Field Notes with Cara Simmons, Head of Marketing for Europe, Cyera

Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Cyera?

I joined Cyera almost a year ago as one of the first boots on the ground to build the entire EMEA region. What started as a team of eight has now grown to 44 people across five countries. I head up marketing for EMEA, where I’ve built the strategy from scratch and now expanding a stellar GTM team.

It’s a super fun, fast-paced job. Cyera is on an incredible journey, and we’re fortunate to have strong backing from Tier 1 venture capital. This allows us to have a simultaneous product and go-to-market focus, meaning we can rapidly embed into markets and build direct value early on.

Can you tell us a bit more about what Cyera does?

We are a data and AI security platform that is fundamentally rewriting the principles of data and AI security. Data security isn’t a new problem, but we have transformed the approach to tackle it. Previously, companies used legacy approaches like Regex for data classification, which barely met 30% accuracy and required extensive manual effort from teams.

Our product leverages advanced and highly-refined LLMs & Machine Learning to classify data by understanding the context around it, without all output reaching a minimum threshold of 95% accuracy. We can scan hundreds of petabytes of data in just weeks, a process that previously took years. The product demonstrates immediate value, and as soon as we test in customer environments, the results unlock a renewed realisation of what an effective data security programme can achieve. This is mission-critical for the European region, where buyers seek deep technical product validation.

How did you get into marketing?

I started out around age 19, working for a renewable energy business where I fell in love with the work, particularly events. I doubled down on field and event marketing, moved into tech, then financial services, and eventually came back to my sweet spot: cybersecurity startups.

It takes a special kind of person to be in a startup environment because it’s so fast-moving, but it’s incredibly rewarding to see something grow so quickly and to have a direct impact on that change.

How would you define success in field marketing?

I define it in many different ways. First, there’s brand success. When people come up to us at events and say, “You guys are everywhere,” I know we’ve done a really good job of getting our brand out there.

Second, success is part of the sales success. We are a partner with sales and channel in pipeline generation, and the main measure is what we are closing as a business.

Finally, I measure success internally. The incredible culture we’ve built and the amazing people who want to work with us are a huge attribute to what we’re building.

What marketing tactics have worked best for engaging audiences?

We recently ran our very first owned conference in the region, called Datasec. People told us it couldn’t be done, but we managed to get over 200 sign-ups and 100 people through the door. We’d been in the region for less than a year.

The success came down to connections and listening to our audience. We brought in a celebrity speaker, Clive Woodward, which resonated well with our industry. We had live music and provided free Ubers. Most importantly, the speaker sessions were peer-to-peer and value-add, not a sales pitch. It was about building a community in the data security world and being seen as a thought leader.

How do you measure an event’s ROI?

We score our leads and track how many MQLs we get and how far they go down the sales cycle. The industry standard is 20 to 30 times pipeline on the event spend; we are currently at 35 times.

But not every event will work, especially when you’re starting out. A lot of it is trial and error. Another key measure is qualitative feedback I always tell my sales team to ask their contacts: Where are you going? What events are you attending? I’m not going to listen to a sales call from an event vendor; I’m going to listen to what our field is saying and where our contacts actually are.

What are the most significant challenges you face when hosting events?

The biggest challenge is making sure our event sticks in people’s minds. Everyone is going after the same ICPs, and they all have busy schedules. You have to be memorable and provide a real value-add to stand out from a million other solution providers.

Another huge challenge is the geographical and cultural differences across EMEA. Each country is completely different, with its own way of being sold to and communicated with. You have to tailor your approach for every new region you break into.

You’ve mentioned working with sales. What is that relationship like?

My biggest piece of career advice is to work with sales, not against them. There has always been this persona that sales and marketing aren’t friends, but you have to build that relationship. There is no point in putting a strategy together that they don’t agree with because it simply won’t work.

If you don’t have that relationship in tech, you’re not going to win. It’s long days and a lot of travel; you want to be friends and work alongside these people to build an incredible culture.

What do you think is the biggest opportunity that field marketers have today?

I think we now have a really good balance between face-to-face and virtual engagement. After COVID, people crave human interaction, but digital marketing has become a powerful complementary tool, not a separate function. There is ample opportunity to get in front of people; the difficult part is honing in on the right way to do it.