CISOs Hate Your Marketing. Here’s How to Fix It. (with special guest Den Jones, Founder of 909Cyber)

DEN (00:00):

We all drink.

ERIN (00:02):

Yeah.

SANDI (00:02):

Yes, absolutely.

ERIN (00:04):

Do a drink in our hand would be amazing. What is that drunken history on YouTube. The kids keep drinking and they talk about history and then the more that they drink, the more history changes. I love that.

SANDI (00:19):

So Den, do you have Alexa, Siri, those kinds of, do you have listening tools in your house? And if you do, do they understand your accent?

DEN (00:27):

So I do. Right, but I'm not going to say her name here. She gets my accent and she recently got promoted to chief household assistant, so she's got a bit of an attitude right now. So I'm not going to say her name. She's a little round ball from the Amazon fellas, but they struggle sometimes. And there's a really good comedy sketch going around where there's Scottish guys in an elevator and first of all we call them lifts and it's the whole thing about them just trying to go to the third floor or whatever floor, and they're just losing their shit. I mean, it is just phenomenally funny. So at some point I'll try and dig it up and share it with you guys because when all these things first came out, the Scottish accent was obviously a forgotten QA point. And I've been here for 25 years now, so my accent's softened. I've got polite. I don't speak as fast, I don't use slang words as many times. I don't swear as, oh no, that's, that's different. Yeah. So basically, yeah, these gadgets were brilliant with one exception they didn't understand the word we said. So I didn't use 'em for the first probably four years or five years. So only now, only now are we getting into me and the relationship with the NSA listening devices.

SANDI (01:52):

Oh man. I would pay money for my listening devices to yell at me in a Scottish accent. I would stand up straight. I would listen. Exactly.

DEN (01:59):

I once had, right. So here's the funny part. When I first moved to the US, there was a woman that worked in Adobe, this older lady, and she obviously loved the accent to the point where she wanted me to phone her and leave her voice message. That was from the Braveheart movie. It's like, I love you, I always have, right? And I left the message for her and she was just like, the first thing I do every morning when I get in is just listening to that message. It brightens my day. I'm like, really? Shit. Did HR ever find out about this? I don't think so. I don't think so. It took two years before I got threatened with HR though. When I was in the Adobe team in Edinburgh and we were agreeing my move over, they actually placed bets on how long it'd be before I got threatened with HR and none of won because it was all within six months, all of their ones, they measured their shit in days. I managed to get two years without that threat and my boss and I thought it was the best joke in the world, but my boss didn't like the joke. I'll not repeat it here because we don't want to get canceled next week. Yes.

(03:23):

But it was a really good joke though.

SANDI (03:25):

Alright, we'll maybe make that an outtake and leave that for our listeners, but for everyone here, thanks for joining us once again. We are a team of four today, so I'd very much love to introduce you to our guest. It's Den Jones and Den is a respected industry leader. He's over 30 years of IT and security experience and he's a renowned and very much in demand speaker as well as the technology podcast host of Cyber 9 0 9. Den has got a reputation of being on the bleeding edge of technology, pushing boundaries and really delivering results in an expedited way. And we'll talk more about that when we get into it. But one thing everyone loves about Den, he is no nonsense, but he also brings his entertaining and really educational perspective on it and security and leadership. And that's really what makes him such an in-demand speaker and makes him so great in front of audiences. From boards to other teams to other IT groups. Den can talk to everyone. And lucky for us, he's here today. Den, welcome to the podcast.

DEN (04:33):

Well Sandi, thanks for having me and Erin and Chris, it's a pleasure to get to hang out with the three of you guys. I'm excited for today's conversation.

SANDI (04:42):

Yeah, so are we den, as you know, Chris and Erin and I started Miracle Max a couple years ago and all three of us have cybersecurity marketing experience. And one of the things we've always bantered around and asked around and thought about was how the heck do we get CSOs and CIOs and CTOs to pay attention to our content, to our message, to our story? You guys are elusive characters. You don't like to be found, you don't like to be emailed to. You hate to be called, actually, you don't hate to be called, but nobody wants to call you. We're all scared of you, but we still try to market to you. So from your perspective, from a CISOs perspective, what makes a vendor's message really stand out or get ignored when they're trying to sell to CISOs?

