Security Marketing: Customers will tell you how to market to them if you ask them (episode #134)

There are always tough times as you build and grow a startup.

So how do you keep a team going when times are tough? ‘Culture is the glue’ my next guest says.

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Dawn van Hoegaerden, CMO, DefectDojo [https://defectdojo.com/].

She is building out the marketing department at DefectDojo, has three vendors, and recently made her first hire. DefectDojo recently announced a $7 million funding round. It has been downloaded 38 million times.

Lessons from the things she made

• Adaptability creates opportunities
• ‘Soft skills’ are really hard skills
• Customers will tell you how to market to them if you ask them
• Find a mentor who champions your growth
• Culture is the glue
• If you don’t want the job, rethink the path

Discussed in this episode

Let AI Agents Market For You – April 23rd at 2:30 pm EDT

AI Guild [https://join.meclabsai.com/]

Career Adaptability: Marketing can lead to many other things (podcast episode #103) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/career-adaptability]

Marketing Career: What you need to understand at each step of the job seeker’s journey (even if you’re not looking) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/job-seekers-10-step-journey]

Marketing Mentorship: 10 digital marketing lessons your fellow marketers learned from their mentors [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/best-practice/mentorship]

The Prospect’s Perception Gap: How to bridge the gap between the results we want and the results we have [https://meclabs.com/education/Flint-prospects-perception-gap]

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Transcript

Daniel Burstein: Was there anything from kind of the legal industry that you really learned stuck with you in that you've been able to apply to your marketing career? I would.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Say empathy. Because part of my work in the clerk's office, there was paperwork. But I also sometimes work the window. And so, you see people often at the worst days of their lives when they have a criminal case and they're coming to find out what they're in or they're with, you know, their parents with teenagers or family members of people who have really suffered a tragedy.

And so learning how to deal with every aspect of humanity in an empathetic way, I think was a really important lesson.

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 Bernstein, to tell you about today's guest.

Daniel Burstein: There are always tough times as you build and grow a startup. So how do you keep a team going when times are tough? Culture is the glue. My next guest says, joining me now to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories, is Don van Hoegaarden, the CMO of Defacto Jail? Thanks for joining me, Don.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Thanks for having me, Daniel. Happy to be here.

Daniel Burstein: Okay, so let's take a quick look at Don's background before I jump into some beer stories. But so you know what I'm talking to. She started as a public relations specialist at Oracle. She's been a manager of distribution partnerships for Infosys, senior director of marketing at Whitehat security, senior director of corporate marketing at Avast. Many more roles that I won't get into.

But for the past year, she's been at Defect Dojo. Defect dojo recently announced a $7 million funding round, and it has been downloaded 38 million times. But it's still in startup phase. So Dawn is building out the marketing department. She currently has three vendors and recently made her first hire. Don, what is your day like as CMO?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, I decided to to talk to you a little bit about when you say the typical day at a startup, there's rarely a typical day. So I just took today for an example of, was working, on strategy for our open source community and how to better engage and communicate with them. I approve some web new website designs, had a meeting with the PR agency, was sourcing remote control F1 cars for an event that we're having in, a couple of months and made Fedex shipping labels for an event that we're doing.

So that is the glamor of a of a startup CMO, the president.

Daniel Burstein: And we're still early afternoon and we still get to do this great podcast. So there's there's much more in your day. Okay, I love it. That is the most specific answer I've gotten. I appreciate that. Right. Well, let's take a look at some of the lessons we can wring out of your career. For our listeners, I like to say never been in another industry.

I've never been a podiatrist or an actuary or something. But we make things in marketing and that's that's a really fun thing we get to do. But your career actually didn't start in marketing. And so your first lesson was adaptability creates opportunities. So how did you learn this lesson?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, after I got out of college, I really thought I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. I had friends in that field. I liked the idea of being an advocate for people. And then I went to work in a courthouse and hang out with a bunch of criminal defense attorneys and realized that that path was not going to be one that I really enjoyed.

I still really respect them and the advocacy that they do for people. It just wasn't the life that I thought was cut out for me. And so I left that job and got a temp job at an analyst firm and was actually just answering the phones. And while someone was on maternity leave and really got interested in the work that they were doing, and it was an early, this is early 90s, research firm and that at the time they compete with Gartner and met a group which was a big firm at the time as well.

And it was kind of a scrappy start up analyst firm. And they liked me and I liked them. And I was curious about what they were doing. So they actually hired me to be a junior analyst in the document management group at the company. And so I started doing research about document management, which at that time was a lot of file management systems.

