TOP CMO: Patrick McBride, Beyond Identity - 'The Product-Led Playbook'

Patrick McBride  00:00

Having an eye towards where you want to go and knowing your own gaps and being really thoughtful about how to fill those gaps.

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Ben Kaplan  00:21

This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. This is TOP CMO with me, Ben Kaplan.

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Ben Kaplan  00:29

today I'm chatting with Patrick McBride, Chief Marketing Officer at Beyond Identity, a pioneering cybersecurity company redefining digital security by removing passwords and creating a more secure and efficient business environment. Patrick's career has been marked by significant roles across the cybersecurity marketing spectrum. He has been instrumental in shaping marketing strategies as ZeroFOX launching clarity into the competitive operational technology and ICS cybersecurity sector and leading granting efforts and iSight partners and axiom his journey provides a unique lens into the intersection of technology and marketing. So what strategies has Patrick found most effective in building customer trust in a technology that challenges traditional security methods like passwords? And how does Patrick approach the task of simplifying cybersecurity concepts for a wider audience? Let's find out with Patrick McBride.

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Ben Kaplan  01:26

Patrick, one of the things in terms of your orientation is you have a strong product background, you tend to have a product focus. And I know Beyond Identity, you're thinking now about product lead growth, the sort of fusion of marketing with product for those who are not familiar, what does that mean? And how does that sort of shift or flavor the role of being a CMO?

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Patrick McBride  01:49

It's kind of funny with product led growth, it's one of those almost Rorschach tests, kinds of things, a lot of us are very familiar with it kind of in a business to consumer context, you know, we go into app stores and try products and you know, for a period of time, and maybe subscribe, hit the button. And actually in by in a b2b scenario, there's a couple of different ways that that can manifest itself. One is, it could be the same thing I try, I buy and maybe it's just a, you know, credit card kind of buy and we move on. And there, there really isn't any interaction with the sales team. In our case, and a lot of cases, SAS companies, particularly ones that are focused on enterprise medium to large enterprise, the sales team has to absolutely part of it. So we're looking at product led growth, as are others kind of in the same place that we are as a another channel, if you will, another marker on where we can drive demand and drive leads.

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Ben Kaplan  02:45

And if I was going to summarize it, what I would say in its most simplistic form, is that product lead growth is our enabling and powering your product to do the marketing for you, by virtue of the design of the product that encourages that. And the most simplistic example, I think, from back in the day was I don't know if Patrick, have you ever signed up for like a Hotmail account as days before Gmail, right? Like Hotmail, you got a free email account at the bottom? You know, you sent it out, it said, Do you want your own free email account, sign up, just using the product marketed the product, right? So there's CMOs listening now who are very brand focused CMOs and consumer centric or customer centric, and on the b2b side, if they're like, Hmm, product lead growth? How do I sort of wrap my head around that? How's that a new channel? For me? What would you say? Or what would be your advice? It's potentially

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Patrick McBride  03:33

a new demand channel, but it's also like, if you're gonna do it, right, it permeates all of your thinking. It's not just how do I get new people introduced into the product? So part of that is, what kind of viral loops have I created, if I, you know, if the product, you know, provides some really interesting value is that value, something a report or something else that I can share with other folks with inside my company or externally, you know, in social media and, and others to lead so that you're not dry? You know, if I get one person in, can I get 10 additional people in by that one person? So there's, there's absolutely a demand gen element of it. But there's also a even if you're going to hand you know, at some point that lead that product qualified lead over to a sales team to to help prosecute, have you instrumented that application to understand so that the salesperson understands what they're using, what they're not using, where they're actually seeing the value of the product, what kind of features are using, so you get to engage with the customer in a way that you haven't necessarily engaged with them before you, you get to start at a much higher point of departure, you get to see, you know, what things they've seen value from within the product, and maybe other places that they haven't explored so you can really drive a different kind of conversation. So it can help move, you know, velocity, you know, there's a velocity aspect to it, can I if a traditional lead to MQL to discovery call to, you know, an opportunity and opportunity to close, you know, takes a certain amount of time, can I leverage the product to really not only bring them in but move them further. They're faster, so that when the salesperson actually does get engaged with that lead, is there an opportunity for them to kind of really run with it in ways that they haven't before, it permeates every step of the selling and renewal process. It's not just new business, you know. And in a SaaS business, healthy businesses are renewing, net renewal, net retention of dollars at you know, 120 120 130%. So, is a product also highlighting new features, capabilities that, you know, could be opportunities for upsell, etc, whether they, you know, click the button, and an adds to the contract, or they just use some capability. And you know, the next time around, when you get through some sort of a end cycle with their current contract, and you say, hey, you've got this new functionality you've been trying out, we'd love to have you take advantage of that, etc. So it's, it really just permeates every piece of the business. One

