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. In 2025, every B2B marketer needs to be focused on one thing. Building trust. So I went to the toughest industry to pull it off, cyber security and and talk 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 John Short, founder and CEO of Compound Growth Marketing, an agency that specializes in working with cybersecurity companies. John and I got into some of the biggest challenges that B2B marketers are facing right now, from resource constraints to targeting niche audiences and balancing personalization with scalability. He is so smart about all things growth, marketing and demand gen.
Mark Huber [00:00:52]:
And it was a long time overdue that John and I finally got to meet and hang in real life. John was awesome. I really love this combo. Pulled the same move on you. I'm not going to tell you who asked me or told me to ask you this question, but does a hole in one count on a par three course?
John Short [00:01:09]:
So the background of this is that I my only hole in one ever in golf is on a par three course at the Cradle at Pinehurst, and I put an asterisk next to it. Whenever somebody asks me if I scored a hole in one, I say yes. So I've had an eagle from 150 yards out go in the hole and a hole in one on a par three course. So I'm just waiting for a hole in one on a simulator.
Mark Huber [00:01:35]:
Okay.
John Short [00:01:35]:
So I can get the trifecta of eagles that don't really count as a hole in one.
Mark Huber [00:01:43]:
For what it's worth, I think it counts. The person who told me to ask you that, was he golfing with you or is this just a point of contention?
John Short [00:01:49]:
No, I've never golfed with him. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:01:51]:
That surprises me.
John Short [00:01:52]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:01:53]:
Who do you think is better, you or him?
John Short [00:01:54]:
Him.
Mark Huber [00:01:55]:
He was pretty good when I golf with him and I made the mistake, I think I was telling you earlier that when I pitched him the idea originally, I made the mistake of not looking up his handicap ahead of time.
John Short [00:02:04]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:02:05]:
So one of our AES at user evidence, after I told him what I was doing, goes, dude, I don't think you realize what you just signed up for. And he sent me a screenshot. I was like, oh my God. I definitely didn't realize what I signed up for.
John Short [00:02:17]:
I think he has me by six to eight strokes right now.
Mark Huber [00:02:21]:
I forget who told him this, but somebody said, you know, if you have a handicap that low, there's no way you're working hard enough.
John Short [00:02:26]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark Huber [00:02:28]:
I love it.
John Short [00:02:29]:
Well, that was the big thing in the Wall Street Journal. Not to draw this out, but the Wall Street Journal recently came out with an article saying that recruiters were looking at the handicap of players to understand if in finance or sales or something. To understand, like, because as an asset.
Mark Huber [00:02:44]:
Yeah.
John Short [00:02:45]:
Of you want people who are really good at golf, in sales meetings, in finance, whatever it was.
Mark Huber [00:02:51]:
So, speaking of, Dave, you did a Q and A recently in the community. How did that go?
John Short [00:02:55]:
It went well. Yeah. The thing I love about that community, Exit 5, is it's a super engaged community. And I've always been impressed with the content that comes out of it. Right. It's real questions that are being asked there of like, I'm having trouble selling to our CEO or a new CRO just came in. That's really challenging. And so you get questions like that.
John Short [00:03:17]:
I just think it's genuinely a really good community. So we enjoy engaging. We'll do more work with them.
Mark Huber [00:03:23]:
I was just in, I think sometime last week they did a CMO club session. And then I had Kip Bodnar from HubSpot and, like, people were asking unbelievable questions. Super in the weeds. I was so surprised. And then at the end, I joined a little bit late. I had something else going on. So I think it was like, 12:58. And it ended at one.
John Short [00:03:43]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:03:44]:
And I go, hey, I got a really meaty question here. This is kind of by accident, but I'm right in the thick of 2025 planning right now. Any advice? And he's like, how did no one ask that question in the 58 minutes leading up to this? Like, why are you the first one?
John Short [00:03:57]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:03:57]:
So I thought it was funny. His best piece of advice was, you know, everybody argues over the last, like, 5 or 10%. He's like, don't waste all of your energy arguing there. He's like, waste all of it in the first 75%, as opposed to nitpicking at the end. So it was an interest point for me because I'm just in the thick of planning and spreadsheets right now. So are you helping any of your clients with that right now? What does that process look like?
John Short [00:04:20]:
Yeah. So, I mean, I built the firm through the lens of my experiences working in house, so certainly we want to be a partner for the companies that we're working with. And I'm optimistic about next year. I think we've. In tech, we've had two challenging years of budgets being pulled down, budgets flattening out. And so there are signs of optimism. It's more pockets of industries like cyber. Cybersecurity is doing really well, and then some of the other clients that we work with.
John Short [00:04:49]:
But there are also some industries that are going to continue to be challenged.
Mark Huber [00:04:53]:
So why do you think that is the case in cyber?
