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How To Effectively Use Metrics and Data in Marketing
00:46:56
On this episode, Ash Parikh, CMO of Trellix, discusses the importance of metrics and data in marketing, including website visitor numbers, click-to-open rates, and share of voice. He emphasizes the need for transparency, trustworthiness, and responsible security in building a brand. Ash also shares his approach to marketing transformations at different stages of a company's growth, highlighting the importance of understanding business goals and target personas. He discusses the balance between AI tools and maintaining a human touch in marketing, as well as the use of AI-powered Martech to improve marketing efficiency.
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- [00:00]
Jeremy
You mentioned this concept of brandgen as an evolution of traditional branding.
- [00:05]
Ash Parikh
Quite this term internally, I'm sure there's a. That term exists elsewhere. Brand gen with an eye on generating demand, generating engagement, and generating those relationships with the people you want to get to. It's one thing to be a cmo, it's another thing to be an operational cmo. If you do not have a handle on your data, you do not have a handle on your metrics, you're not operational in your mindset, you're going to miss out. And you know, when, when things get rough, guess which part of marketing gets stuck or gets scrutinized the most? It's the. It's the parts where you cannot actually draw a straight line from where you invested to what the ROI was.
- [00:47]
Jeremy
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show Marketing Trends. I'm super excited. This particular guest is like, I think it's over a year in the making. We had amazing human booked things, shifted his schedule, our schedule, and it's been at least a year, maybe more. We've got him. We've got him in the virtual studio. And today we're diving into the world of cybersecurity marketing with a guest who's been shaking things up in the tech industry for over two decades. Now. Imagine a company that's like the superhero team of the cyber world battling digital villains with an AI powered master power, right? Like an AI powered shield. That's Trellix in a nutshell, right? And steering their marketing epic starship, if you will, is none other than Ash Parikh, the Chief Marketing Officer. Now, Ash, you've been described as a no fluff marketer with a knack for turning tech jargon into compelling stories. You and I have had time to talk a few times before this conversation. And before we unpack the cyber universe of Trellix, why don't you give our listeners the inside scoop. What's cooking in the Trellix labs and how are you as the CMO translating that into a language that doesn't require a PhD in computer science?
- [02:16]
Ash Parikh
It is absolutely serendipitous that we are here together. Right? We've been trying this for almost a year, as you said, and it's my pleasure, it's truly my pleasure for being here, so thank you for having me. What's cooking in the Trellix labs? A lot. I mean, Trellix is one of those. I just fell in love with this company when I heard about it and I was being talked about. As far as this company is concerned, it was introduced to me and I went back into the heritage of the company. This is two amazing big leaders in the company, in the industry coming together. McAfee and FireEye. McAfee Enterprise and FireEye. I mean, if you really think about what Trellix does today, step back and think about the problem, right? There are more digital cyber threats coming at us, you and I. Working from home is not making it easier. So remote workers are on the upward trend, right? Everything is potentially in the cloud, right? And disparately in disparate locations, right? So spread out and there are silos everywhere as far as technologies are concerned. Just look at marketing, right? I've lost count about the number of gen AI technologies that are out there in Martech. Forget about in the cybersecurity space, which is much bigger. So we have a lot of silos, a lot of complexity. But what you really want to do is, at the end of the day, think about that, Jeremy. You do not want to be hurt by a cyber threat. You want to pick it up earlier and detect it earlier and from anywhere, wherever it's coming. The device that I have right here that I'm speaking to you through, stuff from the cloud, stuff from the network, right? It could come from anywhere. We want to cache those alerts early, make sure that we can actually separate out false positives and false negatives and make sure we can actually make some sense out of them and then ladder it up to a chief information security officer or security analyst and tell them that is the one you want to go after. And we are doing that with intelligence. It's not just Genai. We've been doing this, we doing machine learning. We've been doing threat intelligence for decades now. And that's what we do, right? We basically look for that little, little nugget of information, that needle in a haystack, make sure we go after it and make sure you're not hit by any threats that are out there.
- [04:24]
Jeremy
Something I really appreciate about you, and I've picked this up whenever we've connected before is, well, one. I mean, you have deep experience in the space of demand gen of growth and marketing and tech. I mean, it's epic to see your, you know, the resume by which you've been building for the past couple decades. And when I have an opportunity to connect with someone like you, it's like a. It's like a masterclass in, you know, in demand gen. And something that I want to ask you about, because you talked about this interconnectedness of brand and demand gen, you emphasized that a couple of times. And I, I really want you to elaborate on this because you mentioned this concept of brandgen as an evolution of traditional branding. Can, can you elaborate on how this approach differs from conventional brand building, especially in the cybersecurity sector?
