May Mitchell: Shifting From Security to Risk Management With a Focus on AI and Inclusion | ROCon 2025

Hey everyone. We're back here live at Houston for Qualys Rock Con. Um, if you've been following along, you know what Rock Con means and what it stands for.

If you just saw my previous interview with Quala, CEO, sum Ed, uh, Dakar, you know, risk Operation Conference, and why we transitioned from Quala Security Conference QSC to this concept of a risk conference and, and what a great success it's been from the feedback of customers, partners, business associates, people I think inherently understand that security was always about managing risk. And we kind of lost our way somewhere in there. But we're coming back to it.

I want to introduce you to Mae Mitchell. May is the CMO at Qualys may welcome to Text Drug tv. It's great to have you on here.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. So we're gonna talk about Rock on, we're gonna talk about marketing and go to market, but before we talk about any of that, share with you, share with you with our audience, if you will, a little bit of maybe your history of your story of your journey, CMO public company.

There are a lot of people out here saying, I'd like to be like her. Great question. Thank you.

No, it's, it's a pleasure. Um, I just started Qualys, um, 90 days ago. Really?

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I live in the Bay Area.

Um, and my entire career has been in cybersecurity, large companies, small companies, and I've been very, very fortunate, um, to where I am today. Uh, I've been at companies like McAfee Sure. To Symantec, to, um, Cylance.

I read Cylance. Yeah, yeah, certainly. And, um, and then it eventually got me to Qualys, but I've always known Qualys for about my entire career.

Um, and the opportunity, um, just kind of came about. I wanted to work for a company that was, um, you know, they really needed two things when I was speaking with Ed. And, um, 'cause there's many different CMOs and, um, depending on the journey of where the company is.

But he needed A-A-C-M-O who could, uh, really create that one, go-to market motion with marketing, sales, and channel sales, come together, integrate in one motion. And the second thing was to help build the flywheel of our growth through the power of the, uh, partner ecosystem. So when he set those two things, I mean, those are really two of my core strengths and, um, which led me here and which is why I'm thrilled to, um, uh, be leading, um, the marketing organization at Qualys.

Well, congratulations. I, I knew you were new. I didn't know it was only 90 days, so, congratulations.

And I'm, quite frankly, I'm glad to see the have a CMO here who's running with things. I, I, I, like you have spent my career in cyber. I co-founded a, a cyber company in 2001 and, uh, in vulnerability management.

And I, you know, one of our competitors was this crazy French guy named Philippe. Yeah. Who was telling people We're gonna store your vulnerability data on our servers.

There was no cloud then. And I would talk to the customers and say, you're gonna let him Yeah. Story.

Yeah. Well, he turned out to be crazy like a fox. And, you know, I knew Philippe for many, many years.

I knew summed for many, many years. And as I transitioned into my media business, I, I've always admired Qualys as well. Yeah, that's fantastic.

You know, um, I, uh, met Philippe. Okay. When I started out my career, this is early 2000, um, we both met at a checkpoint, um, partner event.

Oh, Opsec. Opsec, yeah. Yes.

Um, that was the best partner program. Absolutely. Yes.

Absolutely. Be before they, before they started acquiring other companies. Yeah, I know.

But I, I remember meeting, uh, Philippe. He had a little tabletop, and I was an attendee there. I was working at McAfee at the time, and we just started having this conversation.

We stayed in touch over the years. And, um, you know, he had called me when I was at Cylance and I was, we were just going through, we were going through a growth spurt and then certainly through an acquisition. And then that's when he introduced me to Ed.

Um, it was like, fall of 2019, really. But, uh, yeah. It's, it's like I said, the cyber community is really not that big, especially, especially at the Bay Area.

Yeah. Six degrees, Six degrees of separation. No doubt about it.

I wanna, if it's okay with you, I want to turn now to this concept of rock con. Yes. I gotta be honest with you, sum cement took full credit for it.

He said, you know, this was his idea to change certainly this Risk. He signs my, my paycheck, my son, so he doubt. Course my bonuses.

Yes. All credits areed. All right.

