Mark Huber [00:00:01]:
Opinions are cheap and proof is gold. I'm Mark Huber and this is the Proof point, a show from user evidence that helps go to market teams, find ideas, get frameworks, and swap tactics.
Mark Huber [00:00:17]:
In 2025, every B2B marketer needs to be focused on one thing. So I went to the toughest industry to pull it off, cyber security, and talked to six of the best B2B marketing leaders to learn how they're doing it. On today's episode of the Proofpoint, I'm joined by Chris Singelman, senior manager of demand generation at Prelude. Chris and I talked about how his team prioritizes transparency and authenticity in all of their marketing. From ungated content to clear use case based product demos. They built a strategy that reduces friction and earns trust even when it doesn't directly impact metrics like leads and conversions. Enjoy.
Mark Huber [00:00:51]:
I'm pumped to ask this question because I have no idea where it's going to go. But you know Kaylee Edmondson, who's one of our marketing advisors, very, very well. So what is your best Kayleigh story that you can share? That might embarrass her a little bit.
Chris Singlemann [00:01:04]:
But I don't know if it'll embarrass her. But Kaylee is a great marketer, possibly one of the best I've ever met. She joined on with my previous company as an advisor as well and immediately like hitting the ground running. Like first get together in New York. Like we were after hours spending and just like, okay, and what's the conversion rate between this channel and this channel?
Mark Huber [00:01:20]:
Like she's pulled in on me.
Chris Singlemann [00:01:22]:
Slow down just a little bit. I barely know that answer. And so it was great to meet someone who's just like down to brass tacks, right down to plugging gaps and making everything work. So Kay's great to work with.
Mark Huber [00:01:32]:
I love it. So you just told me that you were not working at or I guess haven't always worked at cyber companies. I imagine it's somewhat of a steep learning curve. Is that fair to say?
Chris Singlemann [00:01:42]:
Definitely. I think like, you know, coming in to cyber companies after being at agency space universities previously, it was a very significant learning curve. You're talking about like I was selling Martech and, and services.
Mark Huber [00:01:55]:
That's where I'm at right now.
Chris Singlemann [00:01:57]:
It's an entirely different game. Folks are much more skeptical. They don't always have like the endless budgets that come with spending marketing dollars. Like we need to increase revenue. So spend more on marketing or whatever it may be. And they're like really practical and a lot of cases, abstract use cases. Like how do you become more secure? Well, there's a thousand different ways that you can go off and do that and then beyond that simply like again. I used to sell software that helped you generate more MQLs.
Chris Singlemann [00:02:21]:
Now I'm helping you sell software that prevents credential dumping, which I'm still figuring out what that is.
Mark Huber [00:02:25]:
Yeah. Okay, well you might have to talk to me like I'm five for the rest of this episode. So then you're at Thorough Pass and then your current company now is I think a little bit more early stage compared to Thorough Pass. Is that fair?
Chris Singlemann [00:02:36]:
Yep. Yeah, we raised our series A about a year ago and very different. It's thoroughpass Information Security and we're more in like kind of the true cyber detection response security control validation.
Mark Huber [00:02:45]:
So you raised the series A and in your role in Demand Gen, did you just get hit up like crazy with people trying to.
Chris Singlemann [00:02:51]:
Every agency wants to work with me. It's awesome. I'm super important. Yep. I own all the budget. It's great.
Mark Huber [00:02:55]:
So you're in a demand general. How big is the marketing team right now? Am I looking at the marketing team?
Chris Singlemann [00:02:59]:
You're looking at the market.
Mark Huber [00:03:00]:
Okay, so what are some of the. And I can relate. I was a team of one for my first almost like first seven, eight months at User Evidence. So what are some of the things that you're experiencing right now as a marketing team of one at an early stage company?