- [05:12]
Ash Parikh
Absolutely. So I think you're pulling one of the main principles that I have that I'm working towards. A book, as I'd shared with you earlier, is basically a handbook for an operational cmo. And I've cherry picked those words as well because it's one thing to be a cmo, it's another thing to be an operational cmo. My own background or my experience has been that I've been at a public company that went private. I joined a startup which was extremely high growth and then I've joined a company which is private equity owned, public company coming together and becoming a private company. So all these experiences, what stood out for me was if you do not have a handle on your data, you do not have a handle on your metrics. If you're not operational in your mindset, you're going to miss out. And that revolving door that we talk about from a CMO perspective, a CMO leaves every one year or two years, whatever that might be. The reason is, if not because of his or her own volition, then there's a problem there that you really have not mastered your data. And I'm coming to the question that you asked me a second ago about brand. That's exactly how I think about brand ads and the corporate marketing space, et cetera. It's evolved. It is no longer fascinating to put an ad, say on a F1 car or say basically on a Super bowl ad, right? The afterthought after all that is, you know, hey, how much of this have you actually invested in your customer experience, in your customer engagement? Have you actually made your buyer's journey that much less friction. Frictionful, right. More seamless on your website? You could have absolutely used the money that you spent on that. Now don't get me wrong, branding is amazing. That's exactly why I created this or coined this term internally. I'm sure there's a term exist elsewhere, brand gen with an eye on generating demand, generating engagement and generating those relationships with the people you want to get to. That's when you do branding around that with thought, leadership and great content. That's when you actually convert that, you know, good old traditional branding to brand generation. And I think that's absolutely important because I'll step back and tell you this, right? I have to stand in front of boards. I've got to stand in front of my executive team and say, hey, this is the ROI on every single dollar that I've spent. And when things get rough, guess which part of marketing gets cut or gets scrutinized the most. It's the parts where you cannot actually draw a straight line from where you invested to what the ROI was. And how do people measure roi? The amount of pipeline, the amount of revenue or logos that you brought in, the people that you engage, you made a difference as far as business is concerned. So that is why I basically like using the term brand and I also push the team towards. Listen, I love branding. You have to brand, you have to do whatever you need to to bring people in because it reduces the friction for sales. Imagine if the sales organization has to go out every single time. It's yeah, I'm from Trellix, but what if they already knew who Trellix was but not just who knew who Trellix was, but had a meaning and kind of a definition behind it. Trellix stands for being the ally for chief information security officers around the world. Now that means something. Now that's a brand I can live for.
- [08:31]
Jeremy
I love it. And I'm sure there are many executive leaders that appreciate you. You know, the scrappy, you know, you're the scrappy full stack cmo. Right. And I love that you, you really lean towards how can we be innovative over and you know, instead of high budget traditional advertising like you said, F1 and some of these big things, how can we really focus on differentiating our position and messaging in a scrappy but innovative way? Right. And it's something you've done successfully. Is there a specific example that you can share from your time at Trellix where a creative cost effective approach yielded significant results?
- [09:09]
Ash Parikh
Excellent. So the team does a fantastic job putting a putting out two mind of Chief Information security Officer CISO surveys every year, survey and research. Now that research is very deep. It's excellently done and we basically then engaged with third party to create top hundred global CIS awards. So once that was in place, kind of engaged with the entire ecosphere as far as social media is concerned got almost 450. Almost 450 nominations as far as CISOs are concerned. Yeah. And what we did then, so this is where I mean you know brand gen and also it's less about Brand gen is thinking about the customer in once you do that, you know, the money flows, your business flows. So you always have to think about the Good first. And what's in it for the other person versus yourself? What we did with that, with those hundred winners from that, the best chief information security officers in the world, we plastered their names and their pictures on the NASDAQ tower and we honored them, we celebrated them and we were there by association. All right, so that is how you do a great cost effective campaign. And as a result of that, you actually, you're able to drive a lot of engagement. People have seen this, other chief information security officers have seen this and they also want to be aligned with the campaign. So that's one of the ways you would actually use your dollars.
- [10:32]
Jeremy
Well, the other thing that's connected to this, and you talked about this on our prep conversation last time and you mentioned this thing called handraisers and you present to the board, you present to your ELT all the time. And again, there's so much value you're bringing to the table, but you're also directing people to pay attention to the right thing versus look over here, look over there. And so you talked about this concept of hand raisers and the differentiation there. Can you get into that a little bit? Because it's fascinating.
- [11:00]
Ash Parikh
Thanks for bringing that up, Jeremy. Because I've actually walked into that concept almost, you know, over the years because it's always been around, Ash, stop talking about leads or CMO. Stop talking about MQLs. Forget about me. Every single CMO gets that pushback. It's not about raw leads because what sales is really looking for is, you know, when you draw that picture, it's one pipe, the marketing pipe and feeding into the sales pipe. It's a continuum. So when where we end sales begins, what that means is it's actually a handoff from marketing to sales. And what they are really looking for is people who have raised their hands and said, you know what, Ash, you know what? Dear sales team at Trellix, I want to be contacted. I basically am putting my hand up because I want to be engaged with in such and such way. I need more information about something, whatever that might be. So the concept of hand raisers is, yes, it is a lead, but it is a serious self qualified lead. Let me explain. So someone who's walking by a booth at a trade show and kind of comes by and picks up a T shirt of yours and it's, it's a wonderful experience. You've got to do more of that just to get people to be aware of your brand. Again, it's light brand gen, but you also have the other aspect of it with people actually spending those 20, 30 minutes with you at the booth looking through a demo, what do you believe is a higher engagement or a higher score as far as a lead is concerned?
