Episode Description
Key Highlights:
- Role of Marketing at Devo: Exploration of Devo’s data security platform features and their focus on scalability and competitive edge.
- B2B Marketing Challenges in Security: Discussing strategies to balance edgy and authentic messaging and the need for consistent client engagement.
- Defining Leads for Sales Alignment: Emphasizing the importance of a unified understanding of leads to improve sales and marketing coordination.
- Successful Marketing Campaigns: Greg shares a campaign that generated $28 million in pipeline and the importance of focusing on key personas.
- Improving Marketing Coordination: The necessity for a single conductor to manage all aspects of marketing for better effectiveness.
- Account Warming Strategy: Greg’s successful strategy involving weekly reporting and KPIs to monitor campaign effectiveness.
Summary:
In this episode, Greg Aquavela, Director of Marketing at Devo, shares insights on aligning sales and marketing in the data security sector. He discusses the importance of edgy yet authentic messaging, defining leads for better coordination, and the shift from Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach. Greg also highlights a successful campaign that generated a significant pipeline and the value of analyzing closed deals to enhance marketing strategies.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome, welcome to this week's episode. The podcast for B2B marketers. That is anything but boring this week we have Greg Aquavella, Director of Marketing at Devo leads a team focused on all sorts of things, digital, field, ABM, demand.
He's a jack of all trades and runs a team that does all of that. He created and manages what he calls the account intelligence engine, right? And really focuses and aligns with Devo's ABM strategy. So before joining Devo, Greg worked a couple of different places, sales engagement, data analytics and then, really focused on building up demand jet engine.
So Greg, welcome. Good to have you this week.
Greg A: Thanks. Pleasure being, being on.
pharosIQ: Cool. Before we jump in, tell us a little bit about Devo. Yes. Outside of them being a band from the 80s that, that whole thing. When you Google Devo, that's what you get.
Greg A: Yeah, exactly. That's one of the things we got to be careful on Google Ads.
Yeah, so Devo is the data security platform, and so we have a platform that encompasses everything from Sim, SOAR, threat hunting, behavior analytics, and so we do all of that inside of one platform. And so we offer scalability and, ingest at a level that our competitors simply can't. We're cloud native, and we are a really strong data, security provider.
pharosIQ: So interesting point, on the Devo point pharosIQ was historically one of the companies that became pharosIQ was MRP. So I feel your pain, right? Cause anytime you Google MRP, the first 72 things that pops up is manufacturing resource planning or all of the other acronyms that weren't us.
So how do you battle that? When your name is something that is also named something. So Googleable and so generally popular.
Greg A: So luckily, the the, the band is, not recent, not new, so it's not they're coming up all the time.
But honestly, one of the things that, we really stress when we're looking at stuff like that is really like adding, any kind of words. That can go with Devo, like Devo Security or Devo Sim that, are going to pop up more and more. And that's how we get around that a little bit.
And we've been able to do it, pretty good, pretty well.
pharosIQ: It's popping up more and more. I work with a lot of software companies and as people take words and turn them into companies like Clarity or, Vision or, it's the first thing that pops up is like the dictionary definition.
I, a lot of times when I'm researching customers have to type in software or to your point security, and it's just an interesting, there's so many, there's only so many domains available, right? So now we're reaching the point where coming up with company names is really difficult.
Greg A: And so I manage an agency that I didn't know this until we onboarded them, but they have a domain that is.
dot marketing. I didn't know you could do that, which is crazy. And so one of the things that I see all the time, like you mentioned, when you have a really strong, domain where it's like a word that is, like clarity or something like that, or I see what I see more and more as people are searching, like you said, like clarity platform or clarity solution when, whatever it might be.
So yes, pretty well.
pharosIQ: So you're pretty active on LinkedIn as am I which is good. It makes for great conversation. So I'm starting to see social and content coming from the B2B vendor space, trending towards a little bit more unboring, right? So we're having an impact, I think. But especially in the security space where.
Oh, your buyer persona can be somewhat conservative, right? Is there a such thing as like too edgy in B2B, do you think? Is there a level that can be crossed?