Chris Singlemann [00:03:14]:
I think the biggest thing and I talked to Kayleigh about this is the concept of you know, when you're figuring out product market fit marketing is a lot of highs and lows in terms of like what are the campaigns that we're working on? What's the goal of this campaign? I'm coming from later stage organizations. It's like get meetings, book revenue now it's like okay, we want to get signal, we want to get meetings with different kinds of people and your strategy changes. Like I mentioned when we were talking before, this is just like you pivot a lot. You pivot very quickly and used to that with startups and whatnot. But it's also the product can pivot as the market changes as you get different feedback from prospects and POVs and customers. It's a bit of a roller coaster. So you know the day to day tasks change pretty frequently. We've updated the website, I don't know like how many times in the last six months.
Chris Singlemann [00:03:55]:
So a lot of it's website but then it's okay. How do we get this campaign to market and you know, we, I characterize them more as sprints than acting on anything over the course of a year. Like how much information we can we collect in a pretty short amount of time.
Mark Huber [00:04:07]:
So how do you run those sprints now? I'm curious. My little marketing brain never shuts off.
Chris Singlemann [00:04:11]:
Yeah, we, we honestly follow kind of the software development methodology. At least when we had a couple folks on the team. It's been what can we accomplish in the next two week period? And then the following two weeks is measuring and acting on the previous week's information. So, you know, okay, we're bringing a new campaign to market. We get that done in that two week Sprint, whether it's new landing page, new ad copy, et cetera. How are we going back and looking at the stuff that we were just running and using that to inform future development cycles?
Mark Huber [00:04:35]:
Did you have to sell that idea to your boss or how did that go out?
Chris Singlemann [00:04:37]:
No, it was very much like I came from an agency space, so it was very much like, hey, you're used to project management, you had to manage a lot of clients. So very much pulling from methodologies that I've used in the past to balance a lot of different priorities. And honestly, it's super helpful to like be able to focus on just the one brand and, and have that kind of sprint methodology applied.
Mark Huber [00:04:54]:
Love it. So one of the things that we were talking about is you are trying to lead with transparency and really trying to build trust through just authenticity. So how do you do that at a cyber company?
Chris Singlemann [00:05:05]:
Kind of goes back to the original question of like, what was the main thing I noticed, you know, coming from a, an organization where you're largely selling services or working at an agency and whatnot. Now it's like there's a platform here and the platform contributes a specific degree of value, helps you accomplish specific tasks. My philosophy and the marketing team's philosophy has always been how do we get that into market as clearly as possible? You know, if we're dealing with skeptical buyers and people who don't always, you know, they don't always trust like they're being marketed to, they're getting hit up by.
Mark Huber [00:05:32]:
I'm giving a talk on this exact topic in about an hour. Now.
Chris Singlemann [00:05:35]:
Everyone's hitting them up. They want to be sold to, like, they don't want to be sold to. They want to know that whatever they're putting their money into is actually going to work. And so our goal has always been as many times as the product has pivoted and we've introduced new capabilities. It's a very fast moving engineering team. We created a new video for all the capabilities that are there. We're constantly updating a guided product tour. Storylane is here, Novattic is here.
Chris Singlemann [00:05:55]:
Those tools are immensely valuable to what we've been going to market with. And I think the fundamental thing that we really applied is we don't gate any of that information like a lot of folks who go out to a software company. And I think it's especially true even on the Martech side where you gotta fill out a form before you see the recorded demo or you listen. I built that, I built a recorded demo video and we gated it behind and it was a huge lead gen for us. Now we're much earlier stage. We don't have that built in trust with the market. We have to earn the right to do more and earn the right to sell to you. Our biggest thing is even if it takes a lot of time or we leverage agency partners, that's been where the investment goes.
Chris Singlemann [00:06:28]:
Really high quality product videos that. Here's a use case. It's not like, oh, it's the best thing in the universe. It's like, okay, you need to prevent this thing. We're going to walk you through a flow that shows you how you do that end to end. And then the guided interactive demo that lets folks get right into it and they don't have to fill out a form to do that. It's very much like. And so a lot of people have.
Chris Singlemann [00:06:45]:
I've had conversations like the lead gen hasn't been there. Okay, well gate that demo form. Gate the. Get a demo. I don't want to do that.
