In today’s fiercely competitive cybersecurity landscape, third-party advocacy is an underleveraged force multiplier that drives enhanced revenue growth, customer loyalty, and sales productivity. This presentation will reveal how organizations can systematically transform customers, industry peers, and analysts into powerful brand advocates—drawing inspiration from review-centric platforms like Amazon, where authentic user perspectives drive trust and purchasing decisions. Attendees will gain actionable frameworks for launching and scaling advocacy programs, including strategic advocate identification, value-based engagement, and technology integration for quantifiable results.

Case studies will illustrate how customer- driven narratives accelerate deal closure, boost upsell opportunities and deepen customer relationships. The session will also explore the often-overlooked ROI of advocacy in B2B contexts, demonstrating how even modest programs can yield measurable results across all growth stages - from stealth startups to established public companies.

Attendees will leave equipped to:

- Harness authentic customer and peer voices to build trust and competitive differentiation
- Quantify advocacy’s direct impact on revenue, retention, and productivity
- Apply proven frameworks for launching or optimizing advocacy programs
- Transform reviews and testimonials into scalable demand engines

Thinking about launching or scaling your customer advocacy program? Wondering how to seamlessly integrate the engagement power of your community platform's gamification and functionality to fuel that advocacy? This session is designed specifically for customer marketing, customer advocacy, and community management professionals who are ready to break down silos and create a unified, high-impact customer experience across all their programs.
 
 Learn how to act with more confidence, direction, and strategy by discovering innovative ways to connect your community platform with your advocacy initiatives. We'll explore how to leverage gamification, discussions, and community features to identify, nurture, and reward your most passionate customers, turning them into powerful brand advocates. Discover how this integrated approach not only enhances the customer journey but also delivers significant marketing results without requiring a massive budget increase. Walk away with actionable insights and inspiration to unify your customer programs, supercharge your advocates, and achieve a greater return on your existing investments.

Strategies for Seamless Integration: Attendees will learn concrete methods and best practices for effectively integrating their community platform's features (like gamification) with their customer advocacy programs to create a unified and engaging experience.
 
 Maximizing Existing Investments: Participants will discover how to leverage their current community platform and existing customer base to build and scale a powerful advocacy program without significant new financial investment, aligning with the need to control costs.
 
 Turning Community Engagement into Advocacy: Attendees will gain insights into how to identify, nurture, and reward engaged community members to become active brand advocates, amplifying their marketing reach organically and cost-effectively.
 
 Creating a More Impactful Customer Journey: The session will demonstrate how a unified approach to community and advocacy enhances the overall customer experience, fostering stronger loyalty, driving greater engagement, and ultimately leading to better marketing results.

When I joined Wiz, we were a small startup. Three years later, we became a $32 billion Google acquisition.

In this session, I'll break down the five biggest lessons that transformed how I think about marketing forever. You'll hear why praise is the most underrated growth lever, how humor outperforms “professional” marketing, why the TINIEST details matter more than big plans, and how brand drives pipeline better than any spreadsheet. I'll also share hard-earned truths about moving fast, marketing without a budget, and building from the inside out.

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Everyone talks about Product-Market Fit (PMF) as the milestone to watch. But for B2B founders—especially in complex categories like cybersecurity—PMF is not the signal to scale. Instead, it's the point where a new challenge begins: can this product be sold repeatably, by someone other than the founder?

In this session, we break down the myth of PMF and the chaos that follows when founders scale prematurely. You'll walk away with a framework for testing repeatability, validating your GTM, and building a sales engine that actually works—before hiring the wrong team or burning through cash.

>Why PMF doesn't equal repeatable revenue (especially in B2B)
>The hidden stage between PMF and scale: the repeatability gap
>How to test sales motion before building your sales team
>Common growth-stage pitfalls and how to avoid them
>What "founder-product fit" and "sales-model fit" really look like

As sales cycles get faster and buyers get savvier, Sales Engineers are under increasing pressure to do more—with less time. This session explores how AI can augment key presales workflows without compromising technical accuracy or trust. From accelerating discovery insights to automating demo prep and streamlining technical validation, this talk highlights practical use cases and tools that are helping Sales Engineers improve execution, reduce repetition, and scale their impact.

Building a Signal-Led GTM Playbook with an AI Stack

Let's set the stage: Everyone is still talking about how the MQL model doesn't work anymore, isn't sustainable for business growth, and isn't optimized for how the buyer's journey has completely changed. So (most) teams started to dabble in demand generation, and shook up the industry with a model that prioritizes building real demand/pipeline together with your GTM team, not collecting PDF downloads to pass to an SDR immediately.

2024-2025: Here's where things took a wild, but exciting turn in the past year. DG strategies are built around creating multiple touchpoints in a buyer's journey to educate them, provide value, evangelize your POV, and ultimately make them want to consider your product once it comes time to buy.

Sure, you can track those touchpoints and tell a cohesive customer journey story once a deal closes, but what are you doing with all of those touchpoints to make your GTM engine even more efficient/strategic in capturing and converting that demand faster?

Oh, and your leadership/board came knocking at your door, asking how you're using AI??

Enter: Signal-Led GTM with an AI Stack. This is built on the foundation of demand gen and ABM, but evolves into a playbook that creates and captures buying signals using AI tools (like Hockeystack) that can automatically feed high-intent accounts into your sales machine (outreach, direct to SDR/AE) with the appropriate sequences ready to go based on their signals.


So much more to unpack here, but we really want to share the playbook that we have built and evolved over the past two years, which we know is the now and future.