DEN (05:30):

And that's a great question and one that we do get asked a lot. So at nine nine Cyber our consultancy, we try and help some startups with their go-to-market strategy as well. So we do love the marketing side of it and I only love it because after 30 years of doing this nonsense, I'm tired, man, this shit that we deal with every day. So we've done a poll within our community of a slide where it's 1500 CISOs and on average we're getting about 50 outreaches a day, and that's the average number for the people who responded. So the thing for us is how do you deal with, are you going to deal with an inbound message that you don't expect you're not looking for? Because the reality is if I've got a problem that needs solved, we're going to start having a team research. So it's not the other way around.

(06:29):

So the important thing is, the more important thing is how easy is it to find you information as a vendor when I start searching you online. So from an SEO perspective, and I appreciate the help you guys have given me as part of the SEO for nine to nine cyber, which is really, really important when people are trying to find consulting services. If I'm trying to find product, let's say we would've Banyan security when we met and it's zero trust, well, they need to go find us. I can email and contact and outreach. And the only thing I would say there is because the SDRs and that whole top of funnel business, which I was learning while I was at Banyan, really, so I'm blessed with that education, but that whole top of funnel process, it's hard because you need to get really creative, understand that audience, and it really needs to be personalized to that cso.

(07:28):

If you're just going to do a blast to a hundred CSOs and you're just getting at least if you can get the mailer, so the name is like, hey, den as opposed to like, Hey Jones, or hey, blank or no, hey, anything and just straight into it. So the more you can personalize it, the more you can have a speak to them and the problem they're trying to solve, the problem with that problem is how do you know what problem they're solving? So I think one of the things is we, and even we've done this at nyan and I've done this, started nine to nine cyber, which is I try to tell you this shit that we're selling, it is almost like it starts off with what are we selling? What are we selling? I want tell you my gadget or my widget or my cool thing, well that's the problem.

(08:14):

No one cares. They care, I've got a problem. And you reach out and you say, Hey, I think people like you have a problem like this from all the CIOs we've spoken to or CISOs that we've spoken to, we believe you struggle with these three things. If you struggle with these three things, we think we've got a solution that will save you time, save you money, and reduce your risk. I always tell people lead with saving money because all of the security vendors say they were reduced risk. Very few of them say they saved you money. So you got to I think, twist this thing in its head. And at the end of the day, an executive, what they really care about is saving money.

ERIN (09:02):

And when you're speaking to these folks, I am assuming a lot of them, a certain percentage of them don't have deep maybe security or technical experience, some of the people that you're trying to convey your offerings to. So how do you take something that's highly technical and boil it down to something that various stakeholders will understand and see the value in of what you're doing?

DEN (09:27):

Yeah, that's great. So Erin, I wrote a white paper on zero trust at Adobe and we published it with the whole intent being from the executive perspective, almost all tech sheets, white papers are this technical jargon, the architecture and all that nonsense. And my Adobe team had done that. We published that in 2018 after we'd done our first zero trust deployment. But I wanted to do it from this angle that you're just really speaking of, which is how do you get in front of business executives who do not speak your language, which is deep technical nonsense. So again, I go back to the execs and I have the conversation and I'm looking for the emotional triggers. Do I understand emotionally what their struggles and challenges and constraints are? And therefore how can I connect with them emotionally that we have the right solution framed in a way that's going to resonate and have them leave?

(10:32):

I always say to people, look, if you leave, remember in three things, the guy with the unicorn, the guy with the accent and the authenticity. That's it. Do you want to work with a team that has the authenticity and the trust or not? So whenever you're working, and especially in the security industry and the product space, so you're working, you're marketing with a company that delivers a cloud security, future, ai, whizbang, whatever, when you're working with them, it is not just about the thing your bill and your genius and your brilliance, it's really about the can we trust that we're going to partner with you on the long haul in this journey together and can you make me brilliant and shine within my company as a cso?