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Ben Kaplan  05:47

aspect of product lead growth that sometimes people don't think about is at its core, it's about having a great customer experience, and one that naturally lends itself to grow. So we can put a lot of like kind of fancy terms on it. But it's like, embedded in your experience itself, is the ability to grow. And you don't really get to grow, you don't earn that, right. Like they're going to tell someone else to refer someone else, usually, unless they have a good experience. Right? Very few people are like, Yes, I had a horrible experience. But I will recommend you, you know, and your net promoter score. So how close should a CMO be to the product team? Do you have to be in lockstep? You got to limit it our number of hours per week? How involved should you be a CMO vary? I

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Patrick McBride  06:32

mean, if you're building out a team, at a minimum, your team has to be very involved, you have to be instrumenting. And it's not just within the, you know, the app, it's the, you know, the pathway that they take to get to the app, you have to have, you know, instrumentation for all that. Where are they coming in? Where are they getting stuck? You make a great point, by the way, it's it's 100%. True, but but I would add to that, not only do they have to have a good experience, if you're going to bring people in and actually convert them into you know, paying customer, they're going to have to have wooden plg terms is the aha moment, can they experience real value within the product with a light lift, if they have to work really, really hard to get to some sort of value, so that they can actually see and recognize how this thing could be valued performing in a larger context, then you kind of failed before you start. So that's like, if you're going to spend any time on the front end, you have to really be deliberative about that. And you have to test on that what is going to provide value is a little bit about eye of the beholder. So I mean, there's, there's a normal thing about going out and talking to those personas, you know, and actually stepping back, you have to have value for a particular persona, you know, part of what you absolutely need to do in product lead growth is be very, very persona oriented. I'm going to provide x value for this kind of persona. That's my assumption, how do I, how do I implement that? How do I test that? How do I decide if it's actually happening? What are the metrics that I'm going to use, etc,

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Ben Kaplan  07:56

I actually think we're we are in the marketing field, we're even closer to realizing that than before. Here's my theory. My theory is that a lot of us as marketers have needed to learn how to demonstrate value sooner. What I mean by that is, come read our white paper, come experience this trial, come to our webinar, whatever it might be, to certain extent, I think, would you agree, Patrick, we've all become content publishers, content publishers, in other words, saying deliver value sooner, so that that's going to attract people to do the things you want them to do? So, as marketers, we've started to think, much more than, say, a decade ago, about how do we generate value for the end audience and your words, the end persona, and I think that parallels, you know, it doesn't stop after sign up or emits their product trial, from their first interaction with us, we deliver value, and we keep delivering value.

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Patrick McBride  08:53

Yeah, the user experience is the first part of that, you know, removing the friction from any of those pathways to doing business with us, or even evaluating is first I mean, don't get in, don't get in their way is rule one, and then actually provide something of real value. And, and this, there's a 10x on that, really, when you think of product lead growth, particularly when you're talking kind of in an enterprise market. And there's a lot of products that are integrated with things and might take a while to set up. You know, so maybe you can't show somebody value of the overall product, you know, can I trace it back to the person the persona that we're talking to do they have a particular problem that they're, you know, that is near and present to them, that you can give them you know, a good taste of early value, where they're willing to then part with their time, effort and hopefully money in the future to continue to take the ride with you, whether that's the ride deeper in your product and experiencing themselves or the, you know, if you if you cross set up with an enterprise selling team, you get the privilege to actually talk to that customer, you know, live and dive in with them and then maybe go through a more enterprise like, selling process. So, in all of those cases, yeah, I mean value value value upfront. But I can't under, you can't underestimate the persona. Typically, in my business we tend to sell to I'm in the cybersecurity business. So we tend to our primary buyer, you know, our budget holder is the chief, typically the Chief Information Security Officer, although right now that's kind of moved up a little bit with with some of the financial headwinds, I mean, some of those decisions are going even higher. But you know, generally, that's our budget holder, that's the person we have to, but that's not likely the person that's going to be hands to keyboard in our product. So the persona is we're talking about are the security argue the people that are going to be the daily users of the product, the administrators are going to be doing it. So figuring out what they're dealing with, and what problem they have is a very different thing than figuring out what a CISO may be having a prop so that they become users and then strong advocates for what you're doing.

