3 Lessons From a 15-Year CMO of a $700M Cyber Company

Fifteen years at one company, in one role could get stale. For Rob Sobers, it hasn’t. He’s had the same employer and title for 15 years, but not the same job description. As the company has changed under him – from startup, to growth, to IPO, and now public, so have his objectives as CMO. He has learned valuable B2B Marketing lessons throughout his journey.

Prior to getting into marketing, he was a software engineer for 10 years, including time at Fog Creek working alongside the teams that built Trello and Stack Overflow. His first title at Varonis was “technical marketer,” a nod to his background, and he still writes JavaScript and CSS today, even fixing the occasional website bug himself.

Along with the changing nature of the CMO role, the other piece of what’s kept him at Varonis so long is that he believes in the mission: to protect the world’s data from cyberattacks – which has only gotten higher stakes with AI in the mix. 

Here are three lessons he shared with me on The Exit Five Podcast.

These B2B Marketing lessons are essential for marketers aiming for sustained success in their careers.

1. Stay hands-on with the craft so you don’t lose your edge as you move up.

Rob’s explanation for his long tenure is basically just a good habit: learn new skills.

The reason is simple. Rob says that to stick around, the job has to stay interesting, and to keep it interesting, he commits to learning an area he hasn’t yet mastered.

“Being at the same company and building marketing from the ground up is like stacking blocks. I’ve been hungry to learn what didn’t come naturally.”

This mindset helped Rob build the marketing function one piece at a time, starting 15 years ago: a blog first because he could write, a webinar program because he could present on technical topics, marketing automation next, and eventually bigger swings outside his comfort zone, running a major event, doing field marketing in Japan, building a PR function from scratch.

Staying hands-on reminds Rob of something his mentor Dave Kellogg once told him: “The job of a CMO is to run marketing, but also help the CEO run the company.” Knowing the details gives him context to make faster, more informed decisions than someone managing from a distance ever could.

2. Keep it simple, because a big company (or technical product) doesn’t mean marketing has to be complex.

Even as the CMO of a huge, successful company, Rob still believes in keeping things as simple as possible.

He uses what he calls the reasonableness test: some marketing ideas are just obviously good, like a podcast, a blog, or a briefing center to host top customers. You don’t need to force a pipeline number onto something that’s reasonable on its face. Sometimes the justification is that it makes sense, and chasing perfect measurement only frustrates your team without improving the marketing.

One example at play is the executive briefing center Varonis built when they moved their HQ to Miami. They fly in top customers to discuss the roadmap and gather feedback in person. The center has a conference room, full kitchen, and even a barista.

Varonis Executive Briefing Center in Miami, FL

Rob’s teammate runs the center with one focus: get as many key executives through the doors as possible. Not pipeline, not attribution, just executives in the room. They also run smaller versions remotely for customers who can’t make it to Miami. The point isn’t the space itself, it’s that people want to feel valued as a customer, something Rob says is a lost art in software.

One more example: Rob’s content lead built a Capture the Flag game – which security practitioners love to play. Her KPI is player count – not pipeline.

A big company or complex product doesn’t mean marketing needs to be complicated. Simple beats complex, even at scale. Maybe especially at scale.

3. Why there are no people managers on the marketing team at Varonis and what they do instead.

Every manager at Varonis is hands-on in the work itself, not just managing people.

“We don’t have managers that aren’t experts at the thing that they’re managing.” Rob still personally runs webinars. His head of corporate events is the best at it. His head of PR is phenomenal and loves doing it.

Add management layers and you get what Rob calls a “communication tax”: more meetings, more low priority work that doesn’t actually matter, and a team that’s harder to keep pointed in the same direction. There’s a second cost too: Conway’s Law, the idea that your product ends up mirroring the shape of your org, which is why a siloed team produces a disjointed, inconsistent brand.

Keeping the team this flat means Rob has to say no a lot. He refers back to this Kellogg-ism: “As CMO, you have to get good at saying no, but not too good.”

There’s a real lesson here about managing up. For a lot of CMOs, the thing that actually gets them isn’t their own team, it’s their relationship with the CEO or CRO. You can’t always advocate for marketing. Sometimes you have to say no to your team, because you’re playing the long game with the people above you.

A friend told him once: “If you want to be liked, drive an ice cream truck. If you want to be CMO, you have to be able to say no to your team.”

Rob’s beaten the tenure odds by about 13ish years. The lessons are simple: stay curious enough to want the job for one more year (then another), keep it simple, have the right people on the team, and know when to say no. There are so many more gems in my conversation with Rob, watch it here.