And how can we replace paper file cabinets.

Daniel Burstein: So I'll tell you, I've seen Law and Order, and that sounds a lot more exciting than document management research file cabinets. What about it? Were you like, yes, this is what I want to be doing.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, I think what it was really interesting about it was it was new and every day was different. And crime is not that new. And it's really a grind. The work behind the, you know, ten minute courtroom sessions in Law and order is grueling and difficult and not very exciting. There's a lot of procedure that goes into making cases for criminal defense.

So for me, that part of the work wasn't that interesting. But to be and you have to remember, this is a time when replacing file cabinets was very new and exciting and that you could scan these papers and they weren't cluttering up your office anymore. And there were people even then talking about AI and the precursor to what we think of as AI is now.

And so there were just all these young, really interesting people working on technology, which is not something that I had ever seen myself going into, but I got excited, by the energy and what they were doing.

Daniel Burstein: Marketing in tech is an exciting field, but okay, so is there anything you learned from your time in the legal industry that you've been able to apply to your marketing career? Because, for example, when I interviewed Melinda maki, the chief Marketing officer of Prosper Marketplace, one of her lesson was be open to where your path takes you, kind of similar thing.

And she started as a journalist, and she talked about learning a valuable lesson about accuracy when she lost a full letter grade after a night right along with the police, and she spelled the name of the police station wrong, and, you know, but that really paid off as she went into the financial industry. Accuracy was accuracy was so important.

So, so many marketers I talk to, they start in different industries and so they make that shift. But, you know, sometimes there's something from that industry still we can bring into this industry and learn. So I wonder, was there anything I know we've talked about the negatives of it, but was there anything from kind of the legal industry that, hey, you really learned and stuck with you and that you've been able to apply to your marketing career?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: I would say empathy, because part of my work in the clerk's office, there was paperwork, but I also sometimes work the window. And so, you see people often at the worst days of their lives when they have a criminal case and they're coming to find out what courtroom they're in or they're with, you know, their parents with teenagers or family members of people who have really suffered a tragedy.

And so learning how to deal with every aspect of humanity in an empathetic way, I think was a really important lesson that you can apply across any career.

Daniel Burstein: Well, speaking of empathy, you said that soft skills are really hard skills. So what do you mean by that? And tell us a story. How did you learn that in your career?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, when I first started out in cybersecurity and I've been in cybersecurity for quite a while now, I was a little intimidated because these are the people I was working with, were really, really intelligent on the cutting edge. I worked in startups on the cutting edge of cybersecurity technology. Oftentimes, I didn't understand what they were saying. And then but I was tasked with making it meaningful.

And so what I learned is that my ability or I was in the same boat basically as a lot of the customers they were serving. And so my ability to translate what they were creating into something that was consumable by their audience, their target audience was actually really important, and it was really difficult. So when we talk about ourselves as marketers and communications people as having soft skills, they're actually really, really hard skills to be an expert and be good at.

And what I learned is that the the founders and CEOs that I worked for really did appreciate my ability to do that translation and help us grow the company, because you can have the most fantastic technology in the world, but if you can't communicate what it does and the value that it brings to the customer, you don't have a business.

And so I'd just like to see us create parity between the skill sets. No skill set is better than another. Not one is not hard and one's not soft. But we're all equally valuable to the mission.

Daniel Burstein: Do you have an example of how you use those soft skills to to help a CEO or founder or company, kind of just discover that, discover how to better serve a customer because. So for example, I, we used to do value proposition workshops. We still do from time to time. And we were doing one with a company. They had this patented technology.

It was very impressive, very awesome. And at one point, while we're doing it, because, you know, when we're doing a value proposition workshop, we're trying to, like you said, empathy. We're trying to kind of put ourselves in the customer's shoes, you know, for for that company, for that and really understand, okay, what is the value here? Why would they choose this over something else.

And so the CTO, who understandably like founders, I mean invested money, invested time, invested their life in this product, that they see the product very differently. Right. And so at one point we're trying to do this. You stand up and says, hey, I want you to understand one thing. Every other product in our industry is a bicycle, but ours we've got is a Lamborghini.

And so what I said to him, just to, you know, kind of challenge to help you understand for the customer point of view. I said, well, look around at the world. People are selling a lot more bicycles and Lamborghinis, you know, I mean, like, you don't always need a Lamborghini. And so like, let's get into and understand, like, why does a customer need this product?