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Tom Cain  10:52

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Bill Wise  10:57

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Tom Cain  11:44

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Ben Kaplan  11:52

You know, our team at top agency, we've worked a lot in the cybersecurity industry. And I think one of the things that's interesting about the industry, obviously very, very hot industry. And I think it's instructive for people listening who are in cybersecurity, of course, but also those who are not this one feature of the industry for a lot of players, which is there can be demand generation, led by third party entities and events that quickly affect your demand. And what I mean by that is, it could be an event, an incident, something major that gets everyone like, ooh, that could have happened to us, we need to protect against that. Or it could be things like mandates from Department of Homeland Security, certain definitions of what these threats are. And suddenly that creates a wave of demand, you have to adjust to it. So I'd love to get your insights on within the cybersecurity industry, yes, but also for those externally. How do you think about external forces that affect your demand? And how do you ride that wave, as opposed to getting blindsided by it,

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Patrick McBride  12:51

it's really interesting, you know, there's lots of different things that may be, you know, create some white space for us to kind of operate into or drive opportunity into, you know, you had mentioned, a real example, on the department, homeland security with a new mandate, the product that we do is something called multi factor authentication, a lot of us have used that, you know, in our private lives, it's kind of a big pain in the ass.

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Ben Kaplan  13:11

And it's for people who don't know, I think most people do, but it's like, they're gonna verify who you are, because you logged in, sign up, and then they're gonna text you or give you a code on your app to confirm that was what we're talking about.

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Patrick McBride  13:21

Exactly, or using some sort of an authenticator. And what that, you know, just to kind of pull on the thread a little bit, I'll get to the DHS mandate. The reason to do that was we want to make sure that somebody's getting into our bank account is actually us, not somebody else, or somebody logging into anything where we've gotten, you know, private, critical information. So that's kind of the obvious thing. And we started, you know, and passwords were a big issue. I think a lot of folks, you know, not only do they, you know, I love my passwords that nobody but from a security perspective, they're easy to steal, they get stolen all the time, they get reused. And so this whole MFA was just kind of layering on to the password to make it more secure. The problem is a lot of the things that we've done here to for, you know, with MFA, or what I would call kind of legacy MFA. Worked Okay, way back when, but the attackers know how to get around. And now so therefore, DHS, Department of Homeland Security specifically, you know, one of the agencies inside of that, looking at all the government agencies and figuring out how the bad guys are attempting to and actually breaching, who getting into those agencies, you know, came out with a mandate recently that you can't just have MFA, you have to have phishing resistant MFA. And there's a very technical set of definitions on what that is. But, you know, that opened up a whole new category of you, there's a bunch of legacy MFE players out there, and there are very few that actually provide this level of resistance. How

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Ben Kaplan  14:38

do you jump on that? How fast do you have to move? How do you have your teams sensing it as an opportunity fast enough sometimes with these mandates, it's it may it could just be like a letter or something like that. It can be something else and you gotta realize the you might have a warning of a draft letter before the real lead. How do you think about all of that? Yeah, no, exactly.

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Patrick McBride  14:56

Interesting. You know, sometimes it's a unfunded mandate, we would like you to do that or you should do that, but we're not going to give you funds. In this particular instance, it was a little bit harsher that, you know, the Homeland Security said, Boy, this is a big enough problem A, because two years ago that they were looking at it, you need to have this in place by the end of this year end of 2024. So they gave him a two year fuse, which in in government time, you know, is lightspeed. I mean, nothing happens in two years in the Fed gov. You know, they don't roll over in bed in two years kind of thing. So the answer is, you actually have to jump on it fast and make, you know, and align what you're doing with that mandate. But it's more important, there's a whole education piece of that as well. I mean, you can say the words phishing resistant MFA, what the hell does that actually mean? You know, how do you define that? You know, what is what isn't. So we've had to do a lot of education on there. In fact, in the beginning, we had to do a lot of education, that it's actually important. Now, we're to the point where the white spaces open up enough yet that people are coming in us and saying, Hey, I realized this is important. This is the way the bad guys are getting in. Now I need to do something. So by the way, you did mention the other external thing, a perfect opportunity for us is when you got a mandate, and when somebody has had an incident that traces back to Boy, that was a problem, I could have solved with the thing that you're using, because

