Episode #258: 

Nathan Burke, Chief Marketing Officer at 7AI, explains why the funnel no longer matches how buyers actually purchase. He explains why being different is measurable and why sameness kills attention in cybersecurity, and he breaks down what buyers want now, including trust in the people behind AI. He also outlines how speed, service, and relationships can replace outdated motions.

“The way that we’ve approached buying behavior hasn’t been updated to reflect the reality of the world anymore. The real answer is being able to create an experience and to create something where it’s different, it’s interesting, and it solves a problem.” – Nathan Burke

In this episode, Nathan challenges legacy go-to-market thinking and explains why linear funnels fail to reflect real buying behavior. He explains how differentiation, trust, and human relationships drive measurable impact, especially in complex markets such as cybersecurity. The conversation explores how speed comes from solving real problems with the right people, not louder outreach or more automation.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I am Steve MacDonald, your host, and we have got a really interesting guest on today with Nate Burke. Now, Nate, not only is it interesting, you are a three time B2B CMO. You have gone through six different startups and scales. You constantly are advising early stage startups, but you and I, in the conversation that we had leading up to this recording session, you just threw something out.

[00:00:30] Steve MacDonald: You said, well, the funnel is a fraud. Agreed. Okay. Innately, I understand. I believe. But we are going to dig into that big time here. But I want to first talk a little bit about you and your background, and one of the most important things you absolutely lit up about a couple of minutes ago.

[00:00:49] Steve MacDonald: Because I said, hey, what is something on the personal side that I could share. And you talked about a new camera you got, a digital camera that only shoots in black and white. If I could have grabbed the expression on your face and how proud you were of that. I know I am an avid photographer myself, but I would never give up my color. I understand the design aesthetics of black and white and how beautiful that is. I would just love to hear, from your point of view, a little bit more about your background and maybe even why you have bonded recently with your daughter, your 11 year old daughter, around wwe.

[00:01:24] Nathan Burke: Oh man, how do I tie black and white cameras with wwe.

[00:01:27] Nathan Burke: I am going to see what I can do here. You gave me a tough assignment, so let us try it. I would say that I have been a CMO a couple of times. I am now at seven AI and most of my time is in cybersecurity, which to me is a lot of fun. If you are going to be a CMO and you want a lot of challenges, cybersecurity is a place for you, where everyone sounds exactly the same and your target audience is immediately skeptical of you, which is the kind of challenge I really love. There is a lot about cybersecurity that is unique and that I love about it.

[00:02:00] Nathan Burke: I spend a lot of time just thinking about marketing stuff and how to take a company from complete obscurity to something people want to buy. When I get home after a very long day, I spend an awful lot of time with my wife and daughter. My daughter is 11 right now.

[00:02:15] Nathan Burke: Right now, as we are doing this, she is in the spelling bee final. I am hoping that this afternoon she comes in and is very, very excited about that. She is 11, and as those of you out there with kids know, and with daughters know, you have this really small window of time where they still think you are infallible and they want to hang out with you.

[00:02:36] Nathan Burke: We were talking earlier, and I was trying to figure out what is that thing. She has got a lot of things with my wife that they do together that is a lot of fun, and my daughter is very athletic, very competitive, very competitive. I am like, what is that thing that we can have.

[00:02:50] Nathan Burke: I brought her to a couple of football games. She is not into it. She gets her first snack and she is done. Then I am like, there is something here though. She is also very dramatic. She is going to be in a play here soon. She has got her first big role. I am like, ooh, I got it. What could bring sports together with drama. The answer is professional wrestling. That is another thing we have been really enjoying together. My wife hates it. She thinks it is the dumbest thing, and she is not wrong, but it is still fun. We have bridged the gap between drama and sports, and we spend a lot of time joking about it, especially to my wife’s eye roll.

[00:03:23] Nathan Burke: I have got a lot on my plate and it is a lot of fun, and I love what I do. Even more than that, I love spending time with the family here.

[00:03:31] Steve MacDonald: Here is what I take away from that. You are a very creative guy. If you could figure out ways that I have never heard before of how people interact with their 11 year old daughter, I want to translate that over to how do we interact with our buyers.

