Jared Elder, VP of Marketing at Build Security, on Increasing Revenue Through Better Target Account Planning

In this episode, we're joined by Jared Elder, VP of Marketing at build.security. A growth marketer at heart, he has over 15 years of experience building and managing marketing and sales development teams specifically for SaaS startups.

Jared shares his insights on lead scoring and disqualification, build.security's approach to target account planning, his peeves regarding MQLs, and much more.

Show Notes

On the challenges of marketing to developers

"To me, it's, always been about being an authority [...] and building a brand of trust within that community. It's difficult. But if you're able to provide engineers with the right tools to educate them as they think about tackling a particular problem, you have a pretty good chance at being successful." (05:02)

On the importance of disqualification in the lead process

"[Marketers] need to be thinking about how stringent they should be when it comes to tactical engagement – and what they want to do to really build pipeline." (20:00)

"Being able to adjust based on conditions and what you're seeing in the market and what you're seeing with customers and adoption is going to help." (20:25)

On defining MQLs

"I've never understood the debate around defining what an MQL is, because everyone defines MQL differently. You should define what an MQL is because it actually means something to your business – not because a marketing automation system says it has a lead score of 40." (20:39)

"Define what is most important to you, and then figure out what you can do in building attributes to get to that point." (21:00)

Full Transcript

Sarah E. Brown [00:00:10] Hello everyone, and welcome to Selling in the Cloud, a podcast about the business of cloud sales and marketing, brought to you by Intricately – the authoritative source on digital product, adoption, usage, and spend data for sales and marketing teams. I'm Sarah E. Brown and I'm here with Michael Pollack, and we are your co-hosts.

Sarah E. Brown [00:00:39] Michael, it's great to be here with you on the show.

Michael Pollack [00:00:41] Sarah, as usual, it's great to be here with you.

Sarah E. Brown [00:00:43] In this episode we're speaking with Jared Elder, who's the Vice President of Marketing at Build Security. Jared has more than 15 years of experience building and managing high-performing marketing organizations for software as a service startups, particularly in the security space. Shall we dive in?

Michael Pollack [00:01:00] Absolutely. I'm excited to get into it. Jared, welcome to the show.

Jared Elder [00:01:04] Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Really been a fan, watched a lot of other episodes and now I get to be on one. So this is great.

Sarah E. Brown [00:01:10] Can you give us a brief introduction and share who you are and some background on how you got to be where you are today as VP of Marketing at Build Security? And also, talk a little bit about Build Security and what you're doing in the cloud security space.

Jared Elder [00:01:24] Yeah. So I've been doing marketing and sales development management for early stage SaaS startups for the last 15 years and more recently in the last several years, focused on cyber security, cloud security. And at Build Security, we provide API authorization and policy management. So for anyone that has an application out there, whether it's kind of customer facing, dealing with contractors, or internally being able to develop granular access and identity management to your APIs and being able to build access control. So that's what we're focused on helping developers do.

Michael Pollack [00:01:58] I'm curious for our audience, when you talk about your background as a marketer in cybersecurity, I'd love to unpack that a little bit on the security side of things. Increasingly, when I look at your background, it's – you're helping businesses that are almost delivering core solutions to some extent in that it's security to ensure compliance or rules. Can you talk a little bit about where in the security layer you live in? Who's typically using that?

Jared Elder [00:02:22] Yeah, so we focus on the API layer of security and specifically within that authentication. So normally you look at APIs, the two factors are authentication and authorization. We focus on authorization. So, again, if you want to be able to write rules on who can access your API based on their location or a time of day or a pending status ticket in JIRA or a status deployment in GitHub, being able to create those rules for development teams that don't – you know, they may need to either build RBAC or ABAC access control or attribute-based access control, or they want to just kind of integrate their data sources from within their cloud applications in order to dictate policy on how they construct those access controls. A lot of developers are faced with that. I know actually a previous company, we spent a good amount of time, a good amount of engineers' time, trying to build this type of authorization into our product. And so it allowed me to realize the complexity of the problem that we're solving, the fact that there are a lot of engineering teams that instead of improving their product, making it more usable, adding more rich features, they're actually spending time on kind of securing the API authorization and how they construct their permissions management. So it's a unique problem. The API layer, I think, especially with the growth of things like Cervalis, is becoming more and more prevalent to how we think about security and the layers that we look at it in the API is definitely at the forefront of that.

