Recruiting a Marketing VP - Cyber Security
Recruiting a strategic marketing leader with broad tech-to-tech experience for a scaling Cyber Security business who would be able to take their demand generation and marketing efforts to the next level.
RECRUITMENT BRIEF
COMPANY: IriusRisk
SECTOR: Cyber Security
POSITION: Marketing Vice President
LOCATION: Remote
ABOUT IRIUS RISK
IriusRisk is the home of a powerful, automated threat modelling platform that helps businesses design secure software and manage their risk and security throughout the software development lifecycle. The platform provides scalable, collaborative threat modelling via a fast and reliable self-service tool, with automation that guides organisation’s planning and approach to risk and compliance, making the process of secure design fast, easy and accessible.
Following a successful Series-A funding round in 2020, they were looking for hyper business growth to fuel their expansion into the UK and USA. With impressive Enterprise clients already onboard and new verticals they wanted to expand into, they were looking to scale quickly.
THE SCOPE
Having launched sales and marketing in lockdown, they had a fully remote team taking the first steps. However, the rapid scaling activities meant the CRO quickly identified the need for a demand generation machine that was optimised to support their growing sales function.
With this in mind, the CRO approached Armstrong Lloyd to support him on a project that would recruit a marketing demand generation specialist based in the UK to lead the way for IriusRisk.
However, it soon became apparent through the first round of interviews that with IriusRisk’s rate of growth, their strategic needs were changing and becoming more complex. This required a marketer with broader strategic experience than demand generation alone – one who could lead the entire marketing team covering brand and product marketing as well as demand generation.
RECRUITMENT SOLUTION
With the role refined for a more rounded, strategic marketing leader, the main recruitment challenges for the role also changed. Instead, Armstrong Lloyd was tasked with finding someone who had the breadth of experience in tech-to-tech, combined with the gravitas to engage at a global leadership level but who was also happy to “roll their sleeves up” and get stuck into the delivery and execution of the marketing strategy.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Armstrong Lloyd took up the task with gusto! Leveraging their Market Scope methodology, multiple data sources we explored, including our extensive senior technology network to map out the senior marketing positions across tech-to-tech and relevant scale-ups.
A SUCCESSFUL OUTCOME
A long list of 15 potential candidates was subjected to a thorough screening, whittling down to a shortlist of just 5 suitable candidates. A comprehensive interview process by IriusRisk took it down to a very tough decision at final interview between 2 exceptional marketing leaders.
In the end, the charisma, great people skills and gravitas to affect change and bring the sales team and C-suite on the journey were the deciding factors in their appointment.
Supported by Armstrong Lloyd, the new VP of Marketing has lost no time in starting the process to build the strongest marketing team IriusRIsk have ever had – already one year on they’ve achieved their annual sales targets and successfully entered new markets. With this team in place and inspirational leadership, IriusRisk is one to watch for the future.