Um, but talk, if you don't mind, share with the audience the concept of a risk operations conference versus what was a user conference? A very successful user conference, but it was a user conference. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, um, certainly it's a, it's a transformation, right? I think A QSC, um, you know, all power to the executives at, at Qualys, the customers.

Um, and, and by the way, I have met phenomenal customers here. Every single person I spoke to in the last three days, they absolutely love this conference. And they absolutely love the products that Qualys, you know mm-hmm.

Um, produces. But it's always been more about just Qualys. Everything is about Qualys.

And, um, and it's all always started with the product training. Okay. And more of the practitioner technical level, the transformation of risk and what the means to, um, whether you're speaking to, um, you know, the legal department speaking to, um, a marketing department or board members or, or finance.

It's a conversation. And in order for you to have that conversation, you have to have the right data so you have context to your environment and all the assets and how you prioritize that based on your business workflow. Um, and quantify it.

But, so that's the purpose of the risk operations conference, is to educate individuals, not just the technical folks, but bring the business people involved. They may be a Qualys customer or they may not be. 'cause we have a lot of people that have signed up for this conference and, um, they wanna learn more about it.

They wanna have that conversation. How do I get started? And so that's really the beginning of today.

And we are gonna take this around the world. Our next one is in Mumbai. Yes.

The Month, right, India. Yes. Correct.

Um, but we've been able to still, like, this year is really the first year we're transitioning it. We've had general sessions in the beginning. We've had more, um, panel discussions.

It's not all about Koalas speaking this afternoon is a breakout of more technical and business. But here's the thing, it's not just koalas people speaking. It's, we are gonna have customers come up on stage and learn about their experience.

And that's probably the most important thing, is to really learn about the use cases across all verticals. And then how does that translate? How can someone take those nuggets and then translate it out to their organization?

So that's today, tomorrow, tomorrow is gonna be more panels is tomorrow's actually, we're hosting a panel of our, uh, managed, um, rock partners. There's gonna be five partners up on stage, and they're gonna talk about service delivery options to help a customer, um, through implementation and throughout the life cycle of the purchase. Love it.

Yeah. Good stuff. Let me ask you another, go to another area if it's okay.

You mentioned when you originally spoke with Sumit about this job, looking for a person who was gonna be able to create one go to market motion. Yep. Partners and users, et cetera.

Let's talk about the go to market Qualys. Certainly If, if you would, you know, our audience, our audience are technical people, but they're everything from C level down. But on the tech side, they're cyber people.

They're qua customers. What's the go to market for these? Yeah, certainly.

Um, first and foremost, um, I think the, the, there's statistics out there that 30% of companies survive 30%. This is according to HBR, right? 30% survive because C level alignment.

Okay, that's something to think about. C complete C level alignment up at the top. 2 x conversion rate.

Really, and that's significant. So, um, part of that is the collaboration between marketing, sales, and channel sales. You have to collaborate, you have to speak the same language.

You have to understand the ideal customer profile. So once you understand what that is, um, who, you know, what customer segment are we going after? Is it the enterprise?

Which is really what quals is all about. We're gonna go after the enterprise customers. The way we define that is 5,000 employees and above.

And we're also, we also cover the mid-market as well. We have to think about what are the business problems that those customers, um, tend to have. Who is the core decision maker?

The persona, and then who are the influencers on an average, um, you may be touching maybe 15 to 20 people within a buying center. That's according to Gardner. That's a lot of people to touch, just to get to that person that says, yes.

Right? This is the technology we want. Now help me justify that to ask for a budget.

Okay? Uh, which is a whole, many, many steps. Pieces of content that they touch is probably 20 distinct pieces of content.

So that's another key strategy of go to market as well, is creating that narrative for a business buyer as well as a technical buyer. And if you put your customer hat on, you think about different stages that you go through. Awareness.

I don't have a problem. I'm gonna sleep at night. I, but I get to invited to a lot of dinners.

Okay? They get to invite, they go to dinners because their friends are inviting them peer-to-peer conversation, right? And they learn about better ways.

If I could solve all these AI born cyber attacks and you know, if my budget's only increasing maybe 2% year over year and there's a better way of solving it and staying ahead, then I'm gonna learn about it is that's awareness phase. Different type of content and different story that you tell. The next one is consideration.

