Raaz Herzberg, CMO and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, discusses why technical B2B marketing leaders struggle when coming from outside the domain.
Insight
B2B buyers default to polite positive reinforcement rather than honest feedback
“Maybe the person on the other end is not gonna tell you, like, they're not incentivized to tell you know what, I don't know what you're talking about. It's really, I guess they felt a bit like me in some ways, and they were like, oh, it's a really smart group …”
Insight
Founders must execute functions end-to-end before hiring external specialists
“It's like, if you can't do it one time, end to end, and you're like the core, core, core group, the chances of just bringing somebody from the outside to solve that problem, it's wishful in some ways, but it never ends up that way.”
Insight
Complex B2B enterprise software purchases are heavily driven by brand
“Like at some point of every product, people start looking really heavily at brand, whether we think that way or we don't. Like when I buy my iPhone, I have no idea how it really is compared to an Android phone. I did not look at the specs. I truly have no idea…”
Insight
Early marketing should prioritize rapid audience awareness over pipeline mechanics
“What is the end to the goal of having the right people hear the right thing about my company, ASAP, versus a ton of, like, I don't know, a ton of, like, kind of traditional aspects of building pipelines and different things I really did not know how to do at t…”
Insight
Product mistakes create permanent technical debt; marketing experiments carry zero downside
“If you decide to build a feature in a product, then A, you're taking engineering time, which is the most valuable resource in every company, in my opinion, and B, in some ways, you can never take it back. Like it's complicated your product. Even if one custome…”
Opinion
Most cybersecurity companies market their products using fear and frightening tactics
“I actually don't like the way most security companies market things. It's mostly by, like, frightening and fear, and that's not really, I don't like it.”