Michael Pollack [00:03:51] I'd love to dig into one comment you made there and just this idea that increasingly there's these huge businesses to be built around tools. Right. Tools for developers, or tools for marketers, that increasingly, as we kind of do all our work online, there is this whole toolbox of stuff you kind of need to be able to do that. Having been a founder a couple of times and having built products for developers, I can talk to the extreme challenges. Sometimes you feel selling something to a constituency that oftentimes thinks they could build it themselves. I'd love for you to comment a little bit on your thoughts, just as a marketer targeting developers and how that's unique and how you approach that and how philosophically, maybe that's different than marketing, say, to marketers or other constituencies.

Jared Elder [00:04:37] Absolutely. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Marketing to engineers or technical audiences can certainly be a little more difficult. There are tens of thousands of venture-backed software companies, SaaS companies, that are vying for the time, attention and focus of developers and cybersecurity experts. So being able to offer something that can really catch their eye and get their attention is difficult. And to me, it's, it's always been about really being an authority, obviously. And in terms of content production, thought leadership and building a brand of trust within that community, which can be difficult. But again, if you're able to provide engineers with the right tools and resources to help educate them as they look and think about tackling a particular problem, you're going to be able to really, again, going to develop that authoritative position to them that when it comes time for purchasing a solution, that your company is something that pops into mind. So it presents its difficulties, like you said, engineers are slightly maybe a little more callous to traditional marketing efforts, traditional digital marketing efforts. But again, if you can position yourself and really be able to express how you're, you know, you could ultimately help their daily jobs to be done and things to do, you have a chance at being able to build a pretty successful business.

Sarah E. Brown [00:06:01] You use the word education. I've heard you talk about this before when you're building community or building resources. I'm curious what role data plays in helping you identify what education is needed for developers to whom you're selling.

Jared Elder [00:06:14] Yeah, I think, again, it really goes back to understanding, you know, your persona well enough to know the things that plague them on their day to day basis.

Jared Elder [00:06:25] And it's not just the classic, what keeps someone up at night, right? I mean, sure, everyone likes to think that their product and what they're selling is addressing something that keeps someone up at night. But more importantly, more realistically, it's thinking about what your target persona is tackling on a day-to-day basis. What are the things that take them away from the task that they want to be doing, and lucky for us at Build Security, our founder is an engineer and he's experienced the problems that he's solving. So that goes a very long way for us to think about how we want to market what we're doing. And I think the second thing that we really benefit from is and I mentioned it earlier, a lot of times you do face, and Michael hinted at this, a contingent within a company that oftentimes wants to build.

Jared Elder [00:07:12] And again, I've been at companies before that built dysfunction in-house. But a lot of the times you're in a position where you're lucky enough, where developers raise the white flag, coming out of the gate saying, listen, I don't want to spend time doing this. And more importantly, I'm able to realize now if even if I am able to build it, I have to burn two months' worth of engineers' time to do this rather than enhance my product, I'm still going to have to maintain it. There's going to be a time and place where I'm going to have to enhance the functionality that I've built into these permissions, in these roles, in my general structure of how I'm handling API authorization. So that gives us the ability for them to say, I'd rather find something that can help do it for me, might take that away.

Jared Elder [00:07:52] And even if it means making an investment into a program or platform that allow you to do that, it's something that they're genuinely willing to take off their plate. And much like everything else that the developers, the more open sourced and kind of that open aperture of being developer, community-centric, the more value you can show it to developers, I think, as well.

