An interview with tech marketing innovator Daniel Bleichman, Senior Manager, Inbound Marketing at Cato Networks
Cato Networks is a network security company that develops secure access service edge (SASE) technology, which combines enterprise communication and security capabilities onto a single cloud-based platform. Daniel manages the Inbound Marketing and Growth team, which is responsible for demand generation, lead generation and general pipeline increase efforts for the organization.
What challenges were you facing that initially led you to Informa TechTarget?
Cato Networks is a company in the networking and security industry, and our main competitors are big, well-known organizations. One of our main challenges was that we needed to grow quickly to establish ourselves as an industry leader and compete with others in our space. We determined that we needed a reliable source of intent data to help us understand the market potential and identify prospects that were a good fit for our solutions, which led us to [Informa TechTarget].
How does the Informa TechTarget Portal (formerly Priority Engine) support your Marketing efforts?
[The Informa TechTarget Portal] is essential to filling our Marketing funnel and fueling our email nurture strategy. Our nurture strategy begins with the intent data and topics of interest that trigger [Informa TechTarget] prospects to enter our database. There are different use cases for our SASE solutions depending on an account’s industry or key focuses, so the data [available within the Portal] allows us to understand what specific topics, technologies and solutions each prospect is most interested in, and their use case. We use those insights to determine which nurture stream to enroll each prospect in, ensuring that they receive content that is relevant to them. In general, we leverage [insights through the Portal] to segment users into the right stream to further evaluate their purchase intent and how they engage with our content, which allows us to optimize our engagement strategy the further a prospect progresses in our funnel. In executing this strategy, we found that the email engagement rate from [prospects exported through the Portal] was a lot higher than the engagement rate of prospects from other lead sources.
How does Marketing use the Portal to support Sales?
Our Marketing department is very closely aligned with our team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). To fill our Sales pipeline, our Marketing team creates specific lists of leads, priorities and lead scores to send to our SDRs. These lists are determined by the intent shown by the prospects after they have engaged with our content. Then, our SDRs will begin following up with those leads. Our SDRs are great about following Marketing’s guidance because the intent insights we share with them help them prioritize their outreach and interact with the leads more contextually. Plus, our SDRs have direct access to [the Portal], which allows them to prospect in-tool and research accounts that are interesting to them. We’ve seen a positive correlation between SDRs who are actively using [the Portal] to get a better understanding of an account’s activities and the success they’ve had creating new opportunities.
You also use Informa TechTarget Lead Generation to fill your pipeline. Can you tell us more about your success with this solution?
We create a lot of content internally and are very meticulous about the kind of content we create. We make sure that every content piece we publish is useful, and that whoever consumes our content will understand more about what we are doing and the effectiveness and added value of our solutions. Our content performs well with [Informa] TechTarget Lead Generation, both in terms of reaching our target audience and generating relevant leads. With [Informa] TechTarget Lead Generation, we know that the people who read our content are actually interested in the topics and solutions we’re talking about, and we’ve seen a lot of success with this approach.
What results have you seen from working with Informa TechTarget?
Last year, we sourced about 100 net-new opportunities [through the Informa TechTarget Portal], which is a great result. The scale and accuracy of the data we’re getting from [Informa TechTarget] is unmatched. We rely on [Informa TechTarget] not just for discovering new opportunities, but for expanding the buying team at target accounts.
Additionally, [Informa] TechTarget Lead Generation has been a great source of pipeline for our organization, especially when used in tandem with [the Portal]. With [Informa] TechTarget Lead Generation, we have been able to promote our content to target audiences we cannot reach through our internal resources.
Overall, it’s very easy to work with the [Informa] TechTarget team. They remove barriers in a way that has helped us reach our goal of raising awareness for our company and expanding our business.
