#45: Running product marketing globally at $100M+ ARR, working with field sales, and more with Eyal Webber-Zvik, VP Product Marketing at Cato Networks

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All right, I'm excited to do this interview. We are fully global right now. You're, you're In Israel, it's 6pm where you are. I'm in Vermont in the US and it's 11am but before we hop in, I got a bunch of questions that I want to ask you. Why don't you just give a quick introduction and who you are background on you, maybe like the, the one minute version and we'll go from there.

So. Hi, first of all, it's a great honor and I'm excited to be here. My name is Eyal Webert Zvik. I'm VP of Product Marketing at Keto Networks. I've been with the company for almost seven years now. Seven years minus two months. My background, I started from coding, moved to project management, then product management and then marketing. So it's an interesting career that brought me here today.

Okay, so you've been with the company for seven years. I just was looking the company like, did you join? Actually, could you give some context as to like just the size and scope of, of Cato Networks today? Because I know you're well over 100 million in ARR, but like, it seems like you joined pretty early. Can you take us there for a minute?

Yeah. So I joined the company when we were still in stealth mode. I'm employee number 21 or 22, I think we are now 720something employees during the course of those seven years. So the company has grown very fast. I actually was hired at the beginning to be head of product management. So I started in building the product and then after three years I moved to marketing it. So it's an exciting transition within the Cato journey.

All right, let's talk about that for a second. Because so many people wonder the true role of product marketing. And given your background as a engineer person who comes from the product side, how do you define what product marketing does and how is that different from what you were initially doing from a product management standpoint? And has that background helped you to be successful from a product marketing standpoint?

I'll start with the end. It definitely has helped me, I think especially in B2B, being from a technical background or understanding the technical domain of the customers is very helpful in product marketing. I always look at jobs that I do as a kind of a Google Translate between two worlds. So when I was in product management I was the Google Translate between what the customers need to what the engineers need to understand. And now I'm the Google Translate between the technology and the values. So now the customers want to hear about the values that we bring and I the product marketing role in the core of IT is to really translate the technology to the value proposition.

One of the things that I think people get really caught up on when it comes to product marketing is the measurement side of it. It's like we get, I get product. You know, you talk about positioning and messaging and go to market strategy and understanding your customers. But I've had so many conversations inside of companies that I've been at or in talking to others on, on measuring product marketing. Typically when I talk to someone who comes from an engineering background, they are more analytical and have an ability to quantify things. So how have you thought about quantifying product marketing? Like how do you, how do you set goals and, and, and what is your kind of, how do you see the world?

I love this question because I hire a lot and this is a question that keeps coming in interview like what's, what's going to be my KPIs? How are you going to measure me? And I've been wondering about it for actually for a long time because it's difficult. You know, when you do performance marketing everything is measurable. When you build things those ways that you can measure the success in terms of bugs and time to develop and stuff like that. And I found my KPIs that work for me. They're very soft but they're also very, very empiric for my team. So I have a global team of product marketeers and everybody has both regional responsibilities and global responsibility. So for every one of my members, KPI number one is that everybody in the regional sales organization knows them by name. The second KPI is that everybody in the global sales organization knows them by name. If they achieve this, hopefully within the first KPI, one in the first three months of their job at Cato and second KPI within a year they're successful in the job.

Why do you think that is? Is a heavy field sales type of organization.

So it's half of the work is done to support sales directly and half to support marketing and product marketing as a whole. But if they are able and gladly they are to become subject matter experts within the sales organization Whether it's regionally in helping overcome objections and competitive situations and having sometimes harder strategic convers. And if it's a global scale on, you know, managing platforms that everybody uses or contributing in creating content that everybody loves, they become Personas in the company. And that means that their job is effective, that they're able to contribute to the organization and to the success of the company. So I found this to be the most tangible and even exciting KPI that you want to meet.

Well, I think it's, it's a good, like bullshit remover in, in some ways because it's, it's easy to just. So much of the product marketing stuff is like, it takes, it's stuff that you have to do, but you don't, you influence it, but you can't really do it directly without being able to work with those other teams directly. And so I think it's, it's a good way to like force someone to get in there. Did that come from you in the early days of the company? Because back when you're employee number number 12 or whatever, you know, there is much less kind of, kind of bullshit where you're, you're all in the same room talking and things and working together. So it's almost like a safeguard to like as, as you scale, you're, you're forcing people to go and talk to each other. And I, I mentioned this the other day, but I'll say it to you, one of the things that drives me crazy about B2B marketing is so much of the things that we get stuck on seem to be internal political team issues as opposed to like creative problem solving. Right.

