as the customers on the vendor side. And Susan had spent 30 years or so understanding how to craft those messages for those CISOs from those practitioners. And so being able to have her as an in-house leader and, and a peer of mine, you know, we worked on the same team under the same boss.
I learned so much from Susan, from an editorial point of view, what you say, how you say it, can really move a needle for a brand. And she was a terrific partner to work with. And then on to the left of me was Maya Smith, who, I think is the best creative marketing director in security today.
Maya is an amazing, visionary mind. She's an incredible, designer. She's an incredible brand strategist and brand leader, but she's also a marketer, so she's not. And she's an amazing people manager, too. I mean, she she's incredible at building and lean and leading creative teams. And so I'll give you an example of how the three of us came together to make some incredible magic happen.
I had realized very quickly in the first couple of years of working at tenable that these were not only amazing people to learn from, and have spent many decades in the space of building their kind, holding their craft. But they were also highly collaborative. They wanted my opinion. They wanted me involved in what they were doing. Maya would always pull me into projects, even stuff that I wasn't really tasked to work on.
And she would say, hey, what do you think about this? I want your honest opinion. Do you think you think this is we're heading in the right direction. What do you think? Susan was very similar and we started building this sort of collaborative, dynamic between us. And there were other folks on the team like Brian Alberti. He was also in our organization, Maria Nardi, who ran our events also in our organization.
Everyone was very collaborative. But in this particular case, it was a couple of years ago, tenable was on the verge of launching its very first platform. So not just, oh, here's all our products, here's a our bundling of products, but here's our true blue exposure management platform. This is when platform. It was like the hot thing. Everyone was heading into a platform play (a strategic approach where a company builds or leverages a comprehensive system – platform – that integrates various services, tools, or products).
And this was a momentous milestone for tangibles. And it's 20 to 25 years of operations and security to to deliver something so broad, so enterprise. It was a huge deal. And at the time, every division within marketing. So you had corporate marketing and communications, which is where we worked. You had demand Gen, which is essentially revenue marketing, and then you had product marketing.
We're all responsible with coming up with a very detailed strategic plan for the launch of this massive platform, the one of the biggest product launches probably in the company's history. And then the idea is that we would work together to inter stitch those into the global launch of this product internally and externally, well within corporate marketing. Our leader, who, I may talk about later, who's amazing, Michaela Stribling, who was our leader at the time.
She kind of got the ball rolling and for us. But then she had some stuff she was she was working on. She was like, you know what? I need to step away for a few weeks. I trust you pull the plan together, see what you guys think. I trust the team. So the big boss stepped away, and Maya, myself and Susan stepped in to take over and essentially run corporate marketing's portion of this product launch.
And between Maya's creative mind, Susan's editorial vision, my communications and marketing, approach, we pulled our functional teams together across the entire corporate marketing organization, and we developed a plan that was just very intuitive because it didn't have ego. It wasn't like, hey, I did my thing done. We were listening to each other. We were open to each other's critical feedback.
We were getting bottom up feedback from our operating teams, the people that are in the trenches, right, grinding it out, listening to what they think. We made sure everyone's voice was heard, and we came up with a plan that was one of the most collaborative and strategic rollouts at scale that I've done in my career. And I'll never forget, our boss flew back in on the day that we pitched this to the rest of the marketing department and the CMO at the time, she was seeing this for the first time, and she called me up the night before and she's like, are we sure are you 1,000% sure?
Because we get one shot at this, you know, is there anything we could have done differently? And I said, just trust us. I think we got this. And when we pitched it, it was a resounding success. The marketing organization loved it. We left space and gave it breathing room so the product marketers can come in and do their thing.
We made sure that we had space in there, so we were clearly supporting demand gen and revenue gen, and and we went to market and it was one of the most amazing, easy and seamless product launches I've done considering the mass scale. I mean, we're talking global outreach rolled out in like 4050 countries, huge internal outreach, and customer engagement.