I think that kind of helped understand that. I think to your point, technology itself doesn't do anything. It doesn't sell anything. It doesn't solve problems, it doesn't make money. It's the perception of value of that technology, because that's how you get users and adoption of revenue. So Don, can you think of any, any specific examples, maybe from your career where you use those soft skills to kind of help the more quote unquote hard school folks in the company understand that?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: I think one of the things that I was really proud of, that we did when I was at Whitehat security and I was there for almost nine years in the early days, there were probably 12 of us, and I had come from a PR background and I said, we really need to get PR for our company. We really need to get Jeremiah Grossman, who was our founder and CTO out there, because he's he's young and he's bright, and he he has a great way of distilling some of these concepts himself.

And then I also said this was early days of SAS as well. I said, we have all these statistics and we can really see what the problems are at companies across a whole array of industries and company sizes. We should make a report about this now. Nowadays everyone's got a statistics report, but at the time and application security, there wasn't a statistics report.

So we created this stats report. Jeremiah started a whole PR campaign really became the go to person for application security incidents. People started to rely on our report. It really made our company look bigger than it was and attracted a lot of people to our company, and it had nothing to do necessarily with our technology. But we were providing information that let people know that there actually was a problem.

A lot of other people have your problem, and yes, we can help you solve it, and we have experts here who really understand your issues.

Daniel Burstein: Exactly. Because it doesn't matter how good the technology is until people make that kind of decision in their minds, let me also ask you, when it comes to soft skills, do you have any examples of how you've built relationships that would open doors to new opportunities in your career? Because when I've written about job hunting, I look at it as a funnel.

It's like a job seekers journey, right? And one of the key steps is networking, right? And we know that when we're when we're looking for a job, we know that when we don't have a job, when we do the job, sometimes you overlook it. And one of the things that just really impressed me about your LinkedIn, I only read a few of your roles.

You have been in this career a long time. You have had many impressive roles, and so I think there's got to be something behind the scenes that's not on the LinkedIn with your soft skills, and I would think networking is a part of that. So do you have any examples or any advice on how you've been able to do that?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: It's it's funny because I never think of myself as a networker per se, but I do build lasting relationships with people, which I guess you could say is networking. But it's it's it's never intentional to be networking with people. But I find it every job that I've had, I find people that I have a connection with and I would say the most important person.

And we may talk about this a little bit later in my career, definitely is Stephanie Fone, who was the CEO of white House security. I actually met her when I was working at infosec, and she was a consultant there at the time, and I was working there, and we we hit it off and she left. And then probably a year or so later, contacted me to come work at this startup, called Security Focus.

And I had no experience in information security, but I was open to learn. She was open to give me a chance, and I, I was doing business development there, which is also something I had never done. But I went in, exceeded my targets and went to see the CEO of that company that I would make my target and if I did, because we didn't have bonuses, I said, I want to go on a trip.

And he said, okay, if you do it, you can go on a trip. And so and it was December 29th, I hit my target and the next year I went to Mexico. So that was great. But the relationship I built with Stephanie, I've worked with her now at five startups and having her mentorship and leadership and her openness to giving me roles, maybe where I, I wasn't even sure I could do them.

But we had built a relationship and she trusted me and believed, and I was open enough and adaptable enough to say, sure, I'll do business development, sure I'll do sales, I'll do marketing whatever the company needs and that has resulted, I think, in me building maybe a more rounded body of experience than some marketers so that I really, I feel like at this point I understand the customer because I've sold to them.

I understand partners because I've done business there, and I understand marketing because I've done that for a long time as well.

Daniel Burstein: All right, Don, here's another lesson you mentioned. You say customers will tell you how to market to them if you ask them. So tell me the story. How did you learn this?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, as I as I said, we're a small startup, so we have limited resources. We're trying to put on as many events as possible, create as much collateral as possible. But we really were curious about what is really resonating with the customers. And when my new hire came in in January and really started digging into the metrics, it really gave us a great insight into what our customers want for marketing, and that is case studies and office hours, which are sessions that we have that they get to talk one on one with our co-founder and CTO, ask him any questions they want in an open environment, and that includes our open source customers who who

don't pay for support. They loved our new pricing page, which gave them a lot of detail, and they love going to the product page. You could tell they don't care about the home page, really, even though we spend a lot of time making that beautiful and informative, these are people with limited time themselves and limited resources, so they want to get to the meat of can you solve my problem and how much is it going to cost me?

And that is my takeaway is the the collateral I create, the events I create, need to focus on how do I solve your problem and can I give you value to solve that problem.

