Kelley Rayborn Hill has spent more than two decades in cybersecurity marketing, starting as a coordinator at Tripwire in 2004 before moving into OT security at Claroty, where she has worked for seven years and now serves as Senior Director of Brand.
She oversees brand, creative, and thought leadership for a company that has grown from eighty people to seven hundred. In this conversation, we talk about what works, what gets cut, and what most vendors know but won’t say in public: that they are selling the feeling of security, not the outcome.
You started in criminal psychology and ended up in cybersecurity marketing. How does that happen?
I was really focused on criminal psychology at college — completely different from marketing altogether. Then a job opened at Tripwire for a marketing coordinator who would also support the CEO, Gene Kim. I never thought in a million years they would want me, but they did, and I stayed for twelve!
I loved my time at Tripwire, and the culture was fantastic. The company was growing, but acquisitions change things, so I started looking around at other companies.
Katherine Brocklehurst was the one who recruited me to Claroty. She said take a look, it’s a young company, but I think you’ll be excited about it, and you’ll have real room to grow.
So, I looked into it and realized Claroty protected things that were mission-critical – MRI machines, industrial control systems, the electric grid. That felt different from change management and remediation. We’re protecting things that save lives.
We were a team of eighty people when I joined. We are seven hundred now, and we hired two hundred and fifty of them in a single year after COVID. Keeping brand coherent through that kind of growth is its own challenge.
You joined Claroty before COVID. How has the way buyers evaluate cybersecurity vendors shifted since?
Five, even ten years ago, people bought on brand. They heard the brand value from the company, they thought they probably needed the product, so they bought it. Today, though, people rely more on what their peers say.
The questions buyers are asking have changed. People have moved away from asking whether they need a certain functionality to asking whether the solution will actually work in their environment. And that’s a huge shift, right? People want to make sure that they’re not buying a ton of tools that don’t integrate. They want more of a one-stop-shop.
There’s no single company that does everything, but buyers are definitely moving away from chasing the big brand names and toward what their peers are telling them actually works.
Where are those peer conversations happening? How do buyers find each other?
At Claroty, we launched Nexus, a thought leadership conference built to create that space for open, meaningful dialogue. Once a year, we bring together over three hundred and fifty senior practitioners for a thought leadership conference – and we don’t talk a lick about our product.
Instead, they talk about their pains, and how they’re using other products. They might even talk about our competitors. The point is that we give them a safe space. Under Chatham House Rules, they speak candidly about the challenges they’re facing and learn from how others are addressing them. Bringing people together without the pressure of being sold to creates a more meaningful, productive conversation.
Beyond building a community, what other tactics are working?
Account-based, targeted campaigns. We moved away from mass outreach toward what we’re calling the CPS 3500 list — a focused set of companies we want to build relationships with. One-to-one campaigns work when you do the homework.
We’re using Gemini to build deep account profiles so that before anyone makes a call or sends an email, they actually know the company. Instead of doing a product push, we do a solution push. We want to be able to say: “I know you have this issue, and I know I’m going to help you. Sometimes that means we’re not even talking about Claroty; we might be asking whether they’ve mapped out a five-year security strategy.
Practitioner-led content is the other thing. It’s the voice of the customer, not the voice of Claroty. We also do a lot of webinars, and ours run at somewhere between fifty and seventy-five percent attendance.
How are you using AI to create content? And then how do you verify the quality of that content?
We’re in a good position because we have a dedicated AI team – that we call the AI companions – that introduces and evaluates technologies for us. Personally, I still prefer to write my own content because I want to be deliberate and thoughtful about the message we put out.
As much as it’s easy to push a button and type in some prompts to have an AI feed back a bunch of data, we have to be very careful. It’s not 100% perfect. So, I’m always skeptical. A lot of our marketing team is skeptical because we don’t want people to think that all of our product briefs are created by AI or something like that. We still have writers, we still have a hefty and fruitful marketing team. We don’t use it as much as people might think – yet
I’ve experimented with things like slide creation, but one of the challenges is that the output often doesn’t meet our brand standards. As Senior Director of Brand, I have to be the one making sure people aren’t taking AI-generated slides into client meetings that don’t meet our brand standards. We’ve had that happen. The logo comes out wrong, the colours are off, the messaging drifts. We have clear processes and guardrails in place to ensure anything developed internally meets our quality and brand expectations before it goes any further.
Getting product and engineering teams to contribute to marketing is a perpetual challenge. What actually works?
The biggest shift we made was to stop aligning on the product and start aligning on the problem. A lot of teams go in and talk about the features and functionalities of a product, and that’s how they want to take it to market.
We look on the adverse side and say: what is the customer problem, and how do you align with that problem? And then we build our product based on the answer.
We also have a really great research team, Team 82, so we let them be our voice. Marketing doesn’t write their content for them; they just edit it. We let the research team tell us how they want us to tell the story.
The other thing is incentives. Obviously, engineers don’t have an incentive to build marketing content for us. So, how do we pay them back? Sometimes it’s travel, sometimes it’s bringing them along to show their product in person. At RSA this year we built a mini lab where our team could come and demonstrate live, hands-on, how they hack into a patient monitor or an airport intercom system. That’s exciting for them.
Which marketing outcomes actually influence revenue? And what gets budget despite having an unclear impact on growth?
The things that work are the small, more intimate, regional things – like a dinner, an event, a road show, things like that. They always get funded because it gives sales face time with prospects, and the numbers show.
Brand is always harder, and I’ve dealt with this my entire career. The big events, the RSAs, they’re expensive and noisy and there are always people internally who wonder whether the money is worth it. But I fight for it, because if we’re not there, our competitors are, and our prospects will buy from them. We must show up as strong as the companies with far bigger marketing budgets.
The way we’ve handled that at Claroty is to stop trying to compete on the show floor. For the past five years, we’ve gone guerrilla at RSA. We don’t rent a booth, we rent a space nearby and brand the heck out of it. Then we invite all our customers and all of our prospects up there and host entertainment, activations, lunch and learns – the kind of activities that keep them engaged.
That approach means we don’t have to deal with the noise of the show floor, we don’t have to try to outdo companies with much larger marketing budgets.
What’s the uncomfortable truth about cybersecurity marketing that most vendors won’t say out loud?
Most companies are selling you the feeling of security, not the security outcome. Organisations keep buying tools, and breaches still happen. At some point, buyers have to step back and ask whether their stack is actually reducing risk or just making them feel covered.
In OT, compliance requirements have historically been less consistent and less enforced than in IT. In IT, compliance drove enormous amounts of purchasing because people had to buy to meet a standard. In OT, that same level of pressure is still emerging, which makes it a more challenging sell. You’re asking organizations to invest in securing systems that, in many cases, were never designed with security in mind—and often without a clear regulatory mandate forcing action.
I also think a lot of the AI-powered security thing is mostly noise right now. That said, it’s going to be fast, and it’s going to be furious, and we’re all in for a ride. So I think we should just embrace it, educate ourselves on it, and be at the forefront of it – because if you don’t, you’ll get left behind.
Kelley Rayborn Hill is Senior Director of Brand at Claroty, the OT and CPS cybersecurity company. She has spent over twenty years in the industry, including twelve at Tripwire, and leads brand, creative, and thought leadership strategy for Claroty’s global marketing organization.
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