I attribute the success of that from the corporate marketing side to the truly collaborative nature of Maya and Susan and their willingness to step out of their egos and link arms and leverage our superpowers together to get this done. And I think we need more of that, because sometimes there's some ego and marketing, some ego in PR. And I think when we put that aside and we say, hey, you know more about this area than me, what do you think we can get so much more done together collaboratively?
With that mindset.
Daniel Burstein: The biggest thing that's helped me in my career is put that ego side. I love that. That's an external campaign. Let's talk about an internal campaign, because you mentioned Michaela Sterling, who was the former chief communications officer and SVP of corporate marketing at tenable. One thing you said you learned from working with Michaela was strategic internal comms and power brand resilience.
So that was how you're doing things externally. What about internally?
Nick Lagalante: Absolutely. But part of what I was hired to do at tenable six years ago was create the company's first internal communications department and function as part of its corporate communications team and mix. Now, I had spent most of my career up until that point, if not my entire career up until that point, honing my skills as an external communications professional, PR leader, marketing and brand professional.
I've done a little bit of internal comms, but I wouldn't say that that was something I was super experienced in. And so when I was initially talking to Michaela about the role, I said, look, I've never worked exclusively in internal comms. I'm not really like an HR person. I've worked closely with those teams. I understand their needs and, I'm a great partner to those departments.
But I'm a marketer and if you're going to hire me, I'm going to run this function like I would any marketing or PR function. I'm going to treat employees with the same respect and, reverence and attention that I would if they were customers, if they were, investors or critical external stakeholders. She loved it. She's like, Nick, I'm not looking to hire just another run of the mill internal comms person.
I want a marketer, a PR person in this role because I think it needs a different approach to make it successful at tenable. And at the time, tenable had maybe gone public a year or two before I joined a meet. You're run rest in peace. Was doing this incredible job, just sort of refreshing the organization, taking it from its legacy operations and injecting the new life and energy and culture into the company.
And they had grown tremendously huge leaps and bounds year over year, adding hundreds and hundreds of new employees year over year. So the company was growing globally, thousands of employees. And it's like, okay, now we need a function to tie all this together and make sure that our employees really understand what's going on. They have the information they need to do their jobs, but they're also aligned on the message on the mission of the of the company.
They understand where our executives head space, head spaces are and what their roles are in driving the company forward so that we're steering the ship as one team. We had a core value called one tenable. That was kind of the driving factor of that idea. So Mikayla hires me not knowing much about internal communications and said, hey, I'm going to teach you some things.
Because she had run internal comms at Google, like right before and then through their IPO. So she had a, a myriad of resources, ideas, and learnings to share with me. And that was really helpful. So she was a great mentor and a great teacher, but at the same time, she stepped outside the box, said, Nick, this is your world.
You run it how you need to run it. You try things, you let me know. Just no surprises. That was her big moniker. No surprises. And, and as a result, we did some really amazing things. We we completely built a new infrastructure around our intranet. We treated it like an external website. We had marketing metrics in place that were never there before.
Clicks, impressions, reach, all of that kind of stuff that you don't always track internally with employees. We, we launched a new, social advocacy platform so employees could share marketing content to their socials, and they became brand ambassadors. We were measuring that. We were completely redefining executive comms. And so we were kind of in on this journey to reshape how internal comms was managed and, executed at tenable.
And we were having great results. And then Covid 19 hit and the pandemic hit. And let me tell you, you want to talk about a into the frying pan, into the fire learning lesson, especially around the internal communications function. That was it. And during that time, I learned truly the business power, the business value of the internal communications as a function, because it's not just a mechanism to share benefits and to instruct employees to do things.
It is really especially during a crisis. It is a way to keep firm hands on the steering wheel of your business, to steer the culture at a time when it can completely drive itself off the rails. And in a global pandemic, in unprecedented circumstances, we needed to make sure that there was business continuity, that we were addressing questions, that we were being transparent, that we were aligning the business because we needed everyone to link arms, hold tight and shoulder through this uncertainty together.
And, and I learned a ton of lessons during that period there and how welcomed the other departments were. HR was an incredible partner to us, welcomed our ideas, welcomed our perspective, and taught us a lot, along the way about the people management organization and how that downstream impacts employees and what challenges they have. We learned a lot from our legal teams and the legal, concerns and challenges with managing a global pandemic and different countries with different laws and different health codes and, different requirements facilities.