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Ben Kaplan  16:14

you're saying maybe multiple external factors layered on here's the mandate, here's an incident, those become the ways to be opportunities,

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Patrick McBride  16:21

the mandate in general, depending on how much teeth it has in it, you know, good to better to best the I had an incident that traces back to that thing, you know, the bad guys did thing X that your product could have prevented. That's the big door? And

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Ben Kaplan  16:35

how do you think about in a space like cybersecurity or anyone that has a technical space? How do you think about jargon, in the space, what I just mean by that is, there's a lot of alphabet soup and acronyms, there's a lot of terms that we could use. And, and actually, sometimes I talk to folks and say, who say that our target audience, our persona, very sophisticated audience, they're fine with the jargon. It's okay, they got it. And if they don't get it, they're not our audience. But then the counterpoint to that, which I which I have sometimes will say, and you can tell me if you agree or disagree is we have a limited amount of attention span of someone, your materials are not the most important thing they're doing today, either at their work or just in their life. And so we've got to simplify this and make it easy if we only have 20% of their attention. And they're glancing at it during a meeting about something else. And they're looking at the one email you sent over, we don't have their full attention. All right. So where do you fall on that spectrum? Is it just like, hey, jargon is part of this business? And it's a qualifier? Or is it? No, we've got to simplify this stuff. Because if people aren't paying attention, they're gonna get lost in it. Even if they're sophisticated folks on

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Patrick McBride  17:39

the we have to simplify it in a way that doesn't dumb it down. You don't have to use a bunch of jargon, and different levels, geyser, you know, kind of going through different levels of exploration and stuff like that, you'll end up having to get pretty technical in that though, it's interesting, my my particular persona, you know, whether it's the Chief Information, budget holder, decision maker guy, or the hands to keyboard guy that really knows a lot of the technical jargon, some of the CISOs do as well, they kind of came up through that ranks, what they hate, they're paid paranoid, right? These guys are paid to be paranoid about everything. They're amazingly

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Ben Kaplan  18:13

fun at parties. I've been to a bunch of cybersecurity parties at RSA conference are actually fun. So they can be a lot of fun. If you are a person like that, I joke, but the reality is,

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Patrick McBride  18:25

what they don't like is a bunch of BS marketing fluff is in their words, I'm, you know, they'll take a couple of Best of or whatever market was, but you better be able to back it up very clearly, with not necessarily jargon. But in very clear, very bright line, what you do better what you don't do. And just make it clear to what they really want is really good facts they want to be if if they take that step, if you hook them, and they take that step to actually go down the path. They don't want to read something that clearly came from a marketing walk, they want to read something that came from some technical source, you know, it might have had some editing for clarity and stuff like that, to your point, but they want the facts. And I think there's that's not just cybersecurity. I think I have an acute case of that because of the kind of buyer that we have. But I think all technical buyers want that they don't want a bunch of the fluff, they want the facts and much more clear set of facts. It does this it does this, here's how it's differentiated why why that matters. And

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Ben Kaplan  19:22

I think one of the things is that you might have I call it like a sort of a reason to read on. And what I mean by that is just that, do you have to get everything like oh, yeah, you gotta get this in 60 seconds, well might be a good elevator pitch. Do you have to make everything that's so that you can't tell the story or the use case? Not necessarily. I mean, you might have some time to explain something that isn't as hard technical, but you've got to get them depending on your persona, to have a reason to read on. So there's something that happens soon enough that says that I don't know you call it an aha moment in our language. We call it something that's simple, simple. Rising and significant, that's simple enough that you get it surprising that Oh, I never thought about it that way significant that it means something. And then the other factor in that is the time to get there. You can't do that in the webinar at minute 35, you've got to figure out how to wait to do it at minute, two. And if you do it there that might buy you another eight minutes to then have another one. And it gives you some time to do some of the other things that you need to do agree or disagree that sort of like reason to read on? Well,

