Quarter-over-quarter growth in webinar-driven pipeline
Million in sourced pipeline in Q2 of 2020 from webinars
Registrations per webinar with ON24, up from 30 registrations previously
Of audience members say they would recommend the webinar program to another GP
Name: Lacework
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
Founded: 2015
Employees: 130+
Industry: Computer software
The Lacework Cloud Security Platform is cloud-native and offered as a service, delivering threat detection, behavioral anomaly detection and compliance across multi-cloud environments. Lacework helps its customers significantly reduce costs and risk by freeing themselves from the burden of unnecessary hardware and coding, as well as inaccurate alerts.
Lacework started with a vision to provide cloud security as an end-to-end experience for its customers, with greater intelligence and context, and more sophisticated threat detection. The company applies machine learning to all activity in the cloud, producing a more accurate picture of where threats exist.
Lacework is growing fast and is gearing up for a stock market launch. The company’s sales team is expanding, and quarter-over-quarter annual revenue is increasing. When Ryan McCurdy, Head of Demand Generation at Lacework joined the organization, the marketing function was led by a team of one. Lacework needed to find a way to keep up with its rapid growth and generate demand.
“When you’re a pre-IPO company, you’re doing everything you can to educate the market on how you’re different, why you’re better and why there’s even pain in the market,” McCurdy said. “Webinars are a great way to educate people, and they’re one of our key pipeline generation channels.”
A lack of strong webinar branding and customization
Lacework’s marketing team was doing trade shows and webinars, but neither were contributing to pipeline for the company. The organization’s previous webinar software, BrightTALK, didn’t enable Lacework to create the webinar experience the company wanted, or felt was effective.
“In our space, there’s a lot of noise out there. We’re doing our best to differentiate ourselves,” McCurdy said.
With Lacework’s previous webinar software, BrightTALK, the organization’s content was presented right next to its competitors’ content and lack of robust reporting and marketing automation integration made it difficult to attribute demand to the webinar program. The brand experience and ability for users to binge content was also lacking, and Lacework didn’t have much control over the experience. For example, the company couldn’t edit its landing pages to increase conversions. In addition, presentation functionality didn’t work at times.
“The tool would just break down, and that’s not okay when you have a bunch of people on a webinar,” McCurdy said. “I also had to reach out to my rep to get a recording of our presentation. It was very dysfunctional to
try to manage.”
“We went from doing $0 in sourced webinar pipeline to doing over $1 million per quarter in sourced pipeline, and ON24 is really helping power that.”
RYAN MCCURDY
HEAD OF DEMAND GENERATION, LACEWORK
Scalable digital experiences with bingeable content for various personas
Lacework ended the contract with its previous webinar software vendor and purchased ON24 Webcast Elite to help build up a webinar program. Implementation was seamless.
“I used ON24 at a prior company called Druva, then before that at FireEye,” McCurdy said. “Setup and onboarding were easy compared to with our previous provider.”
Lacework uses the ON24 platform for its monthly, live thought leadership webinar series. These digital experiences could be a lead’s first touch with Lacework, and help the company connect with prospects and customers about their pain points through content geared toward various personas.
“These webinars drive significant registration numbers. For example, we have a webinar coming up, and we’ll probably have about 400 people on,” McCurdy said. “The out-of-the-box reminder emails that ON24 provides help us convert more registrants to attendees.”
Lacework uses ON24 features such as the ability for webinar attendees to open up an asset (for example, a PDF) and have a conversation or book a product demo from there. The company also uses chat and video on its webinars to create a unique and enriching experience.
ON24 enables Lacework to educate its audience on pain points in the industry. The organization uses video in its webinars to provide quick company overviews as well as live or recorded product demos. The prospect experience is one of Lacework’s favorite things about ON24.
“Being able to put one of your key personas into a branded space where they can binge your content is ON24’s sweet spot. I could never do that with my previous vendor,” McCurdy said.
Using ON24’s registration source tracking report, Lacework can also track which sales reps are driving registrations to each webinar, and which registrants actually attend.
“If you want a great webinar experience that scales, ON24 is clearly it. Everything from the experiences you can create, to the ways you can set up and manage your content, to the analytics you get—you have control. You don’t get that with a lot of other providers,” McCurdy said.
Once a webinar ends, Lacework uses the on-demand recording in its nurture streams. Sharing the content gives the company an excellent opportunity to reach out and stay relevant to new prospects, current opportunities and even customers.
Lacework has seen 30% quarter-over-quarter growth in webinar-driven pipeline and $1.1 million in sourced pipeline in Q2 of 2020 from ON24 webinars.
“We know the webinar quality is good and the engagement is good. People who attend our webinars stay on for most of the time,” McCurdy said.
Lacework now gets 250 registrations per webinar with ON24, up from 30 registrations prior to switching vendors, as well as a 69% registration to attendee conversion rate. The company produces 3+ webinars per quarter, up from 1 previously.
“We’ll soon be expanding our number of webinars per month as we’re starting to become more verticalized, which should increase pipeline as well,” McCurdy said. “Being able to execute and scale is where ON24 really shines.”
“Being able to put one
of your key personas into a branded space where they can binge on your content is ON24’s sweet spot.”
RYAN MCCURDY
HEAD OF DEMAND GENERATION, LACEWORK