(11:22):

So how can you connect those dots in a way where the CSO feels confident that they're going to, and that's why some of us have friends who are salespeople still. I don't have many of them, but I do have some of them because I know that when I call them, whatever they get involved with, generally they make good decisions and they pick good companies and their companies are usually going somewhere fun and I trust they'll partner with me with their teams and they know what I need. They know how I operate, which is usually a high standard with a high expectation, but I know at that point that we're going to partner together well, so I'll stay in touch with those people. And I think in business when you're thinking about crafting that marketing message, and you guys know this, right? It's an experience. You're crafting an experience with a vision that's going to be emotionally connecting with technical stuff. Cool, we're going to solve your problem. They all say that.

CHRIS (12:26):

I love what you said, I love what you said about authenticity, right? And being authentic. I view the CISO audience as the double black diamond of marketing. If you can get in B2B and market to CISOs and you're successful, you probably got something. So beyond the direct outreach, beyond that cold outreach, what are you finding is what's the best way to be? What channels are really working in terms of connecting with CISOs?

DEN (12:55):

It is really funny. So the odd LinkedIn message still might work, emails may work. I do think phone calls are still decent. The thing that I've seen the rise in again is those personal letters to your business or to your house if you're working from home and stuff. So some of those little things are a little postcard even because that's a little bit different. So I think we've just gone full circle on what's unique and what's unique to grab the attention. And I think we're sick and tired of emails and those kind of things. The other one though is use your network. So when you're thinking of that marketing thing, it's how do we use our network more effectively? And that's more of a sales thing than it is a marketing thing. But I look at the most successful communication I had recently was a stupid emoji on LinkedIn and it was just a case of they message me twice, I kind of ignored it.

(14:12):

And then the third one was just this creative emoji and it just said, I can't remember even some stupid pity statement. And all I thought was, oh, that's pretty creative. Just something that's a little bit different from all the other nonsense. The one thing definitely not to do is don't fill that first communication with a billion words. Don't fill that first communication with the 54 things you solve. And just remember from a marketing perspective, your intent is to catch the eye and get 'em to click the link. So how are they going to respond to that one thing? And I think is visually, visually exciting, appealing has some level of quirkiness to it. You got to remember a lot of CSOs, they grew up through that technology rank. They're all engineers pretty much. I mean, I don't know any CISO actually that isn't someone who grew up through the engineer architect kind of direction. There's the odd few ones, but they're engineers at heart.

SANDI (15:24):

That's a really interesting point. I never thought about that. So the CISOs origin story is it's the engineer personality, just more money a better suit and more responsibility now. But the way that you would approach an engineer, it's sort of pragmatic, some sense of humor, leave with fact. Don't try to trick them. Don't

DEN (15:52):

Play up. Don't play up.

SANDI (15:54):

Yes. And I think one thing I learned from earlier in my career in selling to DevOps and to engineers is they said, if you don't know, just say you don't know. Especially in conversation, they know that you don't. I mean, that was sort of the thing. They can smell us coming from a mile away.

DEN (16:13):

And it is interesting, right? Because the whole notion of marketing I think quite often is to embellish things so that the're more grand than they really are. There's a lot of, and I lost my shit at Banyan because so many times I would see the technical writer people that were doing the marketing content and they'd all add all the fancy words and it's like, but guys, we don't have time to read all the fancy words. And then also it's almost like I'm a musician. It's almost like taking the raw musical idea and you start off with this grungy rock song, but then it gets polished so much you end up with a pop song. And I think that when we're talking about products go to market, it's let the rawness shine a little bit. In fact, sometimes play up on the rawness because the rawness is actually their ability to partner as even as design partners. So you might be like, Hey, we're not fully baked yet, but we'd love to partner with the CSO community to make this better. How do you want to partner with us? And yeah, might you convert some customers? Absolutely.