Mark Huber [00:06:52]:
Yes.
Chris Singlemann [00:06:52]:
The, the reality is we get on sales conversations and they'll say it was so awesome to see the product before I had this conversation.
Mark Huber [00:06:58]:
Yeah.
Chris Singlemann [00:06:58]:
So we might end up with as many conversations as we'd like. But the reality is they're more informed. Some people might have self disqualified that we might not have wanted to have talked to to begin with. Yeah, exactly. So it's been a really productive means for us to generate qualified conversations that mention the fact that it was awesome to see the demo, awesome to see the product. I know what I'm expecting. And in an ideal world you could create an account and kind of combine that PLG and sales LED motion. But that's future state.
Chris Singlemann [00:07:26]:
But I think the role that we've been going with is can we create new videos for the capabilities we're putting into market and articulate the value add that it means for the end user, not just it's some great product that's going to alleviate all your concerns.
Mark Huber [00:07:39]:
So the ungated approach to marketing, which I love, huge fan of, how did you sell that to your boss? And really the leadership team, One of.
Chris Singlemann [00:07:48]:
The reasons I joined was it was ungated already. So we had an ungated.
Mark Huber [00:07:51]:
You are the luckiest marketer.
Chris Singlemann [00:07:52]:
It was great. Yeah, I've heard that a lot. I came in with like a brand new CRM, like new RevOps. It's been awesome to build it. So it's the same concept where we were already ungated. And the question was posed to me, leading demand, do you want to change that? I was like, maybe someday we'll have forms on some things. Like we do a premium survey asset. We invest a lot of dollars in that, whatever.
Chris Singlemann [00:08:09]:
Perhaps we would g that. But the reality of the situation is we have these assets, people are engaging with them and it creates quality conversations. We're not going to change that.
Mark Huber [00:08:18]:
So I got to ask, how do you measure all of that then? Well, and I'm asking a friend, AKA.
Chris Singlemann [00:08:24]:
Myself, well, I am giving a talk while we're here at Cyber Marketing Con on attribution. And I think like, one of the things that I've often said to folks, especially building attribution programs and HubSpot and whatnot, is you want to measure for the 80%. A lot of attribution programs fail because you're trying to answer like, what influencer did this person see when what LinkedIn posted? They question. It's like the reality is if you can speak to a bulk of what you're doing, the highly strategic initiatives, that's the goal. So our gated or our interactive demos are on website pages. We're using tools like koala and RB2B to understand, like, where are those companies coming from? And it's linking the tools. We're still early stage. We don't have a robust attribution program, but we have enough to help us understand, like, okay, we're generating intent from these accounts.
Chris Singlemann [00:09:04]:
They're on the gated demo page. Storylane is providing us with those insights. It's not answering every single question, but at the scale that we're at right now, it's telling us enough that this is something that we want to go off and do. And I think part of the challenge that I've fallen into in the past, other marketers fall into is we need to understand exactly who this was and when they came and when we're going to talk to them. It's like if we put enough out into the market, they will come.
Mark Huber [00:09:25]:
So I've fallen in that exact scenario before and I'm sure plenty of people who will be listening also have as well. So what would be the best advice that you can share for marketers who are probably getting way too in the weeds with attribution and just questions that they might not know how to answer?
Chris Singlemann [00:09:42]:
Yeah, and we'll talk about this in the chat as well. The concept is like you want to answer people with three questions. Demand capture, demand generation, and the deal creation. So when did they first hear about you? I'm a huge advocate for how did you hear about us on every form. If you're worried about more form fields, don't be worried about that one. Yeah, it is immensely valuable to get the software telling you where they're coming from and the person telling you how they heard about us. That's what starts to justify the podcast that you sit on or the ad that you run in a place where you don't. You forgot to throw utms on it or whatever it may be, which I.
Mark Huber [00:10:12]:
Do all the time.
