Raaz Herzberg on Building Enterprise Brand Without Pipeline Metrics

Pipeline Numbers Are a Lie You Tell Yourself

Raaz Herzberg has a theory that should terrify every board member reviewing marketing dashboards: the numbers mean nothing. Not just a little. Nothing.

Every marketing leader that was ever fired had green numbers on his pipeline. You put a target, you hit the target, you're not selling, right? So the team is frustrated. So the numbers also don't mean something when they're good. So the numbers are just not the way to quantify it.

— Raaz Herzberg

This isn't nihilism. It's pattern recognition from someone who scaled Wiz from employee number 10 to a multi-billion-dollar ARR juggernaut as one of the first product managers, then CMO. She's watched attribution models become religious texts at other companies while walking into cold rooms where prospects have never heard of you—despite perfect MQL-to-SQL ratios on a slide deck somewhere.

Her alternative? Trust the temperature of the room. If security teams at RSA lean in when you say "Wiz," your brand is working. If they glaze over, no pipeline dashboard will save you. She learned this the hard way in the company's earliest days when they pitched network security under the name Beyond Networks. CISOs said things were "interesting" and they'd "love to talk again." Classic buyer politeness masquerading as traction.

We were kind of convincing ourselves that it was something they were interested in. And we got feedback like, oh, it's interesting, we'd love to talk again, but we couldn't get to that next step. I felt like that was a big learning of a mistake where we were kind of trying to push something hard without really feeling the pullback, but we were maybe convincing ourselves a bit that we were feeling the pullback.

— Raaz Herzberg

The pivot to cloud security—what Wiz is today—came when they stopped convincing themselves the metrics looked good and started listening to what wasn't being said. Friction isn't something you push through with better enablement decks. It's a signal to move.

Millions in ARR Before Hiring a Single Salesperson

Most enterprise startups celebrate their first $1M ARR quarter. Wiz was closing millions per hour before they hired their first sales rep. Herzberg was doing legal terms and conditions. She Googled how to create an invoice. The product-market fit was so violent that traditional go-to-market infrastructure became an afterthought.

Three forces converged: Wiz solved cloud security, a massive problem that got exponentially bigger when COVID pushed every enterprise into AWS and Azure overnight. Time-to-value was 15 minutes in a category where competitors required months-long deployments. And the "before Wiz and after Wiz moment" was so clear to security teams that the product sold itself.

The combination of having very short time to value, being very easy to deploy, and solving a very big problem, like solving cloud security, and Wiz started at the beginning of COVID so it was even a bigger problem than it ever was before because everybody were moving even faster to the cloud.

— Raaz Herzberg

Herzberg, co-founder Inan, and CTO Ami owned deals directly in those first two years. Every major customer had a founder in the room. She's never lost a deal at Wiz—not because she's a savant closer, but because she approaches every conversation like her imposter syndrome might finally be exposed. One prospect a year and a half in had already deployed a competitor. She couldn't convince them in a 30-minute call. She was devastated. She spent two years getting that logo. She got it.

The lesson isn't "founders should do sales longer." It's that when product-market fit is this strong, the machinery of sales—territories, quotas, pipeline stages—can wait. What can't wait is making sure no early signal gets ignored because it didn't fit a forecast model.

Hire People Who Don't Want to Be Marketers

Herzberg's hiring philosophy for marketing is to avoid hiring marketers. Or at least, avoid people who self-identify primarily as marketing experts versed in the lexicon of MQLs, nurture streams, and intent data.

I'm not a marketing expert. I know very little about marketing. My only marketing ever role has been as part of Wiz. I don't think I could do marketing at any other company. I think it comes from really, really knowing the domain, really knowing the customers, really knowing the pain points, really knowing the tech, really knowing the before and after that brings organizations.

— Raaz Herzberg

She studied computer science at one of Israel's top technical universities while simultaneously studying art at the country's best art school. She likes everything. She finds everything interesting. That intellectual promiscuity is the through-line in her career, not a devotion to any single craft. What drives her is working with people she looks up to—domain doesn't matter.