Greg A: That's a great question. And it's something that we wrestle with all the time, and it's a base. It's all about finding that balance because you want to be able to catch the eye of the personas that we're going after, which are, security personas, whether it's a, see, so a stock manager or an analyst, you want to make sure you can't you catch their attention.
And stand out, but you don't want to do it in a way that is, that crosses the line, so to speak, and like too edgy. And so we've tried to, find that balance. And I think we're always going to be striving to, get to that, get to that line, but not cross it.
And so I think we're, I think we're getting there. I think it's all about, aligning the messaging with the persona that you're targeting. Because what's going to resonate with an analyst is not going to resonate with a CISO and vice versa. And so as long as, you have a messaging that aligns to certain folks, I think you're going to be okay.
pharosIQ: And I think that the really key factor is authentic, right? I think when You ever have that where someone's trying too hard to be edgy, where it comes off as unedgy because it's fake edgy, and that almost becomes a turnoff, like when if RSA were to come out of their sleeve and all of a sudden be this edgy corporate vibe, people would be like, Whoa, like you've been RSA for 32 years, right?
Insurance ties, buttoned up jackets, you can't all of a sudden be trendy startup RSA,
Greg A: Exactly. And I think we, one of the things that you mentioned too, is authenticity. And that is one of the biggest things that I think people are looking for is that, and, consistency in your brand.
And not to, promote Devo too heavily here. I know we're wanting to talk about some other stuff, but one of the things that, really, makes us, an ally to the SOC is that we have an event that we've been doing for, years, that's called SOC Analyst Appreciation Day.
And what we do is we nominate we have people nominate, analysts in their SOC teams. And it's all about, just giving recognition to some of the, people that might not, have that recognition to. That might not normally see it. And so this has grown in traction.
It's one of the biggest drivers of our brand. And I think when people start to see that they see. Not only are we authentic, but we're staying consistent with our messaging and what we actually are doing. Because it's, we're basically, practicing what we preach essentially.
And I think that's what a lot of people want their companies to look.
pharosIQ: The interesting, Devo and I'm break and I'll talk about it all as much as we'd like, cause it's, there's a lot of interesting things there. I, if I'm, just looking at the software. I'm assuming you have a fairly decently long sales cycle, right?
It's a pretty integrated piece. There's a lot of complications to it. So I get this question a lot and I'd love your, to pick your brain on it. How does a marketer show value short term, right? To execs when you have a 12 month, six to 12, in some cases, 18 month sales cycle, and the revenue is not going to hit until down the road, how do you consistently show value in that situation?
Greg A: It's all what I've learned. That's a great question. I've learned it's all about showing the impact or, making sure that leadership understands the small little catalysts that happen along the way. Because there are so many different touch points. There's so many different.
Conversions that happen throughout the sales cycle that can be really strong indicators. Really good KPIs that your team can measure that will lead up into the sale. And then when you start to get everybody on board with all of these metrics that you're looking at. You can show that short term success
by just showing the, Hey, this person, we have a deal with them right now. The opportunity is open, it's scheduled to close. And let's say, nine months show how we're, what we're doing to actually progress that up, all right. We're doing a small, a small event tailored to them.
We're trying to bring them on and get like a customer, involved in that as well. We show, how many times they're visiting our website. We show. We have demand based so we show the journey throughout the, the whole funnel. So they're, are they engaging with us on LinkedIn?
So it's a matter of rolling up all of those metrics into something that, you can show those little catalysts along the way that, are the leading indicators to, a good sale.
pharosIQ: Yeah. Awesome. And I think I've found, and I work with a lot of the sales side of the house, and a lot of sellers these days, it's about kind of building good habits, right? So like we try to celebrate as many little wins as possible publicly. Yeah. And so whether it be a Slack channel where it was a lot of times, every company has the. The gong bang or the, or the, yeah, the wind say, Hey, woohoo, someone sold something.
But rarely do you see, Hey, Jenny hooked a meeting via cold call yesterday, when you're trying to encourage your team to do more cold calls or, Hey, this template turned into an opportunity when you're trying to get your team to buy into your processes. Like those things, I think, and especially in marketing where you can, just have a regular, I saw a post yesterday on LinkedIn that I loved that.
