William Sandy, Regional Marketing Manager at Armis, shares his playbook for modern field marketing. He discusses the power of authentic, human-centric campaigns and why a field marketer’s most critical role is to be a “navigator” for the sales team.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- The Future of Marketing is Still Human In an increasingly digital world, the businesses that win will be those that facilitate face-to-face credibility and build authentic, human connections.
- The Field Marketer’s Role is the “Navigator” for Sales Their job is to guide the sales team in the right direction, provide them with the right tools, and open the door to new opportunities.
- Use AI to Free Up Time to Advocate for Your Work Automate tedious tasks, then redeploy those hours to get crucial face-to-face time with leadership and sell your team’s value internally.
Could you please give us a quick introduction of yourself, your role, and the company you’re working for?
My name is Will Sandy, and I work as the Regional Marketing Manager for Armis, which is a cybersecurity unicorn that helps complex organisations see and secure their cyber-attack surfaces. My role involves managing the marketing strategy and activities for the Northern Europe territory.
How did you get into marketing? Was this what you always wanted to do?
I don’t know if I always wanted to do it, but looking back, the signs were there. As a teenager, I tried to start a local car wash business with my dad, and it became apparent that I was far more interested in the branding and look-and-feel than in how we were going to make money.
More practically, I wanted to get out of education and start earning, so after my A-levels, I went straight into a marketing apprenticeship at a tech firm called Nintex. I was very lucky to land in a place with amazing people who were fearless in letting me loose on field marketing activities like events and webinars. I’ve been loving it ever since.
What is your main marketing focus at the moment?
You can boil it down to two or three main points. The first, which is the lifeblood of any business, is pipeline generation—constantly finding the most effective and efficient ways to generate it.
The second is pipeline acceleration. Most marketers now have bonuses tied to marketing-attributed revenue, so it becomes very important to ensure the pipeline you’re producing makes its way through the funnel.
The third, which I don’t really like the term for, is brand building. It’s notoriously hard to quantify, but it’s critical. The correlation between brand trust and awareness is forever linked, and the more credible your brand is, the more organic opportunities come your way, which is music to any marketer’s ears.
What has been working for Armis recently in terms of pipeline building?
We’ve been on a journey. Like most organisations, we started off almost solely event-driven, from large trade shows to small, targeted roundtables. While events have certainly worked for us, we realised we were becoming over-reliant on them. We are now on a journey of diversifying that mix and are becoming a lot more mature in our digital marketing function, whether that’s paid media or SEO.
Could you describe one marketing campaign that proved to be very successful?
The one that is quite close to my heart personally is an NHS-targeted campaign we’ve been running this year. It started with a testimonial video we filmed with the IT Director of the hospital where my daughter was born.
We took that great asset, diced it up into short videos and long-form content, and ran a simple campaign on LinkedIn and Google targeted at our NHS ICP. It landed really, really well. We also got the IT Director involved in speaking sessions at various healthcare events. The whole thing has been immensely helpful in building credibility and trust with NHS buyers, and we’ve generated a huge amount of press and even potential award wins from it.
How do you try and stay ahead of your competitors?
This is really tricky because a lot of the messaging in the cybersecurity space is often the same. If you’re a CISO, it’s very hard to differentiate between providers.
The best way to stand out is by being consistently authentic through your messaging. For us, that means really focusing on the use cases and the specific pain points of our buyers. Because of our size, we have the resources to be more personalised and on-track with the problems our buyer is having, which smaller providers may not be able to do. Eventually, that consistency and personalisation builds trust.
What do you think the future of marketing looks like?
I could give a really click-baity answer about AI, but I’m going to try and avoid that. Ultimately, I think the future of marketing is still human.
Even though we are going very digital, as human beings, we can see digital as a bit inauthentic or even suspicious at its worst. It’s very hard to build credibility purely through digital channels. I think the businesses that will win in the future are the ones that are able to facilitate as much face-to-face credibility as possible. While AI has its place in improving efficiency, I don’t think we’re at a point where it’s changing things fundamentally.
When it comes to your events, what have you seen work best?
The boring answer is that they all have their place, depending on your objectives. You have to be accepting of that. We have a realisation that the huge trade shows are going to lean more into your brand building and awareness. In contrast, the smaller roundtables or our “test drives”—small tech-based events for engineers—are really great for building out the buying base and are very much pipeline acceleration focused. You need to do all types of events to fulfil all your needs.
For someone looking to get into field marketing, what kind of advice would you want to share?
The main thing I wish I’d known sooner was to advocate for yourself and for the marketing team. Field marketing is so full of task-based activities like logistics and copy-writing that we often forget to “sell” the results of our campaigns internally, especially to senior leadership. It’s not just important for your career; it’s important for making sure marketing is respected within the company.
I will also bring in the AI piece here. Use tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to handle the hours of your day that used to be spent on tedious tasks, like writing a social calendar or an email nurture sequence. Then, redeploy those hours back into my first point: getting face-to-face time with leadership and using your time to sell yourself and the value of the marketing team.
If you could define your role as a field marketer in one word, what would that word be?
I’m going to use a word from an old manager: navigator.
I mean that in the sense that we are the ones who guide, point, and shoot sales teams in the direction that we and the business need them to go. We supply them with the tools they need, and we open the door just wide enough for them to creep in, take over, and do their thing. Guiding and navigating sales teams to those opportunities is how I see field marketing.
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