For me and for everybody here at Cato was still a very bullshit free company, even at 700 people. This is part of the culture. It has a lot to do with being an Israeli company because everybody says everything to your face.

I was going to say, actually I've worked with or have gotten to know a bunch of Israeli founders or tech startups. And I do think that as I was saying that question to you out loud, I'm like, actually no. His answer is going to be no, because the culture is very direct and straightforward. I think that does kind of remove a lot of the, you know, in the, in the US we have like the, the shit sandwich, which is like, I'm actually gonna like say something shitty to you, but I'm gonna put it in the middle of two compliments and see, so you don't feel it as much.

So yeah, we don't have it. We'll Just say shit to your face if we feel that you should hear it. And we, we also appreciate that being said to us. So, you know, the direct approach is very, very appreciated. And it's kind of like a core value. I'll say something else about it, you know, it kind of makes me think. And we're having like a free form. Yeah, the near zero or what we call it on the marketing side. No marketing fluff approach is something that starts within but also goes out to the materials that we produce. It's very tempting to create content, even tofu content that is very high level to a degree that there's almost no value. And it's just hooks to capture needs. And my team works a lot with co marketing and digital marketing to create content that they can feed into the demand generation machine and drive more engagement. But it has to bring value. We need to always examine ourselves and make sure that we are at zero fluff or near zero fluff because we understand that customers don't buy the minute they meet us. Sometimes it's an unproduced valuable content that will continue consuming it. They'll appreciate us as a vendor and as, you know, thought leaders. And when they do come to the point where they're ready to buy, we'll be in a good spot in their memory. If we bullshit ourselves and the customers, it would fire back.

I think that cybersecurity in the computer and network security like industry that you're in also lends itself to be a very no fluff, no bullshit. Like you can't. Doesn't seem to be that you can lead with that anyway. And so it's like having a deep understanding of who you're selling to seems to have a big impact there. Can you just give context, as I forgot to ask it from the beginning, like just the size of the deals, like the typical customer that you're selling to and the size of that contract.

So Kado actually sells to customers from all verticals and all sizes. Our customer, we have over 1500 customers today. Smallest ones of 500 employees, largest one of Fortune 500 global 2000 Footsie, 100 companies. So there isn't really a sweet spot that is very clear. There are commonalities in the problems that we are solving and the values that we are bringing to solve the problems. And that is those are shared across all of our customers. But there isn't, you know, like eventually we average the deal size, but because we're a private company, I can't say the number, but yeah, but I think.

I Think what you, I think what you said will give people a good balance which is like if your smallest customer has 500 employees, you know, I think a lot of the marketing execs and other people that I've had on this podcast, that's typically what they would consider more that's going enterprise for them is, is 500. So, so you're selling, you know and obviously I think people can, people could do the simple math which is like you're, you're over 100 million ARR, you have 1500 customers. Those are going to be bigger deals. But you mentioned something that just kind of caught me off guard a little bit, which is you sell to all verticals and all sizes. And so what's the go to market approach there? Like what does that look like?

So there is like, you know, the, the go to market from the sales execution approach is a channel first company which obviously amplifies our sales capabilities. But it starts with direct sales because we're a very disruptive solution in our space. We haven't spoke about what we do, but maybe we can touch on that in a minute.

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, so Cato is essentially is taking network and network security that are currently and dominantly an on premise solution and taking them up to the cloud while doing so. We also take several submarkets within the network and network security industry and we're converging them into one. So to put this in comparison, convergence is what Apple did when they came up with the first smartphone. All the camera, the pda, the gps, the media player, all into one device that is not an integration, that it really acts and behaves as one thing. So we do this to firewalls and routers and secure web gateways and Caspian dlp. And I can throw many acronyms of products in the security space. Cloudification is simply taking things to the cloud. I think that for the majority of the world today this has already become a native thing. But for network and network security this is still a very radical change. So I always, when I try to explain, you know, even to the friends and family what we do. So I said think about, you know, Salesforce, which everybody knows exists today in the cloud. When their first salespeople came knocking on enterprises doors and they came and said look, we have a brilliant idea. You'll give us your customers list and we'll store it in our cloud, people would look at them like crazy and show them the door out today. It's obvious. And no one would start a CRM on premise it belongs, it lives in the cloud. That's the natural place. We're doing that revolution to network and network security. But it's a radical change today as Salesforce was 20 years ago. And that also impacts our go to market. It starts with how do you build the sales organization, how do you build the channel ecosystem which in many cases you need to win the first deals directly, then start feeding the channel and then they gain momentum and become independent and you need to replicate it by region and by country. And that requires planning and scaling. But it also forces you on the messaging side not to speak about features, but about the solution architecture and the values that it brings. Because the industry that we are in is so I would say old fashioned firewalls and routers and all those solutions have existed for 20, sometimes 30 years. They're all more or less the same and the nuances, the technical differences between them are very small. So when you try to compare them, it's a long Excel sheet with many, many roles and sales that you can score, not score to differentiate. And we're coming and saying that we don't want to go into a feature wall. Our advantage is not because we introduced a new technology, but because we're offering the same capabilities but in a different way. And it's kind of shifting the discussion from the what to the how. Because today, especially for digital enterprises, the how is much more important. They need to move fast, they need to be able to be dynamic and agile in introducing new capabilities, in expanding in mergers and acquisitions, in cloud migration, in so many projects that they need an infrastructure to support it. And this is what we provide. So we tailor the discussion and the messaging around common use cases, common pain points that we solve and the value that we bring. And we sometimes forcefully steer the conversation away from discussing about features.