- [12:22]
Jeremy
I mean that's to me, if they're stopping by and spending time, you know, and engaging at that level, that's pretty high.
- [12:27]
Ash Parikh
That's one example. Right, so that's just at trade shows. Now let's look at your website. Right? If the website doesn't have call to actions like a demo request or even in your chat bot. Hey, you know what? I really want to speak to someone about X, Y and Z. Not just I want to speak to someone, they qualify what exactly they want to speak about. Is there a solution? Is there an aspect of what you actually do, you know, products or solution areas, et cetera. The other thing could be a product tour. You could also have people hand raise in, raise their hands in webinars or virtual summits. We are basically a hybrid community now, right? We're doing a lot of stuff virtually. If people are asking a serious question, that becomes a very, very high lead score. Now these are the kind of things, but you can just leave it at that. Oh, he asked a question. Now what? Create a base within your infrastructure to basically have that one on one engagement with that, with that person who's asking questions. You can go back and forth, get them, get the lead followed up by MDRs who also have to be enabled in the right way. And finally hand over those hand raisers to your salespeople. So I have one dashboard which is just around MQLs. I have a separate dashboard just on hand raisers.
- [13:35]
Jeremy
Is there a CRO at Trellix? Is there someone that's like responsible for all sales?
- [13:40]
Ash Parikh
Excellent person. He's responsible for customer success. He's responsible for our sales. Yes.
- [13:45]
Jeremy
Okay, so talk about the relationship there in terms of like what's, what's, what's important, what's table stakes between the CMO and the CRO, as you know, sales and marketing alignment, we talk about that in lots of different ways. You seem to have, you know, an opinion and you have a strong opinion on how to align these two areas. But to me, the two leaders have to be on the same page. Are you sharing goals? Is there, is there a tug of war sometimes where you know, hey, we think this is more important. You think that's more important. How do you, how do you bridge that trust and that gap between you two? Two arguably two very important leaders driving growth and demand and top line. How does that work well? How have you navigated that? And how can other CMOs really tighten that bridge with their CROs?
- [14:30]
Ash Parikh
First time I met our CRO, I basically said, I'm here for you. I'm in this company for you. At the end of the day, we are all in the business of selling, absolutely down to the very last person. So I'm here at Trellix to basically help my sales team, everyone who's selling to basically do a better job, making it easier for them, less friction, getting them the right people, all that kind of good stuff. Now, the beauty of this is, I think, again, it's in my background that I used to be a salesperson. I used to carry a bag. I was a sales engineer. That was my. I believe that was my second, second job after my master's. I was a customer success rep before that. So I've kind of seen both sides of the coin, right? What, the frustrations of a customer and the frustrations of a salesperson every single quarter. I mean, unlike marketing or products or wherever else, a salesperson's life is so, so difficult. I mean, you celebrate one quarter when you've hit 140, 200 of your quarter, the very next day, the very first of that next quarter, first day of the next quarter, your clock goes back to zero. You got to prove yourself all over again, right? So they have to basically prioritize things that are of the highest value as far as making a difference to their bottom line and meeting their targets are concerned. So how can I become more of an alignment tool and vehicle so that I can actually help them do their job better? So what I've done is I've created a framework and because I sit right in the middle between a CEO who again, I call our Uber cmo, at a company, right? At the end of the day, it is. You have to make sure that the messaging and the positioning of the company are what's in the CEO's mind, right? That has to be the humility that a CMO actually needs to have. It cannot be an ego struggle. The second piece of it is how do you actually then map that to the products and the sales plays that the CRO really wants to run. Every CRO has a quota. Every CRO is also looked at. What are you doing for my specific product area? Be a single one trick pony or a single product company or multiple product company or a platform company like us. You still have to look at how you're doing across products. Now I, as a cmo have to do two Things I've got to market for products, but I've also got to do it in a way where I'm talking about solutions and addressing pains versus just doing speeds and feeds. As I talk about. Right. It's not about selling products, it's about selling value. It's about. About selling solutions. And by aligning my campaign so the framework goes from business outcomes, so that's the CEO's goal down to the sales place, the product level, sales place, and then finally the campaigns that we run at the marketing level. This is what I constantly use as a framework to kind of align with my sales leader. And it's beautiful. It works like a charm.
- [17:13]
Unknown
Is there like.
