CMO Chats with Vivienne Horsfall, Director of Field Marketing for APJ, Transmit Security

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all over the world, and are thrilled to have Vivienne Horsfall with us today. Vivienne, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Transmit Security?

Hi everyone. Welcome to CMO Chats. I am Vivienne Horsfall, and I’m the Director of Field Marketing at APJ at Transmit Security. My role at Transmit is to lead the field marketing team across Asia Pacific and Japan. I basically turn big pictures or global strategies into regionally relevant campaigns. I’m a bit of a strategist and a ringmaster, balancing different activities from events and demand generation to PR, and also running the SDR team. I take that global vision and translate it into local success.

I’ve worked for technology companies for over 20 years, both in startups and established companies, and within the cybersecurity industry for about 10 years, specifically in identity security, where Transmit operates, for about seven years. I’m in my third year with Transmit now. What I see as a bit different is that it’s all about authenticity: understanding what we’re trying to do, what the customers want, and what the business is looking to achieve, and bringing all of those together. That’s my role at Transmit.

What does your company do? 

We work in the identity security space. We believe that providing great customer experiences is done by having great security. If you can actually know 100% who is on the other end of your digital website or your mobile app, then you can give that person the kind of customer experience they want. Conversely, if you don’t know who it is, you give them the appropriate experience. If you think perhaps it’s a bad actor or a bot, then you give them the experience they should have. We help customers enable that to happen, and we do it differently in the sense that we’ve brought together customer identity and access management with identity verification and fraud prevention. Bringing these three things together helps break down the silos and closes the gaps where we’re seeing fraudsters get in today. So that’s what we’re doing at Transmit, where we’re very strong, and we’re working with some very big enterprises across the globe.

As the Director of Field Marketing at transit security, what’s currently your main marketing focus? 

At the moment, the main marketing focus is getting the message out there and driving meaningful conversations. We’re trying to reach the right people within the right organisations. It’s not about just ticking a box or getting an MQL; it’s about knowing exactly who to speak to and what they want to talk about, not just what we want to talk about, to ensure we are aligned. So we’re focused on, as I mentioned before, the blending of fraud prevention and customer identity. We’re trying to break down the pillars. In the past, you wouldn’t have an event where you invited people from different divisions; you tended to be more specific to one division. But that keeps those silos going when really everybody’s trying to find the same solution. What we find is that fraudsters are great at collaborating all the time, so we’re trying to do the same thing and set up opportunities for customers and prospects to collaborate with their peers, to see what they’re doing, to find out what’s working and what’s not, and to learn about the latest technologies that can help them overcome their challenges.

Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign that your team has recently executed that yielded success in terms of engagement and lead generation?

Greater success has occurred where sales and marketing have a symbiotic relationship, working together. When a salesperson says that a campaign really helped close a deal or move a lead forward, we know we’ve had a truly successful campaign. We’ve seen this in customer roundtables and hosted events where we’ve closely curated the conversation based on feedback from sales to ensure we’re talking about topics their customers want to learn more about. It’s about running events that listen to sales and our customers and deliver on that, as opposed to what we think our customers or prospects want to hear. We’ve seen a lot of opportunities for pipeline growth, which is non-negotiable in any company. These hosted events and executive roundtables have shown the greatest success.

Absolutely, that’s something I also resonate with, coming from a sales background and working with the marketing team. Going into the next question, what are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

Attention. Buyers are overwhelmed. Generic marketing is dead; you can’t do that anymore. People just switch off. It’s almost like invisible marketing. There’s so much noise, and people are doing business differently. They are far more self-sufficient, do a lot more research, and don’t want to waste time. They aren’t coming into the office every day, and when they are, they want to focus on office activities. Otherwise, people are in much more dispersed locations, making it more difficult to bring them together, get their attention, and speak to customers because they don’t want to talk to you until they are much further down the buying process. They will contact you; they don’t want to be contacted. So it’s finding that balance of giving them information, finding out where they’re reading and researching, making sure your information is there, but also ensuring that you provide relevant and resonating information, not just information for the sake of it. That’s really important.

I also think we need to balance the martech sprawl and have a human side to marketing. We lose that a little bit when automation seems to want to replace everything, and it can’t. Then we become very robotic ourselves and are no longer actually speaking to the people we want to speak to. Chatgpt and all these AI-based activities are great; they all have their place. Don’t get me wrong, I use them, but it’s not just copy and paste. We must be careful not to simply cut and paste and then look like everybody else or like we don’t care and are just throwing things out there, hoping something will stick. That’s a very old-fashioned way, and we have the tendency to do that again because it’s easy with these new technologies that provide things much faster. Being authentic is really important, and people pick up on that.

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for marketing leaders today that might not have been available in the past? 

Human connections. You must have human connections. We have learned that we need to work closely with sales, that working together is key. We need to approach things from a different perspective. We are orchestrators, orchestrating customer journeys and ensuring that when people come in, we provide the right information at the right time throughout their journey without going too far and spamming people. Nobody wants to be spammed. The key is looking at the market and your customers the way you want to be treated. Consider what annoys you and don’t do the same. Don’t be the same as everybody else. Differentiate. Be empathetic and considerate of others. We sometimes lose sight of that. Make empathy your superpower.

Empathy goes a long way, especially in this day and age. The next question is, what is the role of the CMO in one word, and why?

I kind of answered that with the whole idea of the orchestrator. You’re conducting everything. You’re conducting the brand, the demand, the sales, and the operations. You’re also trying to affect culture, ensuring your team is happy internally and everyone is working together towards the same goal. Doing a team event is just as important as doing a customer event, and ensuring that you’re not just doing something cookie-cutter that everybody does. Look for things that are meaningful, that have everyone clapping at the end, that leave the audience happy if they are customers, and your team saying, “That was great,” and talking about it afterwards. You want everyone talking about what you did. So it’s that orchestration, as well as being an empathetic person.

Thanks for that, Vivienne. Going into the next question, what’s a piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t really apply to modern CMOs? 

Owning the entire customer journey, from awareness to retention and trust, is important. You don’t hold just one part. This whole concept of pinpoint marketing, where you do one thing or something else in isolation, doesn’t work. It all needs to be integrated. You need to have a consistent conversation, whether it’s internal or external communication, and it needs to build the story across the entire customer journey. We are all storytellers, and it has to be that way. They are all chapters, as opposed to telling the entire story at once, trying to do everything at once, or leaving things out because you think, “Oh, that’s not my area.” It needs to be something where we are all in this together. That is important from a customer care perspective all the way through sales. Every touchpoint needs to communicate in the same way, with the same language and culture. It needs to be integrated, not pinpointed. It’s all about building communities, exactly: building communities for your customers and your own team.

A lot of it really comes down to the human touch, which is very important to keep ongoing, and that can be seen across different aspects of the business. What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

Learn each step. Don’t jump. We have a tendency today to think, “Oh, I’ve done something once, therefore I’m an expert,” but actually become masters of each thing you do. It will help you if you get your foundations right. So I think it’s really important to understand your industry, your market, your customers, your company objectives, and your sales team. What is everyone trying to achieve? Be curious. Don’t just chase tools; chase what makes people act. We are still human; you can’t lose sight of that. So I think it’s really important not to rush through things and to be considerate of the entire process. The more you learn from those around you—everybody has something to share—make sure you’re part of it. Make sure you’re listening to what they have to say. It’s okay to make mistakes; learn from them, and that’s how you grow.