Michael Pollack [00:08:13] To follow on a serious question a little bit, one of the challenges I've experienced when selling something to developers a lot of times is, A: just getting people to try something new is hard, but B: sticking with it, particularly if it's changing something about your process or how you build something which is innate to what most people are doing in that job can be really challenging. So we'd love for you to talk about how do you drive adoption and is the product built in such a way that, as people use the product more, you get data about how they're using it to potentially be able to engage them more? Is that a key part of it? And do you think a lot about designing the experience? And even though you're a marketer, not necessarily a product person, but designing the experience of marketing can make the process more efficient and make the process ideally consistent or comprehensive. How do you think about that, how do you approach that?

Jared Elder [00:09:03] Yeah, so I guess we're a little bit of an interesting stage just being earlier. Again, [we] were founded right in the middle of the pandemic back in mid-March. We came out of stealth mode about three months ago. So we're just about 90 days really in. So in that sense, our products, we're still really making it more enterprise-ready a lot of ways, more easily self-serve than it currently is. That being said, we have some great partners and design partners and customers that are allowing us the ability to get feedback into their team to understand what, when we get to a point where we're kind of a little more widely adopted, what adoption looks like and what those barriers are. And we have some use cases with some pretty incredible companies right now and how they're thinking about our products and how they're thinking about implementing our product in ways that we probably haven't really considered ourselves and being able to really quickly iterate on our platform to incorporate a lot of different data sources, you know, looking at both traditional kind of API authorization. And now we're moving into container security with Kubernetes and Mission Control and and things like that. So not sure if it answered your question, but the partners that we have now, design partners and customers that we have that are using our products that are really happy with it, are constantly teaching us. And that's what's important in the early days. Right. You want to learn and learn fast, fail fast, iterate quickly and really start to, as quickly as possible, find the nerve of where you really want to go and where the pain is, and I think we've very quickly, at least in my short tenure here, have been able to identify that. And that's helped us think a lot about, again, what enterprise adoption looks like. And that's a big thing for us, a big focus. But it also really helps us to understand where we need to take the product and really adapt our roadmap in order to help move that feedback into something actionable.

Michael Pollack [00:11:02] I think that's a great point. I think you get a part of the question. I guess maybe the part I just dig into a little bit more is, is there data you as a marketer, you wish you had, whether it's coming out of the product itself of like, yeah, I want to understand how broadly deployed our product is so we can push more adoption or are you able to see that? I think about as a, for example, in our business, we use Atlassian for some of our engineering tooling and like I feel like they're selling stuff to us all the time and continuously getting us to buy more of their product. And so to me, it's like the marketing never ends. And I'm just curious how you approach that as a marketer, right. Where do you think the marketing stops? Maybe it never stops, in that, again, a lot of these as a service product, you can continue to spend more or adopt more, use more. So I'd love your thoughts on whether it's data from inside the product to target that or just how you think about where the marketing ends if it does at all.

Jared Elder [00:11:57] Yeah, that's a great question because we've worked a lot in the past few weeks, again, despite kind of where we're at in terms of the general availability of our products and the state that it's in and what we're working toward, we've worked a lot to really understand and think about now rather than later, how we want to measure how developers love us like, our goal is to get developers eventually to love us first. We want to educate them about how to think about API authorization, how they can, you know, if they never touch Build Security's products ever in their lives, that's fine.