What do you do when there's certain countries or states where offices can be open and others where they're not? How do you handle that? How do you manage the politics of it all? And being in the trenches with that great cohort of, of leadership, with Michaela's trust, backing and mentorship taught me more about communications in general, especially internal comms.
And I could have ever learned at a workshop or a classroom. And to this day, I still am a big believer that internal communications is not something that should be ignored. It's not something that should be devalued, but it needs to be addressed probably sooner than later in a company's life cycle. Because at some point, something's going to happen and you're going to need to get your employees aligned and focused on the mission and excited and feeling good about where they are.
And internal comms is one of the key drivers in accomplishing that.
Daniel Burstein: You know, we talk about communications and collaboration. I wonder, is there anything you learned from improv that you applied to all of this? Because I know we've really focused on your cybersecurity career here, but I see, like early in your career, you were a marketing assistant at Bay Area Improv theater. That's right. And I can't help but think, you know, at the end of the day, cyber security, we're all just people.
It's communications. It's collaboration. So I love asking, you know, a lot of my guests have had really interesting backgrounds before marketing. It's always very interesting the way they like, take something they learned there and then apply it into their marketing career. So I'm sure cybersecurity, corporate internal communications, PR, marketing, all this is very different from a little improv theater.
But I wonder, were there any transferable lessons that you later applied?
Nick Lagalante: Oh man, Daniel, what a great, great question. So I grew up in New York City. I am a theater kid at heart. I grew up going to the theater. I grew up performing at my school, local companies, and, I love performing arts and, and that was an amazing and fun artistic outlet for me as a hobby, you know, growing up.
But I also love comedy and making my family laugh, making my friends laugh, and humor is a through line in my life. And, I was attracted to improv because of the on your feet energy, the excitement of that, performance medium, especially from a comedic lens as a young kid and having access to great, training and performances, living in New York City, was just like the icing on the cake.
And so when I was in college, I was super involved in the theater community. I was actually at one point a theater minor in my undergrad at the University of Tampa. And improv was something that I was always involved in, and it was a troupe. It was a it was a functioning theater organization that I was performing in.
But they needed back office help. They needed help, you know, with their marketing and growing their audiences and selling tickets. And, you know, that whole thing and social media was just becoming a thing at this time. This is like 2006, 2007, eight that time frame. And so they hired me to do their marketing. But the at the end of the day, that lesson, or those performing lessons, thinking on your feet, listening to what your fellow players are saying, because improv, like most acting, is reacting to what's happening around you.
If you're too much in your head and you're only thinking about what line comes next or what you might say, that's going to be funny, it could wind up completely derailing the scene and throwing off the whole experience for the audience. And there's a lot of that. That is a parallel to marketing. As marketers, I think that we are very creative and we're we're energy, we're energetic, and we have a lot of good ideas.
But this now goes back to the collaboration piece. If we're too much in our heads and we're too focused on what we have to say, we're not listening enough. We're not reacting enough, we're not being as collaborative improv. You know, the improv that I did was theatrical improv. So you're building a scene with 4 or 5 people on stage improvising it.
You know, every line, every moment versus standup, which is all focused on you and the audience. And, I think the lessons learned about listening, collaborating, knowing when to step in and shine and knowing when to to to boost your fellow players or your colleagues and letting them shine. A lot of those lessons I think I've brought into marketing.
In fact, one of the reasons I became a marketer was because it was this creative element of business where I could take my writing passion, my creativity, passion, my humor, the improv background, and I can actually translate this kind of stuff into into business value. And in fact, some of the guys that founded that troupe, started consulting companies in which they used improv as leadership training for executives.
And it's and you could see a lot of a lot of those companies exist today, and a lot of leadership development companies will use improv games and improv techniques to get executives out of their head, being more collaborative, being more creative. Because there's a, I think a direct transfer, for those skills.
Daniel Burstein: I love that, I love that. All right. Well, if you had to break it down, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?