Here are the key questions we can answer & insights we can give:
- How you can pull these signals together (manually, to show why you need AI) and now automatically with an AI agent/workflow tool into your then outbound machine, making the most of your demand gen signals
- How do you measure the success of programs like this on an account/lead level if you're not optimizing for MQLs anymore? Aka, this playbook is the evolution of Demand Gen + ABM that replaces the MQL hamster wheel.
- How this playbook ultimately brings us to the evolution from lead gen -> demand gen -> signal-based GTM using AI and respects buyers throughout.
- How do you advocate for this strategy internally and up the chain to leadership/board? We all know internal selling is something that is always ongoing, and is frankly, necessary.

Your product solves a real problem. Your campaign looks great. But the engineers and red teamers you're targeting call it "fluff," "immature," or "just another buzzword wrapper." 

So what gives?
 
 Let's be real: I've seen cybersecurity campaigns that look beautiful and say absolutely nothing. As an award-winning red teamer turned solutions architect with a background in marketing, I know exactly why your technically-minded audience is ghosting your content‚Äîand I‚Äôm here to show you how to fix it.
 
 In this brutally honest session, we‚Äôll bridge the gap between marketing teams and technical buyers who don‚Äôt owe you their attention. I‚Äôll walk you through why your messaging isn‚Äôt landing, what practitioners like red teamers, engineers, and CISOs are actually looking for, and how to rebuild trust and relevance without relying on buzzwords, overpolish, or ghostwritten fluff.
 
 We'll case study real cybersecurity campaigns-the good, the bad, and the cringey-to highlight how technical buyers evaluate credibility, maturity, and trust at a glance. Then I'll share battle-tested strategies that I've personally used to help vendors go from being ignored on the show floor to closing deals through practitioner-aligned messaging.
 
 Whether you're building thought leadership, launching a product, or trying to get internal buy-in from engineering, this talk will give you the playbook for building messaging that resonates and converts.

Key Takeaways
 1) The 3 credibility signals technical buyers look for and the 3 red flags that kill trust instantly
 2) How to translate technical capabilities into outcomes that matter, without dumbing anything down
 3) A reusable Credibility Layering Framework to craft messaging that works across stakeholders (execs, CISOs, engineers)
 4) How to interview technical SMEs and turn it into authentic, engaging content (no ghostwriting required)
 [My Sniff Test Scorecard to evaluate your own messaging before you ship it] maybe still in dev
 5) Real-world examples of cyber campaigns that failed and how a red teamer would've rewritten them to succeed.

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Building a cybersecurity startup isn't just about having a good idea or great technology, it's about thinking clearly in a highly complex, fast-moving, and crowded environment. In this talk, we'll explore the mental models and first-principle thinking frameworks cybersecurity founders can use to make strategic decisions, identify real opportunities, and avoid common pitfalls.
 
 We'll examine how to think about market structure, buyer psychology, product wedge, and long-term defensibility through reusable lenses that apply across different segments of the industry. Rather than focusing on trends or one-off tactics, this session is about how to reason from fundamentals - how to choose what to build, how to position it, and how to design a company the market rewards.
 
 Whether you're early in your journey or already scaling, this session will help you replace guesswork with clarity and pattern recognition. You'll walk away with strategic models that can be applied to navigate pricing, product-market fit, ecosystem dynamics, and go-to-market choices more effectively.

Key Takeaways
 > Gain 10+ mental models that can be used to think through product, market, and strategy decisions as a cybersecurity CEO
 > Learn how to apply first-principle thinking to complex go-to-market and product development choices, especially in crowded categories
 > Understand how to identify high-leverage opportunities using concepts like data gravity, control points, and ecosystem positioning
 > Discover how to avoid common traps by seeing the invisible incentives driving buyers, partners, and competitors

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VulnCheck is a seed-stage cyber startup in the vulnerability management and threat intelligence sector. This executive Q&A will explore the early-stage marketing strategies that catapulted the company from sub-$2M ARR to $6M with a path to $15M ARR - in under two years with minimal headcount and two straight quarters of profitability with under $8M invested.

Tom Bain, the CMO at VulnCheck, will unpack the strategic and tactical shifts that scaled to power VulnCheck's exponential growth.

Tom will join Nina Korfias, Managing Director, U.S. PR for Marketbridge, to discuss which integrated marketing and communications strategies are essential for startup success, establishing brand credibility and positioning team members as industry experts from day one.

The session will educate attendees on how VulnCheck aligned GTM priorities and marketing's role across growth stages, focusing on integrating PR, content, and demand-gen for efficiency and competitive advantage. Drawing from real-world examples in the cybersecurity sector, the talk will advise on how to balance immediate pipeline needs against long-term brand development.

Tom will share specific frameworks for measuring marketing ROI against aggressive growth targets to attain competitive advantages, secure large contracts, and get more funding as needed for scaling.

This session features a real-world case study for founders, marketers, and investors showing proven strategies to accelerate business growth while avoiding costly marketing mistakes.

The duo will advise on the following:

-Throw out every playbook: Don't just "do the things" that you've done in the past. Starting from scratch is refreshing - it enables you to call your own plays.
-Be authentically transparent: Hard to fake, but critical to build a sustainable business.
-Scale efficiently: It doesn't mean spend no money - and it doesn't mean the alternative is boiling oceans. Instead, assess what you think are the right things to do, do them, and reassess quickly.
-Commit to research-driven thought leadership: PR rooted in research and compelling insights that support the industry you are in is a game-changer. You need street cred to stand out.
-Show it, don't just say it: Don't abuse the megaphone with bragging. Prove your point, show the data, articulate the implications. Again and again.
-Lean into the right message at the right time: Adapt your value-prop for increasingly sophisticated buyer personas and audiences - and in the right channels.