Jared Elder [00:12:36] If we can help them think about API authorization and they can help us think about it, that's a big first step. You know, eventually, would love to get to a point where that authority that we build turns into a repeatable motion of acquiring customers. And I think that we're starting to look at what that looks like from a metric standpoint, a consumption standpoint, how often obviously are users logging in and how often are they using, how sticky or weak, right. And that's kind of what you're saying with Atlassian in a way, but being able to understand the size of their consumptions, how many policies they're managing or PDPs that they've deployed, and then looking at things like where we know developers put kind of a stake in the ground and interest like GitHub, you know, looking at the different repos that we have out there, different metrics that we can measure, engagement of the use of the product, engagement stars, watchers, things like that. All of those things, both within the product as well as what I guess you can say the market is saying about our product as it relates to GitHub usage are all things to, it's that feedback loop of understanding how we want to market it in the same characteristics we just talked about. We could build lead scoring around it, right, when we see different characteristics of different environments where our products are being used. So I think that there's a lot that you can look at in the product. I think that there's a lot that you can look at within the consumption of the product and the usage of the product. But I also think it's the public facing things that you can look at to really judge how you're perceived in the market, whether that's against your reviews on G2 or the way that industry analysts look at you. Or, again, some of the examples I gave around GitHub that's going to let you know if you're solving a problem. And as a marketer, that's ultimately what you want to be measuring. And again, that feedback loop is what keeps the wheel moving.

Sarah E. Brown [00:14:22] As a marketing leader in the cloud security space, I know you've spent many, many years as a marketing leader for cloud security companies. I'm curious now with Build Security, how are you thinking about approaching targeting the right accounts and your ideal customer profiles, total addressable market? And what's driving your approach now as you're breaking into the enterprise?

Jared Elder [00:14:44] Yeah, so obviously in enterprise marketing or enterprise sales, however you would refer to it, if you're selling a product of a certain size and sophistication, it's more important now than ever to make sure that you're focused on the right target accounts. Right? If you're spread too thin, you're never going to really get enough traction and you're putting resources into something that you're getting kind of diminishing returns on. So understanding what that looks like is helpful.

Jared Elder [00:15:11] So, you know, for us, things that we could look at and something that I think, Sarah, I've always said to you is really being able to kind of look at a targeted account and look at a lot of different attributes past what may be on the surface, right – past their industry, not just how many employees they have or where they're located or whether they're regulated or what the revenue is. All that is helpful. You know, potentially how much venture capital they've raised, all of these give us indications on size and magnitudes of companies and types of companies and industries where we may want to focus. But to me, what's always been really helpful, is aligning how I market with things that are a little more under the hood, so to speak, rather than on the surface.

Jared Elder [00:15:55] So what I mean by that is being able to target accounts that, you know, based on technographic information or otherwise that have characteristics that would be conducive to you talking to them, whether that's how much they're spending on a monthly basis on cloud infrastructure, whether that's certain types of applications that they're running or a variety of different things, that, again, it may not be as visible on the surface. But, you know, going back to the example I said before, we're working at really trying to help solve in mission control for Kubernetes. So it would certainly make a lot of sense for me to think about how I can leverage data sources out there like Intricately that are going to give me a light into, here are six thousand companies that we know are located in the US, have more than a thousand employees and are using Kubernetes, and then pairing that like for Build, something that would be similar maybe, pairing that with information on how many applications they have, right. So if we know they're managing a vast array of cloud applications that they're hosting on in different instances of EC2 or Azure or whatever the case is, well, that might give us an indication on the need for kind of a better control plane for managing authorization, policy management. So it's something that I think a lot of marketers want to be doing. How do I hyper target? But it's really finding the sources that are going to allow you to look at, again, elements that otherwise just aren't visible. They're not going to come up in your general run of the mill target accounts. It's a step deeper that gives you insights to know. I can start to market actively to them and assign to my sales team twenty thousand accounts that I think might be using Kubernetes based on whatever I think a company that using Kubernetes might be, with in terms of employee size. Or, I can solidify that information to focus on a subset of five thousand or six thousand or two thousand or whatever that number is of ones that I know are using Kubernetes based on data that Intricately provides. And so for me, when it comes to developing a target account list or named account list, whatever you want to refer to it, it's looking at a lot of different variables. But the hard ones to really do are the ones that are a little more beneath the surface that a lot of marketers don't either think about or really have visibility into right now.