I think that is wise for people to hear you say that is wise for any, any company. It's something that, at least I believe it's like if you, if the first conversation you're having is the, the feature checklist question, then you're, you're going to have trouble winning that because it's always going to come down to something. And like especially if you, you know, any vendor can skew their, you know, you've seen on every website, it's like they put all the green checks and all the can do and then the X. And so I think that it's interesting to hear you say that. So when you talk about channel, can you give a couple of examples of like, can you give a couple of examples of channels that are successful for you all. Just to give people more context.

That's also going to be a very broad, a very broad answer because part of the thing that Cato is doing is that we're taking two main channel ecosystems, one in the networking space and one in the security space. And, and we're selling a solution that helps both of them or both of them are selling. So you used to have channel partners for the security domain, which would be distributors and value added resellers and managed security service providers or MSSPs. And then on the networking side you would have CSPs, which are communication service providers, telcos, many service providers, MSPs, they all had a different way of, you know, meeting their end customers and they would even sell inside the enterprise. The networking channel would send to the networking people and the security channel would say to the security people and we want them all to work together. So that's also part of the headwind that we're facing. It's always improving because those, like there's a wide kind of notion of breaking down those silos. But that means that we had to pave our way into each and every channel and also come with a value proposition to the channel itself, not only to the end customer. So why would a networking oriented channel partner work with me when there are 10 other vendors to offer solutions on the networking side? And the answer would be is that because with Cato, we allow them to tap very easily into security business they didn't have access to before. And on the security channel we give them access to networking business they didn't have access to before. It comes out almost automatically from selling our solution because it converges networking and security. So that was a very, still, is a very appealing kind of proposition.

Seems like so much of what you have to do is rooted in positioning and storytelling to these specific audiences. Do you have particular frameworks or formulas that you use to create those narratives? Is it a, is it a Google Doc with a, with a template? Is it somebody's book that you've read? Like, is it just you kind of riffing on an idea and making a deck? Take me into the process for coming up with the narrative and positioning.

So I inherit most of the, a large majority of the content that the building blocks from our cmo, which is one of my greatest mentors of all times and if I can give any career advice in this call, is to find a good mentor to work for.

But he has deep experience in this, in this world, it seems to be so he can kind of speak fluently in the in the language you both can of of network security.

So we both come with a technical background in this space of many years and we've both transitioned, he did it early, much earlier than me, into product marketing and then later he was VP marketing and now cmo. So there's a lot of experience combined with and we challenge ourselves so we create slides, we practice them on each other, we record ourselves doing it and then we put everything into speaker notes. And we have a rule that every slide that we create for sales to use come with full speaker notes that they can literally read while presenting. And it wouldn't even feel in the language is so conversational that it wouldn't feel like they are reading it. And our guidance to sales is look, here's the sales pitch. Please, we insist, follow it, go one by one in the slide. There are click markers for the slides build up. You do it 10 times. Reading it in the 11th time, you're already memorizing it in the 20th time, it's already spiced with your personal experience and style. But all of our sales tell the same story. And what we do is that.

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Go check them out, create a version. We test it on ourselves. We test it with some of the more veteran sales reps. We get their feedback, we listen to gong recordings of those sessions, see the customer reaction. We make the adjustment and improvements that we need. We release another version. So there's always the amount of versions and the intervals between versions slow down over time. But initially we were updating them more frequently. Now we have a very robust presentation. And this is the one. There's one deck that tells the Kato.

Story, this one deck that tells the Cato story. Is that based off of a particular framework that you have or is this you2 just kind of riffing on like what you think we, what you think needs to be in this deck.