This explains why she initially thought product marketing meant "the team that writes the blogs when you launch something." She asked her now-head of PMM, Zhang, if her job was writing blogs. Zhang is now someone Herzberg calls "the smartest woman on this planet," but that early ignorance revealed something: Herzberg had spent her entire career on the engineering and product side, never go-to-market. Product marketing was a foreign animal. She's since learned it's the hinge between what you build and why anyone should care—but she came to that understanding by building the thing first, not by reading the Pragmatic Marketing Framework.

The advantage of not knowing marketing is you're not bound by its conventions. You don't default to the playbook. You ask, "What are we trying to solve?" Then you use any channel imaginable to solve it. Marketing becomes a creative execution problem, not a compliance exercise.

A Wizard of Oz Booth and the Permission to Be Weird

RSA Conference is the Super Bowl of cybersecurity. Every vendor gets a 5x5 meter booth. Everything is gray, blue, dark, scary. Enterprise serious. Herzberg's first major marketing decision as CMO was to build a Wizard of Oz booth. Big hot air balloon. Yellow brick road. Actors from San Francisco dressed as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man. It cost $400 in actor fees on top of booth space they'd already paid for. Doing something yellow and weird didn't cost more than doing it black and boring.

The risk wasn't financial. It was reputational. She'd just taken the marketing role. People inside Wiz were watching to see what she'd do. She didn't ask a lot of people for their opinion. She rolled with it. The booth generated 4x more leads than the same size space the previous year. Everyone came to see what that company was. It didn't say anything except "Wiz" on a booth.

That taught me a bit about not doing things the classic way, trusting your gut, not being afraid to be different. And it taught me that lesson that that's okay in marketing. It's not that okay in product, by the way. But in marketing, it's fine because let's say that this booth would've been the weirdest thing ever. Okay, I would've never done it again and people would've rolled their eyes at me, but there's no harm there for good or something. I'm not ruining something.

— Raaz Herzberg

This gets at a deeper asymmetry between product and marketing. In product, every decision is forever. You allocate the most expensive resource—engineering time—to build something. If only 2% of customers use it, but one of them is a Fortune 10 company, it's in the product forever. Every future feature has to account for that thing. Mistakes compound. In marketing, mistakes evaporate. Attention is fleeting. What was interesting today is forgotten tomorrow. You can try anything.

That freedom is why she loves marketing now, despite knowing so little about it when she started. You think of something creative, execute it, measure the temperature of the room. If it doesn't work, you do something else tomorrow. No technical debt. No legacy maintenance.

Brand Is What You Can't Measure and What Actually Matters

Ask Herzberg what's underrated in enterprise marketing and she'll say brand. Not billboards on the San Francisco highway. Not logo slaps at conferences. Brand as in: any effort that makes your company seem deeply knowledgeable or expert in the domain to your audience. It's very hard to measure. She has no way of tying it back to a number. She doesn't care.

This is heresy in a world of multi-touch attribution and pipeline waterfalls. But her logic is airtight: the numbers don't tell you when things are good, either. Every fired marketing leader had green pipeline numbers. Attribution models differ so wildly across companies that board members are comparing apples to novels. You can build a team obsessed with a number and still walk into cold rooms where no one knows who you are.

Brand works like buying a phone. You don't compare specs. You just know what you're buying because you've absorbed, over time, that it's the best one. Enterprise software isn't different. It's still people making decisions.

I think people buy things. And at the end of the day, I think enterprise is also people buying things. It's a person at the end that buys something. And the brand matters a lot.

— Raaz Herzberg

Wiz spends effort on things that can't be quantified. They build brand by proving expertise, by making security teams feel like Wiz understands their world better than anyone else. When the brand is working, you feel it. You don't walk into cold rooms anymore. Prospects lean in. Deals close faster. The sales team isn't frustrated.

Herzberg still feels like an imposter every day. She's paranoid about everything. She's never complacent. That nervousness is the fuel. She's meeting six or seven customers today at the Wiz offices—conversations she's had tens of thousands of times. She's still nervous. She's done thousands of deals and never lost one, but she's always afraid it will happen. That fear, married to a refusal to worship metrics that don't predict outcomes, is what built a $30 billion brand in enterprise. Not pipeline dashboards. Not attribution models. Just knowing the domain, trusting your gut, and being willing to put a yellow brick road in a sea of gray booths.