[00:03:47] Steve MacDonald: How do we get their attention. You started out our previous conversation saying the funnel is a fraud, and that is where I want to start here. If you could elaborate on that, what do you mean. We understand those words, but if you had to dissect that and say, why did you come to that opinion, and now what do we do about it.

[00:04:05] Nathan Burke: I am not going to be a politician where I answer something else completely and not answer your question. Instead, I am going to say one thing, and I promise we will get back to it, and then I will answer your question. The first thing I want to say is that I did not even talk about the black and white stuff, so let me get back to that real quick, and here is why.

[00:04:20] Nathan Burke: One of the things that I believe, and it is going to be very difficult for anyone to try to change my mind on this, is that you have got to be different. When it comes to our podcast and the stuff that we put on LinkedIn, it is all in black and white. It is not just because I love black and white, I do, but it is because it is different.

[00:04:36] Nathan Burke: When you scroll LinkedIn, you are going to see a lot of the same. But when you see a black and white beautiful video come up, you are going to stop and say, what is that. To me, the key to everything I try to do in cybersecurity, especially on the brand side, is that everything looks exactly the same. If I am a buyer, and everything looks exactly the same, how do you know what to pay attention to. That is the biggest part I have learned. Someone once said this, and I wish I could credit them.

[00:05:10] Nathan Burke: I will try to do it when this comes out, but it is this idea that better is subjective, but different you can measure. I think that is absolutely true. I want to talk about that more. On your question about the funnel being a fraud, one of the things I have learned is that I am in this luxury position where I get to start over. I have been able to do that a few times. It is really easy to say, I am just going to run the same playbook and do the same things I have always done.

[00:05:37] Nathan Burke: The big problem with that is you have got a ceiling of what you can do, and you know what that ceiling is. If it has already been done, it has probably been played out too. When I think about how we are approaching buyers, this idea that you go after everyone on earth, put them in your database, send a bunch of emails, make a bunch of phone calls, and send a bunch of LinkedIn messages, everyone else is doing that. Then you flip it on its head and think about the last thing you bought. How did you buy it.

[00:06:07] Nathan Burke: Was it because you went to someone’s website, downloaded a white paper, then two weeks later went to a webinar, then three weeks later got on a demo call, and all of these other things happened. No, we do not buy that way anymore. The way we have approached buying behavior has not been updated to the reality of the world anymore.

[00:06:30] Nathan Burke: This idea of going from a number of leads to MQLs to SQLs, then you look at how it works in reality. Someone became a customer because they came to our website, but at the same time someone else went to an event. Our CEO talked to someone they knew at the company, who then introduced them to someone else.

[00:06:48] Nathan Burke: All of that is not linear and it is not a sequence. The real answer is being able to create an experience and to create something where, number one, it is different. Number two, it is interesting. Number three, it solves a problem. It is not going to happen through a database. It is not going to happen through LinkedIn messaging. Approaching things the same way we always have is a great way to be completely inefficient, to spend money like a drunken seller, knowing that 70 percent of what you are spending is wasted, and then getting into attribution wars with everyone else in your company.

[00:07:20] Nathan Burke: It does not make sense. We all know it at our core. The real question is how do we change it in a way that really matters and is repeatable enough to sustain a business.

[00:07:31] Steve MacDonald: I love your quote about different being measurable. I love that. I had a conversation about two months ago on another podcast I host with a chief customer officer. His ICP is CSOs, or Chief Information Security Officers, who you know really well. He said that a CSO had just gone through a purchase to add to their tech stack.

[00:07:57] Steve MacDonald: He was the buyer, the same kind of buyer you are reaching out to. He said they looked at 14 different companies. Every single one answered their RFP. Every single one checked every box they were asked about. He said all he wanted to know was what the experience would be like working with them after hiring them. That reminded me of this conversation where you talked about creating the right experience.

[00:08:22] Steve MacDonald: He said all I want to know is what the experience will be like after I hire you. How important is that experience. You brought it up a couple of times. How does that relate to the funnel being a fraud. How does doing things differently play together.

[00:08:45] Nathan Burke: When we talk about AI, especially AI in security, the approach I see right now is vendors saying, buy my thing. AI does everything and it is perfect, and you do not need people anymore.