It's a very classic blueprint. So there is the problem statement, what you are coming to solve. Then there is an objective definition of the blueprint of the solution. We reference Gartner a lot because they are the go to analyst in our space, obviously. And then we say, look, this is the problem. This is how Gartner say it should be solved. And this is our implementation of the solution. And this is like a summary of what we said. And we've structured it in a way that our salespeople can pitch the solution with all those steps from start to finish in under 15 minutes. And then in the deck, they get to a kind of menu slide where they have, we call this the front end and the back end. They have backend models that they can do a deep dive. So they tell the pitch and then if the customer says, okay, I'd like to know more about technology X or technology Y, so they have another model that they can click and zoom into and then go back to the menu. So it also controls. You know, salespeople don't always like to be told what to do. But we're very objective and we can, as much as we can, say that we are objective about ourselves, but we can look at things from kind of from a bird's eye, listen to gong calls and, and see how these things work. And we've learned that if we don't limit the time of the pitch, some people can not intentionally kill an entire one hour intro call just on telling the keto story. If we force them to do it in 15, 20 minutes, they have a lot of time for advanced conversation to get to next steps to handle objections. So we've structured it in a way that also optimizes sales performance and it works very well. We also had a time, you know, this is anecdotal, but it's related to. We added a discovery slide at the very beginning of the presentation early on and sales got offended. Some people said, look, we're in sales for 20 years. We don't need you to tell us how to do discovery. And we said, okay, hide it, don't use it if you don't want to or if you don't feel that you need it. And after a period of time, we were looking at our performance and we did like a project of listening to goncos of selected sales rep, randomly selected sales rep. And there was one repeating problem of sales not doing discovery that was just jumping in and telling the story and later on trying to figure out how to relate that to the customer pain because we're also selling into different pain points. And then we kind of went back with that to the sales leadership and we agreed that we should do a new discovery slide and force everybody to go through it. And even then, we did ab testing. We created two different discovery slides, we showed it to sales, we let them vote which one they prefer. They pick the one they feel more comfortable with. And now this is a standard part. This is the opening slide of the deck even before we start speaking about the company and the problem.

I love what you said about having the deck be intentionally 15 to 20 minutes or I think that's how you framed it because I think and I've worked with much, much smaller companies with much more digital driven sales motions, right. Somebody comes in through the website, raises their hand, sales talks them. I've always struggled with like, it's, it's this never ending battle of like, well the, the deck doesn't say all of the things that we do. And it's like I've always fought this, this battle of like, well look, we're never going to be able to tell every single thing or know every single question. And I think what you've done is smart, which is like you're intentional about the frame and it's like, hey, here's 15 to 20 minutes of things that we, we want to tell you about to frame this. But then let's freeform discussion and be prepared to have those things. I feel the same way about like websites for example, where oftentimes it's like this one sales rep in this one territory doesn't like how the website says X and it's like, look, you're never going to be able to please every single audience. Let's have some kind of, some kind of jumping off point. Is that how you've thought about this?

Yes, I think maybe, you know, not knowingly it's very much inspired or influenced by how you structure a website, right? You have limited real estate to get the attention, they scroll down, you give them a little more details, scroll a little bit more, they get more details. You need to control the priorities and kind of estimate the time spent from the viewer side on the content that you're presenting. So you have to decide what matters most, what messages you bring in first, what level of details you go into at what point. So the same logic applies in a face to face conversation or in a zoom call. The fact that we know that we have an hour doesn't mean that we can spend it however we want. It still needs to be structured, prioritized, focused, value oriented. The same thing that works in digital, let's say the same logics work face to face. But you have to be aware and conscious of that.

And just like even on your website, right, you have, I'm looking at your, your use case pages as one example. You have basically there's basically 20 use cases you could have for this, for this product. And you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. You've seven products. And so there's just no way that you would ever be able to give each sales rep. This, this dynamic, you know, this deck.

It'S actually one product that sells to seven Use cases.

Got it. Okay. And so that's why you can have kind of one. One deck. Because you have one deck that is the cato, like product story. And then each sales rep or whoever is doing that is going to tailor the discussion to that use case.

Exactly. And even in the process of sales training, you know, we are. We grow very fast. Our entire sales organization now is, I think, in the ballpark of 350 people. We need to train sales to tell the story. So we used to do it by product marketing. Now we already have a sales enablement team that helps us scale this practice. Part of the onboarding is for every new sales to sales or customer success doesn't matter. Everybody who sells the product or upsells the product, they need to practice the pitch. They recall themselves, they send it to the sales enablement team, they watch them do the pitch. If they don't do it by the book, they'll have to do it again until we feel confident that they do it as they should. And then there are another touch point three months after to make sure that they're still, you know, align. They should spice it with their own style and stories. But the pitch today, after seven years of working on it so hard, is so laser focused on what it needs to say. Every world is thought of, everything is around value proposition, differentiation, focus on architecture rather than features, that it's almost impossible to make it better at that point. And they just need to follow it. And for those who do, it works like magic.