John Short [00:04:56]:
Well, I think the hypothesis that got us so excited about cyber was coming out of COVID just the idea that everybody was going remote. So the digital transformations that everybody was going through had to be accelerated. It brought a lot more information and communication online. And so the companies that were previously hesitant to move to cloud technologies all of a sudden had to like. A lot of the opportunities that hackers like to expose is through the email, through communications, through identity challenges that companies are having. So it felt like a really interesting time for us to start focusing on cyber. And we started to get exposure to cyber naturally, but have really kind of built it as one of the core areas where we really focus.
Mark Huber [00:05:47]:
So you're going to school me on this, but what have you found to be different about marketing to people in the cyberspace? Because I know it's not the typical recycled playbook that you can use in most B2B SaaS industries.
John Short [00:05:59]:
It's interesting. It kind of goes back to like when I think back to 0809 when I was at LogMeIn thinking about selling into like what we then called it, where it was a high. Like we enjoyed these situations where we're selling into highly technical buyers who are well educated and pretty jaded by marketing.
Mark Huber [00:06:20]:
So a perfect way of putting it a little bit.
John Short [00:06:22]:
Yeah. They scrutinize marketing, they're paying close attention. We were just at a session on influencer marketing and they were talking about the amount of scrutiny that influencers and cybersecurity get. It's a different audience. And I have always felt like brand is the sum of every single touch point that somebody has for the company. And because of that, demand generation is incredibly important in terms of thinking about the ads that you're showing, when you're showing the ads, how you develop content for SEO. And then afterwards, throughout the lifecycle of the customer, it's not. You can't just bang on your email list over and over again.
John Short [00:07:02]:
You have a very kind of technical buyer who's going to be very quick. So the channel mix Too is interesting. We've seen good results with Reddit from an awareness perspective. And then content syndication, which is not always relevant across our entire pool.
Mark Huber [00:07:20]:
Yeah, that's surprising. So why do you think that's the case? Because I would have written it off in most other, like B2B sub industries.
John Short [00:07:27]:
Yeah. So a lot of the content syndication providers are, I think, are probably creating higher quality content because you have a more skeptical buyer. And so you have organizations like Security Week that are developing really high quality content for the Personas that they're looking to sell to. And so there's a lot of those out there. Right. Target has done a pretty good job for the security audience. And, and so. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:07:54]:
Of all the things that you were going to say content syndication inside.
John Short [00:07:57]:
I know, I. I know, I know. Yeah. It's not the most exciting thing. It's not the most flashy thing.
Mark Huber [00:08:02]:
Yeah.
John Short [00:08:03]:
But I do think we're seeing a little bit of a resurgence there in content syndication where the reputation has been. You get this list of people, they basically are going to give you 80% of leads, 20% of those leads are not even real.
Mark Huber [00:08:18]:
Yeah.
John Short [00:08:19]:
And you don't know if they actually downloaded the content. I think, you know, you saw Zoom Info kind of blow up and become this powerhouse. I think they're like a 25 to $50 billion company. I forget who the actual acquirer was. They kept the Zoom Info name.
Mark Huber [00:08:34]:
Discover Org.
John Short [00:08:35]:
Discover Org. Yeah. They were two kind of middling companies and then somehow they brought them both together and it's turned out to be a really powerful company. And I think that has kind of woken up some of the other vendors out there, like Tech Target, some of these companies where you weren't really sure about the quality. But yeah, we see, we see.
Mark Huber [00:08:54]:
Perfect example of something that's proclaimed dead on LinkedIn when it's probably not dead in the right industry. And you do it the right way.
John Short [00:09:01]:
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. You have to do it the right way. You have to understand how that content is getting out to the customers and if they're actually engaging with it versus just clicking Download, never reading something ever again. Guilty.
Mark Huber [00:09:14]:
You have done that a bunch. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John Short [00:09:17]:
Your best self is going to be the one who's going to read that white paper and you never actually do.
Mark Huber [00:09:22]:
I would love to know on my current computer and previous work computers how many white papers that I've downloaded and told myself I was going to read and then never ended up reading it. It's probably a lot.
John Short [00:09:32]:
Yeah. I am super skeptical of ebooks. Right. Probably haven't downloaded one in a long time. I have started to get some passed to me more often. So I do think that the level of content is. Is increasing. There's still not something that I'm a huge fan of, kind of recommending to our clients outside of the security industry, but certainly something that can still be successful.
Mark Huber [00:09:56]:
I love it. So we'll bring it back to exit 5 and the community webinar that you were in. And it sounds like the chat was unbelievable to the point where you couldn't get to all of the questions. So you wrote about a post with a couple different questions that came up, and I'd love kind of go deeper on some of them. So resource constraints. I can't believe that I'm asking a question about doing more with less. Hopefully this is the last time that I have to ask that. But what are you telling your clients, you know, who are trying to do more with less?