[00:09:03] Nathan Burke: That makes no sense to me, but I want people to keep doing it. If I am in security and trusting a vendor with something critical to my business, am I going to let it run in the background without people looking. When something goes wrong at two in the morning, am I going to submit a ticket, or am I going to meet someone in person. Am I going to lick them in the eye and understand what they really mean, what they really believe, and whether they have my back and I can trust them.

[00:09:35] Nathan Burke: In a world where AI can do a lot of really cool stuff, the ability to trust the people behind the AI and the people who make it work is critical. That is what buyers want. We have had many conversations with CISOs who say they cannot hire enough people in their SOC, so they want AI to help.

[00:09:57] Nathan Burke: What they are not saying is that they want to throw away their people. They are not saying they want to get rid of everyone. What they are saying is that people are spending most of their time on work that turns out to be false positives 70 percent of the time. No one wants to do that. That is why there is churn. That is why hiring is hard. What they really want is to make people more effective, help them grow their careers, and avoid being L1 analysts forever. No one got into cybersecurity to spend 75 percent of their time bouncing URLs off VirusTotal. Not one. I guarantee it.

[00:10:39] Nathan Burke: But instead, they want the career growth. They want to hunt. They want to do the things that are really human and creative. They can do that if they’re not spending all their time data questing. All of this is human. If you look at it, it’s not just because your thing is faster, and it’s not because your thing has more features, or you’ve got crazy good stuff in your roadmap.

[00:10:58] Nathan Burke: But whenever I talk to a CISO, I ask them exactly two things. The two things are, what is the work in security that you’re trying to get done that either isn’t good enough or that you’re not doing right now? More important than that, what do you want your people to be doing? Those are the two things that I really care about, and if our product and what we offer fits in, amazing. There’s a lot of things we can help with. But instead, I’m not saying take our platform, put it in, change the way you work around it. Oh, by the way, that thing you need, give me like six, eight months. We’ll put it in the roadmap.

[00:11:28] Nathan Burke: We’ve flipped that on its head to instead, it’s almost like a service engagement going in and saying, what are you trying to solve? What are those things that your people are wasting time on? Then, can we help with that? And so that model allows us to get someone, like we had one of our biggest customers, from first conversation to deployed globally in production with 120,000 employees. It took eight weeks. It’s just different, right? You don’t get that through the normal way of doing it, where an SE gets on a call, takes a product request, hands it to someone else, they write it up, they hand it to R&D, and then eight months later something else comes out that sort of looks like what they wanted in the first place.

[00:12:04] Nathan Burke: Instead, we assign a dedicated AI security engineer to every customer. They actually write the code. They can commit it, and they do it in three day sprints. That has just changed the expectations, but also that’s not what you’re going to get when you go buy something off the shelf.

[00:12:20] Steve MacDonald: No. So I have so much to unpack there, but one thing in particular, you said there’s two questions that you asked. They had nothing to do with your product. And the typical sales strategy is vendors talk about what they do and how it impacts the buyer. What they don’t do is say, what do you need to get done? A lot of the answers to the questions that you get, I imagine, are things that aren’t always something that your company solves for them. But what you’re doing is you’re learning what their greatest challenges are. You’re learning where their risks are, what they need to get done, and that’s the kind of consultative conversation that they want.

[00:13:03] Nathan Burke: And you just said it like I said before, the funnel is a fraud because if what you’re saying is, I’ve got this thing, looks like this. You use it this way, and no, no way else. Now I’m going to go take it to people. Hey, we’ve got this thing. We do it this way. Does this fit you? No. Alright, I’m going to go down to the next one. I’m going to go down to the next one. Or you say the world isn’t a funnel anymore. It’s people that have problems and challenges that they’re actually trying to solve and want to solve.

[00:13:27] Nathan Burke: I go to them and say, yeah, we’ve got this thing. We can talk about it. We’ll see if it’s a fit. But what are you trying to solve, and what do you want your people to do? Great. I can tell you what we do. Let’s see if it’s a fit. If it is, then I’m solving the problem that you have that’s most acute, that’s right in front of you.