Michael Pollack [00:18:17] Something I'm hearing you talk about that we kind of – it seems to be a bit of a recurring theme on this show and something I know our audiences have heard quite a bit, is this notion of marketing, when done well, is really about disqualification. This notion that, of course, every sales team is pushing their marketer to get as many leads as possible. But the hard part and the discipline and marketing is really around saying, hey, we don't want to get you every lead. We want to get you the best leads and getting the best leads mean we have to have some aggressive methodology for saying some of these aren't the best. And so we're not going to burden you with them. Can you talk just a little bit about your evolution in terms of just thinking about that? Maybe you've always had that point of view, but just you know, I think it's hard because almost all the software tools today for most marketers are all about qualify as many leads as possible, send as many emails to as many people as possible without necessarily challenging you to do the hard thinking or the heavy lifting around, like, how can I quickly disqualify the people and get them out of the funnel? Because effectively they're noise. Can you just comment on your philosophy or your approach or how you think about that?

Jared Elder [00:19:19] Yeah, absolutely. So I think that, like you said, it's when you're a marketer and whether you're coming off a rough quarter or your pipeline that you built this quarter, let's say that you might expect to close next quarter isn't looking good. It's more leads, more leads, more leads, more leads. But we know that that doesn't always equate to the right leads like you said. For instance, if you ran a software company or you were marketing in a software company and you had a mix of, let's say, enterprise class prospects that you targeted to, and adoption on the customer side, that that reflects that. And maybe that split with early stage companies.

Jared Elder [00:20:00] Well, if you're working with them in the midst of the pandemic, when everyone's kind of locking down resources and budget, you need to strategically say maybe those early stage SaaS companies that are really going to have to tighten the belt despite the fact we're seeing them as customers, may not – we shouldn't ignore them, but we should think about how stringent we're going to be when it comes to our tactical engagement with them and what we want to do to really build pipeline there. So I think being able to adjust based on conditions and what you're seeing in the market and what you're seeing with customers and adoption is going to help.

Jared Elder [00:20:32] I think another thing that I've seen as a marketer, is the way that like for instance, I don't know if this is a pet peeve of mine, but I've never understood debates, battles, discussions around defining what an MQL is, because everyone defines what an MQL is differently, and everyone should define what an MQL is because it actually means something to their business, not because of a marketing automation system said that they have a lead score of 40. And that's your threshold for what an MQL is. Define what is most important to you, and then figure out what you can do in building attributes to get to that point. So, for instance, when I do lead scoring or at past companies, when I've done lead scoring, I would look at almost at almost no demographic information. And I know that sounds – with the exception of estimated spend on cloud infrastructure on a monthly basis and kind of talk you through why I do that. So what I found is things with demographic lead scoring, if you're providing someone an individual lead score, potentially based on the employee size of their account, their title, their seniority level, if they're a director or VP – this information is all very helpful. But it really again, I'm just judging something based on surface level characteristics. Now, if I've done my account development right, if I've done my target account list and I've developed my named account list correctly, that should have been kind of an earlier criteria of judgment and filter before I even think about integrating that into the lead score. So if I've already put that into my named account list to say I don't want anyone of employees under this size or I only want people employees over this size or things like that, then by allocating on a lead score, I'm kind of double hitting in a way. And that's just going to create noise because I have someone that may have a lead score of thirty, let's say, because they're a great title at a great company, but maybe they haven't done much on the engagement side. So for me, I got to a point where I felt like a lot of lead scoring in that respect was getting noisy. And I would really do it purely on knowing that out of the gate, if my criteria of my ideal customer profile was right, then any of the leads I should be dealing with, largely – obviously there's exceptions – should largely be within that ideal customer profile. But if I look at behavior, true behavior of how many times they're reading and engaging with my emails and how many times they return to my website, and how many times have we looked at the plans page or back to the product standpoint, how many times are they logging into the product on a daily basis? And how many different policies are they modifying, authoring or verifying on a certain basis? That's more important to me. And there's a lot of other characteristics within product adoption and usage and their engagement and marketing in the form. There's a million things you can add behaviorally that I think paint a much clearer picture. But again, the one thing that I think is really critical, whether you do at the named accounts list or the target accounts list kind of construction period, or you do it on lead scoring is you know, if I'm able to get insights again into things like cloud spend and magnitude of cloud spend and the different landscape of different applications from a security standpoint to looking at and how many applications that are running; that to me, I would say is again, it's not necessarily demographic information. Again, more technographic information. But if you were to bundle it into kind of a lead score component and is much more in a way, kind of characteristics of the company itself rather than behavior, and that's one of the only characteristics that I think is really valuable to consider when it comes to to lead scoring at that level at least.

