Welcome to the Forge by Rob Sobers

Go-to-market strategies for CMOs and B2B SaaS leaders.

If this note is in your inbox, you signed up for my newsletter at some point.

Hey! I’m Rob. I’m the CMO of a cybersecurity SaaS company called Varonis (Nasdaq: VRNS).

This newsletter will be the place where I share everything I know about B2B sales and marketing, leadership, managing remote teams, positioning, models & metrics, frameworks & tools, and so much more.

I hope you’ll stick around as I document my path to $1B ARR!

🔥 Next week, I’m going to drop a link to my CMO Swipe File—a massive collection of links, templates, decks, and spreadsheets I’ve collected over the years and reference all the time. It’s a live Notion database that I update weekly.

If I Was Starting Today

This week, I joined my good friend Jim Huffman on his podcast If I Was Starting Today. Jim and I discussed:

• The value of technical skills in growth

• Growth tactics at $30M revenue

• Channel marketing

• Figuring it out vs. scaling it up

• Demand capture vs. demand creation 🔥

• Growth tactics at $100M+ revenue

• Marketing leadership mindset

What I’m reading

• The pitfalls of “cool parent” leadership (Carl Karlsson)

• No Forms. No SPAM. No Cold Calls (Latané Conant)

• Your Guide to Pricing Transformations in 2023 (OpenView)

• How Apple Has So Far Avoided Layoffs: Lean Hiring, No Free Lunches (WSJ)

• Sales in 2023 & Rise of CFO Power (OnlyCFO)

OnlyCFO @OnlyCFO

If a tool is more expensive than a competitor then some of the below must be true: 1. Quicker time to value 2. Scales better 3. Requires less resources for implementation or ongoing admin 4. Significantly better. Acceptable level here has changed. Can’t be just a little better.