Reinventing ABM and Demand Generation
Many global CMOs operating in micro and large enterprises utilize only the tried and tested methods to create an impact. However, when we came across Gary Sevounts, we were stunned by his unique approach.
While innovation has been acknowledged as a fundamental quality for product and tech teams for some time, innovative practices are also increasingly being applied to marketing. Fundamentals, innovation, technology, and science, when amalgamated with marketing, could result in exponential growth, allowing the companies to drive a win-win situation.
Adapting to customer behavior and new technologies while maintaining a strong customer focus is essential to great marketing. Creating an incredible customer experience means giving consumers something beyond their imagination. By providing the most impactful pipeline and demand generation on account-based marketing with distinct category building and strategic messaging, Gary has proved to be one of the most influential CMOs in the industry.
With a proven track record in building effective demand generation engines, industry-leading brands, and scalable teams for rapid growth, Gary utilizes his knowledge as the full-stack CMO driven by the mantra ‘overachieving while underspending.’
Being a disruptor in this sector, Gary and his team reinvented ABM-driven demand generation driving 3x YoY pipeline generation growth with architecting, building, and scaling the Treasure Operations science as a part of Account-Based Marketing, where he combined account-based marketing with digital inbound marketing, infused with core differentiation, storytelling through product marketing and high-quality content, SEO, intent signals, MarTech, and analytics.
Gary and his team flawlessly executed this by reinventing and enhancing account-based marketing with this Treasure-Ops-driven approach. Today, as the CMO at Socure, Gary implements his decades of experience scaling companies to newer heights. Though, to reach this point, he had quite an astonishing journey filled with various challenges, coming from a technical and storytelling background.
Let us unveil his journey!
The Steady Rise
After getting a degree in software engineering, Gary pursued jobs that covered every crucial aspect of the software industry to gain a complete and deep understanding of how everything is done to be an effective leader. From developing software to QA to running tech support, from sales and business development to product management to product marketing, and then onto owning the complete marketing function.
For the last 15 years, Gary has heavily focused on leading marketing teams, gradually leaving his imprint as the CMO, employing his clear understanding of the software and SaaS industry, which is the significant reason behind his success. His technical storytelling, combined with building impactful teams and generating pipelines, has helped renowned companies to overachieve their growth goals. Delivering such consistent performance was not always easy; Gary highlights the three significant challenges he faced along the way.
Technical Storytelling, Strategic Messaging & Category Building: When Gary was working at Panda Security, it was a very crowded space with several security vendors complaining about a problem. Thus, Gary developed a strategic messaging for cloud-based endpoint protection to stand out. He conducted research after research, conversed with customers and tech people, and came up with a message called Forget Security, a successful disruptive eye-opener for people to increase their curiosity. They asked, “How can we help you forget security?” highlighting the importance of addressing security complexities, incidents, and overly unnecessary costs. The message of Forget Security stood out and overcame numerous challenges that helped the company propel and succeed.
Gary understood the market deeply to elevate the desired message in a way that resonates with customers and assists them in understanding how they can solve their problems with technology to help them grow significantly faster.
Pipeline & Revenue Generation: Gary came up with numerous ideas to hit the sales numbers and overachieve at a lower acquisition cost by reworking the pipeline and revenue generation. He devised a term called TOPS ABM, an account-based marketing engine that would deliver pipeline and revenue numbers above the goals at a fraction of the cost. The system is predicated on data science, account-based marketing, digital inbound marketing, SDR, and product marketing, and content. It allows to attract and identify in real-time companies in the market for solutions that it provides and educate companies turning them into qualified opportunities into revenue in a short time at a fraction of a cost.
Doing More with Less: The current economic downturn is fourth in his career. He has successfully overcome this challenge in several companies by building a very lean marketing organization with lean budgets that consistently outperformed large corporations and helped companies to overachieve their goals. The key is to do more with less.
Partnering with Sales: Scaling pipeline 3x in one year would have been impossible without a close partnership with the CRO. Socure’s CRO, Rhon Daguro, has worked closely with Gary and the marketing team in architecting, building, and scaling the demand and revenue engines. His approach in technical selling, data-driven pitch building and funnel management, real-time feedback, and empowering highly impactful sales teams, has been a huge part of the success story.
Socure: Identity Starts Here
Trusted by 1,000+ top financial institutions, government agencies, and enterprises, Socure is the only graph-defined identity verification platform that utilizes every identity element—delivering the most accurate fraud detection and verification in real-time. It leads the identity verification and fraud protection space. Its mission is to accurately identify with 100% of accuracy the digital identities on the internet right.
The largest companies across many industries, from financial services to fintech to gaming to insurance and other sectors, telcos, and governments rely on Socure for accurately verifying identities to protect against fraud. To help with the conversions of their customers, which is increasingly important in current times because many areas where Socure helps is stopping fraud, which decreases the costs for the companies, also further reducing the cost of acquisition because marketing dollars are becoming harder to obtain.
Socure’s technology helps decrease acquisition costs by providing accurate and inclusive identity verification rights. And it’s also helping to reduce the operational cost by automating approvals, so time and money are not spent on many manual reviews. However, those approvals are done automatically and very accurately.
Scaling with Technology
Gary believes that one should architect the marketing model to help build and accelerate the revenue to figure out the flow in parallel to the plantation of technology. Technology is one of the significant pillars of business, and marketing is transforming. However, numerous automated tools cover different aspects of business, and data science is becoming more imperative. He mentions, “The technology around data science that combines this, which powers the treasure ops account-based marketing approach to achieve marketing goals.”
What Lies Ahead?
Gary aims to continue improving marketing function to focus more on how modern marketing helps to strategically differentiate from one side and significantly accelerates the company’s growth from the other. He notes, “Strategic technical storytelling, category building, and having strong teams are the three essential pillars for hyper-growth.”
Gary wants to build a future marketing organization by enabling marketing professionals learn, evolve, outperform, and have a transformational impact. He consistently focuses on the team to love their work, grow their careers, and deliver an outsized impact on the companies so that they can grow faster. “I build Marketing teams in a way for people on my team to be very proud of their work, and what they will learn, and what they accomplish, and how they push the bar of what it seems to be impossible, so they could go back one day and say this was the best journey of my life and the foundation of my success. Marketing is becoming very strategic for companies, and one of my goals is to build and empower future CMOs.”
Per Gary’s request, this award is shared with CRO Rhon Daguro and the marketing leadership team that built the TOPS ABM engine with him – Heather Adams, Danielle Allen, Jake Deserio, Charmaine Odums, Anthony Winslow, Angela Griffo, West Gass, and others.