- [17:14]
Jeremy
Because I know that you look at data, you look at metrics, you look at things driving the business. There's some things I imagine that you're reacting to as a marketing leader. There's some things that you're thinking ahead. How important is it for you as the CMO to, you know, to is like, okay, I'm noticing this week or today, I'm. I'm reacting to way more things like, okay, I need to. I need to click into this strategy or this team and go deeper. Or is that how you like to set it up, where you kind of like to see the, you know, see the dashboard and understand, okay, I want to be able to tweak things and connect and develop you. You know, is there. Is there kind of a measured approach that you have to. To knowing, okay, when do you need to get involved? When do you need to trust your team? You know, when do you need to trust the direction that your leaders and their teams are going? And when do you need to actually step in and say, hey, guys, we got that wrong. We need to shift. How do you. How do you balance that? Because I imagine there's so much velocity and there's so much you could look at in terms of metrics and what's driving things. So how do you. Yeah, how do you balance that?
- [18:14]
Ash Parikh
As one more of my 10 points or 10 principles right here that I have written down. Thank you for bringing it up. So, first of all, I think it starts with a mindset, right? The way I've been mentoring my team and many of them think that way naturally is having a growth mindset. Always question your results. Make sure there are metrics for everything you do. Measure them often. And from my perspective, it's not about. At this point in your career, nobody wants to ever be how a micromanager looks, you know, breathing down your back or your neck. You really want certain metrics in place so that you can inspect what you can expect. So everything we do, whether it is a page that the product marketing manager creates and it's on the website, he or she would actually have specific kind of metrics that he or she has to look at every single week, month, whatever that might be. Have those dashboards ready for yourself. Work with the right growth marketing leaders within the, within the teams to make sure you have those metrics. Look at brand gen and look at. Let's look at thought leadership. Right. What is your share of voice On a quarterly basis, have those metrics ready. Always be looking, inspect what you're expecting. Have those metrics and data foundation ready so that you're not caught by surprise. I have a board deck which I Basically it's about 172 slides inside it right now and it's constantly, it's ready at any point in time. Having worked for many private equity owned companies by now, I know that my data has to be at my fingertips so I can just pull up any metric that I need. Maybe it takes five minutes to update something or one day or whatever, but it's there. I know what, at any point in time, I know what my website visitor numbers are, bounce rates are, what is the click to open rates for my top content. I know what the share of voice is from a thought leadership perspective and a brand perspective. So a lot of these metrics are absolutely at my fingertips so I don't have to go running and my team, the teams have learned that, you know, Ash is going to be looking for, for this. So let's actually make sure we have it ready in advance.
- [20:16]
Jeremy
How do you look at the metric or the data behind share of voice and thought leadership? Like what do you look at to indicate that you, you know, that you're, that you've got a strong share of voice and that you're, you're gaining ground there.
- [20:28]
Ash Parikh
Absolutely. So look, it is, it is definitely subjective. It depends on the way you slice and dice the problem statement and the definition. But what we try to do is are we the number one security platform in the world? Are we considered the number one security platform? There are different ways of looking at it. The social interactions, the engagement that you may have from various channels. Today, it's not just social media, it's all of the channels as well for the right kind of target Personas. Are you doing that with CISOs? Are you doing that with CIOs? We have different flavors of those metrics. Then we then compare that we actually use third party tools, et cetera and third party agencies to do this for us. But it is fair and we compare ourselves to the best of the best in the industry. And I'm proud to say we've been number one in the industry for many, many quarters now as far as a share of voice for being the leading AI powered security platform.
- [21:17]
Jeremy
Yeah, I noticed that there's been a lot of really cool PR on Trellix lately. One of the ones most recently which is exceptional is the US Department of Defense chose Trellix to protect millions of emails from zero day threats. Which is huge. Which is definitely a testament to the relationship that you have with the DoD Cloud and zero trust architecture and things like that. But I mean, what an incredible. I mean that's got to be quite the flex, right? If the U.S. department of Defense is saying, hey, we are trusting Trellix to protect millions and millions of emails, it's absolutely exceptional.
- [21:51]
Ash Parikh
Yeah, absolutely. I think not just the US Department of Defense, but I think generally the ecosphere at large. Look at what happened at the July 19 outage, right? The very first thing that I'll come back to what you just said around the Department of Defense and if you really go on our website, right on the homepage, we talk about responsible security and we talk about being trustworthy, we talk about being transparent, we talk about giving customers a choice and we give customers control over their own environments. That's exactly what blew up in our face as far as the July 19 situation happened. It could happen to anyone. It could absolutely happen to anyone. But what we offer is an elegant way of looking at things that listen, dear customer, no surprises. We'll make sure that you have all the transparency that you need. And we are responsible because that's how we built our platform. So there's a way to actually message these things and the way to actually stand behind your customers. So to your point, it's not just dod, it's, I mean we've been bringing down tons and tons. Certain things I can't even talk about because it's top secret. Right. But we are absolutely at the beck and call of making sure of all agencies to make sure that, you know, you and I, the common individual, is absolutely safe from a cyber perspective.