Is sales enablement part of your organization?

No. It used to be my team's responsibility, but now they're part of the sales organization.

Can you take me into your role as product marketing leader? What does your team look like? Team structure, how you run the team, weekly rhythms, monthly rhythms, things that you do. People like to hear about that stuff, especially from someone who's running a larger team inside of a larger company.

So I'll start by saying that relative to the company, I have a small team and I love it that way. Always. Even in product management and product marketing, I always have the. Some of the smallest teams. And personally, I like it. I don't like being a manager of many, many people and they become so distant from you in the hierarchy that you don't know anything personal about them.

As a personal lesson that I've learned is like, always be wary of the executive who likes to tell people how many people report to them in an organization. That is always like a smell test for me. Like, who cares about that? Like, I'd Much rather have a team of. If you could do your job with two people, like wouldn't you want to do that?

Yeah, that's all. That's always better. So my team, beyond product marketing, within my group were also responsible for the pricing of the service, which something that usually sits with product management. And here at Cato it's with product marketing. So I have another team member that helps me with pricing. We also run all the PR and media relations from within my team. So also have two team members that are responsible for that. And the rest of the team are classic product marketeers distributed across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific. So presence in each region. And like I said at the beginning, everybody is asked to balance their work. 50% contributing to regional efforts and 50% contributing to global efforts. So regional efforts would be supporting sales, RFPs, events, evangelism, objection, handling strategic meetings, stuff like that. And the global effort would be content creation, thought leadership, tofu, webinars, white papers, ebooks, blogs, stuff like that, as well as owning one of the platforms that serves the entire company, competitive intelligence, demo platform, things of that. So. So everybody has multiple responsibilities. I meet with everyone on a weekly basis for one on one, just to get status on how they do. But we also have a written weekly report and we also have a team meeting every week which kind of would go around and everybody shares what they're doing and what they're focusing on. And I give some Cobot level updates if there are any. And we're also meeting face to face here in Israel every six months. So that's more or less the structure.

So the team is. You said face to face in Israel every six months. The team is not all in person.

No. So we have half of the team is based in Israel, the other half is distributed in North America, Europe and Singapore.

Can you tell me about this written weekly report?

So yeah, we have. Our CEO loves reports and he actually reads everything and he remembers everything, which is even more impressive. So the whole kind of notion of full transparency goes throughout all the departments in the organization. So we try to convey as much information as we can upwards to me, to the CMO and from there to the, to the CEO and to the rest of the company leadership. What we do is that everybody writes what they focused on every week if it's a task that is going on over several weeks. So we'll highlight the differences from previous week to usually be broken down to what I did regionally with the sales organization, what happened in the platform that I'm responsible for what happened or what I did in the areas of content creation and any highlights and focused for next week. And then I take all those reports beginning of every week and I aggregate them and pass it up.

So your team, like, is it an email? They email that to you?

It's a shared. Everybody has a word document that they always add the recent week on top of it.

Yeah, I love that. I love that format. Actually, somebody just recently asked about this in the Exit 5 community about. Like I shared this example of when I was at Drift. At least we used to do this. We used to show and tell every Friday and someone from the marketing team would present. This is not just product marketing, but all of marketing. And basically the format was here's what we got done this week and any highlights right here's what we're working on next week. And then maybe one like big learning or story or something else. And I found that that was a great way to get the rest of the company in the know. And I think it's just a lot of times people feel like they don't know what marketing is doing. And it's not always, especially in something like product marketing, you don't always have these big like sexy new things to tell people about. But there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes and I think that that's a great framework and I love the idea of doing this asynchronously and just having people write. And I feel like also the process of writing forces people to like to think and evaluate. What am I working on? Do you. Do you read these and are you comment? Like, if I'm on your team and I send you my. My update, are you like writing comments on my doc and be like, huh, why are you working on this? Or like, how's this going? Or do you need help? Like what. What's your involvement in those things?

