(21) Category Creation and Market Leadership with the CMO of 1Password, Melton Littlepage - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYASLuVzKRc

Transcript: (00:00) to win in the long run you have to be the king or queen of your category and if you were not today if you were the number two or number three player and the the category leader is soaking up all the category economics then you have a product and category problem and you need this like the CMO who is sure we're the chief marketing officer but we also are the chief markets officer you have to create a market where that company can be number one and if you don't have line aside to that in your current product road map in your current category if you are locked in to not being number one it's incumbent on you (00:35) your role as a member of the executive leadership team is to help steer the business to a place where you have an unfair Advantage you fight an unfair fight in every single deal and a promising way to do that if your product teams can pull it off is carve a path where you're embarking on a category creation Journey [Applause] [Music] give us your background so today your CMO one password before we get into one password let's do a little replay of your your history and SAS I think I'm in my fifth like marketing leadership role in SAS I wandered into it I was I was (01:14) hired to be the general manager of the on premise division of a company that had two divisions the one division was a uh a product that we didn't have a name for uh we didn't know if it was like a a a business service provider we like are we a bsp is it on demand like IBM was pushing that this is long before the term SAS or Cloud was in the Lexicon it was back in 2004 but it was a true multi-tenant uh software that was not configurable not customizable or configurable not customizable that we could deliver at scale and um and that (01:54) was the that was the business like the future obviously but the the on premise original version of that was the cash cow so I was brought on board to be the GM of the cash cow and just milk every penny out of that that we could to you know funnel into this new line of business and see where it would take us and so um that was my my entry point and um and the that multi-tenant software business but now we would say SAS I took off like wildfire so it was it was an expense reporting uh product line and the giant in the industry at the time (02:30) was a company called Concur and uh and concur was also an an on premise product and and to buy concur it' be like a sixf figure deal six months of implementation highly customizable to your every you know need and uh and and in that same deal we would show up and we say we can get you set up by the end of the week and and we offer yeah it's it's like 70% of of of the same thing no you can't customize it but uh we'll charge you month L and if you don't like it you walk away and as we know now like in the like SAS world that's the winning formula but nobody knew then and um and so it was all hands (03:12) on deck like we all had to figure out how to tell this story and we all had to figure out how to get buyers to you let go of their death grip on customization and believe in scale and believe in letting somebody else run the application because then it would be up all the time it wouldn't go down wouldn't be helped us calls like it helped them really understand it's like a whole shifted mindset was the biggest objection then like security or did it seem like I'm trying to compare it to like what's happening with AI today like is this is there a wave in there you know like what what was the objection (03:44) for people it yeah I wish people would think about security uh know it was very much um at the time on premise software companies would sell you in a boutique bespoke 100% customer for you solution and there's a lot of appeal that it's it's not what works for my industry or not what works for the market in general but it's what works specifically for me and that's the way all software was delivered at the time and so it was it was helping to reframe the idea of getting something that is just for me that is 10 times more expensive and takes five times longer to deliver is it impossible to (04:23) maintain and then you have to do your own training and your own support because there's no training and support materials that address your one of one situation oh my God it's like building like a Frankenstein website nobody on the team knows how to update the website so you never change anything in the software that runs your business that would be a nightmare yeah and so um it was it was it was it was really just breaking the habit of anyone who had bought software for the prior decade and and helping them realize that there was an entirely new way to do this what was the company the company was uh jelco (04:57) expense management and and then we were so successful doing that we ran circles around concur uh they ended up acquiring us and uh and I I got on board and I started my journey so I spent 10 years at coner building these you know what what became like the core product of the company but this true SAS uh tool that could be implemented in at the scale of a 10p person company all the way up to a 10,000 person company and and figuring that that whole process out so that the time frame was 2004 to 2014 it was it was while we were (05:34) inventing what we talk about is cloud and SAS now but it was also building demand generation and like building marketing analytics and thinking about free trial to buy and the product Le motion like none of that was was in the market it didn't just flat did not exist in 2004 or if it did it was like super nent by the time 2014 rolled around I think we had we bought most of the learning curve but we hadn't really figured out how to lead with the product we were still leading with sales and leading with marketing uh I think that (06:07) the the next generation of companies that come after that the true product Le growth businesses I