Sarah E. Brown [00:24:18] I love what you're talking about here. And it really positions marketing when you're able to disqualify and use data, like cloud footprint data, to disqualify earlier in the funnel to have confidence that you're not disqualifying potential good fit leads, you're really progressing only the highest quality pipeline. And I think sales and marketing tension seems to get at that a bit right? Where sales is always focused on quality that will progress quickly and marketing, if they have a volume play, that can be at odds. I'm curious too, have you seen this approach to lead scoring improve your relationship with sales?

Jared Elder [00:24:52] Yeah, and I think I've been over the last, you know, let's say all of my career, I always try to remind counterparts on the sales team that my goal solely is to make their commission check bigger, right. Because ultimately, if that's happening, we're hitting our number. And if we're hitting our number, that's what I'm measured around. So, you know, sales solves all, right, if sales are up, everyone's happy, everyone's smiling. But like you said, oftentimes we're really trying to figure out how to do that. So I think where you can really build that relationship, and I think you've touched on it is, you can serve up a hundred MQLs in a month and you put them on this platter and say, hey, they've hit this lead score. So here you go. But what you're not really looking at is, well, how good is that really, right, of a lead? And does it go from MQL to sales accepted or sales qualified? And then more importantly, you know, you can even have a great discussion in your first meeting that you think is going to turn into something more promising and engaging. But you find out that that's not the case. So it's really looking at what are the characteristics and patterns that I'm seeing in these deals that are going to later stage in the pipeline. It's not just that they're getting to the doorstep from an MQL fulfillment perspective. So on the 30th of the month, you can check that box of a goal for the month and say you've done it. But, you know, it's much more about understanding the ones that go further, the ones that are more promising to convert higher. What are the criteria? What can you learn from the use cases? One of the things on those calls that you're analyzing and gong or whatever, that then you can take back to understand how you can adjust your target account list. And that cycle, I think with sales and not just saying, hey, here's some great meetings or here's a bunch of demo requests or here's a certain amount of calls that are set up for you, it's really let's continue to to work together through that process and sit on calls and understand what's making this work rather than stopping at the door, so to speak, when you hand the lead off.

Michael Pollack [00:27:01] There's a number of great points you had in there, but one that I think is worth going back to to just to call out and that I think sometimes gets lost in the current way that things get sold digitally, which is if you sold a physical object in the physical world, you'd look at the exterior of the building you are about to walk into and you might realize like, oh, wait, I'm, you know, trying to sell forklifts. So this restaurant probably isn't a good fit for me or this dentist's office or this dry cleaners. And so you make a really good point around the persistent battle around MQL or title matching. But the first question is, is this even a building that could utilize the thing I'm selling and it's so obvious in the physical world, but in the digital world that's so absent. And so I think you make a really good point there just around the who and the title and all those pieces is so secondary to primarily ensuring you're even walking into the right kind of building.

Jared Elder [00:27:55] Yeah, and again, when you're coming up with a list of target accounts that may be 50 accounts per rep, maybe one hundred, that maybe five hundred accounts per rep, however big that kind of sphere really is of potential target accounts you want to go after. If done correctly, you should have really pretty close alignment between marketing and sales and SDRs on, OK, we all agree that these are the target accounts we want to go after. As much data that we have has told us that these are the characteristics of accounts that we want to go after. And now we're going to put pretty much all of our time, resources, salaries within marketing and sales, marketing budget into these accounts. You really got to get it right. And I've been at companies, I guess I've seen it at different scenarios where you have a blanket target approach. Let's just go after the Fortune 500. Well why do you want to go after the Fortune 500?