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Patrick McBride  20:28

yeah, you're gaining permission, every couple of minutes to have them continue to listen, or to continue to focus in or just, you know, fade away. And I don't take that just as a marketing thing. That's that's also like initial sales calls. That's further down sales calls when you bring in a large, you know, again, when we get into an enterprise planning situation, you have to be really thoughtful, who's come in, what do they need to hear? That's significant, interesting, different, challenging, even. I mean, there's, in any business, there's a status quo way of doing stuff, right or wrong there is and inertia ends up being a pretty heavy force. So if you want to get somebody to really step back, sometimes you got to be controversial. You know, what your what you're doing today isn't working. Let me show you some stats on why that is not you. But the end what the what we're doing as an industry isn't working. Let's show you real facts, real stats, then I get some permission to dive in and tell you why clearly.

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Tom Cain  21:24

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Tom Cain  21:59

And zombies. Yeah, we just heard from zombies in there. Your vision, our craft, topthoughtleader.com. Listen to the first draft again, back to the show.

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Ben Kaplan  22:16

It's interesting me having done you know, a person who has done probably at this point 1000s of webinars and presentations and keynote addresses. And, and it is interesting to me, and I don't know, if you've had this experience of sometimes people will say, Yeah, I got the promise, give me the solutions. I want the solutions. And it actually flies it happens right after you just did a section on solutions. Like you actually literally just did it. They're like, well, where's the solutions? Give me the solutions. And like, well, actually, I just did it, and you try to simplify it and repeat it. But this notion of have a limited amount of tension from someone, and you've got to keep earning it back. You've got to keep getting it back. And you almost can't be simple enough, because the number of times where like I literally just presented something. And then they asked me Well, where's this? And did you not hear me five minutes ago? And I don't say that? I said good question. When I try to get into another way

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Patrick McBride  23:03

we say that in your head. Just not we are not are

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Ben Kaplan  23:06

just not not verbally Yes. So it's an interesting challenge to me. But to me, that's like such a good discipline, right? Because then you realize, oh, by the way, this person we're talking to is not a dumb person. They're a super smart person. It's just you don't have full mindshare people are impatient. And there's a lot of sources of information. So all of us are content publishers. But heck, there's a lot of content. So that's why I think use word facts or be concrete. Other way I say this data is powerful and storytelling, whether you're creating, whether you're aggregating it, whether you're making it more understandable, that suddenly is a way data is a powerful way to get that attention and keep it

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Patrick McBride  23:44

you know, data is a powerful thing. And you paired it with something else that is this is also super, super important data is powerful, but it's most powerful in a storytelling context, right? If I can, if I can tell you a story about you know, how that happened to what, like in my, in my universe, security, people are really, really interested in actually press writ large, when you start to talk about building a brand and getting on media and things like that. If you can figure out a new way, a bad guy, you know, whether that happens to be a state actor, or Orianna, a Russia etc. Or you know, your garden variety, financial, you know, financially motivated attack or doing ransomware attacks, if there's a new way something's going on, if there's a new tactic that they're using to do something to, you know, a certain group of people, and you can fill in those blanks and tell that story at a top level, and then order into exactly how that happened. You got your attention, they will listen to that. They'll listen to it all the way through, though, might go back and listen again, like how did that really happen? And they might jump in and you mentioned a white paper or report that you have in your webinar, they'll go back and read that stuff. So that's kind of the whenever you can explain what the adversary is doing, particularly if it's a new tactic, and how and to whom, you know, that's a story in and of itself, whether it's to an individual prospect that you're talking to or, or it's to press and trying to drive some media attention on the problem, the company etc. I want

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Ben Kaplan  25:06

to end on one question for you that I think is instructive to a lot of other marketers and CMOs, who, you know, I think there's more and more skill sets involved in a CMO. Now, a Swiss Army knife of skills, you know, you need that corkscrew, as well as you need the little blade and that swiss army knife that you need now. And from your background, I mean, I think people probably can tell listening to like your product, technically oriented, you come from a demand gen background. But there's an side of this that is like, we need to build a brand. I've heard you talk about this one, and even use the term which is an interesting one brand generation, which is actually a more process or technical way to look at it's not just brand building, or your brand platform is brand generation, how do you recommend acquiring some of those? None of us are like a plus practitioners of every aspect of the job. How do you start acquiring those other things?

