Cybersecurity is one of the few B2B categories that has weathered the recession—and is expected to grow by at least 10% in 2023. Competition has grown, too, making it harder for companies to stand out.

Gary Sevounts, CMO of Malwarebytes—whose primary customers are small- and medium-sized businesses—has responded with a multifaceted marketing approach that includes distribution partnerships, growth acceleration techniques and adaptability in ever-evolving markets.

What’s the difference between customers and partners?

Customers are companies that are the end users of our products, such as universities, tech companies, banks, state and local governments. Partners are managed security providers (MSPs), MSP platforms such as PAX8 and ConnectWise, distributors including CDW and value-added resellers (VARs) that either resell our products and services to these end customers, or build their own solutions based on our products and services and deliver to our end customers.

What’s in your pipeline playbook?

We have three playbooks. One playbook is on getting new partners. That's more around account-based marketing, around inbound marketing. There are a lot of service-level agreements (SLAs) around that. We're growing fast with that playbook.

The second playbook is around enabling our existing partners such as managed service providers and value-added resellers to grow their businesses. Within that, we're educating them. We're providing them demand gen-in-a-box—basically how to use marketing to generate pipeline/revenue on their end using our products.

The third playbook is around inbound, direct demand generation with small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). We have a well-known brand that is liked by a lot of IT professionals, so the playbook is around turning that interest into requests for contact or trials. We qualify those opportunities and then give them to our partners to accelerate their growth because as they grow, we grow. The beauty of the partner model is you scale much faster in the SMB environment than you would directly.

How do you get partners to implement demand-gen-in-a-box?

We have two plays for enabling existing partners. One is around enabling the best partners to grow faster. In our case, we have what we call precious metal partners—platinum, gold and silver—and then there are the regular partners. You want to spend more personalized time and enablement with precious metal partners because they generate more revenue.

Play two is around upsell, not just on the customer side, but on the partner side. How do you get the regular partners to become silver, silvers to become gold and golds to become platinum? Those plays work in parallel and really make a difference.

What are examples of services you provide to partners?

For partners that want to do email nurturing twice a month, we provide emails that are going to work best for them. We have done A/B testing with these emails for a year and have a stable of emails and topics that are performing, supported by metrics.

We're also training them on how to do things and how to not do things, such as: “Here are the SLAs that you want to follow up. If you get somebody requesting a quote or contact, you want to respond within 5 to 15 minutes max.” With select partners, we have follow-up sessions where we look at their metrics, what's working and what's not working, and adjust. 

Describe a specific pipeline play that worked especially well

One of the most successful pipeline-building models is a next-generation account-based marketing (ABM) model, called Treasure Ops, or TOPS. We developed it in a previous company where we were targeting large enterprises—we had tons of engagement, marketing qualified leads, downloads and intent signals. Turning these over to sales would have overwhelmed them and produced low efficiency. Scoring these leads alone did not help.

We came up with TOPS, where we trained marketing team members to go through the leads to find the golden nuggets that were ready to move forward. Then we automated this process, adding AI components to quickly identify the accounts with the most intent, engagement with our content and website, engagement with competitors and other core signals. We would enrich with key persona data, start the initial ABM campaigns and then work with sales to mature and close them.

As part of that process, we worked with the sales development reps to develop specific plays and with sales to follow up in the right way, with purpose-built content that would go into the blog and/or email. It was like hyper-targeted account-based marketing. Within six months, we built about an $80 million pipeline.

What are other lessons from your CMO experiences?

This is my fifth CMO role. In every role, I get asked to turn around, build or rebuild, and scale the marketing organization and the revenue engine. In every new role, we come up with our own playbook by working with sales, finance and the customer success team and defining the complete processes. This includes the brand and product story, pipeline creation model, demand generation engine, specific demand plays, retention and upsell to brand amplification. We typically run about 10-15 different plays in parallel, and then we find the winners and keep scaling those.