The Surprising Key to Cybersecurity Success

Full transcript

Welcome back to the podcast guys. Today we're joined by Isabelle Papoulias. Isabelle, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Okay, so Isabelle, let's start this. What are you currently up to? Yeah, what am I doing? Well, first of all, hello from sunny Chicago, Chicago, USA. What am I up to? I am doing fractional COO work that is chief operating officer work. with a client. I'm working with a CEO of the professional services agency to help run her business day in and day out because she actually owns multiple businesses and she's running out of space and time to do things. So I run the company day to day with the primary focus being on building the go-to-market strategy and then working with the sales and marketing team to execute through and through. It's recent engagement. Prior to that, I was in a similar role in strategic operations and marketing at a cybersecurity services provider. Great, and so what kind of trends are you currently seeing in the cyber security industry?

Well, I would say the biggest trend I see is probably the one we all see, which is we need more security uh with the AI, the rapid evolution of AI and innovation in that space. mean, we're just... steadily increasing the, what we call the attack surface, you know, in cybersecurity terms. uh And so I think uh the risks are only getting not just bigger in volume, but also greater in sophistication. And I think both for cybersecurity platforms of all kind, as well as managed service providers and cybersecurity, there will only be a greater need moving forward. And of course, both of these will need to become ever more sophisticated in their technology and the services they provide. I think we're just, the risks are much greater, which means the solutions need to be a lot deeper. And how did you actually meet with the CEO that you are currently working with?

That's actually, you know, it's all networking. um It's interesting how networking always like bears fruit in the long run. It was through someone I met, uh long story here, but I think it's interesting to know someone that reached out to me on LinkedIn a couple of years back. We connected, we hit it off, we met in person, another former CEO. He introduced me to some people in his network. One of the women in his network has a fractional CEO business. So meaning she herself is a fractional CEO to her customers. She and I hit it off a couple of years ago. We stayed in touch. There was always this feeling that we wanted to work together and partner at some point. Her business was growing and she was getting more customers and she could service. And she asked me to, uh, to partner and, and support. So then she introduced me to this one. founder and now we're working together. you know it's interesting how these things happen. Who would you say benefits the most from your service, Isabelle?

Well, mean, fundamentally the founder or CEO, because at a basic level, what I'm doing is as a number two operator in the company, I am taking a lot of things off their plates. ah I see myself as the operator that... takes the CEO vision and helps to execute it, right? So the CEO is a visionary and I'm the operating arm day in and day out. And that allows usually the CEO, the founder to focus on what they do best, which is usually be highly strategic, be an evangelist, focus on raising funds, focused on managing the board of directors and so on. And uh you also run the sales and marketing, right? Who would you... Yes, who would you say is your ideal customer that you guys can serve the best? so it's actually it's very unique because we are a professional services agency, a marketing agency that works primarily with mission driven organizations. So we service nonprofits. um That's part of their without getting into a lot of details, that's part of the bigger mission of what the CEO is trying to do across all her businesses. ah She's truly trying to do good in the world and help change the world for the better. So it's very purpose driven. And so our ICP, which in fact, we just finished going through an ICP exercise and defining it with all the right things, know, the formal graphics and the size and uh the triggers and the challenges that they have are. small to medium sized nonprofits, starting with the nonprofits that focus on career and workforce development with disenfranchised communities. So that's not, know, as I always say, that's the ideal customer profile. It's not the only customer profile, right? That's the ideal. But obviously we, you know, we have other sort of like outliers and other companies we'll work with as well. ah That is our core.

So we are. How big is that market? our go-to-market and our messaging and all those fun things. Now that we really have consensus, that's the core audience we're going to go after. Sorry, I interrupted you. Yeah, I wanted to ask like how many people are there that are within that ICP? Do you have like a rough ballpark? I mean, we, so, so yes, we, mean, look, there's about 5,000 that we've identified and I'm just throwing this number on a, sorry, I lied. little under 4,000 is the last number I saw because we're actively actually working with our, you know, our, our tools to define the list. ah Obviously that's way too many. So we. We have refined our filters and are starting off our campaigns with, I don't know if that's interesting to you, but you know, we've, we've narrowed it down even further to get down to roughly what is now like a list of roughly 350 something to start the outreach. Um, even within that list, we are working on the prioritizing even more. And the start outreach will likely be a very sort of very high touch outreach with our CEO. There will be experiential components to it. Yes, we'll probably do some traditional BDR and email marketing at some point, but I think right now that type of outreach is a little challenging, which is why we're starting small. We'd rather go after the ones that are truly perfect in size for us and try to.

