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. Building trust. So I went to the toughest industry to pull it off, Cyber security. And talk with 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 Tom Wentworth, former CMO at Record A Future and new CMO at Incident IO. Tom and I talk a whole lot about what it takes to sell really big ideas into the C suite, like the record, the media empire that he helped build at Record A Future. I really knew nothing about the record prior to this episode, and I didn't want to hit stop while we were recording because I learned so much. We're talking all things about what it takes to get buy in from your CEO and board, how to justify big swings and investments, and really how to turn something like this into a powerhouse that builds trust.
Mark Huber [00:01:05]:
Enjoy.
Mark Huber [00:01:06]:
Got a little bit of inside scoop last night from somebody that used to work for you, and I want to hear your side of this story. But he told me about you guys trying to get into a bar in Austin at like a revenue kickoff or something, and there was a funny story behind it.
Tom Wentworth [00:01:22]:
Yeah, it wasn't a bar. It was a hardcore, you know, like hardcore music place. Like, so we walk in, it's in Austin, Texas, music capital of the world, and it's sort of a headbanger, like death metal. And we walk in looking like four idiots wearing, like, jeans. I had a gray cashmere sweater on, like, my hair, all whatever it is. And we look entirely out of place. Me being me, I got no problem. And it's a mosh pit, right? Like a classic 90s mosh pit going.
Tom Wentworth [00:01:55]:
So I have no problem jumping into the mosh pit. Now, the secret was we had a couple people with us who were ex military and like, serious, serious ex military. So I felt pretty good if, you know, if a fight broke out, you.
Mark Huber [00:02:08]:
Did not tell me that.
Tom Wentworth [00:02:09]:
And I cleared this with, I'm like, look, if I'm gonna get a fight, I need you guys to back me up some muscle. And. Yeah, and look, legit muscle, like trained to kill sort of muscle. So I felt pretty good about it. But, yeah, five of us went out into a pretty hardcore death metal bar and survived. And it was awesome.
Mark Huber [00:02:24]:
So the one detail that you might have left out was the guy who was getting kicked out of the bar.
Tom Wentworth [00:02:29]:
Oh, yeah.
Mark Huber [00:02:30]:
And then what he said to you all in line, something about yuppie, you.
Tom Wentworth [00:02:33]:
Know, you're kicking me out yet these yuppie scumbags are in here. Was I something like that?
Mark Huber [00:02:37]:
More or less? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom Wentworth [00:02:38]:
That's also a true story.
Mark Huber [00:02:40]:
That is awesome. But I was able to sit next to Sam and John Short last night at the dinner that we had, and one of the things that came up outside of that funny story was, was a lot of the work that you had done at Recorded Future. Now you're at Incident IO and we kind of talked about the record at length, and that was something that I'm just not in your or Recorded future's icp. So I knew a little bit about, but not a whole lot. And I would love to dive into that if you're cool with it.
Tom Wentworth [00:03:05]:
Yeah, of course.
Mark Huber [00:03:05]:
So was it your idea or like, how did this come about? Cause it's a big, massive sway.
Tom Wentworth [00:03:09]:
I don't think anything's any one person's idea. The genesis for it came about in London. Myself and my head of comms at the time were at a Nobu, believe it or not. We had so much success with Priority, and we were wondering, well, we have a lot of more stories to tell than we're able to get coverage for with traditional pr. What if we flip the model upside down? What if we became publishers and that turned into a whiteboard, that whiteboard turned into a plan, that plan turned into hiring an editor in chief, and we sort of went from there. It was a team effort for sure. And I'm not even sure necessarily I would think of it as a marketing investment, but marketing spearheaded the initiative. And if you don't know, the Record is sort of media brand.
Tom Wentworth [00:03:46]:
We put together at Recorded Future Threat Intelligence company, and the two components of the Record were a news property called the Record, we actually rebranded as Recorded Feature News. So the news organization had two properties, the Record, which was a news site, and a podcast called Click Here that we also had pretty good success with.