Daniel Burstein: Now, what do you do to ultimately communicate that to sales? I mean, do you speak specifically to customers to get some of that directly from the customer as well? Surveys, AB testing or and now I tell you why I ask because, you know, something I see from salespeople is, you know, when something doesn't sell, they can often blame marketing because it's not like you know, because they talk to the customer that, well, the customer is not going to say, I didn't buy because of you.

You're a bad sales rep. You know, so they've got a very skewed view there. Now. We'll see. In fairness, I've worked with a competitive sales office before. There can be super rich information when you're in a bake off specifically, like when they're in a bake off and they're seeing, okay, there's a lot of information that you can understand versus your competitors, but other than that, you know, the sales person, you know, it's just a natural human thing.

We know what to tell the salesperson. Well, I didn't like what you did or this or that. And so, you know, they blame something else. So but sales has that leverage of like I'm talking to customers every day. So is there anything I don't know AB testing, surveys, voice of the customer going to conferences like like what do you do to kind of get that information?

And you can also communicate to sales? Hey, it's not necessarily that other sales sheet. Here's, here's what they're telling us.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Right. Well, we do go to a lot of events and I talk I actually go to many of our events as well as the salespeople and one of my favorite things to do is to talk to customers. I'll also just do random customer calls. A lot of times the impetus for the call is, will you do a case study for us?

But I get to understand why they bought what they're buying process is. And sometimes you get the case study, sometimes you don't. But I get insight into their buying process and I can go back to those salespeople. And because of the metrics that we've put in place, I can see how many people go to the office hour sessions versus a more high level thought leadership type webinar.

I can see how many people go to the pricing page or the contact us page versus the home page, or the news page. I can see on YouTube that they're viewing the case study videos and the deep dive tech videos more than they're viewing some of the other webinar videos. And so I can go to the salespeople. And so they say to me, I need x, y, z.

I can say, well, actually we need more of ABC because ABC is what the customers are really engaging with and how can we get more of this type of contact content? Because I think especially over the last few years, I've just seen more and there's so much noise that more and more customers really want to trust the vendors that the product does what it says it's going to do, that they're getting value and that their peers who have used it give it a thumbs up.

And so that's where I try to focus my efforts.

Daniel Burstein: I kind of bash sales now I feel bad. So let me ask to you mentioned empathy before. Is there anything you specifically done your career to work with sales to help sales? Because I know you've mentioned you've been in sales in your career. So in many, you know, B2B organizations, I mean, even B2C organizations with a complex sale, we talk about that importance of sales, marketing, alignment.

And I've definitely heard the differences and the interviews I've done of, okay, when there's kind of more of like a battle between sales versus, hey, we're going and we're marching together. So in your role as a marketer, Don, like what your career have you done to then, you know, help sales get to where they need to be? Obviously you're doing all that marketing work, right?

But what have you done to kind of enable them and help the actual sales reps?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, I think the first thing is how you view marketing as a marketer. And so especially in the startup environment, everybody's job is sales enablement because we are trying to build a business and get revenue. So I really see my department as an engine for sales. And I think that that instantly builds a rapport with the sales leader, that you're not going in to be an antagonist.

And, you know, there can be the perception that you're just going out to spend a lot of money on branding, but you're not helping me, build revenue. So it's very important for me to sit down with the sales leader. What are your goals? How can we help you achieve them? We are partners in this and take that approach.

And then, I always ask them when we're making the event schedule, what events would you like to see? We may not do all of them, because I may have data that shows that those aren't good events, but I want them to feel included and that they're part of the decision making and that I'm not doing everything in marketing with the exclusion of sales so that I'm not I'm not dictating to them a program that they don't think is valuable.

I want them to have buy in on the programs that we execute well.

Daniel Burstein: The relationship with sales is just one of the relationships we have in our careers. And then the second half of how we made it marketing, we take a look at some of the lessons Don learned from some of those people. She collaborated with. But first I should mention that the How I Made It in Marketing podcast is underwritten by MC labs.

I the parent company marketing Sherpa. You can get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry in our AI Guild and a community to collaborate with. Grab your free three month scholarship to the AI Guild that join that MC labs ai.com that's joined MC labs ai.com to get going in artificial intelligence. All right. Let's take a look at now some of the lessons from some of the people you collaborated with.

You mentioned Stephanie phone before. She's a CEO and board member. You said you learned from her to find a mentor who champions your growth. How did you find Stephanie? How did you find her as a mentor?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, as I, I said, we were working together at infosec. She was a contractor. I was in, a very junior marketing role there. I'd actually been working at CNN interactive, and my boss there became the CEO of infosec, and he asked me to come out. And so I ended up moving to California and working with him there.

