A Software-as-a-Service company such as Mimecast has a very broad product offering. Mimecast covers a whole host of services that would normally require dozens of point solutions: firewall; Denial of Service mitigration appliances; disclaimer management; anti-spam; anti-phishing; clustered hot-standby mail server; archiving; discovery; email storage management; attachment policy enforcement; encryption in transit; data leak prevention…..

It is very difficult for someone to grasp the breadth and depth of a service offering like this. To assist a clear succinct message that grabs the listener’s imagination and is told with belief and passion is needed.

The job of the evangelist is to connect with ‘the community’ sell a clear vision to solve some form of issue you have today. This vision isn’t just snake oil, the evangelist will typically have a technical background with extensive domain and vertical market knowledge.

By connecting with the community, a feedback loop is created and the evangelist actively illicits feedback, correcting misconstrued or incorrect information about the product and providing the organisation valuable information about how the product is used and perceived in the real world.

So how does the evangelist engage with the community? - the answer to that question is proactively. The evangelist must demonstrate his credibility by actively participating - blogging, podcasting, contributing to forum discussions, creating customer communities.

This isn’t about a sales pitch, this is about embodying an approach to a problem and way of thinking about things - this is about providing thought leadership and trying to move the industry forward - it is not about simply shipping product.

So here begins the gospel according to Mimecast

My role within Mimecast will be changing as from today.

Until now I have been the Product Manager for Mimecast’s unified email management service, but I have been spending more and more time on the Product Marketing aspects of the job - giving briefings to the press and analysts; working on copy for the marketing department and fulfilling speaker slots at trade shows.

With Mimecast’s rapid 300% year-on-year growth it is impossible to keep up this level of engagement and also still remain an effective Product Manager so the CEO and CTO have created the position of Chief Product Evangelist which will allow me to focus my efforts in shaping, understanding and communicating the value of the Mimecast service to internal staff, channel partners, customers and prospects.