Audience 1st

Customer advocacy and loyalty. Lots of people talk about how important it is. Not many talk about how to actually successfully achieve it in the cybersecurity industry. In this third (and last) session of the CISO + Sellers Mashup Series: Building Relationship Capital, we're going to uncover the methods to turn CISOs into loyal customers, not just within your organization, but throughout your enti...

You’ve established the first connection with a CISO. How do you now retain that relationship? In this second session of the Audience 1st CISO Sellers Mashup Series, Erika Eakins, Dmitriy Sokolovskiy, CISSP, QTE, Carlos Guerrero, Chris Roberts, and Dani Woolf uncover how to keep a valuable bi-directional partnership with CISOs without...well...screwing it up. Resonate with Buyers: Discover how to c...

Shady or unclear outreach techniques, lack of soft skills, buyer difficulty to separate the wheat from the chaff. The more cybersecurity vendors and technologies are created, the less effective communication techniques are and the stronger the disconnection between buyer and seller becomes, making it harder for buyers to trust sellers and purchase new tech. In this first session of the CISO Seller...

Peer to peer and community is so valuable in the cybersecurity industry. Buyers cannot just rely on vendors to tell them their product is “the best thing since sliced bread.” It’s best to ask for advice because buyers’ peers have experience with tools and openly share them. That feedback and those stories helps drive them towards a POC. Because a POC is so limited. Buyers cannot identify the value...

Dani Woolf, Founder and CEO of Audience 1st, brings her marketing expertise to Hacker Valley to talk about what’s broken in the marketer-buyer relationship. Dani’s tried and true methods of cybersecurity marketing involve clear messaging, authentic communication, and building trust in an industry where not trusting anyone is the norm. How can cyber marketers break through the negative stereotypes...

In every episode I record with my guests, I ask them one crucial question: "What do you hate most about the cybersecurity industry?" In this episode, I curated the top answers for you. What's more, you'll get an understanding of what security practitioners, go-to-market teams, and cybersecurity vendors can do to alleviate some of these problems in the industry. Who will you hear from? [00:45] Josh...

Free trials and proofs of value are key factors in deciding whether or not to purchase a cybersecurity solution. But there are concerns with them too. CISOs and security practitioners have to be real smart and careful about which products they allow within their environments. In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with Nick Ryan, Director - Enterprise Security, Governance, Risk, & C...

Everything that happens well  inside your organization during a crisis-level cyberattack is good and dandy. But what you're going to be judged on is how it looks in the media. If you don't control that message and you don't say the things that you really want to tell your customers, then you're going to end up losing so much money. So many problems are going to come from that response more than an...

Etiquette 101 for Vendors Next Year at Black Hat: Lead with a genuine message. Do not make false promises or claims. Brutally honest insights from Leo Cruz, CISO at St. Joseph's School for the Deaf (and my new friend) 😎 I met Leo at Black Hat a couple of weeks ago and we recently chatted about the do's and don'ts at conferences like Black Hat. In this episode of Audience 1st, Leo shares his exper...

After I came back from Black Hat, I had some time to evaluate what vendors were doing on the exhibition floors and map that back to what I’d heard from my previous podcast guest. Some analysis and episode cutting developed a beautiful creature of an episode: The Best of What CISOs Love That Vendors Do. What does that mean? In every episode I ask my guest one critical question: "What's one thing a...

Cybersecurity buyers do not have a lot of time to review long RFPs with hundreds of pages. Instead, provide technical diagrams, high-level explanations, and a few slides that provide a focused message. Buyers are going to read as little as possible to make a decision. No one is going to read a hundred pages. They don't have the time and the capacity. No one can digest that. So cut the b******t and...

I get the fact that you're talking about the offensive framework, but you should really talk about the compliance framework, which a lot of CISOs, unfortunately, have to live in. Show them that too. In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with Gary Hayslip, Global CISO for SoftBank Investment Advisers & SoftBank Group International, about his challenges, goals, what vendors do that p...

