The agenda is subject to change. To experience the full conference, we recommend you arrive to attend the first workshop (12pm CT on Sunday, Dec 7) or at least the Opening Night Reception (7pm CT on Sunday, Dec 7) and leave after 3pm CT (CyberMarketingCon) or 8pm CT (CyberCEO Summit) on Wednesday Dec 10. Save the sessions you like on the conference app!
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.
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
Justin Mingo: Milking your Meeting Suite: How to Make the Most out of Major Conferences
We all know that the booth and leads are just the tip of the iceberg, and that the real value - from a revenue marketing perspective - lies in getting your team in front of their prospects and business partners. Brand awareness is great, but sales leaders and executives also want to see ROI. The problem is that getting those meetings booked is hard.
The purpose of this session is to share tactics and strategies that I've used successfully in booking meetings for those big events like RSAC, Gartner, and Black Hat that help build (and maintain) revenue for the business. This includes getting all relevant groups in your organization to work as a team towards this goal, as well as providing them the tools and resources they need to succeed.
Michele Zappulla: Giving Your Free Community Tool an Identity : From Logo to LinkedIn to Live Events ‚ How Purple Knight Went from Download Link to Real-World Brand
Free tools can spark incredible community value, especially in cybersecurity, where visibility and speed matter. But publishing a great tool is only step one. The real challenge is building something that‚Äôs not just useful, but recognizable, respected, and remembered. In this session, we'll explore how Semperis transformed Purple Knight, a free Active Directory security assessment tool, from a quiet download page into a community-driven identity, seen at conferences, cited by security professionals, and trusted by defenders around the world. We'll walk through the practical, replicable steps of giving a free tool a voice, a look, and a life — not just online, but in the real world.
Oscar Burns: Sales or No Sales? Mastering Trade Show Follow-Up Strategies
Marketing often raises concerns about the absence of sales motions in both pre-event and post-event cadences.
But what if you didn't need them at all?
In my talk, I will guide you on how to make your events successful without relying on sales, whether you're collaborating with your BDRs or operating as a one-person team.
When working with sales on field events, whether digital or physical, marketing often feels like prepping a meal for a toddler. We go to the store, pick the ingredients they said they love—ingredients that last year brought "loads of pipeline." From there, we take the time to prep the meal, ensuring everything from the dino nuggets to their favorite spoon is in order. Despite all this love and attention, it's only natural to feel frustrated when our "toddler" demands a double platinum sponsorship at RSA with a VIP meeting room at the W. In this session, we'll cover a playbook to maximize the value of major trade shows by learning how to scrape and gather information on speakers and attendees, then leverage LLMs to match it with your existing CRM. This will not only impress your CMO but also provide sales with precise answers like " what percentage of attendees are in my target account list."
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.
Just as marketing technology underwent a profound transformation in recent years, the sales tech stack is now experiencing its own dramatic evolution. Whether your team includes in-house or outsourced SDRs, supports complex enterprise sales, or operates a high-velocity, product-led growth (PLG) model, the modern sales team demands a new generation of intelligent tools and processes.
Join two experts as they provide a clear, practical exploration of the modern sales technology stack, pinpointing the essential tools and practices necessary at each stage of your sales cycle. Our speakers are not affiliated with any technology vendors, so this discussion is strictly about abstracting technology capabilities into actionable insights, not about pitching products.
You'll discover:
Don't miss this opportunity to gain clarity on how to design a tech stack that empowers your sales team to perform at peak efficiency, intelligence, and velocity—no matter your sales approach.
In today's rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, the ability to scale a product from concept to customer requires more than just innovation—it demands a well-structured go-to-market (GTM) strategy, leveraging strategic partnerships. Partner Led Growth is a critical accelerator for cybersecurity companies, allowing them to navigate complex sales cycles, expand market reach, and establish credibility.
This presentation explores the key principles of building a successful partner-led growth model, including selecting the right partners, structuring channel programs, and aligning incentives. We will examine the various sales partner models—from resellers and VARs to OEM and PaaS marketplaces—and discuss critical success factors such as demand generation, partner enablement, and ongoing engagement.
Attendees will gain insights into best practices for channel recruitment, performance measurement, and avoiding common pitfalls in partner management. By the end of this session, cybersecurity leaders, founders, and GTM professionals will be equipped with a structured framework to assess their readiness for a channel-based approach and implement strategies to accelerate revenue growth through partnerships.
Most cybersecurity companies struggle to get noticed. But if your threat research team finds something real, something with impact, you've got gold. The question is: what do you do with it? This session is about turning one research finding into a strategic marketing engine that drives attention, influence, and pipeline for months. I'll walk through how we transformed a single vulnerability discovery into a multi-channel campaign that lasted over a year: headlines, analyst briefings, CISO webinars, inbound leads, outbound hooks, and press quotes that wouldn't die. We didn't just launch a report. We launched a narrative—and we stayed in control of it long after the initial splash. Even the manufacturer with the vulnerability threatened to sue us for "destroying their reputation." (They didn't.) If you've got a threat research team, this talk will show you how to use it. If you don't, you'll want to build one.
Advertising on social media is expensive and most cybersecurity companies struggle to turn their leads into revenue. Fortunately, it does not have to be that way. From Wiz to SentinelOne, we have cracked the code on how to drive performance for cybersecurity. In this session, you will learn how to use LinkedIn advertising to turn your dream accounts into sales ready leads that not only result in pipeline growth;but also, millions of dollars in bookings.
Key Takeaways- How to identify and advertise to every target account in your total addressable market - Tips and tactics for getting your ideal customer persona to convert directly into a sales meeting from paid social campaigns - Proprietary industry benchmark data across cost per conversion, cost per lead, cost per opportunity, cost per customer, and more, exclusively for CyberSecurity - The exact copy, creative, offers and call to actions we use across millions of dollars of spend to drive tens of millions in revenue
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