Chris Singlemann [00:10:13]:
Exactly. And then you have the software that's telling you, okay, at this particular moment, you captured them from this paid ad. They heard about you on that podcast. And if you can answer those two questions, first and foremost, you're getting a good picture of like the high level strategic initiatives that you're putting out into market. If they're telling you, like I saw a post on LinkedIn, you don't actually have to find out exactly what post it was. That is, you know, again, oh, we forgot to put UTM on that post. It is okay, this channel's working for us. We start seeing a trend there, then maybe we want to go and ask more questions.
Chris Singlemann [00:10:42]:
Same thing with the concept of the deal creation. So if you know, in some cases it's always going to be the same. They heard about you, they converted, and they immediately became a buying in their buying decision. It's not always going to be the case. Sometimes they come in and you nurture them over time. And so understanding where did they first hear about you? When did they actually come into your CRM or start to talk to you? And then in that cycle of being an engaged conversation, what actually brought them to that buying signal? Okay, I'm ready to have this as a POV conversation.
Mark Huber [00:11:08]:
So you mentioned ads and LinkedIn and it sounds like you're running or maybe ran thought leadership ads. So why don't you share a Little bit more about that. What you learned, what worked, maybe what didn't work.
Chris Singlemann [00:11:18]:
Thought leader ads have been a pivot for us, a more recent pivot. I think what we experienced firsthand was, okay, we're. Because the key of any ungated marketing strategy is retargeting. You want to be able to go out and create ads to market to that audience that's already seen you, but you never got their email. So we were finding that we don't necessarily have the volume of traffic coming all the time to build that up at the rate that we wanted it. So we need to put cold ads out into market. And I think I fell into the trap that a lot of people do. Okay, here's a branded image and it's a headline about what the product does.
Chris Singlemann [00:11:48]:
And that deviated from the thing that we find is so successful. Those videos, those authentic capturing of the value of the product ads. So what we've been doing over the last couple of weeks and months is the thought leader ad. So our thought leaders, our SMEs, our founder, security researchers, writing original content on LinkedIn and then putting dollars behind that to build out the retargeting audience. We're doing all the same things that we're doing in the videos and the interactive demo. And then we're just saying like, hey, we run these POVs, we experience this. You could see the exact same thing in the video content on the site. So our goal is we're running those ads, building up a hefty retargeting audience to put those demand capture ads in front of, but also drive them to the site, see the videos, see the interactive demo.
Mark Huber [00:12:32]:
Love that. Yeah. And are there specific like forms of evidence or proof points that you've been using?
Chris Singlemann [00:12:38]:
Best thing we hear on any sales call is I saw the interactive demo and that's why I booked a call. I was like, you might not have booked then, but you might have been starting a research project. And we're going out for an ask or a CTM project and we saw your demo, brought it back to the team. You were included in the group of companies that we're reviewing. We didn't hear from them right away, but. But now they know that we are somebody that they want to review in that process.
Mark Huber [00:13:01]:
So now we're really going to nerd out. I've been passing through UTM parameters on the CTA and the final screen of our interactive demo and I've been amazed. We've only had. We call it the Demo Ranch. We're headquartered in Jackson. So we're trying to lean into the western roots a little bit. I've been blown away at how much attributable pipeline that we've been able to create just by way of that. And I know that there's even more that we've can't attribute just because they didn't convert right away.
Mark Huber [00:13:27]:
It's been amazing.
Chris Singlemann [00:13:28]:
Yep, exactly. And then part of that is like, okay, is the tool, the tools that you have out on your website collecting that information, like, are you able to go back in a session and see did they check out that page? And like those are the things you can start to write workflows for and capture. But again, it's that kind of that 80%. Can I, can I get enough information about 80% of where this person came from? And if you're seeing enough signal from like the direct conversions, the direct attributable, that's when, okay, we need to invest more in this. Like my goal for 2025 is how do we create even more product videos and more interactive tools because I love that. Security leaders need to understand what's this tool actually going to do for them. The coincidence is our tool validates your security controls. They need to be able to validate that we can do what we say we're doing and that concept of earning the right to do more.