figured out the a lot more of the story um but yeah I I I I felt like I got to be in that crossover between product and marketing and um and and really really figuring out the the scale affordability and reach problems all at the same time do you think that um has shaped your marketing Playbook today so so from there you went on to you had a bunch of senior marketing leadership jobs uh schoology New Relic tenable (06:44) you're the CMO at Outreach before one password when I have CMOS on the podcast I like to kind of you know ask like what was your core skill set were like you know usually every CMO comes up from some path they were a product marketer they were a demand gen person they ran the sales team which buck would you put yourself in if you to claim a school of marketing that you came from as CMO now what is it my path was um I eventually became the chief Solutions officer of jco so the chief product officer Ro uh (07:15) into concur concur uh already had a chief product officer the founders they were amazing and and so I I ended up in this this role of of helping to bring the sash product to Market and and sort of the straddle between product and Market marketing so I helped to build product marketing function I helped build the demand generating function in a free trial to buy motion and so I I I think that I would say that those were my areas of strength I you know if you'd ask me this uh a decade ago I would tell you that I was really good at demand generation I'm a a engineer bu trade the (07:51) the systems thinking the analytical planning the being data driven one decision at a time like really getting precise and targeting the IC and following the flow of signals into what constitute an mql and when is it ready for SDR to follow up on it like I I I felt a decade ago like great at that I've learned uh since then in being the CMO at schooly and and leading marketing ATT tenable and at Outreach and now one password you can know a lot without being great at it and and it's a lifetime learning experience I feel like the more marketing leadership experiences I've had the less confident (08:33) I am that I was a great demand generation marketer uh at the time um but I think that that's the way it is with multi-time CMOS you you realize that you need to become data driven at a necessity and and then you over index you swing the pendulum too far and you stop really thinking about the buyer and you stop really thinking about the problems that they're faced and what motivates them to buy you're really just thinking about numbers and so you you over index on capturing the two or 3% of companies that are in the market and you don't do enough to provoke the 97 or 98% (09:11) that aren't and um and so I've like I as a survival skill I've taught myself to like push back from the data table and uh and and be a little bit more open-minded about the difference between making decisions based on what we can measure versus making decisions about the biggest problems that we need to solve there's like a wave of I I've I've talked to a lot of CMOS on this podcast and there's a there's a wave of I feel like a lot of people come to that conclusion eventually and you you kind of realize like it's like you you want to measure everything in marketing and then you come out the other side and you (09:50) realize it Mark this job truly is a blend of you know Art and Science and that's what makes it fun and if you get too far in the science side of it you miss kind of like the creating a soul of a of a brand piece of this and you learn over time that that is usually what makes such a difference and I think we're we're heading towards that it's it's refreshing to hear you say that because it's like so much changes and it's it's nice to like understand the sort of Timeless principles and that seems to be one of them right which is (10:19) measure stuff you use data don't it's it's an advantage to be able to use it but remember that there's a lot of creativity and emotional you know you're trying to evoke an emotion and get attention and earn trust and like all those things matter too they're just a little bit harder to measure directly right oh me hit the nail on the head the like my teams come to me frequently talking about marketing attribution and the need to have better attribution and tools for attribution and cleaner data for attribution and and I like I I get it like I I was in that role once in my career um but you you can't attribute (10:56) your way to being hot right um and and if you're not hot you're you're you're fighting for every lead you're fighting for every deal and when you say hot what do you mean like from a brand standpoint like are you a hot brand like do people want to buy from your company it's not yeah the brand for sure but but even the category you're in right if you're if you're the the highest performing brand in an ice cold category then you're still fighting for every single deal if your category is hot and you're the number two or three player you're going to great like you're you're in a camp (11:31) Miss environment and so we we have to market the category and and keep the category strategic it has to be above the line as a priority for the Target buyer do you have to create a category can you play in an existing category or do you have to just to build on the the concept this is great by the way I'm a a very big believer that to win in the long run you have to be the the king or queen of your category and if you were not uh today if you were the number two or number three player and and the the category leader is soaking up all the category economics (12:09) then you have a product and category problem and you need this like the CMO who is like sure we're the chief marketing officer but we also are the chief markets officer you have to create a market where that company can be number one and if you don't have line aside to that in your current product road map in your current category if you are like locked in to not being number one uh then you you it's incumbent on you