[00:13:43] Nathan Burke: Think about that experience versus I just buy a thing. You’ve got people that love what you’re able to do for them, and they come back and say, can you do this other thing for me? Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, maybe we can in the future. But the difference between someone coming back to you and saying, I want you to do more, versus yeah, I bought this product. It doesn’t really have all the features I want. I guess I got to go look at another product. And then also, by the way, because it’s a product that is meant for many people and not just me, I now have to take my people, I have to dedicate people to this tool, and change our own internal workflows based on this thing I bought. That’s crazy.

[00:14:18] Steve MacDonald: So, you know, there was a woman on our podcast about a year ago, and she is a three time B2B CMO. She’s also a value accelerator advisor with Goldman Sachs, and my last talk to her a couple months ago, she had just helped Goldman Sachs commit a hundred million dollars into a new startup.

[00:14:36] Steve MacDonald: So one of the things that she did, and I love that the two questions you asked, she had a question that she asks customers, either existing customers. And she said it’s the most fruitful conversation that I ask. The best way that I learn. She said, what is it that we do for you? She just opened it up, right? Because we internally, we really know what we do for our customers. We know exactly what we do for them. We know exactly how we benefit them. We know exactly what they need and why they need it, and we’re going to build it and then we’re going to shove it out their way, right?

[00:15:10] Steve MacDonald: What I love is that your question, and questions like that, these are questions that expand our learning so that we can be perceived as not sellers but peers, colleagues. That’s a completely different conversation, completely different strategy. But here’s where I’d love your help in where that can break down.

[00:15:32] Steve MacDonald: I can see how you can do that. You’re very experienced. You’re a CMO. You’ve been around the block a number of times. But speed and momentum to market are something that we have to do to scale. When you took a company from zero to a hundred million, it wasn’t just you on the phone all the time, right?

[00:15:49] Steve MacDonald: Mm-hmm. You had to have high performance teams that can then take this kind of a go-to-market strategy, flip that funnel on the fraud, but it has to be scalable. How do we take this kind of engagement in customer insight and be able to scale it?

[00:16:06] Nathan Burke: Yeah, it is a great point. And that’s the thing is, like the early days are super fun, right? Where it’s me and the CEO on every call and that’s it. I can then, in the afternoon, say, oh, let’s change our messaging because they said something different. That’s easy. Then you add sales and you add a bunch of people, and all of a sudden, like you’re not on every call. To me, the only answer to that, and I think we’ve all in marketing seen it done poorly, which is the relationship between marketing and sales. It’s a choice. I’m going to say that again. The relationship between marketing and sales is a choice.

[00:16:37] Nathan Burke: You can either have it be, I’m marketing, I do marketing, I generate leads, and I hand them over. I don’t do anything with pipeline. I can’t physically create pipeline. It’s not my job. I don’t go into Salesforce and say, yes, this is a qualified lead. I don’t do that. My job is to hand over leads. You know what happens when that’s what you do? You hand things over to sales, and sales says your leads suck. They aren’t ready. They have never even heard of us. And then marketing says, yeah, well if you could sell something, they’d be perfect because they downloaded our white paper, so they’re obviously ready to buy. You’ve seen that. You’ve been there. I never want to do that again.

[00:17:10] Nathan Burke: Instead, it’s okay, well what are we actually trying to do together? I’ll tell you what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build pipeline. Awesome. That doesn’t mean strictly demand gen. It means we’re trying to build pipeline now and in the future because not everybody’s ready to buy now, and so we have to be there when they are ready. And to do that, there’s a thing called brand that’s different from demand. Where we have to build something so that when the time is ready, then we are an obvious choice. On the demand side, it’s what do we actually really need to do? I mean this in, like a spreadsheet straight up form, which is, alright, our average sales price is this, our goal is this. Let’s just make up a number. Let’s say we close at X percent. Okay, great. We need this much pipeline, right? Yeah. How are we going to do that? Is it all on me? Is it all on you? No. Alright. How are we tracking this together that we know it’s working?

[00:17:57] Nathan Burke: That’s just at the super, super high level of why are we deciding to do this event? Not just because you want to go golfing with your buddy, but instead because there’s a reason and there’s people there that we want to talk to. Got it. That’s just one part of it. But then the other part of it is just how do we do this together because I’m not going to be on every call, and I want you to call my baby ugly, my baby being the sales deck, because if it’s not working, I don’t care how pretty it is.