ERIN (17:28):

Yeah. And you were saying, we were talking about trust, it's very similar actually between security and marketing, that trust factor. We kind of joke that marketing and SEO and different aspects within marketing is the dark arts. It's all three people don't really understand, and you can kind of say a similar thing to security, but when you were talking about that trust factor, if everything is perfect and polished, there's no trust there. There's no trust and perfect and polished. So just kind of reiterating your point, it's like people want that the raw kind of a human connection of like, Hey, we have this aspect of what you need. We're not here yet, but we're working on it. And the more that you can kind of be transparent, I think the

DEN (18:14):

Better. Yeah, everyone's shit stinks just a little bit. So to try and pretend that it doesn't, you're really just insulting the intelligence of the CISO that you're trying to convince you're worth the shot, which you'll lose the whole group of us at that point.

SANDI (18:37):

So speaking of trust, one of the things that, some phrases that we always see, especially in B2B tech marketing is zero. Trust is a term. I feel like it's been run to the ground. A couple that are popping up a lot, reducing risk, ransomware productivity. I feel like every marketer that's listening to this right now is probably cringing a little bit saying like, oh man, I use these a lot. What do you see those phrases? What do they actually mean to you? I feel like they don't mean what we think they mean. And I am just hearkening back to one of our first conversations when you scolded me about zero trust and just how it doesn't mean what we think it means, but we use it quite a bit.

DEN (19:26):

And it kind of reminds me of the term digital transformation that everybody used before that. And it's like we're doing digital transformation. And I'm like, what do you mean? What do you mean you're building some shit and you're moving, you're migrating something from one old crappy platform to another digital transformation. Yeah, yeah, I get it. And I think zero trust is kind of like that. So obviously it's an architecture, it's a framework, but I'll tell you what, it's not one vendor delivering zero trust. One vendor can deliver components of zero trust. If you look at the framework, and there's a lot of great stuff out there. I look at it like there's two things. One is I've never walked into a board or a CEO and said, let's do some zero trust.

(20:21):

They pay me to solve their problems. How do you know zero trust is a problem? They might have read who gives a crap monthly magazine, but the reality is are you going to spend a million dollars of your budget or a hundred thousand dollars of your budget on this nebulous thing called zt? Or will I turn around and say one of the top complaints in our company is changing passwords and one of the biggest tickets in the help desk and numbers is tickets related to password changes. Would you like those to go away? Would you like to not have to enter your password? My boss would say, of course that sounds delightful. Cool. Would you like me to reduce the risk when you VPN in to our company so you don't get full network access? Great, doesn't that sound great? Because two things happen. One is a user experience to get to the internal application that is seamless.

(21:22):

Second one, we don't expose your whole internal network. If the workstation's compromised, the bad actor normally would get in, they could run, right? That's the normal VPN for the full-time employee of a large organization. So we get rid of all of those things. Would you like to do that? They're like, yeah. We're like, cool. That kind of falls under this thing that some people call zero trust. In 2017, when we'd done that in Adobe, we didn't tell anybody we were doing zero trust. We called the Zen Zero Trust Enterprise Network, but we didn't tell 40,000 people. I went to the CIO and the CSO and said, this is what we're going to deliver. Here's six things that we're going to deliver. No more passwords, no more VPN. And you went through the other things and they said, that sounds great. And my team listed off about 18 things that would improve.

(22:22):

You can't even go to an executive and tell them it was 18. So when you look at any of these buzzwords, I would love to go beyond the buzzword, actually set the buzzword off to the side and talk about the actual problems or solving in the business because a business is there to make money. So you look at how you lose money, that's the risk element. And then you look at how do we make money? So if we're making money, I've got to think of ways that we can accelerate that from a security perspective or a security advantage. Maybe what we're going to do is an advantage to the sales process and make more money. Usually though we're part of a cost center, so we've now got to think about how can we reduce the risk in the most cost effective way possible? So we spend a lot of time with clients on this one, which I call it pragmatic security.

