Seclore, a leader in data-centric security, was founded over a decade ago with a laser-focused mission: to protect sensitive data wherever it goes, so that companies could collaborate with partners and customers without jeopardizing the loss of valuable intellectual property.
Seclore was founded in India but moved its headquarters to Santa Clara, California in 2022 after closing a $27 million series C round led by Origami Capital and Oquirrh Ventures to expand its presence in North America. Seclore’s business and ambitions were growing, but its marketing team was still small.
Another marketing challenge faced by Seclore was the uniqueness of their solution. While traditional cybersecurity controls aim to safeguard data by protecting an arbitrary perimeter, Seclore has developed a security layer that’s applied directly to sensitive digital assets. Seclore believes legacy solutions fail to protect data when sent from one organization to another, creating a data-security gap that’s not always easy to acknowledge or explain. In contrast, Seclore gives companies comprehensive visibility and strict control over files, wherever they go.
The Challenge: Selling Data Security Products in Sophisticated Markets with a Small Marketing Team
“We were trying to grow our business in the semiconductor industry and needed more product marketing help, but we didn’t have a product marketing function, and we didn’t have the bandwidth to start hiring product marketers,” says Isaac Roybal, CMO at Seclore. “We could have just hired content writers, but marketing to the semiconductor industry requires expertise that most content writers simply don’t have.”
Roybal’s background included product marketing, but as CMO, he found his attention taken up by lead generation and branding. “I was already familiar with Ian” — Ian Hameroff, founder and CEO of Fulcrum Group — “from our time together in product marketing at Microsoft. So to bring someone who I knew and could trust was a top-notch product marketer who could bring in true product marketing expertise — that really helped the flywheel get going.”
When Seclore was finally able to hire a Product Marketer at Seclore, Fulcrum was able to jump right in and support them “Because we’re a small team, we sometimes don’t have the in-house expertise to both service this global audience and provide the level of detail that security professionals in these industries have come to expect,” Jeff Spencer, global director of product and content marketing at Seclore. “That’s why we try to leverage the expertise of trusted agencies like Fulcrum to help fill those gaps in expertise”
Enter Fulcrum Group
Fulcrum’s first project included market research and developing sales enablement materials for Seclore’s partnership with Symantec.
“We do a lot of business through channel partners and resellers,” says Jeff. “We often partner with companies in related areas such as data loss prevention (DLP), cloud access security brokers (CASB), and these are companies like Broadcom, Symantec, and Forcepoint. These are large companies who have identified digital rights management as a gap in their product offering. They’ve partnered with Seclore to provide that solution.”
“Fulcrum’s work on a solution brief for Symantec helped our channel efforts at a critical time,” says Spencer. “We were very happy with Fulcrum’s work on this project.”
“Working with Fulcrum is a pretty seamless process,” says Isaac. “They know all the basics of product marketing, and they came in with a lot of ideas.”
Fulcrum Group Helps Seclore Market Its Solutions in a Complex Industry
The semiconductor industry relies on secure collaboration. Chip design companies need a way to share their work securely with chip fabrication companies and other suppliers without years of proprietary research and design being compromised through data leaks. Leaks enable competitors to sell knock-off products that erode sales and jeopardize competitive advantage. Data leaks and illicit copying are a major problem: 55% of semiconductor companies have discovered knockoffs of their products available for sale.
Seclore’s sales and marketing teams have known for a long time that, by using Seclore’s data-centric security platform, semiconductor companies could share their designs with significantly greater confidence that sensitive data would not be intentionally or accidentally leaked to outsiders. But before launching a new marketing campaign targeting semiconductor companies, Seclore’s marketing team wanted to ensure they had their product marketing strategy and tactics in place.
So again, they reached out to Fulcrum Group. Fulcrum researched the semiconductor industry and interviewed Seclore subject matter experts. Then Fulcrum developed a narrative framework laying out how Seclore should tell the story of how they solve critical data security problems for companies in this industry. The narrative framework takes into account the key concerns of potential buyers. It offers clear, direct language for conveying Seclore’s benefits and how the Seclore solution stands out from products offered by competitors. Then, working from this narrative framework, Fulcrum developed two cornerstone assets: a landing page for semiconductor companies and a pitch deck for the Seclore sales teams. Then, given the semiconductor market’s growing interest in AI both as a driver for demand and as a potential vector for data leakage, Seclore asked Fulcrum to develop a thought leadership white paper about the importance of data security.
“Working with Fulcrum helped us scale our product marketing with the [Fulcrum]’s Product Marketing as a Service (PMMaaS) offering,” Isaac says. “It gave us the full gamut of product marketing capabilities all the way from market research and definition to messaging to writing content that supported our go-to-market strategy.”
“Fulcrum did an incredible job,” says Jeff, “and that’s impressive because Seclore is a relatively complicated technology, and the semiconductor industry is a particularly nuanced industry, and the way you guys were able to navigate that was really world-class.”
Fulcrum Helps Seclore Drive More Business
Fulcrum’s Product Marketing as a Service gave Seclore the marketing help it needed for its semiconductor industry campaign while also supporting the company’s sales organization.
“Fulcrum has really helped on our demand-gen side by giving us top-notch assets we can make available for download on our website,” says Isaac. “It has also helped us with sales enablement. When we look at all these things in aggregate, it’s really helped us increase our pipeline and drive more business. In marketing, our job is to bring the right horse to the watering hole and make them as thirsty as possible, and Fulcrum has definitely helped us do that.”
“The semiconductor page is one of our better performing pages, not only in terms of time on page, but also because it’s climbing in search results,” says Jeff. “We’re also seeing visits from companies we’re really excited about in the semiconductor industry.”
Seclore’s Assessment of Fulcrum: “World Class”
Seclore’s marketing team appreciated the focus, experience, and drive that Fulcrum Group brought to their marketing work for Seclore.
“Fulcrum did an outstanding job not only listening to what we at Seclore wanted, but also driving the deliverables and making them useful, relevant, and highly compelling for this industry,” Jeff says. “What I think in particular makes Fulcrum world class is the way they helped me refine and improve the deliverables we had requested as part of this engagement.”
Jeff continues: “One of the most important points for me, as someone on a very lean marketing team, was that these aren’t just tremendous assets for this specific industry, this work now serves as a template we can use for other industries. It also helped us build trust cross-functionally that the marketing organization is going to deliver high-quality assets that are going to help us achieve our goals.”
He adds, “A lot of marketing is not just to customers, but internally, too. You’re trying to get people excited and engaged, and when we deliver high-quality content like this, it doesn’t just serve the purpose of bringing more customers to our door; it also serves the purpose of people here getting more excited about what we’re selling.”
Jeff especially appreciated the work Fulcrum did researching and writing the white paper on AI. “Fulcrum really went above and beyond with a white paper they wrote for us about AI in the semiconductor industry,” he says. “It was interesting to take some of the foundational material Fulcrum had already developed and combine it with all things we had learned about an emerging space in AI, particularly around the risks and potential of public and private large language models. The result is a white paper that’s going to be a thought leadership piece for us as well as a cornerstone asset for demand generation.”
“I really look forward to working with Fulcrum again,” Jeff says. “We absolutely intend to work with them on future projects.”
“And I would absolutely recommend Fulcrum to other B2B tech companies,” he adds. “I think their ability to become experts in complicated and nuanced technologies and markets is really unparalleled.”