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, cybersecurity, 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 Sam Langrock, senior product marketing manager at Record A Future. Sam and I talked through how Record A Future uses customer evidence like proof points and testimonials to tackle buyer fear, build trust, and close deals faster. And he also shared how they've made trust building a natural part of every sales conversation.
Mark Huber [00:00:48]:
Let's get into it. I owe you for a couple things. One thing that I don't owe you for is for making me look bad. I didn't get the memo that I was supposed to look as sharp as you are right now.
Sam Langrock [00:00:57]:
Cybersecurity industry, you gotta look fresh, man.
Mark Huber [00:01:00]:
I think one of my favorite parts about doing this little test run that we're about to do is just talking about this topic because I know it's something that is super relevant for everybody that's here. But before we get into it, I got a funny story for people who are going to listen to this. So we're talking over zoom for the first time about this presentation. And I think I made it, I don't know, like five, six minutes in. And I said, you know, this is going to be a really weird question, but do you play hockey? And what was the answer that you gave me?
Sam Langrock [00:01:27]:
That was a yes.
Mark Huber [00:01:29]:
I don't know what it is. I'm sure you're probably the same way. Like, people just, if you play hockey and you've played for your entire life, like, you kind of have this spidey sense of, I can tell that person is a hockey person. And it was the first time that I've ever asked that on a call, which is pretty funny.
Sam Langrock [00:01:44]:
Yeah, the talk with a little bit of a Canadian accent. Kind of dead giveaway.
Mark Huber [00:01:49]:
Yeah, yeah. We're talking about a topic that I think everyone who is attending here probably can relate to, which is helping skeptical buyers overcome fear and turn that into confidence. So we went back and forth on that topic originally. Why is that so relevant to you and your role at Recorded Future?
Sam Langrock [00:02:06]:
Yeah, so as a. As a product marketer at Recorded Future, owning A number of our different products, I think really having that information about what the buyer cares about, how the product helps the buyer, you know, the kind of different benefits that they receive direct from the customer, really helps them understand what the benefits are that our product will allow them to have, but also helps our sales team really understand what they should be talking about with the customer.
Mark Huber [00:02:34]:
So I'm. I would say fairly new to cyber in general, but it feels like buyers in cyber are particularly skeptical or I think more skeptical than other industries. So why do you think that's the case?
Sam Langrock [00:02:45]:
Yeah, there might be other edge cases out there where they're maybe a little bit more skeptical that than cyber. Their ass is on the line when they make purchases, which is probably a little bit different than a lot of other industries. There's a stat out there that the average Enterprise organization has 76 different cybersecurity tools. So there's a lot of different cybersecurity tools they purchase. Probably too many, which is why we're seeing a lot of them start to consolidate their tech stack. But we also see 40 to 60% of B2B purchases end in no decision. And that's probably not just because of the salesforce data that we're getting. Probably could be better, but it kind of shows that it's really hard to make a decision about a product, and it's really, really hard when you know that if you make the wrong decision about a product, that could be very damaging to your organization.
Mark Huber [00:03:35]:
Yeah. Because it's not like to put it on me as a marketer, you buy a bad piece of martech, that's one thing. You buy a bad piece of technology as a cyber company or cyber marketer. Like, you're not just putting, like, your job at risk. Like, you're putting, like, customers and data and everything that, you know much better than I do at risk as well.
Sam Langrock [00:03:52]:
That's kind of pipeline's important.
Mark Huber [00:03:54]:
Yeah.
Sam Langrock [00:03:54]:
But at the end of the day, yeah, people's lives and data are a little, little bit more important.
Mark Huber [00:03:58]:
So how do some of those uncertainties, like, show up in the evaluation process?
Sam Langrock [00:04:04]:
I think when you get to that buyer having to start pitching the. So it goes from the sales rep pitching to the buyer, the buyer has to start pitching it to procurement, to the cfo, all those internal people within the company that kind of own the purse strings, that's when we see. It's like, oh, we need to build, like, a business justification for this. You know, we went. We did the discovery call, we did the demo. We love it, it looks great but like how do we help other people understand that yeah, we're gonna spend 100k on this, but it's gonna help us do X, it's gonna make y easier. So having all of that information is critical for when they go and have those conversations to pitch it internally. Cause if you get someone sold on a product, it's like, oh, this is gonna be an easy sell.
Sam Langrock [00:04:50]:
But then all of a sudden the CFO procurement comes in. It's like, okay, how do we move this along there to show them that there is definitely value here.