The person posted that their career changed when they took the time every Friday to send a recap of what marketing did that week to the executive team. Okay, yeah. Just just a half, like a half hour of their life they sat down and they said, we took this meeting, we're working on this, we missed here, and that That just kept, it kept the executive team so bought in to where they were looking forward to the Friday update.
And it was like, sweet, but yeah it's really an interesting vibe. And I've always been fascinated by the stress that comes with shit, we have a, if you have a 12 month sales cycle, if that doesn't close. That's a lot of eggs that went into those baskets. And what happens at the end, if you lose on the end of the side of that,
Greg A: right, and one of the things that you mentioned too, that it's pretty interesting, it's like celebrating the small wins and when you have a long sales cycle at that in whatever company you're working at that's something you really gotta be, cognizant of because, You want to make sure that, you're not only keeping morale up, but you're doing the right things along the way.
And so one of the things that we do as a team with this, with our like account intelligence engine is, anytime something happens around an opportunity or an account that is in an open opportunity, we will send that info over to the sales team to say, Hey, you have an open opportunity with.
They just did something on our website or they just downloaded something they attended, so we're constantly, communicating that out to sales to, making, make sure that, we stay engaged, that they stay engaged and we're trying to deliver the best insights possible. And then in turn, what happens is we'll come up with basically a synopsis of some of that stuff and then relay it, at a higher level to leadership to say, here's what's, here's what's going on at the, intelligence level.
pharosIQ: So you recently posted on LinkedIn that every marketer should ask everyone in every business unit, what a lead is.
And then assuming, and so like your post said, you'll probably get a different answer from everybody. So I'm curious, did you do that? . And if you did, what were the answers? ,
Greg A: they were across the board. Alright goes, it's even crazier if you start to talk about, what.
Lead is from a, ops standpoint. And it's insane. So lead from marketing standpoint is, somebody that potentially downloaded a form, and our model is we don't go after those immediately, we put them into a nurture and try to get them to, fill out a demo essentially.
But another answer that I got. And this, and I asked this question a while ago at Devo. And since then we've changed a few things, but I asked our customer success team, what a lead is to them. And a lead for our customer success team is actually an opportunity at an existing account. And so if you're talking about a lead that is technically an expansion opportunity it's just verbiage that's different.
And so when you try to communicate or have conversations with, maybe a CS CSM about how can we best expand or, what can we do to run like an ABM customer play against an account and they say, Oh, we got this great lead, my team's going to be like, what are you talking about? No, we don't like no, nobody downloaded something recently.
We don't see any signals. And it's as something as simple as like just getting the definitions right across the board are going to just help streamline some more, some, conversations, it's just going to make things smoother. But that was wild because our for a long time our CS team was referring to a lead as.
An opportunity. It's an opportunity to expand, but internally, as the unit, they called it, it's a lead. And so it's getting that, vernacular and just consistent is going to be, it's going to make everybody's lives easier.
pharosIQ: Yeah, the interesting, and again, another post I saw on LinkedIn that there's so much happening right now about the MQL, right?
The death of the MQL and the etc. And my favorite, one of my favorite posts of the year at LinkedIn is that an MQL is really just a contract between all of the different business units on what a lead is. Like it's really like a, just having the conversation to say this, we're all on the same page of exactly what we're going for, because in most cases, sales and marketing alignment is bad and MQLs are dead because marketing thinks an MQL is way different than what sales thinks as well, the CX and way different from the executive team.
And I can't tell you how many companies that conversation never gets had marketing assumes that they're going to go do their MQL thing. Sales assumes that they want people who are ready to buy right away. And that's the only people that will accept. And there's no conversation about a meet in the middle.
And I think that's where that is where. Most of the rubber meets the road from that sales and marketing alignment conversation that's been happening, sir, for the better part of my life.
Greg A: Yeah that's sales and marketing alignment is something that, I've been passionate about since basically day one of my career.
Because, because I always liked being really close to the numbers. Because I always liked, working with the sellers, figuring out how to be, how to grow deals, how to, what's a creative tactic or strategy to get in front of an account. And so by just what I was doing aligned to, the sales side a lot more.