- [23:04]
Jeremy
And just for those who aren't aware and correct me on this, Ash, on July 19th, this was the Crowdstrike issued this update to host devices. I think it was a Falcon sensor and this update had a defective file for Windows machines that essentially caused a lot of people to be locked out of their devices. What was the impact of that on July 19th?
- [23:25]
Ash Parikh
Look, fantastic company CrowdStrike. Great, great vendor in the space, great leader and, you know, wish them absolutely the, the best, but it could happen to anyone. It's, I think it's a matter of architecture and the way you actually architected your piece for us. All I can talk about is from our perspective, we make sure that we actually reside at a particular level within the operating system, which is not in a way intrusive. That is why we talked about responsibility. Even the change windows, we give it ample amount of notice. We also do that in smaller batches and definitely not on certain days of the week. So we give a lot of this flexibility to customers. But again, this can happen to anyone. I think this is a global community that has actually suffered together. So we are standing right there with other vendors in the space.
- [24:15]
Jeremy
Your team is definitely focused on providing clear, unbiased direction to really help customers navigate this complex threat landscape. And I'm curious about how do you approach the challenge of differentiating Trellix in a very crowded cybersecurity market, especially when customers are overwhelmed with marketing noise? Right. How do you really, how do you approach that? How do you. There's a real challenge in differentiating. And how do you take Trellix through that, through that noise?
- [24:48]
Ash Parikh
I'm being pensive here for a second because a number of thoughts are going through my mind. I think it, it comes down to culture, the company culture. You go high when they go low, remain classy. At the end of the day. Let's, let's talk about you and me, Jeremy. I mean, would you like, would you like blatant marketing in your face? None of us actually buy into it at all. When you do things with elegance and class, I think it's appreciated. You can lead a horse to the water, but you cannot make the horse drink. I think empowering and arming people with enough great information and then stepping back and saying, listen, we are here. We are right here for you when you're ready. We are here for you when you're not our customer. We are here for you when you are our customer. I think that goes a big, a very, very long way. Not being myopic, not being shortsighted, but being, you know, keeping the long term relationship in mind. And for me, having worked at so many companies over the many, over many years, I actually run into people who have worked at, with, say at Informatica, like about five, seven years ago. I mean, that person is now the CIO at some other company, right? People. People move and they remember how you treated them, they remember how you engage with them. So it's both a personal kind of a badge of honor as well as a company's badge of honor. So I think, I think that's how I would love to be marketed to. So I guess that shows up in the way we market.
- [26:09]
Jeremy
You talked about this, about this a little bit earlier and I want to click into this a little bit more because you've led marketing transformations at various stages of a company, company's growth, and we're talking about, you know, pre IPO and you know, and companies at varying levels. How does your approach differ, if at all, when preparing a company for an IPO versus scaling marketing at an established public company like Trellix?
- [26:36]
Ash Parikh
This is a fantastic question. I was just having a conversation with the company that I'm considering offering my advisory services to as a board advisor. We were talking about this. Hey, listen, Ash, you're working at Trellix and you worked at Informatica. We are a very small company. They're about less than 200 people. How do things change? So before we even got into that, I said, what are your business goals? What do you want to do? Where exactly do you want to go in the next one year to five years? It really depends on that. And frankly, I mean, I'm not going to reveal the name of the company, but it was very simple. They really wanted to get to IPO at a particular point in time. I said, where are you right now? They said, well, we are done with just the scrappy demand gen and getting things going with a VP of marketing for demand gen, VP of marketing for some. So just getting data sheets out there from a product perspective and a VP of marketing for just communications and press releases, etc. But now we are starting to scale. I said, okay, so you are in the growth phase, which means you're looking to create a category or align yourself with a category that's out there in the market. That's one. So that you're associated with a problem statement. Oh, go create a category. That takes work, but it's possible. That's one. The second thing is you do want to now start appealing to a larger set of people beyond your, hey, I've already proved it out with a. With a small subset. Now you want to actually make sure you can scale this right. So you need to have your individual customer profiles. You actually need to know who your target Personas are. All that information needs to be available before you start doing your marketing and from your corporate marketing and from a thought leadership perspective, I would always aim at who's your buyer, who's the person you really want to influence the most. Who is that person who's going to make a difference in your buying cycle. Align your, your thought leadership, your branding, your corporate communications, your strategy around that, then get started. So that's one, right? But now, as you rightfully said, as you start nearing, you know, the IPO window and whatever else, think about what's, what needs to happen. You are then answerable not just your board, you're also answerable to the public. So predictability and everything is, everything is visible, everything is transparent. You. And that's why I always pretend that I'm, I'm, I'm public, which is my, my data absolutely rocks, right? So that you never have a surprise. You can become private tomorrow. You can go public tomorrow. This and that toggle keeps happening. So many public companies becoming private, so many private companies going public, right? That keeps happening. If you're ready with your data, you're fine. So coming back to that point, predictability and scale, when you are about to go public, you also want to have absolute differentiation and market leadership. By that point, you need to be putting less effort into acquiring new customers. So you should have actually created enough of groundwork and groundswell and thought leadership and brand association for basically saying that, listen, these are the guys we actually want to follow.