Mark Huber [00:04:58]:
So you're at recorded future. Now maybe you can speak to record a future or just generalize this. But in the evaluation process, like what are some common objections that you run into as a product marketer in cyber?
Sam Langrock [00:05:10]:
Yeah, a huge one. If you know recorded future, there's a lot of jokes on Reddit about it being very expensive. You know, it is expensive but it's, you know, we think it's, it's worth the price. So I think, you know, that's, that's one of them. Others being like, you know, does it does actually work? Are we actually getting real stuff out there or just kind of doing what you know, you say in your marketing? So being able to explain the value of the product, but also how easy it makes people's lives. You know, one of our big benefits is reducing time spent on manual investigations. Well, manual investigations are something that the security teams you work with absolutely hate doing. So how can we help them understand, hey, your job would be this much better using a recorded feature.
Sam Langrock [00:05:56]:
And no, it's not going to take away your job if people are worried about AI. Sure it's not going to take away your job, but it's going to make your job so much easier to do and that's going to free up that time that you can go and then spend on more strategic projects.
Mark Huber [00:06:10]:
The stuff that you actually want to do.
Sam Langrock [00:06:12]:
Yeah, probably the stuff that you really want to do rather than being bogged down and researching on this IP address or this website domain that kind of looks like yours.
Mark Huber [00:06:21]:
So have you marketed in other non cyber industries before?
Sam Langrock [00:06:25]:
I have. So I actually started my career at a customer data platform and loyalty platform, so called Session M. We ran some of the loyalty functionality behind the Starbucks app, behind the Chipotle loyalty, your rewards.
Mark Huber [00:06:39]:
You use both of those a lot?
Sam Langrock [00:06:40]:
Yeah, I don't know if they're still in there, but back when I was there. So that actually got acquired by MasterCard October 2019. So then I Worked in the data and services division of MasterCard for about 18 months where I kind of worked on some cyber products, some experimentation products, and then joined recruit a future about three years ago, I guess about two months ago, got acquired by. Acquired by MasterCard once again. So I don't know if it's me or What. I'm the MasterCard acquisition charm.
Mark Huber [00:07:09]:
Yeah. Well, maybe they can turn the old email address just right back on. I don't know how that works. So the reason why I ask is, do you think cyber buyers need more reassurance than buyers in other industries?
Sam Langrock [00:07:20]:
I think so. And I think it goes back to again, you know, they're the ones with their butts on the line. Right. So in those other industries you can have like, you know, oh, well, this tool is to help us build pipeline. That's great. Like as a marketer, you know, we love building pipeline. Yep. But in the cybersecurity industry, you really need to make sure that what you're spending your money on is really going to work.
Sam Langrock [00:07:42]:
And I think another thing that's interesting is the opportunity cost of if you spend money on X, you may not have money to spend on Y. And what happens when Y becomes the bigger problem? So if you look at like Gartner's cybersecurity mesh architecture, that thing is massive. There are so many different tools.
Mark Huber [00:07:59]:
Talk to me like I'm five.
Sam Langrock [00:08:00]:
Yeah, well, it's this. It's this big diagram they put up on a slide, as Gartner does. Yep. And it's got, you know, hundreds of different types of security products that someone could buy and purchase. And now when you're talking about, you know, maybe if it's a 1K purchase, it's a little different from a recorded future, which is on, you know, and this tends to be in the six figures.
Mark Huber [00:08:20]:
Yep.
Sam Langrock [00:08:21]:
So having the ability to really understand, like, what do I need now and what's going to have the biggest bang for my buck and what's going to help my organization the most.
Mark Huber [00:08:30]:
So evidence is one of those things that can help persuade and influence buyers. So how does that help you and really customer evidence in your role at recorded future?
Sam Langrock [00:08:40]:
Yeah, I think it really helps, again, the buyer understand what we're offering. So being able to tell them, hey, if you use our product, we can save you three to five hours on this type of investigation that you're spending all this time during your week doing, and we can just do it like that for you. It's kind of being able to say, here's all the challenges that you're probably dealing with. And here's how we can help. And I think I was reading a new marketing book the other day around like, which one? Make it punchy.
Mark Huber [00:09:13]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. I love. I met Emma for the first time at an event. She's awesome.
Sam Langrock [00:09:16]:
Okay. I haven't met her yet, but yes.
Mark Huber [00:09:19]:
I wasn't trying to big time yet. No, I finally met her in person after a couple years of being LinkedIn friends.
Sam Langrock [00:09:24]:
She's great.
Mark Huber [00:09:24]:
I love that book.