your role as a member of the executive leadership team is to help steer the business to a place where you (12:42) can you have an unfair Advantage you you fight an unfair fight in every single deal and uh and a promising way to do that if your product teams can pull it off is carve a path where you're you're embarking on a category creation journey and um and then Le you force your buyer into a decision are you all doing this at one password yeah I'll give you I'll walk you through how we're doing this because this is great this topic the C like it it's cool to hear you say basically my translation so far is like (13:10) 20 years as a marketing exact still the number one is like Al ree Jack trout 1980 you know whenever they wrote 22 immutable laws of marketing right you can either be number one the way to win is you can either be number one in a category or number two is if you can't be the number one in category great one that you you know you can win in a lot of people listen listen to this podcast have read that book they've read play bigger I think a lot of them believe in the they get the concept but where we see a lot of discussions in our community is like what does that actually mean to create a category (13:39) because then we go and we make these kind of like micro like you know we're the blank and blank that does blank and blank and it and people are like we're the only company that does it so let's let's talk about how you're doing it at one password because I think people struggle with the they get the concept but putting it in practice and like naming it and what is our category is a whole topic of of hot discussion one password is is a password manager uh that in our root we are 18 years old we're north of 250 million of ARR so millions of (14:09) consumers uh are password customers and so we're we're we're the leading consumer password manager but we're also the leading B2B password manager we have more than 150,000 B2B customers that's the fastest growing part of our business and and so it's rare that you're you're you're number one on both sides of the coin right number one is a consumer Brand number one is a B2B brand wa just a tactical question because like I love this stuff because like marketers we want to use our facts have you do you prove that claim like because if you can (14:39) if you can say you're the number one and you can the lesson the marketing lesson is like own it so um do you have like did you do research you know you have the most customers I'm just curious as to like when you make a claim like that how do you how do you own that from a marketing standpoint we hired a research agency to go out and determine who is the most used B2B password manager and then we we owned the result and the result is we're the most used B2B password manager and no matter how you slice it uh number of customers users and uh and and so that's that's a great (15:09) business so is the category password managers password management the category is password managers but that's a it's an 18-year-old category it's arguably older than that it's the the Post-it note in my filing cabinet my mom's got her her her password on a Post-It note on her desk that's the original that's the original password manager and you would be surprised how many of those Post-it notes are still around I could go on and on but the the the the reality is passwords still create the greatest security risk in a business right and and the sooner passwords are gone the better it is for (15:41) everybody and and we've we've had this journey now for nearly 20 years of trying to take the risk out of passwords and there's still a long way to go um but something important changed in the market about starting about 5 years ago with covid so in covid businesses rapidly sent their employees home right that like closed the offices everybody became a remote worker and the it and security teams were not prepared for that at all there there was nothing in their it or cyber security Tech stack that made that easy for their employees (16:14) and and the larger and and more traditional of a business you were the harder that transition was and and these companies hedged their bets right they they put Band-Aids and duct tape on their cyber security Tech stacks and their it processes on the assumption that people were going to return to work right so return to work has been this Hot Topic it's no matter what you're talking about real estate leases or culture or you know in our case you know it management there was assumption that eventually people would come back but I think we all realize that that's not (16:48) going to happen like we we are now permanently in a a new way of work and um and the tools that we have in it and security were designed for the last way we were the in the office on the business provided application on the business provided machine and that just isn't the case when we sent employees home we gave them agency it was a total accident right nobody knew this was going to happen but businesses gave their employees agency to make their own decisions about how to be most productive working remotely and the employees took advantage of that and so (17:24) they brought in their favorite SAS apps from outside right so they were like I'm not going to be constrained by this because it doesn't work over VPN I'm going to use Monday oruna for project management I'm going to use figma for design I'm going to use Chad gbt or grammar lead to help me write and and suddenly the employees using this explosive number of applications none of which are sanctioned by the company much less even visible to the company because you're not on the company Network you might not even be on the company device (17:56) like a part of the agency that people got working from home is if they prefer to use their Mac and not the brick of a you know a Windows machine they were given they use their Mac because they're just logging in to SAS apps that's the way we work today and nothing about the cyber security text deck has been able to keep up