Hey, this qua stuff makes sense. I've been hearing a lot about it. They may go to chat GPT and ask, what are the top three solutions that can help me with, um, to quantify my risk?

Okay, we better show up as one of the top three, right? Uh, again, different pieces of content. Then you go to the next phase.

And that is evaluation. Um, how does this solution work with my existing environment? My environment works.

I may not have Qualys, but how do I get feed from third parties solutions? Okay. Um, I may have a sim already, um, from Microsoft or from Splunk.

Does that work with that? 'cause it's very difficult to take a solution out to bring another one. And Cecils aren't really gonna risk their job in doing that.

It's very disruptive. They're Risk adverse. Yes, exactly.

Um, and then the next phase is purchase. I'm ready to buy. I've got all the references I need.

I've already spoken to industry analysts. I think the budgeting may make sense based on opex, but how do I justify it still? How do I, how do you help me with the SOW to go to, um, legal and finance to have that conversation?

So we help along that way, marketing along with sales. We have a job to do in every single one of those phases. Marketing, we create the narrative.

We educate the buyer with digital ads. Come see us as sitting near you, or come join a webinar to learn more. Sales has a play.

And cha our partners have a play as well. Absolutely. They gotta follow up the leads.

When they follow up on the leads. What are their assets that they could use to have that engaging conversation to pull the buyer all the way through? Love it.

Yeah. I wish more marketing people were as well versed on this as you, because we always, for instance, we always try to tell our sponsors at Tech Trunk, you want a customer that touched your content 2, 3, 4 times. Absolutely.

Or different pieces of content. Yep. Right.

Just a one time a a hit and run. You know, it's, it's a start, but you need to educate them and you, It's constant education. And you gotta write it in a way.

I mean, look, in today's world, no one has time to read. Okay. And so I like for myself, I like, I like, I like infographics.

How many trends? Infographics feel great. People love them.

Yeah. Shorter videos, the social media. Absolutely.

I mean, this is the world we live in. That brings me to my next point, Nate, which is, everyone talks about ai, right? It's all about ai.

It's all about agent generative. And, and, and quite frankly, marketing is one of the biggest areas that is being, being disrupted. Right?

I have a lot of friends in marketing who are afraid of losing their jobs. Yep. But they're not, they're not embracing it.

So they could be a better marketing person. They're hiding from it. Yeah.

Which I don't think is a success formula, but as you sit here at the cmo, how do you see the role of AI transforming, inspiring, changing, yep. Your go-to market. Yep.

Um, one of the, one of the things that um, I always encourage everyone is continuous learning. Okay? Think about yourself first.

Um, how do you, as a leader, how do you create that environment to encourage your employees to develop new skills or maybe an area, you gotta have the courage. You gotta have the courage to speak up. Say, you know what, that's something that I wanna learn more about and I may not.

That's something what I really like about Qualys. 'cause we provide that environment, um, to encourage the employees to start learning things. When I think about ai, uh, what we're doing in marketing is, um, we're thinking about areas where if you think about your job, you know, seven days a week or five days a week, just write down what are you doing every single day?

How much time are you spending on each one of these tasks? How much time do you spend thinking strategically versus executing tactically? 'cause you have to do both.

Okay? So just think about those things and then what would life be like if we can automate some of those things? You as an individual, you and your team, and then collectively as a marketing organization.

And that's what we're doing. We've actually implemented certain those areas. And plus the marketing organization and the structure is evolving.

There are certain positions that are very instrumental that has transformed that I think that, um, you know, certainly could leverage a lot of ai, um, content creation. We can all get better in every single function, whether you're in product marketing, content strategy, campaign development, um, communications functions, the growth marketing functions, field activation to the buyer, to the partner. We can all get better in, uh, creating more content.

Customer market is a big thing. 'cause we have over 10,000 customers and we are constantly looking for happy customers to wanna share their story. So it's not cranking out 30 distinct pieces.

It is about taking one anchor piece. Like we have this great, um, threat research department. Mm-hmm.

So that could be 40 pages. No one has time to read 40 pages. So we, that's like a core anchor piece once a year.