Sam Langrock [00:09:25]:
Right. No, it's great. I just finished on the plane ride over to Philly. One thing I saw.
Mark Huber [00:09:28]:
Read fast because it's not that long of a flight. No, no. Started before.
Sam Langrock [00:09:32]:
That's a good one. One thing they said is like, no one's ever going to buy for your obscure data processing, your AI analysis. This thing that your CTO and CEO want to go out there and talk about. They're going to buy because you solve the challenges and pain points and you make their lives easier and you make them look better.
Mark Huber [00:09:54]:
Are there any forms of evidence that you've seen work better than others for what you do at Record a Future?
Sam Langrock [00:10:01]:
I think evidence that really helps people understand the challenge the buyer was experiencing and how we've helped them kind of become the hero of their company, of their job and the impact that's had. So, for example, we had one customer who we had acquired a company and it was kind of a different motion for our sales team because it's a little bit of different space, different kind of ways of talking about the product. And there's some issues like trying to get it off the ground. And it was selling decently. But we managed to get one of our customers to come and really talk about what they were experiencing before this product from Recorded Future, how they're using it now, and some of the benefits that they've seen. Obviously, when the customer is saying, yeah, we saved tens of millions of dollars and Recorded Future was a big part of that, it really looks great. But even just kind of showcasing like here was my challenge before and here's how much easier it's been become now is super beneficial. And then being able to take that and packaging it into different forms.
Sam Langrock [00:11:09]:
So for example, we did a webinar and then from that webinar we did a Q and a blog post that kind of had some of his top answers. And then he spoke at our user conference Predict, and then we have the video recording of that. So being able to do a whole mess of different things with that story, super impactful Love that.
Mark Huber [00:11:27]:
So you ran through a lot of different use cases for using evidence, but outside of product marketing, what other teams at recorded future are using some of this customer evidence?
Sam Langrock [00:11:37]:
Yeah, we've seen it really perform well in social. I think you see a lot of people post their G2, their Gartner peer insights reviews and those are great, but I think when you look at those, it's really the, the buyer kind of giving a review, not really talking about what makes the product so impactful. Sometimes they might.
Mark Huber [00:11:58]:
I love their team, I love their csm. It's just like all kind of surface level stuff.
Sam Langrock [00:12:02]:
Exactly, exactly. So being able to hand them that like bite sized handle, our social team, that bite sized information of, you know, this is, this is what the product does for me. This is why I love the product that comes straight from the horse's mouth is really impactful and I think we've seen adding it into some of our demand generation assets. There's a lot of quotes that float in different marketing materials, but having real quotes that aren't just made up and are coming directly from something that you captured with a customer, I just think that just makes everything so much better. I've taken all of our information and kind of correlated based on the use case and been like, all right, I'm trying to put together a messaging and positioning around, you know, this particular use case. Let me see how the customer talks about it. And that just makes my job so much easier because I'm not trying to, you know, I was never in a soc, I was never part of a cyber threat intelligence team. But I want to talk the way they talk like a hockey player pick up on how a hockey player talks.
Sam Langrock [00:13:01]:
So being able to really use that information to facilitate how I'm putting together my messaging is it makes me sound 10x smarter.
Mark Huber [00:13:10]:
So how big is the sales team at recorded Future?
Sam Langrock [00:13:13]:
I think we're pushing 100 or so.
Mark Huber [00:13:16]:
So it's by my definition it's like a massive sales team.
Sam Langrock [00:13:18]:
Yeah, global. Global sales team. Yeah. It's, it's big.
Mark Huber [00:13:21]:
So in your role, how are you working with sales and kind of giving them, you know, your best customer evidence to use based on whatever your criteria are. Because I imagine with the sales team that large and how many customers that Recorded Future has, it probably is a first world marketing problem.
Sam Langrock [00:13:36]:
Yeah, it's a difficult problem. If I had a nickel for the number of times someone said, do we have a case study for this industry about this challenge, I might have more money than MasterCard, but it's really helping them have different clubs in their bag. So I think you see a lot of companies just really focus on the traditional case study and maybe a video case study. Well, that's great for some things, but I do find those to just kind of be a little fluffy and maybe not get that full information. So I think by pairing those with also like the customer testimonials that are coming directly from the customer about like, hey, this is what I achieve using recorded future and then really pairing that with more information that you allow your customers to kind of tell you about. So for example, we did a blog with our client Canva about how they built and operationalized their cyber threat intelligence program. I think when you can have clients really start to do that, it makes everything just resonate that much more. But for sales, really being able to provide information across the funnel to be like, hey, here's how we help you acquire these customers.