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Patrick McBride  26:02

Wait a minute. We're not born brand consultants right out of the blue. Some are,

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26:09

some are, but you come from the US. So how do you acquire those other knowledge skills or interface with those on your team? Who do come from that background most effectively? Yeah, given

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Patrick McBride  26:18

you know, I'm a startup CMO. So there's a big chunk of product and product marketing. And then there's a lot of demand generation, if you talk to a lot of the CEOs who want to hire, that's the skill set that they want, I always stop them and say you, if you're gonna get somebody in here that doesn't know that other thing, you're gonna make a mistake. You have to be strong in that area. But you have to have the brand thing, how to get it. I mean, I ran a lot. I mean, there's a lot we can learn from b2c and a b2b business. I mean, if you want to put people that organizations that are way further ahead, and kind of brand building, it's obviously in the b2c community, even though, you know, in the b2b community, we get some unique circumstances what to do, but so I read a lot. But I also for me, I just threw myself into a fire I am, I was at a, at a startup company or restart of a company, really optimizing product, optimizing demand gen, we were going great guns, and I and at the point that, you know, earlier in my career, I knew what I didn't know, I didn't know how to really execute a real brand strategy. And for me, it's not the colors on the as to most markers, not just the colors and the logo and stuff like that, I'm talking about building brand awareness, making it stand for something, giving the brand consumer, some feeling of whatever you want them to have. And, and so I just jumped in, I went to a firm, that first, you know, marketing guy, and was a seven year old firm. And they had a lot of stuff that we could use to get awareness and build brand awareness. And I hired expertise underneath for the brand building part, he went on to be a multi time CMO in his own right. But I drafted off of expertise, I've made a career out of hiring people smarter than me. So I can learn and a team under me can can learn. So that was what I read a lot, I studied it, but I just jumped in, you know, two feet, I knew, you know, this was a company, it was already had some premier top banking clients and stuff like that. But they were known to a small part of the banking industry on the East Coast, doing great in revenue, but they wanted to be have a global presence. Well, in order to do that, we ended up having to build to build out a brand.

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Ben Kaplan  28:13

And I think underrated CMO skill is learning how to learn. And we're living in a time of a lot of changing factors, whether that's technically whether that's culturally whether that's macro economic factors. So being able to adjust is not only a great quality for you see a lot of really successful CEOs that have to take a company from being really small to really big and very different skill set, but also CMOs that are able to wear different hats in different moments for what a company needs. And with the humbleness to not have to be the expert on everything, but can help move things along because of their ability to learn, learn quickly,

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Patrick McBride  28:56

I've found knowing what you don't know is maybe the most important thing you can do in any kind of career path and knowing what you're going to need to know to get to wherever, you know, having an eye towards where you want to go and, and knowing your own gaps. And then being just really thoughtful and inquisitive about how to fill those gaps. Sometimes, you know, I had the opportunity to hire, you know, read in higher and higher doesn't have to be an employee that could be consultative help, that can do there's lots of ways to get there. But then you got to immerse if the book reading doesn't help making the mistakes along the way, and, you know, hopefully not making ones that are, you know, life or career threatening, but you know, making small ones and then not making them again, you know, thinking learning from them and, you know, kind of iteratively you know, going through the process ends up being important or whatever new thing you're learning. So I think yeah, knowing what you don't know, and figuring out how you're going to game that ends up being a pretty good career advice to to anybody

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Ben Kaplan  29:47

and I like that make brilliant mistakes. Brilliant mistakes are ones that are you get a lot of learning. You make them quickly and can adjust from them quickly. They're not life or If you can do them when the stakes aren't so high so that when the stakes are higher, you can exceed so there you go. Patrick McBride CMO Beyond Identity, be willing to learn, make a few brilliant mistakes lean in to product. Thank you so much for joining us on top Sam up.

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Patrick McBride  30:16

Thanks for having done

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Tom Cain  30:21

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