So for me, if I'm surprised by anything that is written on the doc, that's a problem because I shouldn't be waiting for. For my team. I have a small team, so I need to know what they're dealing with, you know, at the highlight, at the tighter level and not be surprised by it. When I get the weekly report, it's just more of a written way to summarize everything in a structured format. Sometimes, you know, things happen. We didn't touch. I was traveling, someone else was traveling. You don't have full control of everything. But generally, as rule of thumb, I shouldn't be surprised. I think that one of the things that I like about it behind the process of summarizing what you do and sitting down and thinking, what are we going to do next week? And this is something that sometimes we speak and say, look, maybe we prioritize this over the other thing. The fact that everything is in a endless scrolling document. If you want to summarize what you did at the end of the quarter or at the end of the year, just scan through the document and you can very quickly extract all the big achievements. And sometimes you just put everything in one slide. For example, when we report our quarterly activities to the board, I can build one slide and put all the strategic deals that my teams contributed to. And that's very powerful. And it takes me less than 30 minutes to extract it from all the reports of all of my team members and my own report. So I find it, you know, it's also kind of a journal or a diary. Not only a weekly report, a duty.

There's not some like, magic report that shows you those strategic deals. You're able to actually just like go through and read them and say, here's one we contributed to. Here's one we contributed to.

Yeah, because we don't put records on Salesforce that I can go and extract it from there.

Why not?

Good questions. I think usually the sales people do this very well here. We have a very high discipline around that, I think relatively so. There's not much that we can contribute into the notes in Salesforce, but we know how we were involved.

No, it's cool. I'm asking because it's honestly, it might seem, I guess, foreign to most people who listen to this because typically we're talking to a lot of higher volume SaaS, companies where everything is digital and everything needs to be measured. And it's just like sometimes it's easier in a model where you have a limited universe of like you have 1500 customers. Right. You're only closing so many deals in a quarter and in a year and that can be more. It's a little bit harder to track, like the process from like how they found out about you to how you buy. But when you're looking back, it's a little bit easier to quantify. Like everyone's working on the same team together. It's not like sales versus marketing. And you have this motion where it's. It is direct sales and channel led. And so you're not always jumping around to be like, whoa, how does marketing get credit for that? It's like your default state on the way in is like, marketing is here to help Sales sell.

I'm not interested in neither of my team in collecting credits for success. I think that if we do a good job, the credit will be earned media, not paid media. Okay. And that's again that that ties back to my KPI. If everybody in Europe knows by name my team members there, they are doing a great job. If they need to decide which RSD to help with first because they're overloaded and they're exceeding the 50% that we wanted to allocate, we're hitting our KPIs. I don't need the kudos messages on Slack on the emulator. Thank you Xoy for helping so much. They're fun to receive and I think they're valuable. But that's not the the KPI for us to.

Well, and typically revenue revenue cures all.

Well, revenue cures all. That's also true. But we're also not, you know, our, our compensation is not dependent on performance like salespeople. So we're not tied in our compensation to any KPIs. We're focused on and doing the best we can do within the resources we have.

I have some follow ups on your team stuff that I want to ask you, but just because you mentioned again this KPI about the team member by name, do you actually have a way of measuring that? Are you going out and polling? Is there a way that you would know that or is it just anecdotal for you?

I think it's a mixture. What I do is that I personally try and visit some of the quarterly business reviews when they happen face to face and then I can observe the interaction between my team members and the rest of the team. I also see how much they are being pulled in to help sales and that's another kind of way to sense it. But you would see, I would see from even my weekly with my team members their relationship with the team if they have a lot of time available to contribute to the global efforts in content creation, they are not regional champions. When I need to tell them, look, I need you to start saying no to sales and do more for the global efforts then I know that they are successful in that API.

And to your point that your team is not is not very big. So you can do that just to quantify like how big is not. Not very big. Do you have five people? Do you have 10 people?

We are eight people now.

Eight people. Perfect. That's a good number. Okay, my follow ups number four on your product marketeers, are they each focused by like you said, you have One product, but you have different use cases. Are they specialists in one particular? Like, if I'm on your team, I'm Dave. Do I have these two use cases or do I need to know all of the use cases?

All of them. You do all of them. And that it didn't ask, but I'll tell about it. It ties to how I onboard new team members. And usually you come into an organization, the first thing you want to start doing is contribute. Right? I want to prove that it was the right decision to hire me. Let me write something, let me do a webinar, let me go into a meeting and present and everybody's excited. And my approach is sit down for two months and learn. I don't want you in the field. I don't want you writing anything. I want you to watch presentations, video recordings, practice pitches, take notes, suggest ideas, go through the exact same training as salespeople do, play with the solution, install it at home, build your own lab, do everything that you can. I'll give you two months, three months before starting asking to see any deliverables from you. Because I believe with all my heart that every day spent during that period would pay itself 10 times fold later on in the amount of cycles that we would save in fixing, messaging, positioning, understanding of the solution in that period of time allows them to be expert in everything we deliver and to sell into all the use cases.

