Most B2B marketing teams are busy. There are campaigns in flight, content on the calendar, events to staff, and pipeline reports due every week. Yet plenty of those same teams watch deals sit in early stages for months while leadership asks what’s going wrong. The usual response is more activity: another campaign, another channel, another round of messaging tweaks built on product, price, place, and promotion.
But according to Evan Goldberg, the problem usually starts earlier than that. The four Ps describe what marketing does. They don’t explain why a buying committee chooses one vendor over five others that look almost identical on paper. For that, he argues, B2B companies need a different marketing framework, one built around what marketing has to create: moat, motivation, and memory.
In this episode of Performance Delivered, host Steffen Horst is joined by Evan Goldberg, founder of Cyber CMO, a fractional marketing consultancy that helps cybersecurity and SaaS companies figure out what happens next when growth gets complicated. Over more than 20 years, Evan has built marketing teams, transformed go-to-market strategies, created categories, launched products, and helped scale a technology marketing agency from startup through acquisition. He has led marketing at companies including LastPass, ZeroFox, and BlackCloak, and has advised more than 60 cybersecurity and SaaS companies. He and Steffen dig into each part of the framework and what happens when one of them is missing.
More marketing activity can hide a broken go-to-market strategy
Evan has watched a pattern repeat across in-house teams, agencies, and fractional engagements: the companies that lean hardest on activity are often the ones that struggle most to scale. Activity, he says, “can have the adverse effect.” It “allows you to cover up for inefficiencies within your product set or your category or in your go-to-market strategy.”
The typical sequence looks reasonable from the inside. A team settles on high-level messaging, high-level positioning, and what it believes is competitive differentiation, then builds campaigns around the four Ps. When growth doesn’t follow, marketers are left confused, and sometimes out of a job. Evan points out that marketing has one of the lowest tenures in job retention across any sector of business, and that question of why is what led him to build the framework he uses today.
The takeaway isn’t that activity is bad. It’s that activity without a defensible position, a reason to buy now, and a reason to be remembered just produces more of the same stalled pipeline.
A real moat is rarely a feature
Evan’s first pillar comes from cybersecurity, a market where many vendors struggle to explain deeply technical products in a way that separates one network security company from the next. In that environment, companies forget that they need something defensible.
He frames it like a court case. A prosecutor has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. A B2B buyer wants the same standard: “beyond a reasonable doubt, what is different about your product?” And you can’t just use words, Evan says. “You have to be able to defend it.”
That defense almost never rests on capabilities. “Very rarely is the moat a feature,” Evan says, because “capabilities can be made very quickly.” When one company announces something new, a competitor can replicate it fast. The moats that hold up are harder to copy: first value attainment (deploying in 12 hours when a competitor takes three weeks), or a user experience simple enough that people want to live inside it every day. The strongest moat Evan has seen in his career wasn’t architecture or output. It was a user interface simplified down to the most digestible view possible.
Buyers don’t fix problems. They fix the problems they’re motivated to fix
Most B2B websites lead with a problem: you have an email security problem, your payments processor can’t accept certain payments. Evan’s issue with that approach is simple. Every business has more problems than budget.
He uses his own home in Miami as the example. With four things broken, you might only fix two right now. What decides which two? For Evan, it’s a roof: his insurance provider will drop his homeowner’s coverage if the roof isn’t updated every 20 years. That external pressure moves the roof to the top of the list.
B2B purchases work the same way. “The companies that win find the external factors that motivate their customers to purchase,” Evan says. Instead of “you have a network security problem,” they say: you’re in a highly regulated industry, you need to comply with seven different regulations, and if you don’t, you face fines. That external factor is what moves a line item up the budget list and into the next procurement cycle. Price still matters, Evan is clear on that, but it is rarely the trigger on its own.
Brand awareness gets you seen. Memory gets you chosen
The third pillar is the one most often mistaken for brand awareness. Evan draws the line with a familiar example: a Super Bowl or World Cup ad with Matthew McConaughey in it. Two weeks later you remember the celebrity, but not the product, and you have to search to figure out what the ad was for. That’s recall, but not the kind that helps when a buying committee sits down to decide.