Mark Huber [00:04:04]:
So I imagine like a massive swing like that you've got to sell internally. So how did you sell that as a leadership team to get sign off on such a big bet?
Tom Wentworth [00:04:13]:
Yeah, and it wasn't so much a big bet with program, it was a people bet. Right. To run a successful media property, you are dependent on reporters. And in the case of a podcast, like we're doing a podcast here, you need a podcast production team. You can't just put a mic up and say, go do a podcast. Like we have showrunners and producers. It really helped, and I knew this going into it that our CEO at the time was a big fan of Bloomberg.
Mark Huber [00:04:36]:
Okay.
Tom Wentworth [00:04:36]:
So we would talk about often, how do we become the Bloomberg of cyber? Bloomberg sells financial intelligence to traders. Recorded future sells threat intelligence to cybersecurity professionals. The comps were pretty clear. We even had the ex CMO of Bloomberg on our board. So I had a little bit of a cheat code. It was very easy to align the CEO and even our board because they both had experience with Bloomberg. But the key was sticking to the Bloomberg of cyber narrative and also treating this not as a marketing investment. Like we did not think of this as how are we going to get more pipeline, how are we going to get more leads? It was literally, how do we build trust with a relationship that is skeptical of marketing? And the only way we thought we could do that is by just providing the news to them.
Tom Wentworth [00:05:15]:
If you trust us for news, you probably will trust our product.
Mark Huber [00:05:18]:
So you're just getting this off the ground. What did the leading indicators look like in the early days of, hey, this might be something that we should keep doing and double down on?
Tom Wentworth [00:05:27]:
So we hired initially an editor in chief who came to us from a bunch of different sites, site called Protocol, but also had worked at Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, a guy named Adam Janofsky. And we said, Adam, we're going to build this media property. You're gonna be the editor in chief. And what that really means for the short term is you're gonna write a story a day. And what's really great, you know, we think about marketing, how good we are creating content. We are nothing compared to a journalist. Like they are used to working on deadlines and churning things out daily, hourly. It is insightful to watch how fast they're able to work.
Tom Wentworth [00:05:56]:
So Adam would publish content, you know, he would. And we didn't have a lot of traffic in the early days, but the thing that we saw very quickly were our customers would come to us and say, hey, I love this thing you're doing. The record, it's become my trusted source for important news. We then hired reporter number two. This person had a huge audience. They had 100,000 Twitter followers. And we were able to very quickly start to get like days where we would get 30, 40, 50,000 page views on stories.
Mark Huber [00:06:25]:
That's wild.
Tom Wentworth [00:06:26]:
Because of this person's built in audience. So that significantly helped bootstrap it and Then it was a matter of just, we want to hire more reporters. We have more. So each reporter was assigned to a beat, just like you'd be if you worked at a publisher. So you might cover geopolitical issues, you might cover vulnerabilities, you might cover technical topics, you might cover nation state things. So we started to expand the coverage areas of our reporting. And every once in a while, pretty predictably, we would get stories that would get 300, 400,000 views in two or three days. It was crazy.
Mark Huber [00:06:54]:
Unbelievable. So, quick little history lesson. So you launched this what year late?
Tom Wentworth [00:06:59]:
Ish. 2020.
Mark Huber [00:07:01]:
Okay, so still fairly recent. And then once it started to really pick up steam, you went from one reporter to kind of how many over time?
Tom Wentworth [00:07:08]:
Yeah, there's roughly seven reporters now. And then our podcast team, there are three full time podcast pros. The cool thing there was we had done a podcast successfully at Recorded Future for a while. We've done, we've done a podcast every single week for like five years. Like, it's crazy. The initial podcast was more about like we would interview people kind of like a traditional B2B tech company podcast. And we said, we're doing this, you know, now that we have a news brand, why don't we level this thing up? And we went out and hired a woman named Dina Temple Rastin, who was a professional podcaster from npr. Like a well respected, had won awards at NPR for her podcast.