And I met Stephanie, and she was just a really.

An interesting person. She had also transitioned into tech from a finance background, so she had been in private equity. So we kind of had that commonality of moving into tech from a different industry. And. We just we just hit it off. She gave me a lot of good advice in my role there and and how to navigate people in the tech industry, which was still fairly new to me.

And when she moved on, we just we stayed connected and it's an it's you can feel when someone really is interested in you. And she always kept in touch. And then when she had a role open, she gave it to me and I should say we've now, she's it would not be an understatement to say that she's changed the course of my life because I've worked with her at five different startups, and grown to different positions and all of those and all five of them had positive exits.

So. And on almost every level, she's changed my life and put me in the position I am to be CMO at de Facto. Jo, today, I feel confident that without her support in those early days, I'm not sure that I would be where I am.

Daniel Burstein: Well, that's a beautiful relationship and a beautiful thing to have in your career. So let me ask you. You say she changed your life. What was a specific lesson that phone taught you and how did you implement it in your career? For example, when I wrote an article about what lessons marketers learned from their mentors, one of my favorites always stuck with me was challenge.

The obvious, right? Because, I mean, that's a good lesson. I like it, but also it's like you can't hear that lesson from everyone. You know what I mean? You can't hear that. Obviously, you got to hear that from someone who's mentoring you that you really trust to push it. So I just wonder when you talk about, I mean, this is such you know, it's not just business.

This is life, right? That's a that is a beautiful life relationship. I wonder what's some what's a really good lesson that phone taught you that you were then able to implement in your career?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, I think one thing that she's taught me, and I think it's her finance background that has helped us, is. That sometimes the the best thing isn't the bright, shiny object. So and I mean that to say, a lot of the technology I work in is not super sexy. It's not, you know, on time magazine, it's not there.

But every company needs it. And it's a bread and butter for many industries. And so don't be swayed by the bright, shiny objects. And because a lot of those startups, especially because I almost exclusively work at startups, they will crash and burn. And that fiscal conservatism in a startup is not a bad thing. And and we were growing a lot of these startups in the, you know, late 90s, early 2000.

And then it kind of happened again in the mid 2000 where, you know, there were the Googles in the Facebooks and all the games in the cafeterias and, you know, you're sitting in, a small office with five people, but. Not being distracted, staying focused. Those companies. Can grow and be really, really successful if you stay the course and you don't start spending money like water.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's talk about that. Not being the bright shiny object for cyber security specifically. Like do you have any examples or anything you've learned on how to communicate the value of cybersecurity and how to cut through the noise to an audience? Because not being the bright, shiny object with cyber security that the big challenges I'd worked a bit earlier in my career, and now we get, members of the marketing ship audience, you know, show me the work.

We try to coach them on it, and I see a commonality. I see, I mean, back then, and that was maybe 20 years ago to today. It's still here's a bunch of scary statistics. By our thing, I mean that that is a common thing we see. And I like to think we've also had a, you know, life insurance marketing.

Sure. But we cover every industry and it kind of reminds me of life insurance, where it's like, you know, you need it, but but really getting someone's attention when you're marketing life insurance actually is difficult. So with life insurance, the upside that the thing you have is life events, right? You have a baby, you get married sometimes, okay.

You're going to make that shift and do it. With cybersecurity, the difficulty is sometimes a new regulation comes out and that's helpful or whatever that is. But a lot of times it's just, oh, no, no, it's too late. And so one thing I, you know, I I've seen is cybersecurity is, you know, line item 43. Yes. It's something that the customer wants to do, but it's number 43.

And you know what? They want to run their business and they want to make the call. They want to make shiny things right. And then all of a sudden when obviously it hits, then it's number one, the hot pot and fire burning thing. So how do you communicate that message without just scary statistics or FUD or, or is that the only way to sell the value of cybersecurity?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: I, I don't believe it's the only way. I don't like to sell it that way because. I don't think it's really authentic. Yes, there is a possibility you will be hacked. Yes, boards and CEOs are looking at that more. But there's also a business value to being preventative with cyber security and also getting your dev teams and your security teams together and making your operations just flow more smoothly and not having to worry about the big scary event.

And so for me, it's less about the boogeyman coming to get you. I mean, you see a lot of cybersecurity as there's always a guy in the dark hoodie, right?