(23:17):

So when you said, Sandi, about reducing risk, reducing risk to me means there's a way that you lose money. How do you lose it? We need to look at how that business operates and what things will make them lose money. And it could be a ransomware. Ransomware is just an outcome of a bad thing that happened. Like someone clicked to link, their device got compromised from the compromised device, they then ran around your network and they start to encrypt data within your network and then they send you a ransomware demand. But that's you now losing productivity that you need to spend more money. So again, you're just losing money or not making money. So I look at risk like that. It's really simple. It's not about, it is about the data, but it's really tying back to money because you're in business to make money. So if you guys suddenly as a marketing firm, couldn't access your computers today for 24 hours, you can probably calculate there's a cost to that. You're not making money, maybe your finance system's down, so you can't even invoice customers, your employees can't log in, so you can't create content, you can't do updates to your existing clients' marketing campaigns. So all these things are all really negative and they will risk you staying in business and making money.

CHRIS (24:47):

You mentioned something, it's really interesting concept here, right? You talked about being a cost center, but then you're pointing out all these areas where really what you do affects all the other areas of the business every day. So how do you deal with politics aside any type of massive industry change that happens? So for example, right now might be just an aversion to making capital investments. As a ciso, are you thinking in the same way? And if so, how do you approach someone like you in Yeah, a little.

DEN (25:25):

Yeah, a bit. I mean, I think of it, so the other thing to remember, the role of a CSO is relatively new. If you compare it to the role of A CIO, A-C-T-O-A-C-F-O, and because it's new people, it still exists in different ways and different companies and the important structures are different. They're not all clear cut, but the reality is it's still a C-level role. Ideally reports to the CEO and ideally is considered a business leader. So they're a technology business leader, but they're still a business leader. So one of the things that, we face this at Banyan as well. You're going through COVID and you're going through the financial turmoil that brings, now we've got a political climate, which is changing every day. It feels like changing the dynamics of business, and I think it will do for the next year when changes happen, what we have to do as business leaders is trying to understand how are we going to survive or thrive through those changes and what levers can we pull so that the business can still make money and reduce our costs and reduce our risk.

(26:44):

So because remember, we're still meant to wear the hat of a business leader. So the biggest thing, Chris, in that scenario is we have to look at the industry and the markets and understand what does that mean to our couple of things. One is if I'm a CSO and a security vendor, which I was, and I'm wearing many hats, I've got a business hat, I've got the IT hat, I've got security hat, and I had the evangelist hat. So for me, I'm sitting there thinking, okay, well how do we help drum up more business? And then the other thing is how do we look internally at our cost and our whole income and expense from an IT and security perspective so that we can run as lean as we possibly can. Now from a marketing perspective, the interesting twist there is really consolidation of your technology stack or are you thinking about other opportunities, leverage interns, partner with startups rather than go with established companies.

(27:49):

So I think when your marketing, especially for you guys when you're dealing with early stage companies and growth companies, how do you market as an early stage company? Well, one of the biggest things you can do is say, look, our price point is going to be lower than the incumbents. And at the same time you can become a design partner with us. So we're really going to have a stronger partnership to deliver what you need. It's what you need and we will grow together and you're going to get in the door early, so we're going to give you the best rates. And if you market that message, that's a way better message than saying, we do five widgets, three features and two functions. It's like, no, we solve your technology problems. We solve these three things. We think you have them, we solve them, and the way we do it is going to be way more creative. We're going to partner with you, we'll save you money when you're under these market conditions. Everybody's trying to save money.

SANDI (28:54):

I love it. Three widgets, two functions is the new name of our podcast. I love that. I love that. So speaking of surviving and thriving and placing big bets, one of those bets that we see all around us that vendors, all kinds of companies are leaning really hard into is ai. It's everywhere. It's in everyone's message, it's in everyone's story. It's the thing that the investors are really spending a lot of money on when it comes to startups. From your perspective though, with everyone talking about ai, I guess, how much skepticism do you approach, how much skepticism rises in you when a company approaches you and their message is, Hey, we're AI enabled or this thing is powered ai, what are your red flags and how are you thinking about this technology? Because it has a very big promise.