Sam Langrock [00:14:42]:
Because the stuff is on our website is ranked for SEO. People can find it easily and then providing them with the information so they can include it in their pitch decks, in their follow up materials and then having those short clips to be like, well, is anyone getting any benefit out of our vulnerability intelligence products? Yes. Here's someone saying how much time it's saved or how these alerts have helped them get shift left to boom. Having all that information really helps them. Obviously there's always work to do because sometimes sales doesn't want to look for it.
Mark Huber [00:15:14]:
No, they would never do that.
Sam Langrock [00:15:16]:
Shout out to my sales reps. I hope they're not listening. They've got enough podcasts, I'm sure.
Mark Huber [00:15:20]:
Yeah, yeah, I love that you mentioned the knock on case studies and maybe that's because of us being in marketing and we kind of know how case studies are typically written, which is usually not the customer, it's the company writing the case study for the customer. Them probably not having enough time to write it themselves, saying it looks great and it is, you know, wherever it lives, it's out there. I just don't really read case studies anymore, but I look at the kind of bite sized proof points and look at those in particular because I think they're just so much more believable.
Sam Langrock [00:15:52]:
Yeah, no, I agree. I think the case studies are just, they're also redlined by that comms team.
Mark Huber [00:15:58]:
Yeah.
Sam Langrock [00:15:59]:
And you know, if you're in the business of working with the companies that recorded future works with, there's a lot of red lines.
Mark Huber [00:16:05]:
So yeah, you're working with massive companies that have massive legal teams probably mostly red lines. Yeah.
Sam Langrock [00:16:11]:
So be able to pull out that actual information. And you're right. Like, people's attention span is gone.
Mark Huber [00:16:18]:
Yeah.
Sam Langrock [00:16:18]:
Reading through a full case study, you know, I think having that, you know, people know what the challenges are, people know what the. The benefits are, but, like, are people actually experiencing those?
Mark Huber [00:16:29]:
Yep. So this has got to be a kind of a tough thing to do. But how do you measure, like, the impact of customer evidence? Like, what are the things that you're looking at both quantitatively and maybe qualitatively?
Sam Langrock [00:16:40]:
Yeah, it's something that we're really hoping to solve in 2025. I'm sure that's on every marketer's wish list. I want to solve revenue attribution. We are using a few new platforms that'll hopefully help with that because we haven't quite figured it out yet. I think, you know, this is something that our former cmo Tom Wentworth implemented is kind of doing an NPS score with your. With your reps in understanding, do they feel like they have access to the information they need? Where can we be doing better? And then trying to measure that over time is very helpful. I think also looking at your sales enablement platforms and tools, like, are people looking at these people use? Are people sending them? Are people demanding it more?
Mark Huber [00:17:23]:
How many fewer times are you getting. Do we have a case study request?
Sam Langrock [00:17:25]:
That's what I was going to say. Yeah. More qualitatively, actually, this is another issue. But how many times am I getting pinged from reps being like, hey, where's that case study that has that ROI stat that I can be like, yeah, here you go. So, yeah, I mean, the number of times where they're also like, do we have something for X? And I'm like, yeah, here it is. And they're like, oh, my God, you just.
Mark Huber [00:17:46]:
Your best friend.
Sam Langrock [00:17:46]:
Yeah, you saved my day.
Mark Huber [00:17:48]:
So getting into your playbook, how you use this at recorded future, what would be maybe the best advice that you could give? Product marketer or a B2B marketer who's looking to do some of the things that you're doing right now?
Sam Langrock [00:18:00]:
Yeah, so I can give my advice and kind of what we're doing and then give my advice on what I think you should do if you're starting up. So what we do, again is the traditional case studies and videos because I think they are still an important part of the mix as much as maybe not everyone reads them, but they look good on a website and they're nice to have printed out at Trade shows and conferences. And then we're working with user evidence to build those more bite sized testimonials by asking a number of questions like how does recorded future benefit you and your day to day? We get tons of great information, some that you wouldn't expect, like a retailer talking about how our physical security product is protecting their retail locations. So it's always funny kind of looking through the testimonials and being like, oh, I didn't expect to see this benefit from this company, but that's great. And I think that third part is working with customers on more information that can be used as whether it's thought leadership or more bottom of the funnel content. Again, going back to the Canva blog, hey, come write a blog with us and talk about how you kind of built up your program because that's super powerful. And a lot of organizations are looking to the types of companies we work with to try and improve their program. If I was getting started and one thing we had such a hard time with this, even that recorded feature where pretty large cybersecurity company, just a really hard time getting case studies and getting people to do named case studies and videos and sit down with us.