Tom Wentworth [00:07:45]:
And we said, dina, come help us build a real podcast. Tell us what you need. And, and so Dina said, I'm going to need a showrunner. Like I need to write stories, I'm going to need a producer, I'm going to need some production help. But if we do this, I think we can build one of the biggest podcasts, not just for B2B vendors, but like one of the biggest podcasts in tech, which we did. So she took our podcast from being interesting to every single week we'd end up in the top 10 of the tech news category. It would be like Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal recorded future news like it was crazy. And you know, she, she built a podcast that people wanted to subscribe to.
Mark Huber [00:08:19]:
Was that a hard sell to get somebody to leave NPR doing probably some pretty great work over there?
Tom Wentworth [00:08:24]:
Yeah. By that point we had built. So the number one thing that reporters care about, it turns out, is editorial independence. You will not hire a reporter at your company if you say, I'm gonna tell you what to write about. The whole job of reporter is to understand their audience and be able to Say, here's what my audience cares about. And if you tell them even about customers, you can't write about our customers. It's a non starter for them. So I think by the time that we went out and hired Dina and that team, we had proven that, hey, we can build a media business.
Tom Wentworth [00:08:49]:
We're serious about this. We're gonna give you resources. It's not gonna be you and a microphone. So it was reasonably easy for her. She knew us from covering us as a reporter, so that was pretty cool. But the thing that made the record successful, honestly was being able to tell the reporters that they can report on whatever they think is important. And sometimes we'd have issues where our customers would get pissed off. They would come to us and say, hey, one of your reporters wrote a story about a breach that impacted me and I need you to take that story down.
Tom Wentworth [00:09:16]:
And we would never, ever do that. Our belief, first of all, Bloomberg has the same policy. Like, Bloomberg can write about anything. And the only story Bloomberg can't write about is Bloomberg itself. Michael Bloomberg, that's the only person you can't talk trash about. And we took the same approach, but it became uncomfortable at some point. But our story back to customers was, hey, look, this is a news organization. Like, they're going to cover.
Tom Wentworth [00:09:36]:
The thing that we never did is break news about breaches. So if you were breached, we might not. We would never break that news. That would be bad. But we might report on it if somebody else had covered it.
Mark Huber [00:09:45]:
And was that a conscious decision that you all made?
Tom Wentworth [00:09:48]:
Yes, absolutely. So we could always say, look, hey, the news that, yes, we covered it. But like, that was broken by somebody else. Like, so we felt pretty good about that. And that worked in almost all situations.
Mark Huber [00:09:58]:
How are some of those customer conversations of you having? I don't know if it was you.
Tom Wentworth [00:10:01]:
Yeah, no, I was on a few. Yeah, I was on a few. And I think in some ways they're doing it just because they feel like they have to. Like, somebody told their PR team said, hey, go tell that vendor of ours they have to take their story down. But they know we're not going to take the story down. It's just we're a news organization, just like CNN or Wall Street Journal. They're not going to take a story down either. We would correct stories.
Tom Wentworth [00:10:18]:
Like, if you have something factually incorrect, we have no problem. We would give your spokespeople a chance to comment, which would happen a lot. Like, we would go to the companies and say, do you have a quote for us, and they would give it to us in a lot of cases, those were uncomfortable conversations, for sure.
Mark Huber [00:10:31]:
When you think back to the early days of kind of getting this off the ground, what were some of the big hurdles that you ran into? You know, standing this up.
Tom Wentworth [00:10:38]:
I mean, what's getting. Getting traffic. Right. Like, it was. It's really hard. You do all. You put all this work in and you're getting 3, 400 visits a day. That wasn't super good.
Tom Wentworth [00:10:47]:
I think the learning for me was if you bring somebody in who's a reporter with an audience like we did, that instantly made us credible. Like, we could. We would be in front of people that we were never in front of before. So having the number one problem is distribution. It's the same problem in B2B SaaS. Like, how do you get out there? And I think having reporters who know how to do distribution, if you can publish content frequently and know how to distribute it. And some of these guys have real strong, like, they know how to do distribution. They're out there posting to hacker news.
Tom Wentworth [00:11:15]:
We had a streak where we would be in hacker news all the time because our reporter knew how to get things published in hacker news. Like, that was super cool.