Daniel Burstein: Yes, exactly. It's true. Hamburger.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Yeah. Some I you know, what about light? What about outcomes? What about how much better your productivity is going to be if you're not, for example, the company I'm working at now, we help you to streamline your vulnerability management process. Right. So you're we're getting rid of all those duplications. You're getting rid of false, false positives that you might deliver to your dev people, and then they're mad at you.

So you're streamlining your business operations, which makes everything more effective. And by the way, your security is also better. And you can report to your board and your CEO results that help them with auditing and compliance. But you're also taking care of the business. And that's a much happier story than the boogeyman is coming to get you. Because he might not come, he might not come.

But you still need to have this baseline in place.

Daniel Burstein: So is one of the things you're talking about governance, like the idea that you generally want to be a better run company because, you know, one analogy, I I've seen this in the ESG space, which, you know, politics are what they are, falls into favor, falls out of favor. But the big argument I've seen for ESG, aside from maybe the moral one, is that companies that are good with ESG are generally well-run companies and will be better investments because of that.

So that kind of the approach here, like, well, governance, it's generally being a better run company. And yes, part of that is security, but it's not the only thing.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, I think and I think it is across the board and operations, if you're a better run company, you're less likely to be hacked because you're looking across your company at every, every aspect of it and everything that's going on. And being more secure will just help you in almost every way, because a lot of security incidents happen.

The Sony have, which was several years ago, but there are like marketing sites that are left hanging out there, people whose emails never turn their the silliest, silliest things that happen. So if you're well run and you're managing your security across the board, you're not likely to be impacted by things like that or even. By the also on the other and by the big things that happen because you've taken care of everything upfront.

And I think our customers and customers at other companies where I worked, I've had customers who want to know everything because they want to fix everything, even if they it's impossible to do so. And I've had customers who get the reports and then they they want to turn it off because they don't want to know anymore, you know, which company do you want to do business with?

Right.

Daniel Burstein: Exactly. I think that also gets to kind of the culture of the company. And like you were talking about two there's the shiny object cultures, whatever the Google where they got the bikes and the cafeterias and everything. It's all for that culture. But there's different cultures at different startups like you mentioned, some of sometimes the smaller conservative cultures you mentioned.

You learn that culture is the glue and you learn this from, seen in Aaron, the co-founder and CEO of Nova. So how did you learn this lesson? Culture is the glue.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: So on is he has a really interesting background. He came to this country from Turkey many years ago. Met him, when he was CEO of Remote and Slide where I worked. So in cybersecurity.

Small scrappy teams, I would say culture was number one for him. So when you have a company of 15 to 20 people, big egos don't really help. And there are a lot of companies that I've worked, where bad behavior is excused because someone is brilliant. Sinan had the opposite view that everyone has to be respected and treated as an individual and an important part of the community of our company, and he would he would show that he was respectful to everyone and every role in the company.

And as a startup, you face tough times you know you don't have necessarily. I'm not talking about the $100 million startups, but when you're in a seed stage startup, you have to make hard decisions about staffing, about what events you can go to. And there's marketing that can sometimes cut your budget. Sometimes people have to be like, oh, but you have a culture where you're all on the same mission and you make it fun.

He he's great at thinking up fun activities, you know, and having virtual Christmas parties and even to this day, I went to Portugal. One of our dev teams was in Portugal, on a vacation. I haven't worked with those folks and I don't know, ten years organized an outing. We went on a food tour. That's culture and that's bonding with people.

And you can't. You get much more out of people when they feel like they're part of something. And when they feel like the culture includes them, because there's a lot of people make a lot of tech grows and bad environments and tech companies, and where some people definitely stand out and other people are excluded. And I think when you get everyone on the same mission and everyone feels included.

You're so much more powerful as an organization because even when the tough times come and you're not sure when you're going to get your next funding, you're all working as hard as you can together to get the outcomes that you want. And his startups have also had good exits, so.

Daniel Burstein: Do you have any specific examples of anything you've done as a marketer to help build a culture in a company? Because when you talk about those small startups like, you know, yes, in the big $100 million startup stairs, the people operations department and the robust HR and the internal communications and all of that. But, you know, from my experience being when you're in a smaller company, being as Markos, we talked earlier about soft skills where you're seeing as having the soft skills and you got to know this stuff too and figure stuff out.

Right. So one thing I would do is, you know, I would help the HR department write the job postings and job openings because that's going to really change the culture of the company, the people you bring in. And to me, having them written in the right, not like some boring, bland whatever, but having them written with the like, the funding culture of the company.