- [29:34]
Jeremy
I know I'd be remiss if we didn't get into some AI powered Martech convo because I know that you do employ modern AI powered Martech and you use it to scale marketing. And I'm very curious because you're known for leveraging AI powered martech, can you walk us through a specific AI tool or a process you've implemented at Trellix that has significantly improved marketing efficiency or effectiveness?
- [30:02]
Ash Parikh
I'll go through buckets of technology versus naming the, naming the tools itself. But I'll step back and first talk about AI in general. Just tools, marketing tools in general. And when I talk about Martech, I also talk about sales tech because they are aligned and joined at the hip. You know, let's forget the marketos and the Adobe experience managers of the world that everyone has. You have that foundation, you have a salesforce or whatever else. But there's so much more to be done in personalization, right? In targeting, in making sure that you can get to the right information at record time. So it's speed, it's accuracy, it's making sure. That it is not manual to get to what you want. So there are bodies of work and tools out there that I really truly attracted to. One is I'm a huge believer in sales enablement. So there are tools out there which allow you to make sure that the salesperson with an AI, with AI generation can actually create the right kind of content that can be sent out to Jeremy, who's a CIO of say, a global Fortune 500 kind of a company or whatever that might be. So there are things as starting points. But I'll come to this in a second because I'm using this word, starting points. AI can get you thus far and only thus far. That's it. You need to be doing something beyond that. The second area that I really like is conversational AI. Your chatbots, can you actually make them a little bit more intelligent by asking the right question, right questions to the right people? So if you know who's actually coming to your website, who's asking those questions, et cetera, you can get to the answer much faster. Right. There are areas where this is. This is wonderful. There's a tool out there, especially with the whole M and A thing going on and customer people actually moving from company to company. There are tools out there will allow you to actually track that Jeremy has moved from, say, company A to company Y. And by the way, I had a relationship with Jeremy at Company. Hey, he's the same Jeremy, but he just doesn't know my company well. So using AI, you can actually get to know Jeremy even better, or get Jeremy to know your company better with these kind of tools. So there's a lot out there. But there's one thing that I've definitely got to say is that, and this is going to be in the book that I'm writing as well, is the human aspect cannot be ignored just because AI gets you to the particular point. Jeremy. I mean, I've seen so many. You probably get inundated with emails every single day. I do. I have all new different mailbox, email box, which for junk.
- [32:32]
Jeremy
Me too. Yep.
- [32:33]
Ash Parikh
And being a CMO and being a marketer, I get a lot of that. Right. Hey, listen, try this tool out, et cetera. What really is missing in those emails that get sent to me, I can clearly say it's machine generated. They have taken out someone else's name, they put my name. There's no personalization. Right. And there you go. I'm getting the stuff pipe the one, the stuff that's actually created for 2,000 other people has just been sent to me. The one thing that actually stuck was a campaign that someone ran and I never ended up buying their tool, unfortunately. But the way they did it was amazing. They went out to my social media to whatever extent I had, public stuff and some other areas and the articles that I'd written and some talks that I'd given and they realized they knew that I loved tennis. They also knew that I basically was a foodie. So they sent me a few things. They sent me a tennis ball with my picture on it and had a message on it as well. It's right here, it's on my desk. So 12 years later, it's still with me. There's a fine line of becoming too invasive and also knowing enough about the person. So that's where the human interaction and the human piece of it, you balance it out with all the automation that you get.
- [33:46]
Jeremy
Yeah, that was my follow up, was just because I know it's important to you and many and many marketing executives is the balance of the use of the AI tools and maintaining that human touch in the marketing, in the strategy. And you know, you've executed a ton of integrated campaigns and sales plays that we know that, but it's really important to keep that balance. What's the art and science there? Like the utility of, of with your own team and your own brand? Like, what's the, yeah, what do you do to maintain that balance? How do you keep that human touch but also leverage, you know, the power of AI and not lose that? Are there, are there questions you're asking? Is there an approach you have to make sure. Hey, is this, this is the filter by which we, we look at these opportunities before just saying click a button, let AI, you know, crank it out.
