How Tenable Captured the Fortune 500 Using Solution-Based Marketing, with Melton Littlepage, SVP at Tenable

This episode features an interview with Melton Littlepage, Senior VP of Marketing at Tenable. Melton has more than 15 years of marketing experience, including as VP of Global Marketing for SAP Concur, and CMO of Schoology. At Tenable, Melton is responsible for driving demand gen for cybersecurity solutions that are used by more than 30,000 organizations worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 500.

On this episode, Melton breaks down his solution-based marketing approach, how to truly understand the problems your customers face, and how to make your brand synonymous with the solutions they need.

Key Takeaways

• Marketing has two missions: tell your story to the market, and then when the market is searching for an answer to a problem, be there with the answer.
• The job of a marketer is to help the buyer understand how to manage their problems. It’s to help them see that there is a solution that can take a lot of pain and effort out of their life, allow them to do a better job, and help their company be more successful.
• Management of your website is crucial. It's where you express yourself as a brand, develop your category, create community, inform and educate the market on the products you offer, and it’s how you assemble those products into solutions that are important for solving real-world problems.
• Having conversational marketing on your website is an essential tool. It’s an attractive alternative to gated content forms and it goes beyond being a lead-capture tool. It allows you to have meaningful conversations with your customers and guide them through their buying journey.

Quotes

• “Being a VP of marketing is like being the VP of helping the customer solve a problem. We have a lot of internal processes and KPIs and metrics and all that's really important, but our job is really to understand our buyer and understand what they're up against.”
• “[Our customer] is not looking to buy a product, they're looking to solve a problem. We need to jump in there and help them solve the problem. That's how they're going to end up buying the product. It doesn't come the other way around.”
• “We've built a demand gen organization that is dedicated to reaching our target persona and changing their mind. That’s it in a nutshell.”
• “We start with the buyer and the problems they have in their day to day world. We try to help them understand that there is a better way to do what we do. We hold their hand through the process of learning how it could apply in their organization and what the potential benefit is. And then, in an ideal world, we start a conversation with them. If we can do that, we've succeeded in our role as marketing. If we can't do that, then all the KPIs, processes, tech– it just doesn't matter.”

Sponsor

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