In this episode of Audience 1st, Nick digs in deep to understand: • The methods that get me to look at a vendor or solution. • Platforms I trust to learn about new vendors or solutions. • How I learn about and research vendors. • The % I take a demo from marketing promotions. • The % split preference for getting information from marketing versus sales. • The preference for working with one salespe...

I've been interviewing cybersecurity buyers about why and how they buy for 4 months. The tables have turned. Nelson Gilliat, host of The Buyer Centric Revenue Model Podcast asked me how and why I buy. In this episode of Audience 1st, Nick digs in deep to understand: The methods that get me to look at a vendor or solution. Platforms I trust to learn about new vendors or solutions. How I learn about...

Dmitriy’s tenure as a CISO for the last four years has been a drastic transformation in the way he thinks about cybersecurity, specifically risk management, in general, and, more importantly, how that ties into the whole business flow of a company; not a technical entity, but a business in a company. Words like: Business value Return on investment Long term planning …have a very different meaning...

The way you build trust can take you in different directions: Down a destructive path of ruined reputation or up a rewarding road of unlimited relationships and referrals. What do you choose? In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with Joshua Marpet, CEO of MJM Growth, about his challenges, goals, what vendors do that piss him off, and the alternatives. Josh is an ex-cop, ex-fireman...

Building the community, building the right mindset, the hacker mindset is super important. Here's why. Everybody's spread thin and it’s very difficult to train people to free time of security experts. In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with Ferd Hagethorn, Director of Security Services at Planit Testing, about his challenges, goals, what vendors do that piss him off, and the alt...

There are too many people who think that if you fall into jargon and start spouting geek speak that you're going to impress people. In fact, the opposite is true. In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with Jenny Botton, Head of Corporate Information Security at CCL, about her challenges, goals, what vendors do that piss her off, and the alternatives. Jenny is interested in the huma...

“Name a problem in the security world.” That was one loaded question Mike Krass, owner of MKG Marketing and host of “What’s the Problem?” Podcast, asked me. That request got me thinking and sifting through the 101 problems I had listed when prepping for our call. (Remind me to share that with you another time.) Three main issues stand out to me as a marketer and professional in the cybersecurity i...

Today, I'm doing something special because, well, it's my birthday weekend. I wanted to celebrate and gift you with a nice, little package of the best of the worst. What does that mean? Well, in every episode I ask my guest one critical question: What's the worst thing you've experienced from a vendor? So, I've compiled a nice little sh*tlist. What's more, I always ask my guest: What's the alterna...

Even if you never made a sale with somebody, if they brought you 10 people that ended up needing a solution like yours and you were able to help them move their mission forward, it still works out. In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with John Gates, Lead IT Security Operations/Threat Response Analyst at a Fortune 500 company, about his challenges, goals, what vendors do that pis...

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking on the Market-to-Revenue Podcast with Chris Morgan. He asked me 6 questions: * What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue? * What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame? * What are 2 roadblocks that you’re working on now? * What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work? * What are 2 techniques that GTM teams need t...

It is inherent to have successful engagement pre and post-sale, but... Many ghost their customers or pop up every quarter for renewals or expansions. And the consequences of those actions are heavy. In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with Chris Elliot, Director of Corporate Security and Security Operations at SoFi, about his challenges, goals, what vendors do that piss him off,...

What are you doing to efficiently reduce manual processes and save tireless hours of those battling threats behind the keyboard? In this episode, I had a brutally honest conversation with Malia Mason, vCISO and Manager of Cybersecurity, about her challenges, goals, what vendors do that piss her off, and the alternatives. Malia served in the United States Navy as a Sonar Technician Second Class and...

You may not have to articulate that, but ask yourself, "What is the business case? Why would a CISO spend any amount of money with me?" How do you speak in terms that resonate with CISOs? What are their goals and challenges? Have you considered the constraints new CISOs have to undergo in their new roles? When engaging a CISO, have you thought about the tech they have to adopt before pitching to t...