We're going to bring in the right people. And even though, like obviously writing job postings isn't officially the job of marketer, but but as a marketer, small company, you've any specific examples of here's something I did to help the culture in a company, because I'm the one with those soft skills, supposedly communication skills.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, I did so when we were at, New Vector, which is the last startup I worked out with Stephanie, and that was during Covid. So nobody was really traveling anywhere. You couldn't go to the office. So like, we need to have a holiday party. And we usually had a regular like, everyone would have a physical holiday parties.

We didn't have a holiday party like, oh, that's not going to be fun. Well, so I found I, you know, I found a company that actually did trivia games online. And so everybody and we did, we ended up doing a white elephant party online, and everybody had their gifts in Amazon so you could send it to the person afterwards.

But it was it was actually really, really fun. People thought it wasn't going to be fun. At another company I worked out for our company anniversary as an employee activation. We did company trivia for. I think there were probably 500 people on the call. Because the company had been around for 30 years and had acquired data, acquired a startup I worked for.

But we you know, we made the questions all about the company and people got to play. And we, we had a birthday cake contest for the company. So employees and this was announced during the, trivia game, the winner. We challenged the company to make a cake for services 30th birthday and probably about 20 entrants. They had to make the cake, take a picture of it, and then the winner got to take it into the we baked it and took it into the office and had a champagne party and got their, you know, picture and social media.

And it was really fun.

Daniel Burstein: Was it an open source cake? Was it just like, here's the ingredients and you build it? Was it you put together.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: You know, people? It was interesting because it was a global company. So we got a lot of cakes from different cultures, which was which was fun too. So we had the guy who won was actually British. So I think he was really a shoo in for, I think he had actually tried out for the Great British Baking Show.

Daniel Burstein: Oh that's awesome.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: So his was really nice. But we had, kind of more traditional, I think there was some kind of traditional Spanish cake. There was a southern like Southern American kind of pound cake thing. So it was just you and you get to learn more about people and, and that's fun.

Daniel Burstein: So speaking of culture, you know, sometimes we feel like we don't want to work in a culture where we've got to look over our shoulder because someone is gunning for our job. But you said one of your big lessons was, if you don't want the job, rethink the path. And you said, you learn this from Priscilla Emery, the owner of Enterprise Advisors, also known as HCM scope, was a former analyst at New Science Associates, which was acquired by Gartner.

So how did you learn this from Priscilla? If you don't want the job, rethink the path.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, as we mentioned earlier in our conversation, I was really excited when I started, New Science and I would transition from, the legal world and as I started, I have probably a year or two. I wasn't sure that this was actually going to be the thing for me. And what I, what I realized is my favorite part of the job was when tech firms would come in with their PR agencies and brief us about their technology.

And I really got along well with all of the PR people who would come in for that job. Seems really, really fun. And it's still in tech, but they're traveling around in their communicating about these new products. That seems cool and I think at some point, Priscilla noticed that I was not as enthusiastic as I had been. And and we had one of our reviews.

And she said to me, quite honestly, and I appreciated the candor. She said, you know, if you don't want to be me, then maybe this isn't the career for you. And she was the vice president of our document management practice and.

At first I was a little taken aback, and I thought, well, why do I have to be you? But then, as I thought about it. I said, that's really actually quite good advice, because if you're if you have aspirations and ambition, you don't want to stay in the same job you're in. But if the path of the job you're in is this person's job like it was Priscilla's job to be VP of the service, was that where I saw myself?

Not really. And it's advice that I've passed on to other people on my teams at different points in time and it's actually fun because I think it's kind of a relief when you tell people that sometimes. And I've had people on teams who have left tech and gone on to nursing school, a completely different industry, but it's almost as if they have to be given permission because it's a good job and it's a good path.

And of course, you want, you know, you want to be CMO someday, but it's not for everyone.

Daniel Burstein: Yes, I love that advice because we should always be trying to serve the people we work with. We should be serving our customers all that. But one thing I like to do and how I made it marketing is pick the other side just to really understand these ideas, beat them up. So what, as a leader, should we do to help our teams see the value of their current jobs and roles?

Because, for example, in the prospect's perception gap, our own CEO, Phillip McLaughlin, he teaches value is derived from a limited view of reality and thus is often appraised differently. We presume value, but we have to help them. The customers see it, right. And that's what we do as marketers. We help customers see the value, but internally to helping people see value.

And one thing I've seen from people early in their career is sometimes, you know, there's things they don't like about the job or the role, but those are just sometimes things that come with a job and it's nicer to be in school when you have summers off and all these things. There's all these things, right? It's frankly, it's nicer not to work than to work.