Mark Huber [00:11:23]:
Yeah. I can't even imagine, like, having to go through that entire process without having that level of expertise. That's huge. So as this is blowing up, what was leadership looking for? Did they just let you run this thing and they believed in you all, or.
Tom Wentworth [00:11:36]:
It was good vibes? Yolo. Honestly, we never.
Mark Huber [00:11:41]:
This is the first YOLO we've had on this so far.
Tom Wentworth [00:11:43]:
Of course, coming from me. Of course. We looked at traffic as a proxy for, like, if the site was growing. We felt pretty good about that. We did some interesting things. Like we dropped the $0.06 tag on our Publish on the Record, our publishing site. So all of a sudden I could start tagging companies that visited you, which. That was actually a little bit of a cheat.
Tom Wentworth [00:12:01]:
Cod.
Mark Huber [00:12:02]:
Yep.
Tom Wentworth [00:12:02]:
Shh on that one.
Mark Huber [00:12:03]:
Yeah.
Tom Wentworth [00:12:04]:
So we were able to say, like, at one point, 80% of the closed one deals that we had every quarter had gone to the record in the past 80 days. So as a marketing quote unquote touch. It was a very successful marketing touch. I mean, we weren't trying to source ops from the record.
Mark Huber [00:12:19]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tom Wentworth [00:12:20]:
So it was a mix of me being able to say, look, our ICP is all over this. That's good. And it was also just the customers telling us, hey, I really love the work you're doing on your podcast. I really trust the records. My primary source, cybersecurity news. A lot of anecdotal feedback was more than enough. And, you know, I would tell the sales reps, ask the question, like in the sales cycle and then go post it on Slack. That got it in front of the CEO.
Tom Wentworth [00:12:43]:
But we didn't need a lot of. We felt pretty good about it.
Mark Huber [00:12:46]:
So we're using Gong or something like Gong and tracking it, like with, you know, a piece of technology or you just.
Tom Wentworth [00:12:52]:
Yeah, I mean, we did. We had. I had a GONG filter set up for the record, but more just even anecdotally, like csm.
Mark Huber [00:12:58]:
Yep.
Tom Wentworth [00:12:58]:
You know, we would just tell them, hey, if you hear anybody talk about the record, make sure you share it. And they would do it all the time.
Mark Huber [00:13:02]:
Yep. All right, good. That's what I'm having our CS and sales team do with the podcast that we're on right now with the proofpoint. So if you were to do it all over again, because I want to talk about the new role, not just this, anything that you would do differently.
Tom Wentworth [00:13:14]:
No, actually it worked out way better than we expected. When we first started this, this was an idea, it was a whiteboard conversation, it was a dinner conversation. To turn that into a site that was generating, you know, essentially around a million views a month and a podcast that was getting essentially a million and a half downloads a year, something like that. Like pretty, pretty good numbers, right?
Mark Huber [00:13:34]:
Yeah.
Tom Wentworth [00:13:34]:
So, no, it vastly exceeded our expectations. Maybe the only thing I'd have done differently is had more confidence that it was going to work. My advice, however, is almost no one can pull this off. Like, everyone talks about we should build a media company on our organization and like, dude, you work in, like something that no one cares about. Like we said at the intersection of people care. You know, the mainstream media cares about cybersecurity, right? They care about nation state level threats. They care about big breaches. Like.
Tom Wentworth [00:14:03]:
Like what happened in MGM grand had a huge ransomware attack. Like, people care about that. So it sat at the intersection of something that we knew uniquely as a cybersecurity company and things that the public actually cared about. But like, the average B2B company who sells Martech is not going to start a media company and have any level of success with it. Like, just no one cares.
Mark Huber [00:14:23]:
I'm laughing because literally the first episode that we did on this podcast earlier this year was, should every company be a media company? We had three people on debate it and two out of the three said, no. Every company does not need to Be.
Tom Wentworth [00:14:34]:
A media company and you're not a media. I was even taught this. Media company. You're called a media company because you monetize media. Like none of us are actually media companies. I wasn't a media company. I was. We called ourselves a news organization.