so it's created a gap and the Gap is businesses don't know how to secure access to these SAS apps brought in by the employees the industry calls it Shadow it but it's just it's just like productivity tools and and they (18:30) don't know how to secure the personal devices whether it's an iPhone iPad or or home machine because they can't put like mobile device management like who in the world would allow the company to put mobile device management on their personal device and um and so it's a huge security hole in the business and no one talks about this it's an elephant in the room you don't talk about something you can't solve right you go and talk about the things you can solve and so we recognize that and and we buil a set of capabilities that that can discover all of those applications being used and secure them secure the access (19:07) and we can do that built on the foundation of our Market leading password manager uh and so we have all of the security bonafides but we also have the credibility of the consumer World preferring us and bringing us into their personal life and um and so it's new and it's novel we're oneof one and um and so the the only way to bring this to Market is is not to to show up and be the better version of something that existed prior to this tectonic shift in the way we worked right like we there there's categories in our industry like uh it's a um identity and access (19:49) management I am like you would know it is single side on through OCTA or Microsoft intro we're we're not we're not a better version of that we're we do something that they can't do even on their best day okay let's talk about the marketing of it so if if you if you do something no one else can do a traditional marketing strategy of comparison where we are the number one in this or we are these three things are differentiated capabilities this is our competitive mode uh those tools don't work because what you really have to do (20:24) is you have to get the buyer to want to buy the category right they they're okay this is the time I'm going to prioritize solving this problem I've never been able to solve before uh and and they have to put it above the line it has to be more important than other projects and then once they are invested in the category then you have to show up as the category leader and and so that's the the category strategy so for us the number one priority is to Market this new category to our Target buyer to let (20:57) them know it exists that now like you've never been able to solve these problems before the problems are new the problems are important and now there's a solution to it and so is this on top of like the existing business like is this a new direction for the the company so you're like is it like a repositioning effort or it's like we have we have a bigger problem and we can sell to our we can sell more to our existing customer that might be buying us for like you know I bought I bought the personal pass like as a consumer I buy it but I happen to (21:25) work at a company and like oh we should bring this into our company ultimately this is the third Act of the business act one consumer password manager act two business password manager act three is this new category and so it will be the future of the business and um and and the faster we can get there the better right because we we know like so so your your audience are are students of category development if the category uh lands and it becomes a priority across the the community of your ICP then the category leader emerges with un believable economics (22:00) they have larger average deal sizes they have higher win rates they have shorter sales Cycles they they go into every deal in column a right they're not column B and C trying to fight for deals and so our strategy is is make the category important and emerge as the category leader okay did tactically did you say what the category is people want to be like all right I get it what's the category like what did you call the category the category is extended access manager agement it's the it's the second generation of identity and access (22:34) management I am and so extended access management allows us from a naming strategy it allows us to connect with the Legacy category and signal that we are the advanced or or second phase extended it could have been nextg access management um but it it's it it has that connotation and the abbreviation xam EX access management it's just it's catchy so Zam is the category extended access management was this in progress like you you join the you're coming up on almost two years did you join like and this was (23:10) a a new thing like this is what we're going to go do or did it happen prior it it came together in my I would say my first nine months okay all right so you so you come in nine months in we're gonna we're going to create a new category we're going to go here how did you do it right you had the idea to do it what's the like the kind of short version of like did you did you come up with it internally did you hire someone externally how did you shop it around how did you get the company on board with like all right hey we're going to go create this new category our product (23:38) organization our product leaders so our CEO and uh and the product leadership team came up with the the they identified the pain in the market and the need and and they came up with the outline of of what has become the extended access management product Zam uh and we didn't have a name for it we had a we we had an internal code name a reference to an onion because there's layers to ex what we extend out into the wild and um and so I recognized that as soon as they as soon as they brought it to the table I recognized that it is an entirely new category of of software and (24:14) and um and I articulated the options that we have like the one option is category creation right and and it has all of the risk we would be first we'd have to invest a huge amount of money and energy in marketing the category even before we started