Chris Singlemann [00:14:09]:
So we're an early stage company. They don't always have to give us the time of day. We can spend a lot of money to get in front of them or we can just put the best foot, the most authentic foot forward and say, here it is all on the table, what the tool does and what we can get from it.
Mark Huber [00:14:23]:
So by the time that this goes out, it will be long after this event has ended. So give me a little preview of what you're going to be presenting that you haven't talked about already.
Chris Singlemann [00:14:31]:
So the goal is a framework. And I think coming from a HubSpot agency, I helped a lot of folks migrate over from Salesforce. Worked with a lot of people who are deeply embedded in that rev ops function. And the thing that always kept popping up was Salesforce campaigns. Salesforce campaigns are actually a great mechanism regardless of how much you love HubSpot.
Mark Huber [00:14:47]:
I promise you, I just said this like three hours ago. I said one of the only things that I miss about Salesforce is campaign.
Chris Singlemann [00:14:54]:
It could not be simpler. It's like, yeah, I want to get, I don't want to pick teams. I work for a HubSpot agency. So obviously I've got Some preferences, but that was like always. My finding as well is like there was no easy way to Translate that to HubSpot. HubSpot is very much versed in this software based attribution world. Did you have a UTM on it? Was the HubSpot tracking code installed? And that's not how buyers are working today. They're not always on your website, they're on LinkedIn, on Reddit, they're wherever they might be.
Chris Singlemann [00:15:20]:
And so the goal of the talk is to understand, like break down a very simple framework that you can apply for just a methodology for building one, like your attribution program. To begin with, assume you have nothing. So how do you align with sales? How do you build out the mechanisms and the questions that you'll ask to define that? Capture generation, deal creation. And then we'll do an experiment in HubSpot where we've actually kind of created a custom object that mirrors what we've done in Salesforce. So if there's anything that HubSpot is great at, it's being like infinitely customizable.
Mark Huber [00:15:51]:
Yeah.
Chris Singlemann [00:15:51]:
And while they continue to iterate on the campaign functionality, what we did as a team was kind of break down the component parts of a Salesforce campaign, rebuild it in HubSpot. And I found a really straightforward way. Like we're early stage, we don't need to answer every question. It's where did you come from? And what was the primary campaign source? And so we're going to discuss how you can go ahead and build something like that in your own instance.
Mark Huber [00:16:09]:
Asking for a friend, AKA me. What time is your talk?
Chris Singlemann [00:16:11]:
Is it four? It's at four o'clock tomorrow.
Mark Huber [00:16:13]:
I will be there. So you'll at least see you there. You'll probably have a bunch of people in the room if that's what you're talking about.
Chris Singlemann [00:16:17]:
I hope so. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:16:18]:
I was Talking about using HubSpot campaigns with one of the people on our marketing team at User Evidence and I just wasn't sure if that leaves a.
Chris Singlemann [00:16:26]:
Lot to be desired. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:16:28]:
So it sounds like the custom object route requires a little bit of work, but it helps you.
Chris Singlemann [00:16:32]:
And, and to be perfectly honest, it was not that much work. Like the reality of Salesforce campaigns is they're very simple. Yeah, I mean like the, they're very easy to just. Okay, they touch this campaign, they touch this campaign and then you can start to inform in Salesforce with your field customizations what that actually means to you. And I think the challenge is with a lot of HubSpot users and marketers who are data obsessed to begin with, they want to know like, is this first touch attribution or last touch or U shaped, whatever it may be. And they're trying to answer that question before they answer like the fundamental, like, what do we actually need to know? And so when we're thinking about attribution, it's a concept of what do you need to advocate to your boss for more budget? What do you need in your team to determine what channels are working for you? And kind of starting to waterfall from like, what's the least. Because the worst thing you can do is throw a report in front of your CEO that says, here's the 12 tools that we're using and this one has no attribution. Like, all right, kill that tool.
Chris Singlemann [00:17:21]:
Yeah, it's not the data that they need. So part of the talk is getting that framework concept of waterfalling your data to the relevant audience.