DEN (29:49):

Yeah. So as a rule of thumb, any new technology, I try not to shy away from it. I think if you, depending on the business, the organization, but AI is a great example. Everybody needs to be on top of this. People need to be able to learn and play and play in a way that I think is not risking the business. So companies need to put frameworks around how to adopt ai, how to learn and practice. And so I think that's a really important thing. You have to assume at some point, one of these big AI companies are going to be breached and your data will be out there. You have to be very mindful of the data that's being used to train models, the models themselves and the output. Because remember, garbage in is still garbage out. And you saw in the early days, it's not as much now in the media, but in the early days chat, GPT, there was a lot of conversation about things and answers not being correct.

(30:53):

And I can remember one where you looked up a university professor and the garbage was so bad about this person that he had a lawsuit against open eye because it basically said he was a pedophile. It said everything that you think would destroy someone's career was pretty much in the output and there was no recourse to improve the data. So the reality was they have to be really thoughtful about that. I look at ai, especially in the context of marketing as amazing technology to create images, videos, narratives, blogs, white papers. I mean, it is endless what we're starting to be able to do with ai. I mean, I'm loving it from a security perspective. I think I roll my eyes when someone says we are an AI company, especially an AI security company, because I really pull it back to the fundamentals of security. Are you an endpoint security company?

(32:08):

Are you cloud security? Are you going to scan stuff? Are you going to look at my configs? So all these things that security companies have done for decades, it's still solving those same problems in the background. Are we leveraging AI in order to make our product better or the experience better? So I don't think companies need to say they have AI any longer. Excuse me. They will still go for the next 12 months. They're all going to see it. That's how marketing works, right? We're still in the phase of thinking, do you have it or don't you? Because not everybody has it baked into their product 12 months from now. I think if you deal with a product, you got to assume it's got AI in it. And the funny thing for me, I had a demo about a month ago with this company and the sales guy is going through it and he's all excited and he's showing me the look and the feel of the platform.

(33:07):

And I just started laughing because in the banner of the platform, the title page, it just said ai, blah blah blah. And I'm like, you don't need to. It's almost like, oh, I dunno. It was analytics. It was like some analytics nonsense, and you'd just click the menu option that says analytics. I don't need the menu option to say AI analytics. Why? Because not all analytics is going to use ai. Some of it'll be machine learning, some it'll be just logic, some will don't. Tell me how you made the sausage in the sausage factory. I just know I'm buying sausages analytics. That's cool. So yeah, I gave 'em a lot of shit for that. And I said, feedback for you. Get that crap out of there. We don't need it. Your team will push back, but a year from now, if that's in there, we'll all be laughing at you. So there you go. Grumpy Scottish guy on AI being over rotated in 2025.

SANDI (34:11):

Den, I have an idea for a new show. We need grumpy Scottish guy reviews, B2B tech website homepages. I need that. I need that in my life.

DEN (34:21):

So Sandi, we've got a thing called the perfect pitch where we are inviting companies to come in and do a pitch. So basically myself and then we'll have other advisory CSOs and we'll let them come in. It's a one hour recorded thing, come pitch to us and we will grill you just as if you're pitching to me and my team at Adobe or whatever else. And the grumpy Scottish guy will definitely be visible there. Also the cheeky Scottish guy, because even though they'll pay as a nominal fee, it's a small fee just for beer money basically, I think. But the whole goal there is get a video recorded asset of you actually trying to sell to CISOs. Go do it.

ERIN (35:07):

That's pretty valuable.

DEN (35:08):

Shameless, shameless plug for one of our lines of business, I guess to you, marketing people out there.

