Lastline, built by the researchers behind the Anubis and Wepawet malware analysis tools, had just changed CEOs in spring 2016 and was searching for a head of marketing. Rather than rush a hire, CEO Christopher Kruegel brought in The Artesian Network to run marketing as a team and fix the go-to-market foundation.
Key Results
- Baseline in six weeks: market landscape, SWOT, competitive SEO benchmark, and marketing and sales systems audits, all complete by the July 2016 executive check-in.
- Earned media at scale: 84 pieces of coverage from May to December 2016, in outlets including Forbes, BBC World Service and The Register, with a potential reach of more than 34 million readers.
- Positioning grounded in customer data: a persona-based messaging framework built on win/loss analysis and Lastline’s 2016 customer survey.
- A two-year partnership: Lastline’s new CMO re-engaged Artesian in 2017 to build the customer-profiling foundation for its user community. The work continued through June 2018.
The Challenge
Lastline’s technology was stronger than its market presence. Its sandbox powered advanced threat protection for major security vendors, but much of that success was white-labeled, so the Lastline name stayed largely invisible to buyers.
Our July 2016 benchmark measured the gap. FireEye’s website drew about 20 times Lastline’s traffic over six months, and Palo Alto Networks about 28 times. Each had roughly 18 to 19 times as many sites linking in.
The company had also just changed CEOs and was searching for a VP of Marketing. Leadership was uneasy about its messaging, its sales tools and how quickly new sales hires became productive. Strategy was pulling several ways at once: channel or direct, SMB or enterprise, product or platform.
Hiring a VP of Marketing into that uncertainty carried real risk. Lastline needed a proven team that could start immediately and prove out the model before a permanent leader arrived.
What We Did
Artesian ran marketing as Lastline’s in-house team, organized in phases with an executive checkpoint at the end of each one.
- Baselined everything in six weeks. From kickoff on June 8, 2016, we trained on the product and competitors, then delivered a market landscape and SWOT, an SEO and traffic benchmark against five competitors, and audits of the marketing and sales systems.
- Rebuilt the sales infrastructure plan. Our sales operations lead assessed Salesforce and HubSpot and recommended clear opportunity stages with exit criteria, separate tracks for end customers and partners, consolidated forecast dashboards, data enrichment and a database cleanup plan.
- Found the customer truth before writing a word. Win/loss analysis and Lastline’s 2016 customer survey reshaped positioning: lead with two defensible claims, most effective and most flexible, and build the extensibility story around the API rather than a premature “platform” claim.
- Ran PR and media relations. A rapid-response program put Lastline’s experts into breaking security stories, backed by press releases and contributed opinion articles.
- Armed sales and refreshed the brand. We translated engineering content into business-level blog posts, refreshed brand templates and datasheets, and supported event and booth materials.
- Turned customers into a community. After Bert Rankin joined as CMO, he brought us back in 2017 to profile the installed base: mapping business, technical and user stakeholders, opening a dialogue with senior security leaders, and identifying candidates for Lastline’s first user group.
The Positioning Shift
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Lead message | Technical underpinnings first | Top-line business value: most effective, most flexible |
| Proof | Mixed proof points | Third-party validation: NSS Labs, Forrester, customer survey data |
| Platform story | Pressure to claim “platform” early | Product first, with extensibility proven through the API |
| Audience | One message for technical evaluators | Value tailored by persona, from analyst to CISO |
| Market voice | Largely invisible behind OEM partners | A regular voice in breaking security news |
The Outcome
Lastline got a working marketing function right away, without an executive hire made under pressure. When Bert Rankin joined as CMO in August 2016, he inherited a baseline, a positioning framework, a sales-systems roadmap and an active press program instead of a blank page.
In November 2016, Lastline announced more than 200% year-over-year sales growth and more than 5 million new users protected. It cited NSS Labs’ finding of 100% detection with zero false positives and its standing in the 2016 Forrester Wave.
It was our model working as designed: we built ourselves out of a job. Then the new CMO brought us back, and the partnership ran through June 2018. Lastline was acquired by VMware in 2020.
When I joined Lastline as CMO, I didn’t inherit a blank page. Artesian had already done the hard diagnostic work: the market baseline, the customer research and a positioning framework we could build on. That’s why I brought them back when we set out to turn our installed base into a real community.