marketing the product and and it could flat fail um or we could take it to Market as you know a a number seven into the existing IAM category and then fight on a differentiated story like use use the like the market leader if you have this set of problems but if you have this other set of problems use us and uh and (24:53) then try to be a a better for some people version of a 10-year-old category and uh and so we debated that for quite a while because there's actually there's soft Assurance of being in an existing category there's there's already a budget for it there's already a team in our Target customers responsible for it the capabilities are defined the leaders are you they all leaders have a mixed reputation and so there's ways to take advantage and find a gap in there find a little bit of blue ocean and uh and then (25:26) capitalize I think we could have pulled that off and it could have become a multi hundred million dollar line of business but for it to become a billion dollar line of business like for it to really be a cyber security defining capability which we think it is then we had to take all the risk and and lead with a new category and then pull our buyer and and and the attention of the buyer and really the entire Community pull their attention over to it and and believe that when they see it they'll recognize it and they'll jump in and that's that's the whole marketing (26:02) strategy so I'll give you an example our buyer is a cybercity buyer they don't want to be first to buy anything right because that that's a lot of risk what if they get it wrong what if if that purchase and not the other purchase you know creates a vulnerability that and their business gets breached but they also don't want to be last right because if if everybody is moving in the direction of securing something and they don't and they're breached then that's a huge black mark and so they want to be in the safe middle of the pack and and so the the the pack is actually really (26:35) condensed in this buying Community you don't you don't see this the like the the flat version of Jeffrey Moore's you know crossing the chasm it's a super narrow and very tall uh version of the normal curve where it moves quickly or it doesn't move at all and so what we need to do is we we need to form that consensus in the security Community like like actually get inside the Mind share of the buyer and um and have them collectively believe that now is the time to solve these problems solving these problems is this category and then (27:11) have them embark on that and and then trust that we'll emerge as the category leader and so we leave nothing to chance there like we have a massive analyst relations program where we're trying to bring the gardeners and Foresters and idc's along on the journey because if they believe in it and recommend it that gives it cloud we are working hand inand with cesos and security Community forums and round taes and the chadam house rules like sort of back room conversations to just provoke the conversation we're leading with (27:41) thought leadership and leading with a category point of view and and we're putting it all on the table and um and and what we're just trying to do is is get the herd mentality going because we know that if we can get a th000 customers to buy then the next 10,000 are right behind and um and if we can't get the first thousand like it then it's going to be a street fight for every deal for the next 10 years and we don't want that all right so how do you do it people that are listening are itching to hear the that the how do you put this strategy (28:13) into play like what are the tactics tactics starts with having a really bulletproof category point of view and and so again you're not marketing your product you're marketing the category and it starts with the uh um elephant in the room problems that they're widely recognized and never discussed because they're just unsolvable and associating pain with those so using research using facts and saying that these problems exist you you have no idea where your data is in these apps brought in by employees and when the employees leave they take the data (28:48) with them or maybe they have access to your systems forever and you just don't know that's a huge problem why is that a problem second line number you like 68% of data breaches result from compromised access to systems people aren't breaking in and hacking in they're logging in and stealing your data it's like okay well um now I have a real problem and it's very obviously consequential because industry says a basically three out of four breaches that become reputation damaging or ransomware attacks start (29:21) this way and and they say the the right way to solve that is to find all of this it and then block people from accessing it until they store their credentials very securely and use the most secure way to log in and once you've done that you've pretty much wiped out the risk of this and if you can get someone to that third stage say yeah I have that problem uh yeah that consequence is a real risk for me and is the answer really that easy then they're hooked on the category and they just need to figure out how to do that and so we we lead with that story Everywhere We Do following the play (29:59) bigger model we do lightning strike events like The Big Industry conference for us is RSA conference it's the largest security event so we had like a massive lightning strike moment there to unveil the category we also launched our product but the the focus was on the category we met with 25 analysts we met with not just the industry analysts the financial analysts that are also plugged in and influencing and shaping ceso opinion we held meetups with cesos where we walked them through one ceso to another the um the the category strategy and we got them to acknowledge the pain (30:36) and be open to um evaluating a solution if a solution presented itself and then the last Act is to present our solution in the context of the problems the category solves and as