But an MQL is interesting. I'll tell you what we did here at Devo. We, our MQL definition, and if you ask any company what an MQL is, you're going to get a different answer, right? And we know that. We had the definition of an MQL meaning like a meeting was set. Simple as that. Like we have a meeting set.
That's an MQL. Recently we changed, changed that up. And in the sense where We're not looking at MQLs. We don't care. I don't care about MQLs right at the moment. And what I care about is, are we, A, bringing in the right people? And then B, are we bringing them down funnel to like an MQA account?
Like basically, which is a demand basis, version of a, journey stage right before an opportunity. And so in order for an account to become an MQA account, they have to, do a certain amount of things or they have to have a certain amount of engagements with us, whether it's a form fill.
LinkedIn impressions or ad engagements. It could be they attended an event, they were at RSA, things like that. Basically they're moving the entire account down funnel. And so the big thing that we've pivoted as a company in the past, year and a half is we've shifted this mentality and this mindset around, let's stop looking at an MQL because.
Our buying committee is at least 10 people, right? And so if we focus on that individual, we're missing out on so many more, opportunities at this account. And so what we're focusing on is taking really an account approach and saying, all right, is the account at the MQA stage? And if it is, how can we then have these conversations and progress, certain people to the right places.
pharosIQ: Yeah, I like that. I like it's like that, you have that vibe where everybody can feel like an accounts heating up, right? They're engaging with your social more couple of website visits here. It's that vibe. And then you're like, where should we attack and drive from there from a pipeline standpoint?
So awesome. We're flowing through and I could probably talk to you for hours about many more things like. Okay. What are your thoughts on being randomly tagged on LinkedIn, right? Things of that nature. But that's a, that's for the second podcast when you come back and we hang out again, right?
There we go. I want to talk to it and really give you an opportunity to showcase, some unbeatable boring stuff that you've done in your career. So we can inspire the audience on that side. You mentioned Some events stuff you mentioned, you got a whole bunch of things in the hopper.
So if I were to ask you what is one thing that you've done at Devo or in your career that was unbeatable? Boring? What is that campaign? And why do you want to tell them to tell us about it?
Greg A: So I want to tell you about one campaign. And I, the reason why I want to tell you about it is because it generated around 28 million in pipeline.
And it was an amazing campaign. And. What we did is we basically, it was a competitive takeout campaign where we had two different tracks and each track was targeting a different audience, right? And so in each of those tracks, we then overlaid persona level messaging and tried to get in front of the right people at the right time.
This was a test into a one to few type, ABM campaign where the soul. Purpose of this was to really generate net new business for, for the company. And that had, really great results based on, how much opportunity was generated. And the really cool thing around that is we had so much awesome alignment with our sellers, with our, BDR team, with our, RSMs around.
It was not purely focused on, all right, here's a lead go after it. It was, here are the accounts that we're going after. Marketing is going to provide this air coverage at the same time. BDRs are going to, attack this level on the account. RSMs are going to attack this level. And it was this perfectly like.
Joined effort that everybody had a role to play. It was like, almost like an orchestra. And I like to think of me, myself as like the conductor in this is that as cocky as that sounds. But what ended up happening is everyone was in lockstep doing what they should be doing at the right time, whether it was like an event, whether it was a PDR outreach, whether, whatever it was, and it just ended up working out in a way that.
The results didn't lie. We couldn't, and so it spoke volumes to what we did. That was one really cool thing that we did really well. And we're actually in the process of, replicating that in a v2 version that is gonna even better and greater. That's really cool.
Another thing that I'll touch on and it's not necessarily As exciting as an awesome tactic that I think you're probably looking for. But I don't, I just did this recently and I think people should do this more if they're not already doing this is so my team, we did a year and a half look back on all of our closed one deals.
And what we did is we looked at the personas that were associated with every single opportunity. And before we did this exercise, we've done this exercise maybe like once every six months or so. But this time we took it a step deeper and really looked at the personas of what is actually happening and then looked at what each individual did on that opportunity.
