“How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business” with Armen Najarian CMO of Agari

As part of my series of interviews about “How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Armen Najarian is CMO of Agari, the next-generation secure email cloud, where he is charged with strengthening the Agari brand worldwide and enabling market demand for Agari solutions across direct and partner channels. Najarian has more than 15 years of Silicon Valley enterprise technology and cybersecurity marketing expertise.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I have been working in marketing for more than two decades — what originally attracted me was a combination of working with products that people love, and being able to tell unique stories about their experiences. What brought me to cybersecurity marketing is that there is something very satisfying about serving in a mission-driven business — many cyber security companies adhere to this philosophy. At Agari, we are all committed to our mission, ‘Agari protects digital communication to ensure humanity prevails over evil.’ We are growing very rapidly because we are serving a higher order.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

I have had a lifelong career in marketing, so just a few months after I started at my previous company I was thrust into an additional role I had never before experienced: sales. We had a gap in our sales leadership team and needed to backfill for APAC, so I became the interim head of APAC sales while maintaining my role as CMO. This was a really unique experience because it put me in the shoes of my most important internal stakeholder, the sales organization. I think every CMO would benefit from the experience of working on the sales team. One interesting story from this experience is that I had to once make a day trip to Japan; I flew to Tokyo, took a one hour meeting, and immediately flew back to San Francisco all without a suitcase — less than 35 hours door-to-door.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I can recall earlier in my career, when I was an MC at our annual customer summit — we had hundreds of people in the room and all eyes were on me — the only guy in the room to wear a suit and tie. My CEO actually heckled me from where he was sitting; I was publicly ridiculed in front of the entire room — fortunately I don’t have a fear of public speaking. I knew that when I made the next set of introductions I would have to address the situation — I considered cutting the tie for dramatic effect, but it was a nice tie — so instead I made a humorous show of taking off my tie in front of the room. And the lesson I learned was not to take myself too seriously.

Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?

It would have to be LinkedIn — that’s our most dominant platform. It’s a great platform for meaningful interaction with our customers. LinkedIn is always open on my desktop and I am in frequent collaboration with my network — sharing content, commenting on others material, and building my community.

Let’s talk about LinkedIn specifically, now. Can you share 5 ways to leverage LinkedIn to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.

Historically, Agari has used LinkedIn as a traditional social media channel to share and promote our content, such as blogs, white papers and even third-party content, which has been managed through the company brand handle and loose participation of Agari employees.

In 2019, our strategy is much more intentional:

First, we want to strengthen the presence of every Agari seller. We are evolving our sales team from 25 unrelated profiles to a unified presence. Most LinkedIn profiles are focused on highlighting work experience; our new sales profiles will be focused on appealing to our customers and buyers. These affiliated pages will all look the same, surface on the same searches with the same key messages, and serve as a marketing and sales asset by changing the way the people engage with Agari by positioning our sales team as value-added problem solvers.

Second, I would recommend building — or taking advantage of an existing — community. Community has a network effect, where a cross-breeding of information takes place. There is a principle in design that 1+1=3, which is the same way that I view information sharing in a community. And closely related to these first two points is the importance of engagement — you can’t have a community without engagement. Specifically, by elevating awareness among our own, we have effectively built a public Agari community. This as already started to pay dividends with content getting much more play across the extended networks.

My third and fourth point are also closely related. You should take advantage of native LinkedIn platform features and you should expand your content marketing efforts. Specifically, LinkedIn has an excellent first-person video platform, which enables you to create engaging content wherever you go. Agari is using this video platform to create short videos about emerging trends in email security, which we promote with #HackNation on the LinkedIn tagging system. Separately, as a company (and as individuals) we tag all of the content we publish with #TrustYourInbox — what is effectively our 2019 Agari campaign theme. We insert our brand into the tag with all content we trust.

Finally, I would suggest building a privae alumni group of current and former company members. I recently launched an Alumni group for my former company, and it has been so great on many levels to stay connected and informed. Again this takes advantage of the network effect, and it also encourages relationship building, which can help to dissolve operational silos.

Overall, this effort recognizes the prominence of LinkedIn among buyers of B2B services as a tool to locate people and content to help them solve pressing business issues and to validate the credentials and expertise of selling professional with whom they engage. We are moving forward with the theory that around two-thirds of B2B buyers use LinkedIn during their technology evaluation processes.

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Well, like I mentioned Agari’s mission is to protect digital communication to ensure humanity prevails over evil. And when I’m interviewing candidates to join Agari, I want people that are excited to share our mission. So certainly, we want to restore trust to the inbox, but I also think that it is really important to find something that you’re truly passionate about, and go all-in. For companies that have a powerful mission statement, they aren’t just doing it to put words on paper — if you subscribe to that mission it won’t feel like work.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Someone that comes to mind is Kobe Bryant; he is a consummate competitor with his so-called mamba mentality, and has seemingly not slowed down even after his retirement from the NBA. Kobe has now made the transition from sports to investing and the VC community, so it would be fascinating to pick his brain about investing.

Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!