ERIN (35:19):

I know we're probably about to wrap Sandi, but I have one thing on the topic of ai, do you feel then that people are pretty blase about it? Like, oh, cool AI, and they're not really asking the right questions or any questions at all when they're looking like security wise, when they're looking at a product or a service and they're just like, cool AI and they're kind of going into it blinded, or what are your thoughts there?

DEN (35:49):

Yeah, absolutely. I think That'ss a big brush stroke. I think generally speaking, I'd say the majority are, are so excited about the stuff this thing can do. And the word of caution that we give people is, look, when you're throwing something at the chat GPT, you can throw it in there, but you don't need to use your client's name. You don't need to put social security numbers. There's some data that you just should not be putting in there. And even if your company decided to deploy an AI platform, so you think it's more secure in-house, which it's not, but if they do, then I think you should still sanitize the data that goes in there as well.

(36:36):

We're going to see at some point, and I had this prediction last year, but I think within the next year we're going to see one of these platforms breached, especially one of these dev platforms like Copilot or something like this. It'll be breached. And then on the dark web, you would just get tons of people's code and I think code for big products or household names that these companies don't want their shit out there. I can't wait for that day actually. I only can't wait for that day. I think we do need a little bit of a wake up call just for people to remember and realize that these platforms are not infallible.

SANDI (37:21):

Okay,

DEN (37:22):

There's a gloomy, there's a gloomy.

SANDI (37:25):

We got to end this on a higher note,

DEN (37:28):

Higher

SANDI (37:29):

Note.

DEN (37:31):

But Sandi, I mean, well, that's one thing to be positive because I'm actually an optimist at heart, which is very rare in this industry for security people. I do look at it like the tools that the security industry are building and the creativeness I'm seeing leveraging ai. I think that cat and mouse game between the bad actors and us, I think we're going to get some really fun tools coming out over the next year or so, and even the ability for us to customize and enable workflows as part of that security endeavor. I think there's going to be some fantastic stuff out there. So I do want to say that I don't want to be doom and gloom about ai. I do love it.

SANDI (38:14):

Well then hopefully that means that CISOs and their security teams won't have to work nights and weekends and holidays and be on call because those AI agents will be working for them.

DEN (38:25):

Yeah. Well, this is going to be the other thing, right? Is when you look at AI and its ability to change the workforce, and I don't care whether it's security, marketing, engineering or whatever, I think there's going to be a big sweeping change. So I think for all of us, how do we embrace AI in a way that continues our relevance within our own industries? Because you can't not do marketing and you can't think AI is going to take over all of marketing. It won't take over all of security, but I think there's going to be tasks that AI is going to be brilliant at, that you guys are going to build your business an amazing way without having to employ the same number of people. So I see that the efficiencies that our marketing consultancy or their security consultancy is going to have, we should be taking advantage of those

ERIN (39:20):

For sure. Before we do go to Den, if people want to connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

DEN (39:28):

I would say LinkedIn. I mean our consultancy website, we're there. There's a lot of stuff on 9 0 9 Cyber our podcast. So cyber 9 0 9, we are actually renaming it. So by the time this podcast releases, it'll be more about 9 0 9 exec. And as Sandi's been a guest on the show will tell you, I spend less time talking about cybersecurity. I talk a lot more about leadership, executives building businesses, and really trying to be a place for executives in their careers to grow in tech, really. So there and then LinkedIn, I post a lot of nonsense on LinkedIn, so you'll see me there. That's another avenue. I'm all over the place, to be fair.

ERIN (40:21):

Well, we'll include all of those in the show notes so everybody can find you. We'll do that.

DEN (40:26):

Excellent.

SANDI (40:27):

Cool. Well, Den, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for sharing your bits of wisdom. Thank you for giving hopefully our listeners some things to think about when they think about marketing and trying to approach CISOs and others like you, and we look forward to hopefully another conversation soon.

DEN (40:46):

Excellent. Thank you guys. I really appreciate your time. Have a great week.

SANDI (40:50):

Thanks Den.

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