And what we found was it took us back a little bit because typically we've all always had two main personas that we go after. It's the CISO, right? And then it's the analysts or the practitioners. And each of those have a different messaging. And what we saw when we did this. The people that actually engage with us a lot and where we can, drive that influence and we can really get into an account and create some buzz.
Is at neither of those levels. It's actually right in the middle. And so what we found is where we're winning the most is when we have that middle sock analyst or the sock manager, excuse me really engaging with us. That's when we can, win and we can really move the needle and drive that drive that influence.
And so I think when people are. Analyzing like the closed one and really looking at where some of the catalysts have happened at the account, what personas have engaged, you can then take those, replicate them, and it'll, help your content team target messaging, create things that are actually going to drive valuable conversations.
And so that's just something that we did recently. That was eyeopening because it was it's changing a lot of what we're doing right now.
pharosIQ: Yeah, two key takeaways there. First love the Conductor, if you will, right? That ev a really great campaigns are always across multiple segments of the business, right?
It requires buy-in from and I've found that whatever I've really hit a campaign. It had an owner, right? Like that, like this specific initiative is all you, right? And that's why events. Tend to work best from an integrated standpoint. Because you can say you own this event and it's not as much a campaign, but it's a thing, so someone like really just owns the shit out of it.
It works with sales to make sure we get people there works with, like it's that and I think I wish that there were more conductors, if you will. Cause it's hard to you have a really strong CMO could do it, but that's a lot of conducting because you're conducting a lot of stuff.
So I think like a. Like reattacking how even how marketing programs and campaigns are done, because right now you have a demand gen person, then you have a field person, and then you have that, and then somebody says we're trying to do this and everybody still just does their own thing.
Hopefully we align in the same segment. But
Greg A: if
pharosIQ: you turn it on its head and said, Hey, Greg, you're in charge of Attacking the SOC manager, right? And your job is to coordinate with all of the different segments of the business to attack that segment for the next nine months. And then you have to report on your it's something that's always frustrated me a bit about how marketing teams are built because we like every piece of data says like these things go really well when someone owns it, but it's rare.
It's rare that someone does.
Greg A: That's I think what we found when we ran that one campaign is I, I was, I owned it, but, there were so many other players involved and it was just a matter of, making sure that, people were doing things, at the right time.
It's almost we were playing, like basketball, everybody, on the court was, supposed to be doing something at the right time. If we were doing a player or doing like a pick and roll, that was something that had to be, coordinated and talked about beforehand.
Not only with marketing or with field, but also with like our sales team. And so having that one person essentially like over oversee and say, okay, you know what now, marketing has, we've tried to like warm this account up from, an ad standpoint or whatever.
All right. Sales, you guys go after them right now. Let's see what you can do and see what you can drive up. And. Reporting on that. What we did is we reported on this campaign on a weekly basis and had certain KPIs that we were trying to hit allowed us to follow those those metrics week over week and see if certain things need needed to be tweaked or, changed and whatnot.
Yeah, it worked well.
pharosIQ: Greg, that was awesome. Great ideas, killer stuff. Good chats. We're going to have to do a round two, I'm telling you, it's just going to have to happen. Cause there's a lot more to talk about. Cause it's just been really fun. So thank you for joining us.
Where can anybody, any of our users find you, find Devo, find the company, all of the above.
Greg A: Yeah. Anybody wants to connect with me, I'm happy to always have conversations reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm relatively active on there and, I start to try to stay relevant a little bit and, keep up with the trends.
And if you want to look at Devo just go to devo. com and, you'll find some really cool stuff around cybersecurity.
pharosIQ: Awesome. Thank you much for those listening. Spotify, Apple Music, wherever you're listening to your podcasts, head over there, subscribe, listen every week and or give us a five star rating.
Every rating gets us higher up on those rankings when B2B marketers are searching for new stuff to reach. I just saw a An article this week about how there is a massive shortage of b2b content from a podcast standpoint, right? So take one day off a week from your true crime listen to some b2b marketing focus.
I mean trust me. I love the true crime Listen to some b2b marketing focused stuff. Listen to us here and We'll hopefully see you again next week Greg. Thank you again. And we'll talk soon. All right,
Greg A: Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Bye