Tom Wentworth [00:14:45]:
We produce news. We didn't monetize media. Actually, right around when I left, we did a deal with a podcast distribution network in the NPR universe where, like, we would actually make money on the podcast. Like we had. We built a big enough audience that we could have monetized like a media company. We didn't feel like we needed to.
Mark Huber [00:15:00]:
Yep.
Tom Wentworth [00:15:01]:
I don't think it's bad to do media. Like doing a podcast like this is great for all the reasons I'm sure that you know too. But being a media company is just not, should not be the end state for most organizations.
Mark Huber [00:15:11]:
So you went from a fairly large company to I think a company with what, 80ish people right now?
Tom Wentworth [00:15:16]:
Yeah, roughly. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:15:17]:
And Sam mentioned that you're doing a little bit more work now and rolling up your sleeves.
Tom Wentworth [00:15:22]:
Yeah. You get to be in a CMO role at a scale up like Recorded Future, where the team is essentially 50 people. When you add in the media organization and you're 350 million in ARR, your job is much more about setting the strategy, managing VPs, and making sure that they're able to successfully achieve their objectives. Like you, you're very far away from the work. I was managing VPs who manage directors, who manage managers who manage the work doers. So I thought in my genius moment of clarity, when I decided to leave Recorded Future, I'm like, I should go do a series A. Like, that would be fun to go do marketing again. I haven't done marketing in a long time and it turns out it's hard to do marketing.
Tom Wentworth [00:16:01]:
Like yesterday after I finished up my presentation, I was loading leads through HubSpot and I had to teach myself like, oh, this is how you do it again. And, oh, here's the mistakes to watch out for. Like, I had to relearn that.
Mark Huber [00:16:13]:
Yeah.
Tom Wentworth [00:16:13]:
And I'm not sure that was fun or not, but it was definitely doing the act of marketing.
Mark Huber [00:16:17]:
Yeah.
Tom Wentworth [00:16:17]:
So I think going back to series A, the mistake I made was being too far away from the work at Recorded Future. Yep, I was too far away from the work. Now I'm maybe too close to the work in some ways, but I love it and it's a challenge.
Mark Huber [00:16:29]:
So you strike me though, as somebody who would be, you know, really excited about that challenge and getting back into the work is that, yeah, I'm a nerd.
Tom Wentworth [00:16:36]:
Really?
Mark Huber [00:16:36]:
Prior to that? No, I didn't say that, but I did.
Tom Wentworth [00:16:38]:
No, a hundred percent. That was, that's the bet. Like, the bet is like, I have enough ego to think like, I can go do. And we have somebody on my team who is exceptionally good at social media and I'm like, I could never do that. Like what she does, she's. She does memes that are relevant to site reliability engineers and like a super hardcore technical Persona. But how she does it is incredible. Like, I could never do that.
Tom Wentworth [00:16:59]:
We have someone on my team who runs events. We just came back from re event and she knows how to plan out experiences and do things that I would have no idea how to do. Yeah, like I lost the connection to the art of marketing and that was a mistake.
Mark Huber [00:17:11]:
So how big is the team at Incident IO?
Tom Wentworth [00:17:13]:
We are currently with myself, three people.
Mark Huber [00:17:16]:
And then you've been in the seat for what, like a couple months?
Tom Wentworth [00:17:18]:
Two months? Yeah, a little bit less than two months.
Mark Huber [00:17:20]:
What is, I guess one of the big things that you've learned about getting back into the actual marketing that you know, maybe you weren't expecting?
Tom Wentworth [00:17:26]:
I think it's when you work for an engineering driven culture like we have at Incident IO. So we sell incident management where when something breaks, like your site goes down, we help wake up the engineers that need to help participate, participate in the incident. We help manage the incident response process itself. So we fire up a slack channel, we bring in all the context you need and then we help you work through that incident and communicate to your customers. But it's a super nerdy Persona that we sell to. We operate on an engineering culture at incident. So we have daily standups, essentially, we talk about delivering work in hours and days. Like I worked in a quarterly schedule.