It makes a ton of sense. And given the technical nature of your product, right. Like, I'm sure if someone on the digital team who you, who you all hire to do SEM, you know, you're not going to be like, don't do anything for three months. You know, like, let's, let's, let's fix this. That's. Yeah, you got to know the product, especially if you have so many use cases. It's like the most important thing is the first three months you want that person coming out of there and being able to answer questions. And is it hard to hire for that role given like the technical nature of your product? And then typically marketers don't really come from that world. Do you have a profile or are you able to hire me and train me and in three months I'm an expert in this world?

The short answer is, oh my God, how difficult it is to hire.

Which is maybe why your team is eight people. Right. That's another reason. It's like, it's really hard. It's hard to hire.

It's hard to hire. And I don't want to compromise, you know, We've done some experiments over the years. It's almost impossible today the talent pool of product marketeers in our space that actually did everything that my team does is almost non existent. Some product marketees are usually all laser focused on just writing content or competitive or technical marketing. It's super difficult to find them. Even more so in Israel, which is one of the reasons now I'm growing the team only globally and less locally. So we started, we tried transitioning product managers to product marketers like the transition that I did and my CMO did and that didn't work for various reasons. And then we tried to take marketing people that sold, that worked on people who were product marketing without technical background but with great writing and communication skills and teach them the technical part. And that also didn't work. And what we found to be the most successful kind of evolution is to take people who are sales engineers and pre sales that were already very good in external communication and presentations and are looking to make this change or advancement in their career to the marketing side and convert them. And this is great because they have technical background in a degree that the customer won't argue with them, that the sales or the sales engineers won't argue with them internally. So they build their own thought leadership and subject matter expertise. But they're also great in communicating and then the work from all the skills that they have. The work is more focused on how we polish the storytelling and how we control the text level in presentations and how to structure a white paper. It's more in the fine lines than in the core competencies. And this is what we do today. We usually focus on finding People with 10 plus years in sales engineering with a clear technical background in our space, preferably for compete from competing companies, take them and convert them to product marketers.

Nice. Yeah, it's good to hear. I think just as a hiring lesson for others listening to have that framework as opposed to like yeah, well hire, you know, like it seems like you've learned over the seven years of like this is, this is a very specific Persona. And yes, recruiting and hiring is hard, but it's at least easier knowing that there's kind of only one particular type that you're going after and then you can, you can narrow your focus. Okay, that was my question about product marketing. My other question is about you own pricing. And my goodness, there is nothing that I've seen in SaaS companies that I would want to own less. Now granted I'm not the technical person that you are. I don't know this space pricing just at every company seems like it can turn into this crazy thing. Can you share a little bit about like the philosophy on pricing? Who's involved in that? Everyone's going to have an opinion on that. And how do you feel about owning pricing?

Actually I've owned. My previous career was in product management, so I've owned pricing in several previous life cycles. So it wasn't new to me moving into product marketing here. It was actually new to me that I came to be head of product and I didn't own pricing here at Cato. That was the surprise. I think pricing is an amazing and challenging topic to own. First of all, it forces you to be in a very direct touch with the field because as product management or product marketeer it's very easy with all the work to kind of get yourself high in the clouds and detached from the field and pricing doesn't allow this at all. It also forces you to understand a lot of aspects of the business that otherwise might, might not be close to your heart, like how revenue recognition works and how the market landscape works and trends and how the channel ecosystem works and how. So many different factors. What we did at Cato that it took us a few years to stabilize our pricing model, that was before it went over to my hands and then I got a mature model that now needs to be evolved. From cheval perspective, are they responding to dynamics in the market? You know, a competitor comes up with a new offering or there is some kind of, you know, price drop of some relevant technology that may also have an impact to us and we need to respond to that. If we don't predict it. We're also introducing new features and new premium add ons. So how do you price them and how you tie them into the model? And there's always tension because we, our price model is somewhat different from our competitors because our architecture is different and how the pricing also reflects value. So there are things that sometimes you say, look, I can price this to very low point, but the value is so great that sometimes this is part of the positioning of a premium add on. You don't want to price it too low because you want the price to express the value as well. You need to factor all those things in and as the company grows and you have more channel partners, every change has so many ripple waves to it that you become much more bounded and limited in how agile and dynamic you can be. So it increases the challenges, which is why today it's not just me, but I have another team member who is Slowly taking over the leadership on that with me. I love it. I think I can speak about the process. What we do is that we want to drive price change. We built a proposal for what is the in Cato pricing committee which is sea level with some audiences from VP level from different departments. We build the deck that explains the change we want to drive. Always have to come backed up with data. What is the reason for the change? What is, how is it going to affect us and where it's going to affect us? How are the competition priced every data that we can bring in to come with the decision? We don't come with open ended questions, even if there are open questions. We come with a proposed solution and that's part of a C level communication practices that we, I always work around, work on and then we first of all present it on one on one meetings to the sea levels and then we gather the committee, go through it again, make sure everybody agrees and understands, formalize it and then there is an execution phase of how it boils down to the different, you know, systems and platforms that need to reflect this pricing. So it's becoming a full blown procedure done rather than just us saying, you know what, let's drop the price of this SKU by 50% because we feel like or because we feel there's a need. But it's amazing. I love all those. Personally, I love so many interactions with so many departments and to know and feel that things I'm touching has a company wide impact. For me this is the best place I can hope to be in the company.