Jared Elder [00:28:55] Because that seems like the bigger companies and they may have bigger IT budgets. And that's just – you can't think of it that way. You really need to go beneath the surface and you may find that, you know, seventy five percent of the Fortune 500 companies may not be operating certain applications in the cloud that would ever necessitate the need for your product or, you know, a good portion of the Fortune 500 companies are still on-premise rather than in the cloud. So there's a bunch of factors that you can get wrong with just arbitrarily, let's go after these accounts. So to me, again, that alignment, whether it's just marketing and sales, really getting along, but more importantly, working together and dedicating all of their resources means that for the next three, six months, 12 months, whatever your sales cycle looks like, you're going to put a lot of time and effort into those target accounts.

Jared Elder [00:29:45] And again, if you get it wrong out of the gate, it's going to make for a tough quarter. It's going to make for a tough six months. It's going to make for a really tough point to be able to really get in the groove, and be able to get those repeatable motions in place.

Sarah E. Brown [00:29:58] For our listeners who are revenue leaders at cloud companies, what advice would you give for folks who are maybe earlier in their journey to adopting a data-driven approach and adopting the approach that you've been talking about?

Jared Elder [00:30:09] Yeah, I think that there's a lot of companies out there that probably still don't do things like lead scoring or target account scoring to really develop their ideal customer profile. And if you're not doing that now, it's definitely something that you should focus on. And again, at first, you may only have suspicions on what that might look like. You may not have a whole lot of data. If you do have data, obviously use it to help learn about everything that you can to construct those. And again, lead scoring is something that I think 90 to 95 percent of marketers will say that they're doing. But what factors are you looking at? So doing it is a great first step, but constantly honing that and looking at as many data sources as you can, whether that's engagement over email, engagement over content, through your website, product engagement and usage and adoption. And what are the KPIs within using your product that you think are really important to set off an indication that someone may be a better prospect than someone else. And then again, the data that you can look at through a more of a magnifying glass in order to help you construct that list when it comes to understanding other products they're adopting, other services, and knowing, hey, if I have an offering that works over helping to manage Kubernetes or aspects within Kubernetes or Docker or whatever the case might be, systems like Intricately are going to help to give you those insights. And it's again, giving you a big leg up. You're going to have to learn a lot. You're going to have to go out and figure out a lot of things with your marketing, with your product as you go. But by starting off in the right direction and going, having a compass like Intricately to guide you to what that should look like, at least to start with. And then being able to iterate on the way that you look at ideal customer profile and your your lead is going on a constant basis. The more data that you can be looking at, true, meaningful data, the better that you can really construct what that you look like. And that's where it becomes really invaluable to marketers.

Sarah E. Brown [00:32:07] So we could talk to you all day about these topics and likely we'll have to have you on again. But for folks who are listening to this, who want to learn more about you and your work, where should we direct them to?

Jared Elder [00:32:15] Build.security is our website and we have some repos up on GitHub, and if anyone is interested in better securing their APIs for their applications, please let us know. We love to talk about authorization, obviously, it's becoming more and more prominent. And again, API security is – you know, APIs are really running and driving the cloud these days. So we're really at the forefront of thinking about how we should be securing it. But we love to hear from other developers in the cloud security, practitioners out there on how we should be thinking about it differently, too.

Michael Pollack [00:32:49] Well, that's it for us. This episode may be over, but we can continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #SellingInTheCloud. On Twitter, I'm @MRPollack.

Sarah E. Brown [00:32:58] And I'm @SEBMarketing.

Michael Pollack [00:32:59] Thank you to everyone for joining us for this episode of Selling in the Cloud, brought to you by Intricately: the authoritative source, digital product, adoption, usage and spend data for cloud sales and marketing teams. If you like the show, head over to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and please give us a review. We appreciate it. Until next time.