Tom Wentworth [00:18:02]:
We'd be happy if we hit our quarterly objectives and that's how we would measure ourselves. Now when I go to a conference like this, I feel like I'm falling behind because I'm not in the work as much as I need to be for that day. The cool thing about this company and the cool thing about our culture is we really do value daily contribution. Just like when you're an engineer, you can ship code on your third day and you ship updates every single week. That's how we treat it. And that was not how it worked for me and some of my prior experiences. And that creates super challenge. You know, that's a, that is a challenge for me.
Tom Wentworth [00:18:33]:
For sure. I want to ship work every day.
Mark Huber [00:18:35]:
I love it. So we're right in the middle of planning for next year right now. Are you already finished with planning? Are you in the thick of it? Where are you right now?
Tom Wentworth [00:18:42]:
Financial planning? I feel pretty good about what we're actually going to execute next year. I need to document. In fact, my job Thursday when I get back home is to write out what I have in my head as the plan.
Mark Huber [00:18:53]:
So without giving away the secret sauce of what you're actually going to do, how do you go about that process?
Tom Wentworth [00:18:58]:
I've learned the lesson the hard way. First of all, you don't have a plan, you'll be given one. Yep, that's a quote that comes from my friend Pat Shea at Recorded Future. I like that one. So I don't wanna be given a plan is my number one objective. And number two, I've gotta make some bets that I don't like. Campaigns, meaning I don't like things that last a week or two weeks or three weeks. I don't think you can.
Tom Wentworth [00:19:18]:
For a complex sales cycle, it's not a long enough amount of time to know if something's gonna work or not. So I'm trying to say for the next six months, ish, maybe a little bit shorter. What are the one or two things that we can rally the entire organization around? This idea of sales plays. They're not really sal plays, their company plays. We're going to pick a couple of things that we are going to go around and that we are going to scream about in the market, that we are going to educate the sellers at a level of painstaking, level of detail about that we will organize marketing campaigns around. So organizing everything that we do around these two plays for the next six months or so, which lets us then say, hey, your random idea, that's cool, but I got two plays I want to execute and that's taking up 90% of my day. It makes it very easy to have structure. But most importantly it tells the sales team like this is where you should have confidence.
Tom Wentworth [00:20:09]:
This is where we think you're going to be successful in hitting your number. And you're going to get a tremendous amount of support from the marketing team, the product team, the rest of the organization around. I think picking a few things and going at them for longer than you feel comfortable with is probably the right move to make.
Mark Huber [00:20:23]:
So how much documentation is like enough documentation when it comes to your plan? Because I feel like Many first time VPs of marketing just over document everything they're doing and just get lost in the documentation. Like where do you find kind of that right level of detail? Yeah.
Tom Wentworth [00:20:38]:
One of the cool things about any company is we are all about Notion. You use Notion at all?
Mark Huber [00:20:42]:
I have not used Notion until user evidence and I'm using it like crazy.
Tom Wentworth [00:20:46]:
Notion's awesome.
Mark Huber [00:20:47]:
Yes.
Tom Wentworth [00:20:47]:
It's like, it's a little overwhelming, but Notion is awesome. So for us, like a play will be a notion document that lists out all the different assets that essentially are going to like. It'll be some sort of high level description of here's the play, here's why we're doing it, here's what we think we're going to accomplish in this play. And we're going to use Notion essentially. Like you might use Seismic or High Spot. It's going to be the home for a play that every single week or day, as we learn more things about it, we'll update the Notion page. I don't think it needs to be. I work at a startup like Perfect is the enemy of good.
Tom Wentworth [00:21:19]:
You will get minimum viable level stuff and tweak it.
Mark Huber [00:21:22]:
So I was personally very intimidated by using Notion at first because it was a blank slate and I just didn't really know what to do with it. There are so many templates that you can use in the marketplace as like a starting point. I know you're very like tech and tool savvy.