Nick Lagalante: Number one collaboration? We can't do it alone. And I think that there's this either misconception or sometimes this default where marketers either feel or are made to feel that everything lies in their minds, in their hands, and they have to be miracle workers for a business. But at the end of the day, it's truly about partnerships, learning, listening, collaboration.
I think that allows the marketer to generate the best ideas, to pivot and flex where they need to, and even in really small companies where you might be a marketing team of one, you might be the sole person handling comms, PR, advertising, demand, events, the whole thing. Collaboration is still key because we need to be able to understand a the needs of the business.
So we have to be able to collaborate and talk to and partner with our business partners in the organization, the sales leaders, the finance organization. We have to understand the challenges that HR is facing, trying to, you know, foster, create an environment of of high performance but strong culture, etc.. So collaboration I think is is one key tenant that we need.
And especially right now with market uncertainty, we need more collaboration than ever. As a community and getting out of your ego, putting your listening ear on and realizing that we can make better things together than just me on my own, trying to solve all the problems myself. Number one. Number two. We need to be business people.
And when I say that, I mean we need to truly understand the needs of the business, understand the customer, understand their journey, why they buy, how they buy, what problems they have the pains. Right. Bringing it back to that consultative approach and, and, and how we deliver that product or service to them, that whole experience is part of the marketing mix, in my opinion.
And the more we know about the business, the more we learn about the functions of the business, especially how they relate and impact the customer experience, the better will be, the better equipped will be, to do what we need to do to generate that demand, that attention, that messaging that truly resonates. Hey.
Daniel Burstein: And I'm going, Nick.
Nick Lagalante: No. And I had just one one last point, please. One last point. And I would say the final thing or the final tenant here is innovation. Get out of your head. And every so often learn new things. Always be a student. The first marketing manager leader I ever had. I had an internship again in the theater world, right?
Coming out of undergrad, I kind of was living in this space of discovering marketing, but still being involved in theater. And my first actual marketing job as an intern was a marketing comms associate for Theater Development Fund. It's one of the largest performing arts nonprofits in New York City. The tickets ticket booths get Broadway tickets super cheap. I worked there, for about six months under the tutelage of a gentleman named Bobby Gore.
Robert Gore, but went by Bobby. Brilliant marketer, brilliant businessman, brilliant creative mind, creative strategist. And he taught me something that, I've carried with me my whole career in something that I teach up-and-coming, marketers, PR, comms people and my own teams that I manage. And that is this concept of being a forever student, especially in marketing, technology, media.
Things change by the minute. Things evolve, the landscape evolves. How we reach audiences, how we connect, how we tell stories, how customers are consuming information, making buying decisions and interacting with companies is constantly changing. And I think it's important for us as marketers to make sure that we are also evolving and changing to understand those landscapes and and meet the needs, of the customers in the market head on.
You have a lot of conversations today about AI and ethical, queries around the use of AI, and I have all kinds of thoughts on that that I won't get into, but it's not to say that it should be ignored. We should figure out how to make it work for us and our needs. Do it in a way that's ethical, but also do it in a way that's effective.
It kind of reminds me of when I started my career in marketing. Like I was mentioning, social media was becoming a big thing. And I remember the business owners and executives at the time that kind of thought it was a fad and said, we're not going to get onto this social thing. This is just a fad for college kids.
We don't believe in it. We don't think this is how we're going to sell our products. And the companies that said, you know what we think this is the future. We're not sure where this is going to go, but we're going to give it a shot. There's a stark difference in the success and the longevity of the businesses that embrace this new found technology, this new found communication landscape, and those that were kind of scared of it or didn't understand it, or were too rooted in the older way of doing things.
And so innovation, learning and not being afraid to try different things, especially from our younger, practitioners and professionals who have different skills than we do, we need to be listening and learning all the time and not stuck in our ways. And that's how we stay ahead of the game, and that's how we cut through the noise.
Daniel Burstein: So thanks for sharing your journey with us, Nick, so we can learn from you.
Nick Lagalante: Thank you so much for having me, Danielle.
Daniel Burstein: And thanks to everyone for listening.
Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing for rpa.com and.
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