something that is different right and so now we're confronting our buyer with the choice right instead of saying you're gonna you're going to buy one thing and you can choose from Flavor a b or c now we're confronting them and saying you're going to buy a or uh you know number two right uh or or or you know 99 that it it isn't it isn't choosing like the best (31:15) amongst something that's similar we're we're truly forcing them make a decision do I go left or right at a fork in the road and so by by presenting ourselves as different from everything else we at least provoke you know that uh that moment of should I go right right should I take the modern approach should I solve these problems or should I uh stay with my original plan and um and we're doing surprisingly well there by provoking a decision instead of following the natural flow they're in I think a lot of marketing and sales teams (31:50) they want to follow the the natural flow of a purchase decision because you know how to acquire that lead you know how to score that lead you know how to qualify and route that lead you know how to pitch that lead and then you you know that your win rate is 25 to 40% and so you're going to win some lose some I mean I think that's really comforting to a lot of marketing and sales teams they just want to you know put money in the bank put runs on the board but we're not following that path here we're we're saying we're willing to go All or (32:19) Nothing UPF front right what what is the marketing or look like so if you looked at it organizationally you would say it it has a pretty traditional structure corporate marketing and Communications as a team growth as a team how many people are in the company and then what is the size of the marketing team we're north of 1,200 employees we have about uh 80 people in the marketing organization which includes product marketing and um while we may look similar for a growth SAS business what sets us apart are a couple things uh we have a global advisory ciso as a a (32:54) direct report to me as a member of our marketing leadership team he is a he's a former ciso and he's an evangelist for us and and he is like a subject matter expert as the you know Str helping you with the strategy like we're trying to sell to this Persona we can basically play run Inception great idea not exactly though like so you would think that um but it's it's actually slightly different uh he he is he's in the ceso communities and and he has ACC to a lot of the target Persona that we'd like to (33:31) sell to and and he's allowed in there he and he participates in there as a as a peer because he is a former ciso but but if he showed up and started pitching the product he would he would he'd be you know sent to the road immediately I just mean from like an Intel like you you have someone who would be your customer being a part of your team which is smart like you like from a knowledge standpoint not not having them be a shill for for one password just but from like uh this is the person who might who would buy our product we have them on (34:01) our team to hey does this messaging land like that feels super valuable yeah I mean that's helpful too but there's there's actually a really strategic role here uh when when he is in the ceso community he he can agitate for the problems that the category solves and he he can uh highlight the pain and he can talk about the solutions that thek Market needs and and so he can do all of the work in terms of uh fomenting rage amongst cesos that there's not a solution to these problems and and then leading people to the desire to solve them right because I talked before about being hot if if you're not a priority in (34:49) the community of people you sell to you're not hot you're you may be valuable right you may be a point solution and they may need to purchase doesn't Implement you to get a job done but you're you're not going to become a de facto standard piece of every business on the planet and we want to be a de facto piece of every company on the planet we want to be embedded in in the blueprint of the cybercity tech deack and so to do that you you have to you have to win the hearts of the ceso community they have to really believe that the problem is so important that (35:23) they would prioritize this over another problem and believe me they have tons of problems to co solve and um and they would need to believe that it's a low-risk high value solution and so the our Global advisory SEO I wouldn't say um stir the pot but I I would say is provocative and and opens people's eyes to the problem because if their eyes are open to the problem their hearts are going to be open to the solution and um so that that's a non-traditional uh view of our marketing team and then we have transitioned from product pure product marketing to solution marketing so that we can talk (36:01) about the these pains directly and talk about how we solve these pains in a realistic way like we can hand the road map to a security buyer and say you you know this has been a priority of yours for years and you can't solve it here is the road map to solving this problem and then yeah I mean you can solve it with maybe other tools but we can provide the tool that makes this possible and so again we're leading with the problem and the solution to the problem and trust that it will come back to us as (36:33) the vendor of choice but that's the that like that's that's how we are trying to wedge oursel in and and become you know a household name for every security team in the world you got a traditional kind of split for the team there's roughly 80 80 folks on the team what are the best channels that are that are working for one password right now and like and do you have a do you have like a High Vol volume self-service business that's the consumer thing and like how does the how does the markting team shape where (37:03) they're they're focusing the effort like does the high volume is you know do you have people split across that funnel I'm curious to know some of the Dynamics