In the security realm, no one person or product can fight cybercrime alone. And for marketers, no one product or tool out of a MarTech stack can singlehandedly deliver the experience and support that customers require in today’s digital world. That’s why even for a company such as McAfee, which helps users fight off some of the internet’s worst bad actors, there will always be a touch of human interaction in its marketing efforts.

“As much as we can use digital, we can be data-driven, we can use A.I. in some places, but there’s still a reality that there’s a human factor and the human factor is that customers are fluid. They don’t stand still, people move all the time. Our competitors move all the time. There’s still for us a human aspect. So that’s where we’re trying to put focus is how do you operationalize that human piece, so it’s not just about having access to data, buying access to data, and having a really good digital story. You need a human story still. We still need human beings engaging with human beings.”

That’s Lynne Doherty, EVP of Global Sales and Marketing at McAfee and on this episode of Marketing Trends, Lynne dives into what the future MarTech stack will look like, how McAfee is developing strategies to create a single source of truth when it comes to its data strategy and the challenges of navigating a rebrand while simultaneously being an advocate for your customers and meeting business goals. Enjoy!

Main Takeaways

• Changing Landscape: The hiring process for marketers is not only opening up new opportunities to hire talent from all corners of the globe, but it’s also forcing marketers to rethink how they host events. Centralized and local events are now a thing of the past. If you don’t have centralized customer locations where you do on-premise marketing and on-premises demand gen, your talent inevitably gets spread out, which means the hiring habits of companies and their customers are changing.
• Meshing Data with a Human Element: While it’s important for your marketing department to make tough decisions based on what your data is telling you, your entire marketing strategy can’t just be predicated from data. Make sure you are continuing to deploy a hybrid approach to your marketing efforts by utilizing technology and data while mixing in a human connection with your customers.
• Platform Instead of Products: The MarTech stack is not only a marketer’s candy shop, but it can also be one of the biggest obstacles and challenges when it comes to understanding how their marketing stack best works for them. In the future, the MarTech stack will begin to shrink and instead of marketers relying on multiple tools from various vendors, they will start to rely on platforms that house multiple tools and still create a single source of truth for their data.

Key Quotes:

“I bring a lens of coming from engineering, having a perspective on digital marketing and how that plays a really important role, having a view of how a customer moves through that sales journey, and the really important role that marketing plays on that. There’s this recognition that more and more of the buying process is happening online and digitally before a sales person is involved. So drawing out the importance of the digital side, the marketing side, and meeting customers where they are [is important].”

“Customers more and more want not just a partner, but an advocate who’s going to listen to their needs and who’s going to be there with them when it counts.”

“COVID has driven the level of noise for our customers to an all-time high. Every company, every vendor, and every partner has had to work in a virtual world over the last year. As a customer and as a consumer, that has meant that there’s so much coming up because now everything’s virtual, and we are used to split channels. Now they’re sort of one channel that’s gotten all of the focus, so bringing together all of those different pieces is really important.”

“60 to 80% of organizations are never coming back to work full-time. What that allows for both from a marketing and talent perspective, as well as for our customers, is the ability to hire talent anywhere. From a marketing perspective that means that doing centralized events and local events is a thing of the past. If you don’t have centralized customer locations where you do on-premise marketing and on-premise demand gen the talent gets spread out.”

“The dream of every marketer is to start and build the brand of a new company.”

“We need to be doing both, running the business for today, being there for our customers today, as well as building the company, the name, the brand, the vision for the future. We are really dialing up our level of communication with our customers during this time because it’s a big opportunity. In any time when there’s uncertainty, without hearing a message, I think sometimes people assume a bad message. We are trying to be really proactive, both with our account-based marketing, with our in-person conversations, putting the human touch and the human connection on everything that we do.”

“In the future we’ll see consolidation of tools. There has historically been an approach where you pick the very best tool independent of does it work with your other tools, and if we really want to and need to move to a digital seamless approach, we need to have consolidation of tools. We need to have platforms instead of products.”

“Cybersecurity needed to become important to everybody. As every company had to have people work from home, they had to adapt their own security practices. They had to adapt that people then were sharing devices, that somebody’s child was doing schoolwork on their company computer. And so companies had to adapt to their needs.”

“It’s not just about technology, it’s the human impact of technology. We all know, it’s not just marketing, but as all of us move into a more and more digital world, it makes a difference that humans feel secure when they do that, that we feel secure with  our property and data and families.”

Bio:

Lynne Doherty is executive vice president of global sales and marketing at McAfee. Lynne is responsible for the team that ensures that McAfee delivers a premium experience and strong security outcomes for our customers. Her customer-first team includes all sales, pre-sales, channel and marketing groups that support our Enterprise business.

Lynne has been leading sales organizations and driving positive business outcomes for customers for more than 20 years. Lynne joined McAfee from Cisco, where she most recently served as Senior Vice President of U.S. Commercial Sales — Cisco’s largest, single-market sales organization. In this role, she oversaw a team of more than 2,000 employees, drove $8B in revenue annually, serving 400,000+ accounts. Prior to this position, Lynne led Cisco’s Security Sales for the Americas, overseeing a $2B portfolio of products across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. With her extensive security and industry expertise, Lynne played a key role in the integration and go-to-market strategy efforts following Cisco’s acquisitions of Duo Security, Umbrella and Cloudlock.

Throughout her more than 15 years in various sales and leadership roles at Cisco, Lynne built a reputation for leading high-performing, international organizations that capitalized on competitive opportunities and cultivated innovative initiatives that disrupted markets and drove technology adoption.

Lynne holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and started her career as a programmer at Bell Atlantic before joining Sun Microsystems as a Regional Executive in Sales and Engineering.

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