- [34:35]
Ash Parikh
Let's take a concrete example, right? So everyone kind of leverages SEO, right? Organic search, etc. So what I typically do is I have a tool which I really like. I have it right now open and I plug in the kind of. I basically ask and I plug in the kind of keywords that are relevant and I allow the tool to give me, you know, to recommend that. Listen, Ash, you'll be spending, you'll be spending X amount of effort, both paid and organic, this amount of effort to do XYZ for these kind of words, you should probably focus on this word versus the other one because you'll probably get your mind share much faster, etc. So. Got it. And it also kind of spits out a bit of starter content for the little ad that you see or the little kind of verbiage that you see when you do a Google search or a browser search. But that's the problem. If you just go ahead with what is provided by the tool, it's going to look and feel like everything else. That's where personalization comes in. That's the art and science of I wouldn't click most of these ads that show up or most of these links that show up if they just look stuck by, look like another and basically spit it out by a tool. I'm not going to click on it. You know that. So it's got to speak to me. More personalization the better. So that's where I feel the human aspect can come in. And I'm actually speaking at a keynoting at a conference soon. It's all about the art and science of AI and marketing. And I think it's a fascinating piece because there's so much talk of AI, so much talk of gen AI.
- [36:04]
Jeremy
There has to be a balance, the other balance. That's interesting. And I know we're, we're coming up on time and again. I knew this, this always happens when I'm like I need more time with these amazing marketers. But you know, there, you've had, you've had success using data to drive engagement. Right? I'm curious about how you're leveraging intent and propensity data at Trellix to really personalize the journey because you're, you're balancing data driven decisions with this creative intuition in your marketing as well. Like how, how are you doing that?
- [36:38]
Ash Parikh
Okay, so let's step back. Post 2020. Right? Post Covid. Most of us are in a hybrid world. I think we covered that. You and I are, have probably started to do a lot more of our research online before we even buy anything. Like I'm, I'm actually in the, in the market now for a new, new pair of tennis shoes and I'm, I am switching a brand. I mean I love a specific brand. I'm trying to switch to another one and you know, there's a lot of marketing going on for. I'm never going to, you know, name vendors of course, but, or brands. But it's, it's fascinating because I'm doing a lot of my research by going to say Amazon.com or I'm looking at reviews and I'm looking at customer reviews, I'm looking at demos on, you know, maybe even video reviews on YouTube and actually doing a lot of my research before I'm clicking that button on the vendor's Website and say I'm buying. The same has now percolated in the world of B2B. Right? So imagine what, what used to happen in the world of B2B. I know a salesperson, I'm the CIO of a company and I'm going to go and potentially have drinks or dinner or you know, a golf game or going to invite them to my, my space and I'm going to speak to them at length and he or she is going to tell me what's great about the platform or the product, et cetera, and help me get along and make a decision. That was my single source. And I would do that with various vendors, right? That would be my single source of truth. Today I'm armed with so much great information on the web. That is why companies, websites have become more important than ever. That's where a wealth of that information stores, you know, reviews, competitive reviews, talking to partners, talking to analysts. Are you in a category or not? I do all my, you know, comparative shopping. So I'm getting to the point that you basically made about intent. So this is where you actually create your strategy, your marketing strategy. It doesn't take one tactic, it takes a collection of tactics. Because you and I are hunting on a number of these channels. Marketing channels. Not all of them may be important, but they are all things that you will consider as a buyer. So I need to be there, meet them where, when and how they need to be met. That's something that I always talk about. The second thing is the hand raises that we spoke about, right. If there is any signal that you can get from a customer saying that I am ready for X or I'm interested in whatever, whether you're using AI, you're using a tool or using your actual activity. Like someone actually takes a demo, you actually have a hand raiser, you have a signal from someone saying that I'm interested in X, Y and Z. Right. So that's where you actually get to. There's an intent now. Now you can probably almost surface that intent to that sector of people. So if it's a CIO or it's a cxo, whoever these people are interested in these kind of things. Now you can start taking care of the signals.
- [39:32]
Jeremy
How about how that relates to ABM and abx? It seems like there's been a shift from ABM to abx, if at all. How has that shift influence Trellix approach, right. To engaging high value accounts? We talk about this a lot at Mission. I mean it's, we use our network effect all the time for ABM and ABX optimization. But I'm curious about your sector specifically and what's, what's working well in that world for you? What are some of the challenges you're coming up against?
- [40:00]
Ash Parikh
So what is abm, right, is account based marketing. Why is, why did, why was that even born? Because every customer wants to feel special now because marketing teams could not scale. We had one is to one, one is to few, one is too many. Then you added the different angle around ABX and digital marketing and whatever else that might be. At the end of the day, you really want to make sure that your most strategic top accounts, critical accounts, cannot lose accounts are treated with a white glove service. So I still feel, I mean it's still there, it's still relevant. I mean we do whether we call it a personalized virtual EBC or digital ebc, where we stand up, not just a meeting. So EBC is one thing, but you actually have a landing page that, that's dedicated to say your, your company, Jeremy, where we actually know the jargon that you speak or we are looking at some of the public documents that are available. What are the top business goals. You align them to what your company could do for them. You show a couple of demos, you have a list of team members on the, on the landing page, et cetera. You can, you know, basically adapt that for one of one is to one or one is to few as well. That is never going to go away because a customer always wants to feel special. How you scale is always going to change.