John Short [00:10:25]:
I think it's a good exercise for marketers to be going through. I graduated in 08, so I graduated at the very bottom of the economy we were going through.
Mark Huber [00:10:35]:
My dad started paying out of state tuition for me in 08. I graduated in 2012.
John Short [00:10:38]:
So yeah, yeah, yeah, son, do you want to go to illinois? So I graduated 08 and have always kind of been interested in the economy, but I think the recessions down economies, nobody likes them, nobody likes to lose their job. But one thing that they can help us with is really kind of focus on what's most important to us. And so I think overall, we kind of get efficient. As companies tighten their belt, we get efficient and we start to focus on what matters most. And then we can learn from that. And we start expanding. We start expanding and then VCs come in and start dumping capital on us. And then we try to do too much, and then there's a little bit of a bubble, and then it all get exposed and then the bubble pops and then we kind of go back to focusing on the things that are very narrow.
John Short [00:11:30]:
And I think focus is the best attribute that I see in marketers. The people who can prioritize the best and build the best hypothesis of what's going to be most successful are the marketers who are really successful, the folk. When I'm interviewing, I'm always looking for who are people who are going to chase the shiny object and just go.
Mark Huber [00:11:51]:
Are marketers doing that?
John Short [00:11:52]:
Yeah, yeah, they chase after the shiny object. So I think that where we are in the economy today, it's about Kind of focusing, identifying the lowest cost channels and trying to figure out where we can get the most bang for our buck. So a lot of that is how do we leverage the current database that we have. And I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff there. I think one of the unanswered questions was around the data stack, around the zoom info, around the clays, around the common rooms of the world. So I think that was one piece that was really interesting and then the other piece is, you know, just how do we prioritize and align and think about the full funnel and where we need to be in that customer journey and maybe where are the gaps in that customer journey where our competitors aren't that we can be investing more.
Mark Huber [00:12:44]:
So are you working with your clients to kind of coach them through that and help them do that or how does that work?
John Short [00:12:50]:
Yeah, so we, we are partially a strategic partner to the companies we work with and then we also support with execution as well. So we want to help them think about what channels are going to be best for them to be focused on how they can build marketing assets like through content, things that are going to perpetually drive new customers, new revenue in. And we want to think about what channels they should be investing in and how they should be focusing on those channels.
Mark Huber [00:13:23]:
So there's never a one size fits all answer for really anything in B2B marketing. But when it comes to prioritization, what would be the best advice that you would give B2B marketers right now for, you know, what they should be looking at next year and how to prioritize things.
John Short [00:13:37]:
Like the exercise that I always go to is going through the buyer's journey. And I actually have a Google Doc that I can send to you afterwards that you can share out to the audience. But I go through and I build an awareness stage, a pain or pain stage, a consideration phase, and then a conversion phase. And we look at the Personas that we're looking to target at each one of those stages. We're looking at the inflection points that users are going through at each one of those stages that might bring them into market. We look at what the offer would be, what the creative would look like, and then what channel we're going to leverage them on. And so that to me is a really powerful exercise for building a hypothesis of, okay, where are we really strong right now, where are we investing our dollars and where are the gaps? And so I do that and then I list out the channels that I think are going to be most effective to us. And I look at them, how much scale I can get with those audiences, and then how expensive are they? Like from a customer acquisition perspective, how expensive is that channel going to be? And then how much confidence do I have that this channel is going to be successful?
Mark Huber [00:14:50]:
So that is kind of make it sound really simple.
John Short [00:14:54]:
That is how I kind of go through the process of identifying and prioritizing the channels that we want to be. And there's things going on in the background. Right. Competitive research to understand what our competitors are doing, where they're really strong and where some of the gaps might be in their strategy. But yeah, that's how I'd look at it.
Mark Huber [00:15:14]:
So you mentioned audiences, and I think one of the other questions that you weren't able to get to was targeting niche audiences, which I'm sure is probably pretty commonplace in cyber. So how do you, how do you work through that with your clients?
John Short [00:15:25]:
This is becoming a more popular question because B2B technology, cybersecurity, B2B SaaS in general has gotten very competitive. We're also seeing companies move up market partially because of what I talked about before. There's been a digital transformation. More people are moving to cloud software versus on prem.
Mark Huber [00:15:45]:
Yep.
John Short [00:15:45]:
And so with that, there is an opportunity for SaaS companies to start charging more money for their products. And they're also niching down into specific verticals, or they're not necessarily more vertical, but they're niching down into who their audience is. And so for that, I think companies need to start from square one. I think for a long time we saw B2B marketers say, okay, we have this finite audience. I'm going to buy Terminus, we're going to advertise, laughing at agreement. We're going to shower our accounts with ads, display ads, display ads and impressions rather than like, you know, look, the Stargate account is like across the street from you, like shake their hand, buy them lunch and try to get them to purchase. So I would look to start small and look at, you know, when we think about abm, we think of aligning with sales on what the ICP looks like, what your target account list looks like. And then we put the step of identifying what are the lowest hanging fruit channels that we can leverage in order to engage.