of the team so we have three motions uh in the marketing org uh and you you hit on the first one which is uh self-service product Le growth it's both on the consumer side it's also for small businesses so small businesses and consumers both purchase directly completely served by marketing self-implemented all the way through renewal uh completely touchless uh it's a a phenomenal business and having (37:36) millions of consumers is is created a flywheel it's a b Toc to B2B flywheel that allowed us to grow we we launched our B2B product in 2018 and uh and we've we've grown massively like 150,000 B2B customers today and a lot of that is on on that back of that flywheel the reputation and the prior use are just consumers bringing us to the office with them and so having 150,000 uh customers gives us 150,000 renewals a year roughly which is a great opportunity to cross sell and so the First Act of our uh Zam category (38:13) execution is cross- selling into the base and so we already have a delighted customer that's getting great value and stepping them up to the next set of problems to solve and the next set of jobs to be done which are still relevant to the same buyer that's a that a a cross sale execution challenge it's hard to do at scale it involves a lot of scale storytelling and then the hard work of a massive customer success organization but it it's proven to be very effective for us and so that that's step one step two is you know being the market leader in B2B uh in a in a in a (38:48) category password management that still has a ton of demand we get thousands and thousands of inbound High intent leads you know people are coming to us to solve this problem recognizing ing that we're the market leader either because they've used us in a past life or used us as a consumer and so using that uh uh that high intent lead for our original product but doing Discovery in the first sales call and saying like well do you have these other problems like do you do you are you challenged by the this this (39:17) modern distributed work environment and hybrid and and bring your own device if that's a challenge for you like we we have these other things we can offer and so spr springboarding off of that high intent lead which we're going to win a lot of those in really short sales Cycles uh springboarding from there to a much bigger story with a lot more value uh is great leverage on our existing business and so between those two motions we're we're in thousands of Zam sales Cycles extended access management sales Cycles before marketing runs our first campaign like before we put our (39:51) first dollar to work marketing the Zam solution and then of course the third Act is is really getting la with our category strategy and then the demand generating solution marketing programs behind that that really you know provoke demand for people that aren't current customers that aren't looking for a password manager but have these chronic you know elephant in the room I don't even talk about them pains that are now solvable for the first time and so with those three legs of the stool we're able to do demand generation just for the (40:24) future platform and then run those through a traditional sales Le sales cycle what's different about moving the company into to Enterprise in the fall you all were part of some some golf stuff this is the first CMO that I've had on in a B2B context B2B software context that's doing Sports Marketing um where did what are what are you doing there and where does that fit in the mix yeah we're we're passionate about uh uh partnering with with champion level franchises and um and using Sports Marketing to really our story we we arrived there by doing a lot of homework we hired a third party that took our our (41:04) this is going to sound nerdy um but we we have our uh our buyer Persona uh documents really well researched we we handed those to an agency that was able to use neelen data across all possible Sports sponsorship opportunities and they really found the intersections of something that that fit our brand personality and something that was just in the heart of our buyer and and beautifully for me there was true alignment between our B2B buyer and our Target consumer buyer and um and and so we we knew that we could find a way through Sports to reach them when they weren't at work meaning like you kind of get it two for one like the consumer (41:45) will might see that content somewhere and it's relevant to them it's going to be relevant to someone whether you're at a business or a consumer well I mean yeah so so uh like these Sports sponsorships are expensive you you build a business case on the BWB buyer but every time like if you're a B2B software company and you're you're sponsoring a player or a team or a a sports event or Stadium you you hit your buyer but then 99% of the people in the audience aren't your buyer and so there's this huge overspray right well in our case the you (42:18) we hit our Target buyer which is the 1% and then the other 99% are also our consumer Target buyer and so there there's no Miss like we we can't possibly advertise in with on our target audience If It Isn't Our B2B audience that sprays pass them into the consumer audience which gives us a lot of confidence like when we ran the business case we we did a major sponsorship we were the title sponsor of the President's Cup golf tournament in the fall uh it's a it's an All-Star Game in golf it's wildly popular that tens of (42:53) millions of people tune in live to watch it and uh and being the title sponsor means in the background of the television coverage like you can escape but it's not a commercial you just see our logo everywhere and um and and we were able to justify that two ways one we were going to saturate our B2B buyer in the business case there alone was enough to justify the investment and also we were going to saturate our b2c buyer in the business case there alone was enough to justify the investment and so knowing (43:22) that we were going to achieve both gave us a lot