[00:18:19] Nathan Burke: I want you to tell me that someone came up with an objection because it wasn’t really explained very well here. They came up with this objection, which then led him to a competitor. I need to know that. You have to create this culture of not only are we in it together on the same team, I need you to tell me what you’re learning out there. I need to actually turn it into something that changes our message that we put out there and deliver and that I enable you to go do. By starting from the very beginning on there is no us versus them. There is no we’re just there to spend money and send you to events. But instead, we’re both accountable. That’s the only way that you can do it when speed matters. I think over time, and if you’ve been in a company for 10 years and you’ve already got some built in pipeline and momentum, you’ve got a ton of customers. That’s one thing, and it’s different.

[00:19:06] Nathan Burke: It’s slower. But if the game is how quickly can we six x our revenue from last year, well then we all kind of know. Not impossible, but it’s really hard. And if it’s really hard, and you’ve got a hard job, and I got a hard job, we’ve got a hard job together. We’re going to talk about drinks.

[00:19:23] Nathan Burke: You build that culture. When you’re on the same football team and you have this shared experience, but also a shared goal, I think everything changes. And there’s no pointing fingers, and there’s no I want this attribution. Instead, it’s we’ve got to move at hyper speed, put all of that friction aside, and how do we do it together. When you’re part of teams like that, it’s just something special.

[00:19:44] Steve MacDonald: You know, I had this vivid visual that a lot of marketing and sales departments work as part of a baton race. Marketing creates leads and you pass it off, and then sales grabs the baton and then they go and they try to close the deal. And you stop the race, and you go back and you prepare for the next lead, and the next handoff. Versus we’re all in the race the whole way through. We’re all accountable.

[00:20:11] Nathan Burke: We’re encircling them.

[00:20:13] Steve MacDonald: There you go. There are graveyards of CMOs out there that have been perceived as, you are only as good as your last lead that you brought into the organization. You are one of the biggest cost centers in the business here. If you are not generating leads that we can close, what role do you have? Where actually the hard part is closing deals. It is not creating the leads. Eighty percent of the effort is closing an SQL. If you can get it to an SQL, however your definition of a qualified SQL is. The hard part comes after that. CMOs today, in a modern go-to-market strategy, we cannot afford to be just lead passers off, right? 

[00:20:58] Nathan Burke: If we can just, you know, just go to any of these lead gen companies that hit you on LinkedIn every day and just outsource it.

[00:21:05] Steve MacDonald: Yeah.

[00:21:05] Nathan Burke: But that is not what it is, right? If it were that easy, just buy a list from one of the million data brokers that has everybody’s email address and call it a day. It just does not work like that.

[00:21:16] Steve MacDonald: So give me an idea. We have talked conceptually that it is not a handoff, right? That it is a surround strategy, like you just said there. What is different than the way that a typical CMO works with a CRO or Chief Sales Officer in this surround strategy, if you can dig a little deeper for us.

[00:21:35] Nathan Burke: One thing that is nice is we are all in the office together. As someone that has been part of remote teams in the past, and it absolutely can work and it does, but physical proximity has something to do with the culture and the relationship. It really just does. When you are together all the time, whether it is in an exec team meeting or on sales calls or just together talking about an event, it is hard for things to fall through the cracks when you have got that shared responsibility of, this is our number for next year, how are we going to do it.

[00:22:00] Nathan Burke: As it relates to your question of tactically, what does that look like? It is understanding what are we going to do this year. Are we doing a lot of events? Not only that, but what does an event mean? Is it we just find one of these event vendors and just let them hand it off to us, or is it for everything we do, we are going to have at least a customer there. We are going to make sure our CEO is there, or people that he knows are there. We are going to do a super high end, Michelin star kind of experience. We are not going to just do the timeshare of sales where if you have got a nice meal, you got to listen to a sales pitch. Who are we going to talk to and what do we know about them and who knows them here? Not only that, what do we know about what they are looking for through the community, people that we already know, and are they ready to see something, or like, let us hit them up in three months? In the meantime, is there anything we can do to help them?