John Short [00:16:56]:
And that's things like email, that's InMail, that's going to conferences, and making sure you're meeting with certain people when you're at those conferences. And so, yeah, I think that's helpful because, you know, at some point, LinkedIn some of the other channels out there, they just become less effective when you don't have as large of an audience size that you can go after.
Mark Huber [00:17:17]:
So I got two more questions for you, one from the Q and A and then one to wrap it up.
John Short [00:17:22]:
So no more surprise questions?
Mark Huber [00:17:24]:
Well, no, I'm going to let you pay it back to who tipped me off. So we're going to make fun of him in a little bit.
John Short [00:17:28]:
Okay.
Mark Huber [00:17:29]:
So it wouldn't be a marketing podcast episode if we didn't talk about something related to measurement and attributions. How are you walking clients through measurement right now? And you know, maybe a different way than people usually think about measurement.
John Short [00:17:42]:
Yeah. So we really think about data triangulation. Many attribution models are good, none are perfect. When we're looking at attribution, we look at analytics. We look at what your CRM and marketing automation systems say and then we look at what the customer is telling us. We look at analytics to help us understand how many times does that user come to our site before? What channels did they come in from? Did we see a lift when we were doing something like a Q and A session externally or when we post on social, do we see a bump? And then through the marketing automation system, it's similar, but we have more of a connection to down funnel metrics. Like if somebody becomes a qualified lead, if they become pipeline, et cetera. And then we have the self reported, which is a lot of people like to ask that in the form.
John Short [00:18:31]:
If you can. I highly recommend you get your.
Mark Huber [00:18:34]:
We started doing it earlier this year. It's been awesome. Yeah, I basically just went through. I showed what our attribution was showing us in HubSpot and then I used ChatGPT to then take all the answers from self reported attribution and then pair it up side by side to show the two co founders because it tells a very different story. It's also flawed in its own way, I think.
John Short [00:18:52]:
Yeah, that's why we think data triangulation is so important. Because if a user has heard about you previously because they've seen you on tv, but they go to Google and they search for ways to build social proof or something like that, and they see your ad, they're going to be more likely to click on your ad. Right. So there's a one, two punch there and no one channel typically deserves all the credit there. When possible, I would say get your sales team to ask.
Mark Huber [00:19:20]:
That's what I want to start doing.
John Short [00:19:21]:
Yeah, because you have gong, you can get all this data and you start to hear the emotion behind it. And it can be really powerful for marketing teams to hear.
Mark Huber [00:19:30]:
Yep.
John Short [00:19:31]:
From the leads, how they heard about you, what got them really excited, what point in their buying journey they're in. Right. What's happening at that company X is happening at my company. So I went to Google or so I went to the cyber marketing.
Mark Huber [00:19:48]:
Yeah. Well you learned like some inflection points or whatever it may be.
John Short [00:19:51]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:19:51]:
That's funny because I was thinking about that on the flight here to the event this week. And now that you said that, I'm go tell our VP of sales who's also here that hey, we're gonna start doing this.
John Short [00:19:59]:
Yeah, yeah.
Mark Huber [00:20:01]:
This has been awesome. I could talk shop with you all day. But we gotta have one question at the end. We gotta get back at Dave. So what's the best Dave story that you have that you can share? He speaks super highly about you.
John Short [00:20:13]:
The best Dave story. There were a couple for one when I was working with Drift. Drift was early client of ours, but I think one of the best was a couple of months ago. I hadn't talked with him in like six months and had called him up and he's like not really into having phone conversations.
Mark Huber [00:20:32]:
Yeah, he doesn't have a calendar link which I love.
John Short [00:20:35]:
Yeah. But so I was talking with him and we were in the middle of a conversation and all I heard was in the background. It was like 3:30, like when your kids are getting dropped off at school. And all I heard was daddy, Daddy. I brought this home from school. And then he's like, all right John, gotta go, bye. And he just like hadn't talked to him in six months and he just like immediately drops the phone to hang out with his kids. And so yeah, it was kind of a funny situation.
Mark Huber [00:21:03]:
Love it. Well, this was great. Thank you for coming on. This was a blast. And we'll have to do this again maybe sometime next year and we'll see how a lot of what we talked about holds true in the new year.
John Short [00:21:12]:
All right, sounds good. Thank you so much.
Mark Huber [00:21:14]:
Thank you. Thanks for listening to the proofpoint. If you like what you heard during this conversation, you probably will like Evidently a bi weekly news newsletter where I share my biggest hits and get honest about my Mrs. 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.