Tom Wentworth [00:21:34]:
We, yeah, we had, we had a lot of that stuff figured out. But just the idea of databases and treating content like databases that then can be re indexed in other places is incredible to me. Like, it's super. It just, it makes a lot of sense. I feel like Notion could for. Is for sure going to replace a lot of the things like seismic and High spot because it's just, it's a way of organizing content and it's super easy.
Mark Huber [00:21:55]:
Absolutely. So in my mind you're one of those CMOs who always has a good kind of pulse on the market of just tools and tech that are out there. So what are some of the types of tech that you're experimenting with right now or maybe is on your wish list for next year?
Tom Wentworth [00:22:09]:
I like the idea of signals. Like I believe pretty strongly that there's a marketing funnel of high intent where people say I want a demo, I want to try your product. Like very, like very clearly that's a funnel. Right. I think the idea of an MQL where we artificially say this is a good lead based on some sort of random scoring or whatever doesn't make A lot of sense to me. But I do like the idea of signals and a signal. Could be they were engaging with me in social media places. They were looking at high intent pages on our website.
Tom Wentworth [00:22:37]:
This RB2B creepy thing that unmasks, you know, like that's a sign signal. It's not an mql, but it's a signal. So I like this tool called Common Room. I was just going to guess if.
Mark Huber [00:22:46]:
It was Common Room. I've been messing around with it a bit. I've been blown away by it.
Tom Wentworth [00:22:48]:
Yeah, we. I haven't figured out exactly how I would use it. I know I will or I feel pretty strongly I will. But a way to be able to harness all those signals and make and put them in a place where a BDR can easily say here are some things I think are super important. I'm going to reach out to somebody. I now know what I might talk to them about. You're not going to solve that problem if you live in outreach in Salesforce alone.
Mark Huber [00:23:06]:
No.
Tom Wentworth [00:23:07]:
So. So I really like the idea of signal based selling and then helping all the BDRs and AES be able to say, all right, if you see somebody from R2B B on our site, which we see a lot, like don't reach out to them and say hey dude, I saw you on our site. Like that's probably bad but how might you use that signal maybe in conjunction with something else to reach out to them meaningfully. That's the stuff that's really interesting to.
Mark Huber [00:23:27]:
Me and I think that's where I'm getting hung up on right now. It's like the actioning off of that and how to make sure that your SDRs and AES know one what the signal is and to what to do with it and not come across in a super creepy way. So it sounds like that's something that you're working.
Tom Wentworth [00:23:41]:
I don't have the answer yet. I know, I know. That's the problem I'm going to try to solve. Like after I get through again backing to my daily weekly cadence, after I get through some of this play definition process, like the next thing for me is how do I figure out how to. How to get these signals in front of BDRs and AES. We're all bought into the concept but to your point, the execution is going to be the challenge. What do you say?
Mark Huber [00:24:00]:
Are you messing around with Clay at all?
Tom Wentworth [00:24:01]:
Yeah. So I had a person on my team who just left to go work for Clay actually and who might be there by the time this podcast airs and he was a GTM engineer, I'd never worked with a GTM engineer before. And what an incredible role this is.
Mark Huber [00:24:14]:
I'm trying to make the case to hire for a GTM engineer in my company. So I might use this.
Tom Wentworth [00:24:17]:
I can intro you this guy, but he wants clay. No. So I've now taken over a lot of his GTM engineering. I was a computer science major, so I feel pretty good. Like clay is incredible. Like, honestly, the ability to clay in some ways is just a data prep tool. Like if you've been in the data engineering world for any period of time, you look at clay and say there are a million tools that can do what clay does. And there are tools like alteryx, our data prep tools.
Tom Wentworth [00:24:41]:
Like they. But like what Clay's figured out is, oh yeah, if I just integrate with all these different data sources that matter to GTM teams, like just the ability to waterfall things like contact Info or someone's LinkedIn profile or their company domain, they've just made it trivially easy for people to go through and get whatever. So we have a clay process, for example, that will look at a company like standard company stuff. And one of the things that we care about is number of engineers. So we will go use clay to figure out the number of engineers that work at that company. We will have clay read the company's LinkedIn profile to identify if that company's quote unquote digital native or not. So we have a claude script or claude prompt that will go through and say do these things and then tell me yes or no, no gray area if this company's digital native or not. Because our ICP or digital native tech company, engineering companies, so all that stuff that would have been impossible before clay makes it super easy to do.
