Dan Larson is Arctic Wolf’s CMO, overseeing corporate marketing, brand, communications, technical marketing, demand generation, enablement, product marketing, and marketing technology. His background includes 15 years of sales, product, and marketing leadership experience, with a proven track record of building powerful technology brands by establishing best-in-class market positioning, competitive differentiation, and product messaging.
1. What are the successful ingredients of maintaining ambitious growth rates during a turbulent time for global tech companies?
It’s important to stay focused on the mission, which in our case, is making security work in a time where the value doesn’t match the outcome, for many organizations. When you have a company full of people that take ownership of their role and internalize the organizational mission rather than just treating it as a job, you’re able to accomplish incredible things, and we have that here at Arctic Wolf.
2. How does a CMO at a global SecOps company approaches data and tech investments?
As a CMO, it’s important to look at the availability of new and improved products on the market that could enable better, richer, or more unique insights no matter what area of the business they align to. As to who to contact first, it really depends on the nature of the product itself – if it’s a security or data-specific tool I’d likely reach out to our CISO first, for example. At the end of the day, any large business investment is reviewed by the majority of the c-suite to ensure it’s going to be both a worthy and a safe decision that is implemented correctly.
3. What is Dan’s advice on juggling the many hats of a CMO (tech & data experts, privacy governance chiefs, customer experience custodians, creative leaders, digital strategists and more)?
The value you’ll gain from wearing different hats and being asked to expand your skillset is massive, but it’s also important not to stretch yourself too thin. The best marketing is marketing that’s done well —focus on executing one campaign or building one channel effectively, not on managing a bunch of different mediocre projects simultaneously. Also I believe in doing the homework. Studying your competitors, studying the industry, studying analyst reports, studying customers. A CMO’s number one job is to know the customer, so when it’s time to tackle a new problem — how are we going to go international, how are we going to win this new market, that comes from doing your homework. The second step is to get diversity of opinion. Sometimes I’ll go so far as to get a designated naysayer in the room so that we don’t all fall in love with the first idea that pops up that’s said by the loudest person. Breaking up people into small groups is a good idea when ideating, and sometimes I like to be in solitude when I’m researching or ideating on strategy. If you’re in meetings 8 hours a day for 5 days a week, you’re not going to have the time or bandwidth to create or execute big ideas.
4. What role does a CMO play in cybersecurity resilience?
Like any leader at an organization, it’s critical for a CMO to foster a culture of security awareness among their employees and direct reports. That means encouraging completion of security awareness trainings while also leading by example and completing them yourself, encouraging self-reporting of suspicious messages and generally practicing proper security-conscious behavior, like hovering over links before clicking, double-checking email addresses and URLs to ensure they’re legitimate and always keeping multi-factor authentication on.
5. Tell us a litte about the Arctic Wolf/Alpine partnership and what is driving F1 teams to appoint cybersecurity principals?
This is an exciting one for us! Sports and entertainment organizations face unique cybersecurity challenges due to their dynamic environments, consumer-facing digital platforms, and mobile workforces. These factors make them prime targets for threat actors aiming to exploit vulnerabilities and steal sensitive data, including financial information, intellectual property, and personal details of employees and customers. BWT Alpine is a global organization that needs 24/7/365 threat detection and response, and with Formula One is known as the fastest sport on earth, teams like Alpine need a security partner that will keep up with them on and off the track. The level of threats that all sports teams are facing – but especially one as technical and data-reliant as Formula 1, make it critical for these teams to have a leader who has the knowledge to partner with and add the right security tooling.
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