[00:22:50] Nathan Burke: If it is something where they are saying, I just got asked by my board what is my AI strategy? That does not mean buy your product, but like, can we actually help them? Can we have one of our AI experts on the phone with them talking about it from the top down? Even better than that, can we have one of our customers go talk to them completely absent us?

[00:23:08] Nathan Burke: I will tell you this, and it is a little bit of a deviation, but good enough. Right before this call, one of our biggest customers, we just sent him a text and said, we have four new salespeople starting today. Can you get on a Zoom with us? He said, absolutely. Not a problem. So he got on for an hour and without prompting, he said, listen, what I want to tell you is this. This is what I was trying to solve. This is what I got asked by the board. This is why I decided to talk to you, and it is partially because of meeting in person with our executive team, and then here is how I was able to get it accomplished. Here is how I am able to measure it. This is what I am going to show the board next week, and he just like put it in front of us.

[00:23:48] Nathan Burke: You do not get that from a BDR just reaching out and trying to sell something transactionally. How many of your customers in the past, on an hour’s notice, jump on a Zoom with a full sales team and tell them how he bought and what they should do, how to identify people like him, the landmines to avoid, and that sort of thing.

[00:24:07] Nathan Burke: There is really something to be said, and I have given him credit and I will give him credit again. A guy I worked with way, way long ago at my first startup, Mike Triano, had this concept of scalable intimacy. Really, that is what we are trying to get to. This idea of think of your best friend or think of someone that you really trust, and how do you do that at scale? And by scale, I mean more than one person, right? It is not something that you can put out to the masses.

[00:24:31] Nathan Burke: But the real answer is how do you make someone feel special, but also valued? How do you make them feel like an expert, that they know what they are talking about? How do you support them? You get that right, and your product is really good, and it solves their problem. That is a relationship. I think it is really easy, and it sounds cheap, to say we are your trusted advisor or any of those things, and it is easy to say, it is hard to do. But what we are trying to do is really invest that time on the one on one basis, and it will pay off over time.

[00:24:57] Nathan Burke: Everyone buys things because they refer, and one of the questions that was asked on this session we had was, how do we find more people like you? Someone legitimately asked us, send cold emails, LinkedIn, whatever. He was like, absolutely not. I do not look at email. I do not look at LinkedIn. The only way I buy is because right now I am basking in the win that I got from buying your product. I am telling everyone that I know on all our signal chats and all of our other chats where we talk that you are not invited, but also everyone else talks. All of the people that we have built this great relationship with. And it is not, hey, you bought our product, I am going to give you money to go. No. It is something more than that, and it is a huge investment, but I guarantee it pays off.

[00:25:39] Steve MacDonald: I mean, you actually talked about creating an unfair competitive advantage and how you do that, and it is about using people and relationships to create conversations. I would love to have you just explain what you meant by that.

[00:25:54] Nathan Burke: Yeah, I think when we look at any kind of sales situation we get into, we are really asking ourselves where is our unfair advantage? The reason we ask this is not like manipulation or like how do we do anything negative. Instead, it is to separate the product from the conversation. If our unfair advantage is that our CEO had them as a customer for ten years at his last company, that means there is an unfair advantage of trust.

[00:26:25] Nathan Burke: It is someone that said, I am going to do something for you, did it for you, and for ten years you benefited from it and you believed it. There is an unfair advantage there. There is an unfair advantage of speed. Someone saying, I have got to do this immediately. I have a mandate from the board. I cannot hire more people. In fact, I got to get rid of some people. I do not want to do it, but I have to. So how can you do it quickly? Can we have that unfair advantage of speed?

[00:26:50] Nathan Burke: There are a lot of unfair advantages that you have to separate from the product, and it is one of these situations where if marketing is really setting the conditions by which someone can buy, then how do we set the conditions by which we can have someone feel the benefit from what we can give them?

[00:27:03] Nathan Burke: To me, that is the unfair advantage, because they are not going to get that on two battle cards. They are not going to get it from an analyst at an analyst firm. It has got to be more than that. Like I said before, none of this is easy and it takes a lot of effort, but I think you need effort, you need time, you need investment to have an advantage that goes beyond what you can see on someone’s website.