And then we're gonna create derivatives of that. And every quarter, some trends that we're seeing, maybe trends that we're seeing by vertical, and then we're gonna publish that. Customer stories could be, um, really simple.

We interview a customer and then we can have AI interview and then translate that in five different languages. It's amazing, isn't it? The emails that we do for follow up pre, during and post events and we have SLAs on this too.

Um, and, and that's where AI can help. Now this is just marketing. You then take that same content for consistency.

And then the BDR team can use the same AI tools for consistency, lead scoring, the nurture. You can also take that and feed that to your channel partners for the campaign kit. So you now see the glue to tie the entire go to market into one motion.

So those are the things that we're doing. We're just starting like in the areas that we really can add more, um, speed. Get the flywheel going.

Yep. I agree. I mean, we, we, you know, with Techstrong, we obviously work with a lot of Right vendor, you know, sponsors.

So we, we call that the long pole in the tent, right? That one report, that one report can feed a campaign for six months. Yes.

You could do a webinar from it. You could do infographics off of it. You could do customer testimonials.

And there, and, and with ai, really, you, you, I don't wanna say you're not gonna use a human 'cause I'm not here saying AI's taking people's jobs. You need a human in the loop. Yep.

But with ai, there's really no excuse that you can't do these kinds of things repeatedly. Absolutely. Over, over and over.

And have more consistency than we ever did in, in marketing and go to markets. Right. And I, I, I think the problem is a lot of people, quite frankly, are afraid of their jobs.

They don't want to tell you what they're doing repetitively. 'cause they'll be replaced. Yeah, I agree.

It starts at, you know, I, I said a key word in, in terms of like leadership. Yeah. I learned a lot of my leadership skills when I was at Symantec and um, you know, John Thompson.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and so they invested heavily into leadership, whether you're a first line manager or a VP level and all that.

But, um, I think about the core attributes that make a really strong leader, you know, and I think about creating an environment where you could encourage, um, individuals that have courage to step up. You know, like it's okay te acknowledge you what you do great at, right. The areas that, you know, your core strengths, but also you gotta create that environment that you can raise your hand, say, you know what, I wanna learn more.

And that's what we're trying to do here, is I think a lot of people just don't know, how do you leverage ai? You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Well it's, it's still new and, and it's, a lot of people are leading with fear versus curiosity. Let's call it as a CEO at my company, I, I've encouraged people experiment. You're gonna make some mistakes.

It's gonna do some stupid things, but you're gonna learn more from that than you do maybe from just using it. But experiment, use it, use it for video, use it for writing, use it for marketing. Just use it and see what yeah.

What we can do. It. It's, but I think that's an individual, like you said, how each individual looks at it.

It's an individual choice. I see it as an opportunity. It is an opportunity.

Absolutely. And I, and I say this a lot, um, by the way, I'm a big advocate of, um, women in the cha, a woman in the channel, women in cyber, a woman in tech and all that. And I sit on, on a ton of panels talk about this topic.

But I do say this because it's been a numbers game. We know the statistics of women in tech has been, you know, it's like 22%. But Is it that high?

I was, I thought 50 In tech and then it's Women in leadership is is single digit, right? Seven. So I say this, if you wanna get ahead right now, think about ai, think about something that you can learn right now, um, and then you can get ahead and, um, across your peers and everything.

So I love it. I agree with you mayor. A hundred percent.

We're about outta time. I want to thank you for coming on. You bet.

Good luck. Best of luck with Qualis. We'll, I'm sure we'll be talking more 'cause we cover Qualis all year round.

Super. Not just that these rocks. And, um, I'd love to hear more about what your experiences are with ai, with the go to market and with Rock.

'cause as I told Summed, what started as a user conference could very quickly become the, the tip of the spear for a movement around returning back to risk management and Security. Absolutely. We're looking forward to, um, next year's event here in the Americas.

Yeah. And um, you know, it, it'll be more open, you know, up, up to folks that are with, with us or with not, you know, and that's, this is just a start of it. Absolutely.

All right. Hey, we're gonna take a break. We are live here in Houston at Qualys Rock On, uh, we'll I think I ne we're probably late 'cause we ran a little late.

But, so we'll be back on in about two or three minutes. Until then you're watching Textron TV.