In B2B, larger purchases are rarely one person’s decision. Every member of the committee needs something distinctly memorable about you. One may have heard you speak somewhere. Another knows your slogan. Another connects you to a local event in their hometown. The recall “is beyond brand because it’s specialized for everybody in the buying committee,” Evan says. If he were selling to 12 members of a security team, he would need each of them to remember something different.
Map the buying committee from your actual customer profile, not your ideal one
Building that kind of memory requires knowing exactly who sits on the committee. Evan starts with the ideal customer profile, then goes a level deeper. “I call it the ACP, the actual customer profile”: not who you think is a fit, but who actually is.
Once you truly understand that customer, the roles come into focus. For an email security product, a security architect wants to know how it affects the network and integrations. The person running email marketing and deliverability wants to know whether it speeds up or slows down delivery. A risk and compliance lead wants to understand its impact on identity and access management requirements. Each of them is in your sphere of influence, and each needs material they can use to recall your brand when it matters.
Missing one of the three is how pipeline gets stuck in stage one
Evan treats moat, motivation, and memory as equal. When one is missing, he says, you get top-of-funnel pipeline that goes nowhere, and eventually a call from the CFO and CEO asking why millions of dollars in deals have been stuck in stage one and stage two for nine months.
Have a moat and motivation but no memory, and the buying committee can’t recall your company name in the meeting that matters, which alone creates doubt. Have only the moat, and buyers don’t see what problem it really solves or why it’s the best solution. Marketers can create top-of-funnel pipeline in many ways, Evan notes, but “the best marketers create the top of funnel pipeline that converts and keeps converting.” He avoids absolutes, but in the vast majority of cases he reviews, companies with all three in place perform significantly better than those with one or two.
This B2B marketing framework matters more now that buyers learn from AI
Evan sees the framework becoming more important, not less, because of how buyers now research. Many B2B websites still talk mostly about themselves, with a case study dropped in for credibility, and lose visitors who don’t connect immediately.
And increasingly, buyers never reach the website at all. “They’re learning on ChatGPT, they’re learning on Claude,” Evan says. That means moat, motivation, and memory have to be communicated through storytelling and third parties, in the places people actually look for information. Getting that right is what earns the website visit and the spot in a nurture stream. The framework, he argues, “could be potentially more important now than it was even just a year or two ago.”
Episode Transcript
Steffen (00:12)
Welcome back to Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets to Marketing Success, the podcast where we explore what's actually driving growth and performance in today's complex marketing landscape. I'm your host, Stefan Horst, and today we're challenging one of the oldest frameworks in the mark in marketing: the four P's: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. For decades, that's been the playbook. But in B2B, where buying committee are larger.
Steffen (00:41)
Sales cycles are longer and decisions carry real risks. Those four levers don't always explain why one company wins and another stalls. The four Ps told us what marketing does. My guest today argues we need a new operating model, one built around what marketing needs to create: mode, motivation, and memory. Joining me today is Evan Goldberg. Evan is the founder of Cyber CMO.
Steffen (01:07)
A fractional marketing consultancy that helps cybersecurity and SaaS companies figure out what happens next when growth gets complicated. For more than 20 years, he's built marketing teams, transformed go-to-market strategies, created categories, launched products, and helped scale a technology marketing agency from startup through acquisition. He said marketing at companies including LastPass, Zero Fox, and Black Cloak, and has advised more than 60 cybersecurity and SaaS companies. Evan.
Steffen (01:36)
Welcome to Performance Delivered and it's great having you.
Evan Goldberg (01:40)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you today.
Steffen (01:43)
Now, Evan, let's start by stripping things back. Most B2B market teams are busy. Campaigns, content, events, pipeline reports, but activity isn't the same as influence. You've spent your career building go to market strategy for B2B companies. if you strip away the day to day marketing activity, what do you think actually drives the B2B buying decision?