Tom Wentworth [00:25:31]:
So I adore clay. I think clay plus common room is interesting. There's this tool called log growth machine. Have you heard of that before?
Mark Huber [00:25:38]:
I have actually, yes.
Tom Wentworth [00:25:40]:
We use that for a lot of founder led stuff. So we have processes where we can, on behalf of our busy founders, we can automate some things with log Growth machine. So the actual workflow would be something happens, goes into clay, clay enriches some things, goes to lagrothe machine. I push some buttons in the growth machine and magic happens. These are tools that two months ago I had no idea what they are and now they're a daily part of my workflow.
Mark Huber [00:26:02]:
So we're using something right now at user evidence called heyreach, which from my experience is a little Similar to Legrowth Machine, but cool. Sounds like you're doing a lot in your first two months.
Tom Wentworth [00:26:11]:
I was. I don't know if I've had to learn a lot like things I didn't know about. So having a GTM engineer opened my eyes to all the things that were not possible before. You had somebody who was technical and not in a rev Ops role like RevOps is different. Who just thinks about how do I make BDRs more productive? How do I give AES the information they actually want? This person did an incredible job at it.
Mark Huber [00:26:31]:
If you were to help me sell hiring a go to market engineer to Evan and Ray, which they'll probably be listening to, the two co founders. How would you help me sell it?
Tom Wentworth [00:26:39]:
We're in an area where you're not going to expand BDR resources. In the past it was very easy. It was a spreadsheet. This many, you need this much pipeline, you need these many BDRs. That era is over. The only way you're going to scale is through automation. And whether that automation is kind of AI bdrs like I think all of that is at the. Is at the mercy of good data.
Tom Wentworth [00:26:57]:
And I don't think without good data you can do anything. So I feel like to me this is just solving the foundational data problem that's going to make whatever else you do actually be efficient and not require n number of new salespeople, n number of new BDRs which you can't afford anyway.
Mark Huber [00:27:10]:
No. We were talking about Dave Gerhardt a little bit beforehand when I was golfing with him. You are one of his first texts and calls about many B2B marketing things. So what's your favorite DG story that you'd be willing to share?
Tom Wentworth [00:27:23]:
He led this conference called Hyper Growth at Drift. They had a little era where they like to know we're going to bring on people that we might not agree with their perspectives, but we should all embrace people that we don't like. They brought on this guy, Grant Cardone, who is a very controversial.
Mark Huber [00:27:37]:
I know the story. Keep going.
Tom Wentworth [00:27:39]:
Yeah, they brought on we at this event.
Mark Huber [00:27:41]:
No, I heard it secondhand. So I'd love to hear a firsthand.
Tom Wentworth [00:27:43]:
Experience brought in this guy and I think both he and the founder CEO David Cancel just looked at that and said, yeah, I think we changed our mind. Like maybe we should set some limits on who we don't agree with. Yes, that guy blew himself up in a way that I couldn't even imagine I was hearing. And poor Dave is out there on Twitter doing the best he can to apologize. And it was a great crisis comms moment I think for him.
Mark Huber [00:28:05]:
Oh my gosh.
Tom Wentworth [00:28:06]:
I think he learned the hard way that there is an actual answer to the question of should we bring people along? We don't agree with the answer. In some cases it's going to be no.
Mark Huber [00:28:12]:
Oh my God.
Tom Wentworth [00:28:13]:
He wanted me to share that story. I was hoping that story would go away.
Mark Huber [00:28:15]:
No, no, no. All good. Well, thank you. I could keep talking for hours. You're a busy guy. But I appreciate you coming on the Proof Point. This was great.
Tom Wentworth [00:28:22]:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Mark Huber [00:28:23]:
Thanks for listening to the Proof Point. 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.