Yeah, for sure. the CEO. The biggest thing for us is also, so size aside and sort of the core of what they do, the type of work they do with their communities is, you know, we're looking for those that are at an inflection point in their growth, where they're doing well. But in order to do better, they need to raise more funding in order to raise more funding, they need to raise more visibility and really show the impact they have in the community. And in order to do that, they need to market themselves better. And they're not, they're not well-resourced in marketing, right? So we want them to be big enough that they have money to pay us just to be blunt, ah but not so big that they already have an in-house, like a full house, you know, a marketing team and they don't need outside help. Yeah, that's great that you are actually niching down. uh I found out that uh it's very important, know, like who are you trying to talk to? And I'm curious, like how can you get the people that are in the inflection points in their company? Like

how... the actual person. How do we reach the actual the right person inside the company or because of the no. How do you gather that list? Because it's a very specific kind of... oh How should I say it? situation. ah know, like, from the outside. I'm assuming. that's a great question because, I don't have a perfect answer for you because we were just discussing that, with, with the CEO this morning. So how do we kind of like identify that even more? We are doing a lot of manual research. I mean, we, we have someone, junior member of the team that, you know, we're not just taking the list from, um, I forget the tool we use. think it's, I think it's seamless. No, I think it's seamless. If we, you know, we're doing a lot of follow-up research, like we're going on their websites, we're looking for news, all those things.

and then, know, also using, um, you know, uh, chat GPT to go deeper. So some of this is, yeah, I mean, it's, it's not perfect. but there is a combination and absolutely it's a combination of quantitative data that we get from the tool, if you want to call it that. And, and as much qualitative as we can gather and then some. some intuition, you know, it's definitely a mix of art and science like most things in marketing. And you we mentioned uh AI already, how are you guys using it in your operations? So we're using it right now in the basic use cases that you would expect, right? Like for content creation, for ideation and those types of things. think, you know, I've only been with a company for, what is it now? I think it's just about two months. ah So I think it's a huge opportunity for us to do a lot more with AI. And so that's not on the strategic plan this quarter. because I felt that we needed to address some other core priorities first around the go-to market. But I uh definitely want to see AI and how do we better... deploy the tools and use AI in more sophisticated ways across the entire company in Q3, I guess. And I don't know, the team doesn't know this. I don't know if they're listening to this podcast and they're runaway screaming in the night,

but that is definitely something I'd like to see us doing in Q3 and to have be part of the plan. that's a huge opportunity. We need to do that across the board. I don't have a good sense right now of. some idea, you know, in terms of really like what workflows are in place right now, where does the friction happen that where we can automate some, um, you know, workflows with AI from an agentic standpoint. Um, you know, I don't feel like I know enough, but around that specifically, uh, but that's definitely a priority for, for next quarter. Yeah. I have a tricky question for you. I'm curious about your answer. What would you change about the cyber security industry if you could change only one thing? I'll tell you, I would get rid of half the acronyms, at least half. There's all these acronyms and every time I'm in cybersecurity, I work for a business. I learned more and more and I learned, you know, 15 and I lose five. I mean, it's sort of like, shouldn't say the, actually it's the wrong way of saying it. I learned 15. Or I learned 50 and I think I'm caught up and then 20 others come up that I've never heard of. you know, it's a bit of a joke, but um I think it would be nice to speak some plain language sometimes. um You know, especially coming from... Not all of us are engineers, right? In cyber. mean, if you're coming from the sales and marketing side, you have to be technical enough to be able to take all the technical aspects of what the platform does or what services you deliver and translate it into reasonable language. um But you'll just, as a go-to marketer, I you'll just never be as technical as an engineer will be. just, you that's not possible. So I think, um You know, the acronyms and things that come to mind, but generally I would say having very strong product marketing in cybersecurity is probably the most important thing because you need that translator and you need that connection tissue between the product team and then the sales and marketing team.

Yeah, very unexpected answer, the first part of it. you expecting me to say? Well, I wasn't expecting to say that the acronyms are the one thing that you would change. Well, that's a bit of a joke, so I won't take that too seriously. I figured that out. So where are you looking to take the company going forward? I mean, we're looking to grow, right? have um the company's fairly young. uh There hasn't been a lot of focus on growth because the CEO has been busy building other adjacent businesses around it. And so now there's definitely, we're doubling down on growth and we have targets to grow this year and we're looking to meet them. And I guess you can say the spotlight is on me. Okay You know, would say the, how should I say this? The business has been growing opportunistically, um, up until now and it's been doing well. And now to quote the CEO, uh, I actually like that. What the way she says is now we're cooking with gas. Oh wow, I love that.

Okay and for listeners who want to connect with you or actually learn more about what you guys are doing, where can they find you? LinkedIn is the best place to find me. So, Isabelle Papoulias, can check me out. uh yeah, happy to connect. me a message. Great, Isabelle, thanks for joining the podcast and we'll see you in the next one. Wonderful, thanks for having me, Nicholas. Alright, so how did you find it, Isabelle? It was entertaining. Thank you. uh I mean, not, it's nice because it's really short. I actually like that it's really short and cause you don't need anything more than that. Like you're not doing it. No one listens to entire podcasts about sales and marketing and, and, and, Ligia, like they just don't, you know, you may listen. to entire podcasts about news. The whole point of this is really brand, you're just going for like brand awareness and consideration. like just enough to be able to put your name out there and the name of your guest and have like, you know, some,