Evan Goldberg (02:11)
It's an excellent question. And what you just prefaced about activity, right, is really counterproductive to the organizations that I've seen grow the fastest and have the most success in scaling. Right. There is a bit of a correlation, if you will, to the companies that focus so much on activity and activity and and think that
Evan Goldberg (02:38)
Activity will create the type of pipeline that is sustainable for them to meet their growth metrics when in reality activity can have the adverse effect, right? And what it does is it allows you to cover up for inefficiencies within your product set or your category or in your go-to-market strategy. And so, what do I mean by that? Well, a lot of times.
Evan Goldberg (03:03)
We think about how we message, how we position, right? We think about the competitive landscape, but we do so kind of at a at a at a high level, right? And then we go back to those four Ps that you mentioned, and we take our high-level messaging and our high-level positioning and our what we think is competitive differentiation, and we we invoke campaigns built around these four Ps, or we build a strategy.
Evan Goldberg (03:29)
Yet we find ourselves not growing or scaling at the rate for which we want to. And a lot of the times it leaves marketers a bit perplexed. It's also cost marketers their jobs, right? You know, marketing has one of the lowest tenures in in job retention across any sector of business. And so really over the course of my career, I've peeled back the onion to try to understand why. And that's what helped me kind of develop the framework that I use today.
Evan Goldberg (03:56)
I think you went on mute, Stefan. I can't hear you. Sorry.
Steffen (04:01)
So
Steffen (04:02)
so basically you've boiled that answer down to three words mode, motivation and memory. How did you get there? Why those three and why in that order?
Evan Goldberg (04:11)
Yeah, so
Evan Goldberg (04:14)
Having seen companies from various viewpoints, and what I mean by that is I've I've led marketing and product marketing in-house at large and small B2B companies. I've been on the agency side and I've also worked fractionally and through a freelance lens. So I've seen basically organizations from every viewpoint possible from a marketing perspective. And every time that I've really gotten to narrow down the focus and to think: look at the what is what is stalling growth or what is prohibiting growth.
Evan Goldberg (04:44)
From accelerating at the pace we want. I kept coming back to a couple of different factors. And I didn't always know them as motivation and memory. That's simply how I simplified the framework over the last couple of years. As I got deeper into cybersecurity, and any one of your listeners who knows that industry knows there's a there's a real positioning and messaging challenge within that sector in particular. it is very hard.
Evan Goldberg (05:11)
to not only break down very in-depth technical topics, right? But also to do it in a way that differentiates one type of network security company for the from the other. And on top of that, when you're you're trying so hard to do that,
Evan Goldberg (05:28)
Companies have forgotten that they need to find something that's defensible about their product, right? So it I use the analogy: if I were in a United States court of law and I was the prosecution, I would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was guilty, right? In order to convict them of a crime.
Steffen (05:46)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Goldberg (05:49)
Well, in order for me as a B2B buyer to purchase a product, right, one of the things I really want to know is beyond a reasonable doubt, what is different about your product? What is what is what makes it unique? That can mean a lot of different things. That could be the architecture it's built on. It could be the the services or the output that it provides. The best example of moat that I've seen through my experience wasn't any of those. It was actually the user experience.
Evan Goldberg (06:19)
Was the ability to take a user interface and simplify it down to its to the most easily digestible view possible that
Steffen (06:31)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Goldberg (06:32)
separated it from its competitors. And so there's a lot of different things, but you can't just use words. You have to be able to defend it. And so MOAT was the first thing that I really realized was important in that space. And that's translated into SaaS and other B2B sectors as well.
Steffen (06:47)
Yeah.
Steffen (06:48)
Okay. So let's start with MOOC. Let's let's look a little bit closer at that. So in categories like cybersecurity and SaaS, buyers are often looking at five or six vendors that sound almost identical identical on paper. And then you just talked about it, right? and marketing often gets pulled into product conversations about features, packaging and positioning and and how to tweak those kind of things. In a crowded B2B market, what actually makes something defensible?
Steffen (07:17)
You know, you you talked about
Evan Goldberg (07:17)
Yeah.
Steffen (07:18)
it needs to be defensible. But what what makes something defensible and how is that different from the product decisions marketing le usually gets pulled into?