[00:27:22] Nathan Burke: But that is really what the unfair advantage is, and if you ask that question every single time you are going into a net new, hey, there is an opportunity there, it really changes the behavior. It makes the sales rep feel less of, I have to close this deal by myself and no one else to. Hey CEO, get on here, reach out to this guy. Or hey, actually one of the women in the product team, you worked with this person a couple years ago. Can you just see what is going on there? There is an unfair advantage to being human about it without being sleazy. It is really super nuanced and it takes an awful lot of effort, but any long term relationship you have ever had with someone that is on the vendor side, where it does not feel like they are against you or just trying to make a buck from a transaction, that is what makes it.

[00:28:09] Steve MacDonald: Everything you said there, in my mind, if I could sum it up as a takeaway from our entire conversation here, is how to create authentic relationships that do not feel like a sales outreach. That do not feel like a marketing drop. That does not work anymore. That is why all the buyers, they are waiting till the very end of the journey to want to even talk to us.

[00:28:29] Steve MacDonald: We have to rethink how we are doing this. I want to ask you one last question. It is the most important. It could be the hardest, but here is the question. We have covered a lot of territory. In the context of the funnels of fraud, what is the single most important takeaway that you want the audience here? If they took away nothing else from our conversation, if they remembered one thing, what would that one thing be?

[00:28:57] Nathan Burke: When you think about the people that could be buyers of your product as prospects, as people that you are trying to sell to, I think that leads to one set of behaviors. If you think of someone as a person that is trying to solve a challenge and they do not know about what you have, I think it makes it a different way of addressing and engaging with them.

[00:29:20] Nathan Burke: Before we even launched the company, Anna, the other half of my global marketing team, there is only two of us right now, changing that soon, but she sat on a plane next to a CISO and he was really talking about AI. Just loved AI, loved AI, loved AI. And we had not launched yet. We did not have anything to show him yet. But she kept in touch, and then once we launched our podcast, we invited him to be on it. He had no idea who we were as a company. He was just like so excited about AI, and he was so excited that he told this story that I have told a million times and I will tell it one million and two, which is he went to his team and said, what are the things you are spending all your time on that you are wasting your time on?

[00:29:56] Nathan Burke: This one woman stepped up and said, security questionnaires. I am spending all my time doing the same thing over and over again. He said, I want you to take a week and find a way to use AI to automate that whole process. If you do that, I will give you your full bonus for the year. The next week, wow. She came back to him and said, not only did I figure it out, it is running in production now. I am just looking for what the next project is. She got her full bonus. Eventually, after all of that, they did become a customer.

[00:30:22] Nathan Burke: We did not talk about our product. We had Anna on a plane, but we had that connection of someone we knew what he cared about. We knew that he really cares about his team. He wanted to find a way. He had to be creative to show them there is a better way than doing things the way they are doing it, because he wanted their team to grow. That is the thing that drives this guy, is I love my team and I want them to be able to grow in their career and go as high as they want to go.

[00:30:49] Nathan Burke: Think of the investment in the front end of that, where before we ever put a product in front of him. Now it is someone that we have done several things with. We will go to dinner with him. We had his team in, and it was one of his team members’ birthday, and we brought in a cake and stuff. These are not tactics, right? These are relationships. Think of all of that stuff first before you ever show your product. What can you do to make someone believe and want to trust you before you ever give something to them that you ask them to trust?

[00:31:18] Steve MacDonald: I got to tell you, I think we have a series of podcasts that we need to do here, because I do not want to end. We could go another couple of hours. But you know, the goal of this podcast is to bring C Suite executives together, all B2B companies, ABM go-to-market motion, and rethink what we are doing. What is great is when you moved up the ranks and you first became a CMO, you did not give up the marketing responsibilities, but you took on the responsibilities of how do we grow companies. And that is the level that you talked about here today. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on, because I look at every podcast as a part, a small part, of the rising tide that lifts all boats. And if we can help all our C-suite peers and other B2B companies grow and succeed, fantastic! I think you were an amazing part of that rising tide today. So, Nate, thank you for coming on.

[00:32:04] Nathan Burke: Yep. This was a lot of fun. What an exciting time to do what we are doing.