- [41:11]
Jeremy
The other really interesting thing that I've been hearing a lot about, and this may be old, old to you, I feel like you're way ahead of the curve here, but it seems like there's a lot more chatter around the rise of AI agents. Right. And I'm curious about your perspective there because one, just your opinion on AI agents. Are you actually preparing yourself or your marketing team to work alongside AI agents? Right. Do you think that that's where things are headed? It seems like we've certainly seen AI agents used in cyber attacks and things like that. But just what do you think of it? It seems like it's definitely hot right now and I'm seeing a lot of dev and tech go into developing some really strong tools at the AI agent world. Would love to just hear your opinion and experience there as it applies to you, your team and just AI agents in general.
- [42:02]
Ash Parikh
Yeah. So basically things like robotics, virtual assistants, gaming, all these things, I mean, at the end of the day what are these AI agents? They are doing work on the behalf of something with a specific objective. It could be software, it could be a physical kind of bot. I mean, at the end of the day, they're collecting data from various sensors, whether it's through a device, through whatever that might be. Let's make it specific to marketing, since this is a conversation about marketing here first. So I would. I basically look. For me, one form of an AI agent is definitely what is aligned to your chatbots. There's a way to leverage AI agents. One is to make sure that you're listening for the data that's going to support and engage and enrich the customer's experience, the buying experience. If I'm going to be able to listen for signals, to know that. Listen. Jeremy was on my website. The first thing he did was go to this particular page. The second thing he went here. So he went first to my platform page and he looked at who was my leadership team. And the third thing he did was he went to my pricing page. I know that he actually has a specific intent in mind he wants to do. He has a goal in mind. I know you better. So if I'm listening to those kind of signals and I'm using it to enhance and make your journey less, you know, less frictionful, I think that's. That's going to be basically the way I'm going to use them in marketing. But however, go back to the whole human side, so it cannot be one or the other.
- [43:26]
Jeremy
Incredible. Well, in the last couple of minutes, I just would love to hear. I mean, there's. I have a hundred more questions for you, but I'll. I'll reserve those when you come back and do a round two, maybe end of year, next year. What are you thinking about in terms of the future? I feel like the future is coming so fast, especially at you and your segment in your category. Just what are you thinking about in terms of, you know, where you want to. Where do you want to position, you know, the brand, you know, take us into the future a little bit. What do you see happening in the space, broadly speaking, in the space that you're serving? We just love to kind of hear you future cast about where Trellix is headed, where the industry's headed. We'd love to hear you kind of.
- [44:04]
Ash Parikh
Riff on that, regardless of whether it's Trellix or not. I mean, in the cybersecurity, the security space, there are tons of stools, as we already spoke about. There's going to be a ton of Consolidation, it's already started out. You probably heard a number of them this particular year. Companies buying out smaller companies especially to round out the capabilities that they are probably lacking. Every vendor will say, I don't want to be a platform till they become a platform. At that point in time they talk about platformization, if I can get that word right. But that's the whole beauty of the game. You start out being a single trick pony. You start out being a single product. I pin at companies like that. And you then start looking at adjacencies because you do want to grow. You can't just grow having a single company, a single product. So that is going to become a platform place. So I basically feel that there's a strong bet on companies looking for platforms. But with best of breed products, here's a difference. Because a platform can be created by a number of products just loosely working together. When you invest it as a company, being the best at each part, each piece of that platform, I think that is what differentiates any company from the other. I think that's going to be the way forward. That's one. And especially in the cybersecurity space, if you really think about it, my threats are coming to me from network and cloud and data and wherever else there's a company for each of those problems. There are products for each of those problems and there are loosely created products within platforms which kind of more are portfolios versus platforms. So you really want to get to that utopian stage where you become a platform of best of breed across all these vectors. So I see the market going towards more of a best of breed platform.
- [45:51]
Jeremy
Kind of an approach that's very, very interesting. I know I'll be paying attention to that as well. And it's fascinating to Ash. This has been an incredible conversation. There's, there's a few of these conversations that I kind of categorize as like a masterclass of so much intelligence and so much information that you shared and so much in between. That leaves like room for creativity and ideas and opinions. And so I know we're honored to finally have you on the show. This has been incredible and a big shout out to you and your team. I know that you're supported by a badass team at Trellix, there's no doubt there. So shout out to everyone there at Trellix and really grateful that you made time to be on the show.
- [46:29]
Ash Parikh
Absolutely. Thank you, Jeremy. I mean, yes, it is a badass team. They are world class. I mean they are just fantastic at what they do. And they love what they do, right? I mean they are constantly pushing the boundaries of everything marketing. Very, very proud. And again, thank you for having me. This was great.
- [46:43]
Jeremy
Amazing. Thank you sir.
- [46:57]
Unknown
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