Yeah, that's great. It's great to hear. It's great to hear you talk through that. I think that way that you just described, rolling out the pricing change I think is a good mental model for people who are listening to this to think about almost any big change. Like I'm sure you do something similar with positioning which is like you, you get a group of leaders in the company involved but first you're meeting one on one with the C level people. Because I've learned this from, from my own mistakes, which is like you never want to unveil a big change to a big group for the first time. You need to go and have those conversations first. Okay, I want to, I want to wrap up and just maybe spend the last five minutes talking about you, which is, it's rare today. Maybe this is a American thing, I don't know. But it's easy to jump around companies a lot. One to two years at a particular place and I Look at your history. I look at the cmos history. You've been at Cato for seven years. Talk about your evolution from you as employee number 12 at this company to now you're running, you know, product marketing and you, you got a team of eight people and there's 600 people at the company. Just. I'm curious to just hear you kind of reflect back on how you've grown over the last seven years.

I don't think I can quantify it by other, by, you know, using a word like enormous growth on. On every possible metric. My passion is in building things. This is why I was drawn to engineering at the beginning to software development and from there to project management, which I could tie things together and help things become one working project and then product management. And now this. Being in a company for a long period of time, especially at a company that starts very small and then goes through a hyper growth, you get to have such an amazing perspective of things. And solving problems now and knowing how we solved smaller versions of that problem five years ago helps me think about things the way I think about them, helps me approach problems differently. I have this. I'm not sure even how to put it in words because it's somewhat of a gut feeling, but maybe a good way to put it is that, you know, we all. I'll speak about gut feelings. Gut feelings in my mind come from experience that is so embedded in you that when you come to a challenge, something tells you what's the right solution. When you work at a company for seven years and two companies before that, I work at the company for 10 years, also started very few until an exit and inquisition. You go through all those challenges, those ups and downs and startups are such a roller coaster that it builds character that gives you those mental capabilities to overcome whatever comes next. You know, it can be a business downturn like that is happening now and we know how to prepare for it because we've seen recessions in the past. It can be growth in teams, it can be working with sales, it can be challenge from the competition. Everything is something that we've already been through this company or the previous company. But we haven't just dealt with the challenge momentarily. We've seen it from before it came. We went into the challenge, we've solved it. First attempt, second attempt. We saw the outcome over time. We saw the growth coming after it and the lessons learned. This broad perspective that can only be achieved over a course of multiple years is so insightful and so maturing that I feel that People who jump between companies every two years, maybe they advance in titles and compensation, but they miss a lot of important lessons.

Yeah, well, if you look at the scope of, like, things that you're doing right, it's like, it'd be, it'd be much harder to own pricing and nail the story if you were rotating in. But you have the history of, and the relationships of working with, with some of these people and these teams. And on this business for six, seven years has to have a big factor on, on your ability to be successful in this market.

I want to believe so. Yeah.

All right, you can go home and have dinner now. Thank you for doing. This is great. Just if anybody wants to connect with you personally after, after listening to this, I'd love to just have you kind of plug yourself or plug Cato really quickly before we wrap up.

So, yes, I'm on LinkedIn and I love meeting new people and, you know, getting advice, providing advices, just knowing people. I think I love LinkedIn as the social network for, for professional people. I think it's, it's a great place and I'm super excited about the opportunity to speak with you. Dave, it's been a real pleasure.

Yeah, me too. This was a lot of fun. I learned a lot in an hour. And just so you know, my, my, my process is like, I'm, I'm, I'm learning. I'm scribbling notes the whole time that I'm. I'. So this was great to connect. I'm glad we got to do it. And, and thank you to everybody listening for this on this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Fun to talk to you and fun to. Fun to learn more about Cato and what you're doing. And I'm sure we'll stay in touch after this.

All right, thank you very much.

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