Evan Goldberg (07:27)
So it's a it's a great question. And there is some overlap, right? So marketing, especially product marketing, right? In a lot of organizations, you're you're supposed to be that interlock between the voice of the market, the voice of the customer, and bring that to engineering, right? So there is some overlap. But ideally, when we talk about defensibility, I'm talking I'm looking at it through through two through two different lenses. One through the lens of if I were to purchase this as a business, right, what's gonna get me to use it or get my team to
Evan Goldberg (07:57)
use it or get deployment out to the scale for which I want it, right? the other thing that I'm looking for is if I'm similar in price or if I'm similar in in said capabilities, right? What is the one thing that is different that's actually going to provide extra value for me? Right. So for some companies, it could be something like what we call first value attainment. So that could be
Evan Goldberg (08:25)
it only takes us, you know, 12 hours to set up and deploy versus a competitor might be three weeks, right? For whatever
Steffen (08:32)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Goldberg (08:34)
reason, right? It could go back to the to the UI UX dashboard that I talked about earlier. Like what makes this something that I want to live and breathe inside of on a daily basis so that I can get the types of insights that I need. Very rarely is the moat a feature.
Evan Goldberg (08:53)
Right, or a capability. And the reason for that is because capabilities can be made very quickly. Right. When you're talking about one company looking at the next company and company, you know, A sees an announcement from company B, company A can go replicate company B's announcement pretty quickly, right? So you have to try to find those things that are harder to replicate that really give you a leg up on the experience that you can provide your end users.
Steffen (09:19)
Interesting. Now from a motivation perspective, we tend to assume deals are won on price or on the channel that brought delete in. But the real reason sometimes moves or something moves is often something else entirely. Can you walk us through a real deal where the actual trigger had nothing to do with the price? Or the channel?
Evan Goldberg (09:42)
Yes. Yeah.
Evan Goldberg (09:44)
Yeah. And look, price to to say price is not important would be disingenuous, right? Price is always a factor. But what I see a lot of, and I chat, you know, your listeners can go and and pick any B2B category, pick fintech, pick health tech, pick cybersecurity, and you're gonna go to a website and you're gonna see a home page and it's gonna talk about problems. It's gonna say you have you have an email security problem, or you can't
Evan Goldberg (10:09)
Your payments processor can't accept payments from a company. These are all problems. Okay. Well, think about your personal life and think about then the broader business world. We all have problems, we all have challenges. Are we able to fix all of them? Are we able to spend money in combating every challenge? Right, think about owning a home, right? There's four things broken. Maybe you can only fix two of them right now. Well, what makes you fix two of them, right?
Evan Goldberg (10:38)
over the other two. Well, I can give you a perfect example, right? I live in Miami, right? My insurance provider will drop me from homeowner's insurance if I don't get an updated roof every 20 years. Right? So if I have leaks, if I have all sorts of things, but my roof is getting old, a motivation for me is I might lose my homeowner's insurance because I haven't updated my roof. Now take that to the business world, right? Every business website, again, you have this problem, but
Evan Goldberg (11:08)
What are the motivations for you to actually fix that problem? What is gonna make you
Evan Goldberg (11:14)
what is going to make you or or whoever's in charge of budget approve finances to fix that problem? And what level of risk or what level of maybe dissatisfaction are you willing to live with because you can only choose certain things at a time. And the companies that win find the external factors that motivate their customers to purchase, right? They don't just say, hey, you have a network security.
Evan Goldberg (11:44)
Problem. They say your organization is in a highly regulated industry and you need to be compliant with seven different regulations. And if you don't do this, you're going to be fined by the European Union and you get where I'm going with this, right? Now all of a sudden you have an external factor in play.
Evan Goldberg (12:03)
That perhaps moves that line item up the budget list and into the next procurement cycle. So, this challenge I see, the mistake I see is focusing so much on the problem. We're taught as marketers, right? Talk to the problem. Well, we've gotten to the point where there's a lot of problems. We can't possibly expect businesses to solve them all. So, what's actually gonna motivate them to find something, right? Or motivate them to prioritize what it is you're offering.
Steffen (12:31)
Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Now, the last part in in in your in the structure that you lay out is is memory. On the surface that sounds a lot like brand awareness, but you draw a hard line between the two. What's the difference between being seen and being remembered when the buying committee finally sits down to decide? Yeah.
