Ever realized you know something everybody else doesn’t? I have—and it nearly cost me my career. I came from the creative agency world, where everything is pixel perfect, award-winning masterpieces. I loved agency life as long as I could hold on to it. Eventually, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t taking care of myself, and it showed. My first gig in cybersecurity was marketer no. 1 at a startup. I quite literally social engineered my way into the job, and it was here that I would realize that I had gotten too big for my breeches. I was hot shit in creative agency land, but coming to B2B cybersecurity marketing knocked me down a peg or two... or seven. I was taking L after L for months straight—and I didn't know why. Turns out, I knew nothing about my buyers, and neither did the founder. Oh, I knew who they were and how to target them. But I had failed to figure out the only thing that actually matters - how they think. It was like they knew exactly what I was going to do before I did it. It seemed like they were playing defense against me - and it was working. But wait - why does it seem like they're playing defense? I'm not attacking them... Am I? Sitting in my car, alone and defeated, I realized something that would change everything I'd ever known or thought about marketing forever. —The only difference between a marketing campaign and a cyber attack is that one of them is legal. They *were* playing defense. In cybersecurity marketing, you are the threat. And your audience is made of world class experts at defending against exactly what you're trying to do. I posted about this revelation on here just to see what would happen. I laid out exactly how each step in a cyber attack parallels each step in a marketing campaign. Malicious actors do recon on their targets. Marketers build personas. This list goes on and on. That eventually led to me getting invited on the Cybersecurity Marketing Society's podcast. My intentions were pure. Empathy and self awareness to better understand our buyers. - Marketers in my DMs cursing me out, telling me "how dare" I compare marketers to malicious actors. - Nobody cared that I had 30+ messages from CISOs and practitioners praising me for it. - New boss had the company name removed from all the promo material for my episode to distance themselves from me. I remember HR being on my next 1:1 like it was yesterday. They didn't say that was why, but they didn't have to. I went out to the garage, and I sobbed. 4 years later, I would present my talk, From Intruder to Ally: A Hacker's Guide to Marketing on Hard Mode, to thousands of marketers at one of the largest online demand generation conferences on the planet. It would make it on multiple "best of" lists and it would open doors I could have never dreamed of. Whoever you are, wherever you are - Listen to me: With everything you have inside you — never give up.
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