Sam Langrock [00:19:30]:
A lot of our marketing says you're overworked and under resourced and we want them to sit down with marketing to help us out. Yeah, it's a really hard conversation to have. So I think one thing that's great about user evidence is being able to have those surveys that you can pick out the people that you want to send it to. You can garner that kind of bite sized testimonial information, but then you can also start building a roster of people that might do more activities with you. So one thing we have in the end of our surveys is like thank you for completing the survey. Are any of these other activities of interest to you that might be a case study, it might be participating in a webinar, it might be a speaking engagement. There's a number of different avenues you can do and we actually get a lot of great information from that. And now all of a sudden we went from having a pipeline of people wanting to talk about us that was like this to unearthing a pipeline out there that is really long.
Sam Langrock [00:20:20]:
And actually last week we had a webinar and we pretty easily got our champion from 7 11, which again, big organization.
Mark Huber [00:20:28]:
Heard of it? Yeah.
Sam Langrock [00:20:30]:
To come on and be part of that, that's amazing. And there was a lot less legal red tape we had to go through. It was a lot easier for the account manager and this customer success manager to get them. Because we were like, hey, this person highlighted that they'd be willing to be part of this. You know, could we talk to them for a webinar? And it's like, yeah, this is, this is 100x easier.
Mark Huber [00:20:51]:
Yeah. And, you know, maybe you had this problem before, maybe you didn't. But at a company with much lower customer count, marketers tend to usually go to the same handful of people and go back and go back and go back. And you can only do that so many times before you piss them off. So it's awesome to kind of grow that pool so you're not abusing the same advocates that you have, especially in.
Sam Langrock [00:21:13]:
An industry where they are under resourced and overworked.
Mark Huber [00:21:17]:
Coming full circle, kind of. To wrap it up here, how do you see customer evidence evolving at Recorded Future in the future? I didn't think I was going to word the question like that, but it was perfect.
Sam Langrock [00:21:27]:
I think it'll be an integral part of it. I think one thing we need to help our sales team is really understand the challenges the customer is experiencing. And I think the way you can do that is by really understanding the customer. And, you know, people just think case studies might be a nice to have marketing asset, but I think when done right, they're also a window into who your customer is. And if you can really help enable your sales team to understand who is this SOC analyst that wants to use Recorded Future? Who is this vulnerability management lead providing those materials so that they can talk in the same language as their customer? And then when it comes to that customer having to pitch procurement, having to pitch finance, then being able to say, hey, there's three other companies that are mid sized regional banks just like us that are using recorded feature and they're seeing these outcomes.
Mark Huber [00:22:25]:
Love it. So, last question. This will be a good one. I'm interviewing Tom tomorrow and whatever your answer is, I'm gonna ask him for the other side of the story. But what is your favorite or best Tom Wentworth story?
Sam Langrock [00:22:38]:
Oh, my favorite best Tom Wentworth story. Oh, this is. This is a doozy. So two years ago we were at our Skorko down outside of Austin and we went into the city after and it's Tom and it's three other product marketers, Jake, Trevor and Chad. And we were having a good time bar hopping and all of a sudden somehow one of the guys, Jake, brings us to this garage. It's a bar, but it looked like a legit garage. I think it was off a rainy street.
Mark Huber [00:23:12]:
I think I was just in Austin. I didn't go on this trip, but I think I've been to the place that you're talking about.
Sam Langrock [00:23:17]:
Well, it turns out there's a heavy metal band playing there and we're going in, we're gonna be let in. And we are wearing like business casual. Like kind of what I'm wearing now.
Mark Huber [00:23:26]:
Yeah, not your traditional heavy metal outfit.
Sam Langrock [00:23:28]:
Yeah, exactly. Well, some guy's getting kicked out and he's like, you're letting these narcs in and business casual and you're kicking me out. And then there's, you know where there's a mosh pit and Tom's there in his cashmere sweater and Jordan's bouncing around the mosh pit. That was a crazy night.
Mark Huber [00:23:46]:
Cannot wait to ask him about this. But this was awesome. This was a blast. And if this is any sign of what's to come in about 90ish minutes, I think we're gonna have a good fireside chat up there. So thanks, Sam. I appreciate it.
Sam Langrock [00:23:56]:
Yeah, awesome.
Mark Huber [00:23:57]:
Thanks for listening to the proofpoint. If you like what you heard during this conversation, you probably will like Evidently a 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.