Evan Goldberg (12:54)
Yeah,
Evan Goldberg (12:55)
great qu great, great question. So being seen, right, is if you're watching the the Super Bowl or the World Cup and you see an ad and it has a celebrity in it. And two weeks later you're talking to your friends and you say, Hey, remember that ad that you saw with Matthew McConaughey in it, right? But you can't remember what that ad was for. You just
Steffen (13:19)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Goldberg (13:19)
remember.
Evan Goldberg (13:20)
That Matthew McConaughey was in it, you have to now Google it and find some way to figure out what it was. That is that creates recall, but not the type of recall that you need when you're in a buying committee scenario where you're debating through you're debating through potential purchases or you're debating through the competition, right? So there it could be a brand element. I don't want to say that it's not, but to me, memory is what specific
Evan Goldberg (13:49)
Liv Bihain.
Evan Goldberg (13:51)
That are you giving to each of the members of a buying committee? Now we I talk about buying committee, and that might not be applicable to everyone who listens, but most B2B larger purchases now are not the decision of one individual. There's a a committee involved, and especially if you have a larger platform. And so they all need to have something distinctly memorable for you, right? maybe they maybe one of the members has heard you talk somewhere. Maybe
Steffen (14:19)
Right.
Evan Goldberg (14:20)
one of the members knows.
Evan Goldberg (14:21)
Your brand slogan, right? Maybe one of the members can connect you to a a local event that you had in in their hometown, right? You you've got to create this recall, but the recall is beyond brand because it's specialized for everybody in the buying committee. So, yes, that'd be great if everyone remembered the cyber CMO brand, but if I were selling to 12 different members of a security team, a specific product.
Evan Goldberg (14:52)
I would need them to all remember something different about my company in order to get them all to have that brand recall. And so it
Steffen (15:00)
Yeah.
Evan Goldberg (15:00)
goes beyond brand to some extent, but it can also include elements of brand.
Steffen (15:04)
Yeah. How how do you go about identifying these information for that buying committee? Because I would assume the buying committees with within companies they differ, who who is part of that. And then how do you go about to kind of creating all these pieces that are required so that everyone within the committee feels like they have everything they need in order to make a decision?
Evan Goldberg (15:26)
Yeah, I mean we've we've been doing some of this in marketing for many, many years when we talk about the ICP, right? Who is your ideal customer profile? This is taking it a level deeper, right? So the
Steffen (15:38)
Okay.
Evan Goldberg (15:39)
original ideal customer profiles is.
Evan Goldberg (15:42)
The customers that you believe would be a good fit for your organization, who are the personas within who is the persona within that customer that would buy from you, right? Well, that's evolved now to talk more about one, not just who we think is our ICP, but who actually is a good fit for us, right? I call it the ACP, the actual customer profile. And then within them, right, if you understand truly understand that customer, then you can start to understand the different roles and
Evan Goldberg (16:12)
positions that were within that organization, right? So let's say, and I apologize for using security as an example. Again, it's just the the most familiarity that I have. Let's say that I am selling an email security product. I've got the
Evan Goldberg (16:28)
security architecture people who are going to want to know how this impacts the network and various integrations with other technology. I'm gonna have the person who runs email marketing and deliverability be interested in how the program might speed up or slow down email deliverability. Like what's it gonna do for us, right? I may have a risk and compliance person that wants to understand how this impacts my identity and access management requirements.
Evan Goldberg (16:58)
For my compliance efforts and goes on and on and on, right? So you, if you truly know your ideal customer profile, you can then start to pick out the people within the organization that are gonna be us in your sphere of influence and you can start influencing them directly, right, with elements that they can use to then recall your brand.
Steffen (17:19)
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now you're also clear that that these three, the mode, motivation, and and memory, carry equal weight. It's not about picking a favorite. You need all three working together to actually optimize growth. So what have you seen happen to a company that's strong on one or two of these but ignores the third one completely?
Evan Goldberg (17:43)
this is where you get all of that top-of-funnel pipeline that goes nowhere. And the CFO and CEO CEO call and say, Hey, we've got, you know, five million dollars in in deals that have been stuck in stage one and stage two for the last nine months. What the heck is going on? Right. And you know, it it's kind of the same.