All, all think other things being equal. And there's meetings and these different things. So I love what you say of like, yes, there certainly this balance and we, we do want to do what's best for our employees and our customers, everything and push them in the right direction and say, hey, maybe this isn't enough for you by the other side.

Do you have any examples of what you do like to show them the value of, you know, the role they have or the role they could have and the organization and just in general, to kind of teach them and get them up to speed on, you know, what it means to be a professional. And, you know, they don't have that class in college.

I interviewed, professor, who's a author and a researcher, and that was one of the things I told her. I'm like, you need to stop with the syllabus because. Right. That's what they get. Like the really good students, even, you know, in college are like, okay, what's on the rubric and what's on the syllabus and how do we do that?

But then you get out into the world, like, especially in a small startup, and it's just, okay, let's figure it out. You know, there's there's there's we have our plans. It's called we got lined up. So it's it's back to the original question. So you know, that side of that question, what do you do to to have do you have any examples of showing the value of the role or teaching people how to how to take on that role in an organization when they're early in their career?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: That is a good question. I think one of the things that you can do and that I have done is you have to model the almost like with children, the behavior that you want to see. And so especially working at a startup, you know, as I said, today, is printing out Fedex labels. Sometimes I'm dragging things to Fedex.

I'm doing things that aren't particularly interesting. But I think if they can see the value of what they do, even if it's not the fun stuff to the organization. So I know I don't like taking containers to Fedex away 50 pounds, but I know when that box gets to the show and people love our collateral and they love our giveaways, and our salespeople are engaged and we get lots of leads, that's great for me.

And I think you have to be willing to show that you will do all of the jobs, too, that I'm not sitting in an ivory tower barking orders at people, but whatever it is, it's for the greater good. And when we get those wins that we celebrate those wins as a team. So whatever compliments the marketing team gets, now that I actually have an employee and about to have a second one, it's all of us.

Because in a company this small, no one does anything on their own. I depend on the CEO, I depend on the engineers. I depend on my demand in person. I depend on the salespeople to tell me about customers. And I think getting to know the different parts of the organization and understanding how your work impacts them makes you feel valuable, because there are certain jobs, and especially in the early stage where you can feel like you're just in a silo and you're not really understanding your role in the greater organization.

But if you actually talk to people, and I think I always try to bring any praise, we get back to the team because I know it's not me, it's all of us. And I think that gives people when they feel valued, they feel more ownership in what they're doing.

Daniel Burstein: Are we talked about from your lessons and from your stories all about like, what it means to be in a market or what it means to be an effective marketer. But if you had to break it down and tell us directly, Don, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Dawn van Hoegaerden: I think the key really is to be open and curious on many different fronts. So I think you need to be open to opportunities like I was earlier in my career. Take a chance. If someone's willing to give you an opportunity, it means they see something in you. And even if you don't think you have it down 100%, take the leap.

I think you have to be open to ideas from all different sources. I get ideas about marketing from our engineering department, from our solution architects, from our executive leadership team, and I'm willing to be open and some of them are really, really good. And when you're in a startup and you're a team of 1 or 2 and you're doing all the tactical work all day, you can't have time to think about everything.

And a lot of these folks are talking to customers and understanding what customers want to hear. So I think that's another one. I think thirdly, being open to your customers because customers will tell you what they need and want and what helps them buy and a lot of times that can impact the roadmap because they're there can be people in tech who are very rigid and this is what we're building.

What does anyone want that you know. And so you it's part of being I think a good marketer is listening and being open to customer feedback as well, and relaying that throughout the organization so that you're actually building something that people want, which then will help accelerate your growth. And then I think curiosity, curiosity about the technology that you're working in, I think especially for me, having been in this industry for a while, marketing was very different.

When I started, it was much more of a brand exercise versus and more qualitative than the quantitative work that goes into marketing today. And some people have been left behind by that. But I think you have to be open to the changes and open to embracing the new technologies, because otherwise you you are not going to be successful.

And one of the ways that I do that is by hiring people who know much more about the areas that I don't know as much about. And so my, my recent hire was in demand Gen. And he is a deep diver into metrics analytics. And I love that. Because he makes our whole department look better. And so I think you have I think that openness and not being afraid of people knowing more than you do about anything, because how else do you learn?

Daniel Burstein: Well, thank you for teaching us today, for opening up your career to us and sharing all your lessons. It was great talking to you.

Dawn van Hoegaerden: Well, thank you very much. It was wonderful.

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 rpa.com and.