Description

On today's show and the theme of The CRO Series we will be discussing topics like; Rev Ops, Cx, GTM, Functional Alignment, Metrics that Matter, Pipeline / Forecasting, Digital Strategies and Digital Transformation. Again, we promise to give you actionable insights from our guests who are tenured and experienced CRO’s who come from high growth SaaS companies.

Today we have Christopher Bray, CRO at Aura, who has an illustrious career spanning many decades in Dell, McAfee, Symantec, Cylance and now at Aura. We welcome him to the show.

We kick off by asking Christopher about his journey, and what has led him to where he is today?

• Grew up in more than one culture
• Learnt how to make friends quickly
• Global role for most of his career
• Started in Europe, South Africa and then the US
• Dell in Southern Africa
• It is so diverse
• Learnt how to think on his feet
• Malware and threats
• Aura as a brand is new
• The technology isn't
• Taking technology and pulling them together

Next we ask Christopher, what does the CRO role mean to him?

• Multiple functions
• Marketing team
• Engineering team
• Customer facing team
• Account management
• Project Management

Who is Aura and how are they helping the world?

• Protecting consumers
• Identity and privacy
• Device security
• Informative, engaging and empowering
• AI
• Product does the thinking for you

We ask Christopher what are the next big plans for Aura?

• An exciting acquisition coming up
• Very disruptive in the marketplace
• Fun and exciting culture to be a part of

Next we ask Christopher how they are structured and what markets do they operate in?

• Market segmentation approach
• Partnership
• Layer of security
• Enterprise sales
• Understanding performance marketing
• Partner Sales
• Diverse background beyond pure sales
• Patience of long sales cycles
• Appreciation of how to drive performance KPIs

We then ask Christopher, do they invest heavily on the support/ onboarding side?

• Yes
• Partner Solutions

Next we ask Christopher, could he tell us about how they begin the process to inform the direction for the year ahead?

• We can unpack this for hours
• Really strong ops team
• Strong relationship with finance
• Account by account basis
• Stack right
• Scenario planning
• Transition to Google Suite
• Multi-tab spreadsheets
• Alignment

We ask Christopher, do they have competitors or are they dominating?

• Depends..
• They see us as competitors
• We stand apart

Last but not least, we ask Christopher, what he feels is his super power?

• Building phenomenal high performance teams
• Solving complex business problems
• The best ideas don't always come from headquarters
• Learnt very early on that you should understand your people super power
• We don't have a price list