Mark Huber [00:17:28]:
Yep. Yeah, that was something that I think I went through two or three weeks ago. One of the co founders of User Evidence is here and he was asking a question that I could sense was an attribution related question. And the easy route would have been just to share a bunch of data with him without very much context and then have him come to his own conclusions with the basic first touch model that we have with a standard, you know, I think it's a 45 day look back window. So I sent him all that data, but then I exported it in a Google sheet and then I created a simple little pie chart that shows this is what that will tell you is working right now. But what I also did was I took all of the self reported attribution, I threw it into ChatGPT and then prompted it to try and match whatever they were saying to the values that we use. And it blew my mind, and I think it blew his mind that if you put the two pie charts right next to each other, they tell a fairly different story.
Chris Singlemann [00:18:21]:
Oh yeah, yeah. And so the concept is like you're relying and we talk about it in the conversation, which is like both of those things are highly fallible. Your software is going to tell you only what it sees in if there was a cookie place and we all know where that's going and the person is only going to tell you what they remember. Yeah. And again, like, which is more important? The reality is both of those things are important because if they heard about you on a podcast ad a year ago, but clicked on your paid search ad means like there's one, maybe, probably multiple points that you're missing unless they have some stellar memory that I don't have. And the other thing is that they don't consider like that click or that Google search is like how they heard about you. So those are two very different answers. And it's important to look at them both as you're saying, that's going to inform your strategy in way more ways than either one of those would.
Chris Singlemann [00:19:06]:
You can't just rely on one or the other.
Mark Huber [00:19:07]:
Yep. So you seem like a really sharp marketer. I've got a very high bar. So that's about a sharp. I appreciate you. What is maybe the one thing that you're most excited about or curious about for marketing in 2025?
Chris Singlemann [00:19:20]:
I think it ultimately comes down to when I was at an agency, we often talked about, like, you know, how do we get around this whole GDPR thing? Like, how do we make our website compliant? But I still want to get all the cookie data. It's like, well, that's actually a good thing. It's good that people have, like, you know, one of the things I always say, and if you're listening to this, please don't call my cell phone. I don't want to be sold to on my cell phone. I don't know how you got it. And one day I filled out a form and it's that, you know, Bob's your uncle. But the reality is, like, there are concessions that we have to make as marketers. And that ultimately comes down to kind of the thesis of the talk where, like, you're never going to know everything.
Chris Singlemann [00:19:52]:
And so I kind of think that we're reaching a plateau of martech across the board. Like, there's only so much we can build and who knows what AI has in store. But I think it's what I'm actually really excited for is not the next tech or not the next this. It's how do we learn to maximize what we already have and feel comfortable with that? Like, we've gone through a long history of marketing and sales are just aligned. What's a MQL? No, they only want to see SQLs. What does that mean? How does the tools that we have today and the information that we have today actually bring us closer together to understand, like, we're all working towards common goals. It was said in one of the talks this morning, pipeline, we all want more revenue, we all want more pipeline, and more tools isn't going to fix that. So I think we've reached the point of no return where there's not going to be another tool magically that fix it all.
Mark Huber [00:20:37]:
Hear that marketers. Yeah.
Chris Singlemann [00:20:39]:
And waiting for that to come isn't going to change anything. So I think, and I think there's more and more people that are kind of buying into that concept. So it's a concept of again, asking the right questions and being comfortable with the things that you're never going to find out and working with what you have.
Mark Huber [00:20:50]:
Chris, I could talk for hours with you. This was awesome. Thank you for coming on the proofpoint and thank you, Kaylee for making this happen.
Chris Singlemann [00:20:57]:
That's right. Thank you very much, Kaylee. Good to meet you.
Mark Huber [00:20:59]:
Thanks for listening to the proofpoint. If you like what you heard during this conversation, you probably will like evidently my bi weekly newsletter where I share my biggest hits and get honest about my misses as a first time VP of Marketing. You can subscribe using the link in the show notes here. In this episode, the Proof point is brought to you by User Evidence. If you want to learn more about how our customer evidence platform can help you build trust and close deals faster, check out userevidence. Com.