Dear BAMf Podcast: Episode 65 with Heather Smith

Dear BAMf // Episode 065: Heather Smith of SpyCloud gives tips and tricks for CMO's presenting at board meetings.

In this episode of the Dear BAMf podcast, we speak with Heather Smith, VP of Marketing at SpyCLoud. Heather is experienced in all facets of marketing at global organizations, both large and small. She is decisive, logical and analytical yet creative. In this episode, Heather answers tough marketing and PR questions from our listeners, including this one about CMO's presenting at board meetings.

Dear BAMf,

Now that I've secured a CMO title, I'll be presenting formally to our startup's board every quarter. Although I have 20 years of experience in comms and marketing — I have never been in front of a board. Are there any tips and tricks for boards that I can glean from the Dear BAMf community? From what I know the board is high stakes. We have two aggressive investors, another is pretty hard on us from the numbers perspective and two others who don't do much, but get swayed by the dominant ones. I feel like I'm about to enter a mini game of Thrones and I want us to show how we're moving from our Series D funding to an IPO in the next few years.

Listen now to hear how Heather advises this writer to move forward.

Dear BAMf: Episode 65

Episode 65 highlights:

What is SpyCloud?

HS: SpyCloudis a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas. We exist to help companies get ahead of cyber attacks that originate from the use of stolen credentials. We help companies thwart criminals' ability to profit off of stolen information, so we actually recapture data. We protect 2 billion employee and consumer accounts worldwide.

What are you most proud of accomplishing in the last 12 months?

HS: Hiring and onboarding an amazing team during the pandemic. I was able to hire 12 people, eight of whom were during the pandemic, so I never met them. It really makes you change your processes in every way. Onboarding has to be a lot cleaner. You got to have documentation and you have to enable people to work study. You can't sit with them in the same way that you could when you pull up a chair, it's a whole different way of thinking.

Do you have a favorite way to tell a story?

HS: My favorite way is with data. You can be an amazing storyteller at a party and you don't need data. But day to day in my working life, data is truth. We live in a world of misinformation and I use data to center my way of thinking and conveying information. When you're in marketing/communications, everybody's a marketer so you deal with a lot of opinions. If you can get past opinions and look at the heart of an issue through data, that's powerful for storytelling internally and externally. Part of what makes stolen credentials so dangerous is people's prevalence to reuse the same password across multiple accounts. I wanted to know, how many people are reusing the same password across their accounts, in our database of 135 billion breached assets and 24 million billion passwords? The answer is 60% of people that were exposed to data breaches last year are reusing passwords and 97% of those are the exact same password.

What are some tips and tricks for CMO's presenting at board meetings?

What is Dear BAMf?