Evan Goldberg (18:02)
Quagmire companies can get themselves into if they focus on a lot of activity without a strategy, right? Like you will marketers can be very good at creating top of funnel pipeline in a lot of different ways. The best marketers create the top of funnel pipeline that converts and keeps converting until you know that opportunity becomes a close one deal and then can maybe expand them into more. So if I've got a
Evan Goldberg (18:30)
let's say that I have a mo and I have some motivation, but I have no recall of your brand whatsoever, or you or who runs the company or something about the company. Well
Evan Goldberg (18:43)
What's gonna happen in that meeting that you're having with your counterparts when you can't remember the company name, right? What that that alone draws doubt, right? You can't remember the company name, you can't remember them, right? And then if you just have you have the moat, well, what are you missing if you just have the moat? You're missing sort of the outcomes piece, right? You're missing, right? that's great. Like I'm glad that it has a really good UI or UX or something like this. But what what problem? What does this help me really solve? And is
Evan Goldberg (19:13)
Is it the best solution out there? And you don't even remember the brand name. So what good is it going to be, right? So
Steffen (19:17)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Goldberg (19:19)
look, I don't like to speak in absolutes and say it will never work with just two of the three, but from the vast majority of cases that I look at, right? When you have all three of these things in place, like you are setting yourself up for success in an order of magnitude that is, I think, quite significantly better than if you just have one out of three or two out of three.
Steffen (19:41)
Yeah. a lot of companies aren't aren't marketing to any of the three. You know, to to any of these three. What does that actually look like from the outside? And is that why so many companies stall out despite doing everything else?
Evan Goldberg (19:58)
I mean, for you look, I every company has their own challenges, and it's hard to speak to every company. From my perspective, though, when you go on a lot of B2B websites, you see a whole lot of companies talking about themselves, and then below it, they'll put a random case study in to make it look like they're being more neutral and and and having someone support what they're doing. But anytime that
Evan Goldberg (20:20)
You go to a website and you're not immediately connected. I think I saw the last data was like you have like one and a half seconds to connect with someone when they come to your website or they leave for good, right? So unless you
Steffen (20:31)
Yeah. Yeah.
Evan Goldberg (20:33)
can make that connection like right off the bat, right? Well, you're setting yourself up for a lot of website bounces, right? You're setting yourself up for again, so maybe some of that top of funnel demand that never converts. But if you think about the way B2B marketing is changing and the fact that now you're
Evan Goldberg (20:51)
People don't come to your website just as a reason to learn. They're learning on ChatGPT, they're learning on Claude, right? So if you're not getting your information out into those areas, right, you may never even get them to your website to begin with. So communicating motivation, memory through storytelling, through third parties, right? So that it resonates and populates in places where people are actually seeking information from, like that
Steffen (21:20)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Goldberg (21:20)
is a
Evan Goldberg (21:21)
essential even getting them to your website today and being able to capture them and getting them into your nurture stream. So I I'd argue, you know, the framework could be potentially more important now than it was even just a year or two ago because of just the way the buying cycle and and buyer experience is changing so much.
Steffen (21:37)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Evan, thank you so much for joining me on the Performance About Podcast and and sharing your your perspective. It's clear the old playbook isn't enough on its own. Real B2B growth comes from building something defensible, understanding what actually moves buyers to act, and making sure you are the name they remember when the decision gets made.
Steffen (22:02)
For listeners who want to learn more about your work or connect with you, where's the best place to reach you?
Evan Goldberg (22:08)
Yeah. Yeah, best place to meet me is on LinkedIn. So Evan R. Goldberg on LinkedIn is the best place to connect. And then I can I'll exchange email and phone numbers on there if we want to talk more or set up a Zoom, but connect with me on LinkedIn and and we'll have a conversation from there. I'd love to talk to as many people as possible.
Steffen (22:26)
Perfect. And as always, we leave that information in the show notes. Thanks everyone for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode of Performance Delivered, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform. To learn more about Symphonic Digital, visit us at symphonicdigital.com. See you next time.