of confidence to move forward with the invest investment and and the reason we did it like following the data we knew that we could reach our buyer when they weren't at work now you could also do that with a television commercial but but the thing about sports that's magical is when people are fanatical right the sports fan it's irrational right you're when you're a golf fan you just you're passionate about golf you soak it in your mind and your heart are open and um and so we want to rub off some of that (43:53) fanaticism onto our brand and and we know like as marketers like the again going back to the the non- measurables the the buyer um chooses to buy with their heart uh and then they justify the decision with their head and so much of our marketing is we're marketing to the head right I can Market the ROI analysis but that's a justification after the decision's been made I can Market speeds and capabilities but that that again is it's an intellectual argument when I mark it to the heart I'm like you talked (44:24) about it earlier I can build trust I can I can have someone have confidence that this is going to work it's going to help them really add value to their business it's not going to put their career Jeopardy I feel like at your at the scale of a one password too and especially if it's the first time doing that I think people are watching that on TV and they're like oh hey cool one password like it's it's a if it's a known brand in the space to see creative especially at a sports event like that for the first time it can work and can do something um just technically what do (44:54) you what does uh sat like saturate the B2B buyer mean is there like a certain number of impression like you're trying to reach a certain number of people and you you know what your Market is or is it more of just like a philosophical kind of thing so sat like not saturated in the term of like fill them to overflowing um maybe a better way of saying it is we uh we can reach them repetitiously uh when when they're not looking for us and and so um we can put a lot of Impressions on them I think is how we would said it a decade ago what we're really trying to do is we're (45:31) trying to look like the market leader we are so when you think about the other title sponsors of golf you end up with companies like cocacola AT&T BMW Accenture and now one password right and so we're we're trying to put ourselves in that Echelon oh it's such an amazing marketing lesson like if you're at a if you have the budget to be able to do that's such a that's just like a gangster brand move which is like put us at the table with all of these people and now this oh yeah I see I see them on the same scale of BMW especially from an Enterprise standpoint that legitimizes (46:04) us man that's cool to hear that because there just another way of measuring the success of it and thinking about it other than like you know did we generate you know more signups than this other period in time right well totally so again I talked about this earlier if if all you did was count website Impressions and signups he would miss like the real value here that the real value here is we're we're running our Core Business we are we are in thousands of sales cycles each quarter and um if we have the reputation of being the leader and and it's visible like it's in (46:39) undeniable out in the marketplace we we force the buyer if they if they're leaning towards our competitor we force them to acknowledge that they're buying number two or number three or number four right and nobody wants to do that nobody wants to know who the market leader is and then buy someone else because you have to have so much confidence in your decision like why am I bucking the trend why am I seeing something other people don't see and so if we give them pause and say why like why am I doing this why am I not going with the market leader it's going to it's going to shift their perception and (47:11) their decision-making process and it it will absolutely result in US winning a higher percentage of those deals we're in and the deals that we were going to lose it's more likely to shift those to no decision right and we'll we'll have another chance another bite at the end app in the future when that person dusts themselves off and is ready to rethink about a purchase process and so that alone is the business case right and that is purely from appearing in the market as the undeniable category in our (47:42) case you know solution leader and um and then for people that were saying like one password like what's a one password like in that was a very common Google search during the four days of the President's Cup it allows us to tell our story to to someone for the first time but the story we put forward was the new category story like we positioned ourselves as so much more than a password manager and so that allowed us to start nudging the future buyers towards the more important bigger ticket a more capable solution without taking anything away from our consumer business (48:18) okay I I got like a 50 follow-ups that I want I want to I wish we had more time to keep going because I feel like this could be a this could be a we could turn this into a three three hour session so maybe there'll be a way to do that but Melton thank you for coming and hanging out with me it'll be interesting to see the messages and feedback you get after this because there's a bunch of people listening that are going through something similar to their company or want to take their company through creating a new category and I think (48:41) oftentimes we think of it in the context of like a startup like creating a new category from the beginning this is a company that's been around for 15 20 years right and is now going through it in a new way so it's cool to hear that Journey um thanks for hanging out with me and and sharing some of the one password Story on on this podcast I appreciate it Dave it's been uh a blast being here thank you so much for having me all right man thank you so much [Music]