How To Effectively Use Metrics and Data in Marketing

0:00You mentioned this concept of brand gen as an evolution of traditional branding. Quite this term, internally, I'm sure 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, if you're not operational in your mindset, you're going to miss out. And you know, when things get rough, guess which part of marketing gets cut or gets scrutinized the most?

0:34It's the parts where you cannot actually draw a straight line from where you invested to what the ROI was.

0:47Hello, 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 this amazing human booked, things shifted, his schedule, our schedule, and it's been at least a year, maybe more. We've got them 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.

1:32That'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? It is absolutely serendipitous that we are here together, right?

2:19We've been trying this for almost a year, as you said, and it's my pleasure. It's truly my pleasure being here. So thank you for having me. What's cooking in the Trellix Labs? A lot. I mean, Trellix is one of those, you know, I just fell in love with this company when I heard about it and I was, you know, being talked about as far as this company is concerned. I 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, go to step back and think about the problem, right?

2:56There 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. There's 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, right? 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.

3:32You 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.

4:04And we are doing that with intelligence. It's not just Gen AI. We've been doing this. We've been 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 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. 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 the resume by which you've been building for the past couple decades.

4:41And when I have an opportunity to connect with someone like you, it's like a masterclass in demand gen and something that I want to ask you about because you talked about this interconnectedness of brand and demand gen. You emphasize that a couple of times. And I really want you to elaborate on this because you mentioned this concept of brand gen as an evolution of traditional branding. Can you elaborate on how this approach differs from conventional brand building, especially in the cybersecurity sector? Absolutely. So I think you're pulling one of the main principles that I have working towards a book, as I shared with you earlier, is basically a handbook for an operational CMO.

5:23And 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, a 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.

5:57and that revolving door that we talk about from a CMO perspective, right? I mean, a CMO leaves every one year, two years, whatever that might be. The reason is, if not because of his own volition, then there's a problem there. If 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 and 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 do a Super Bowl ad. The afterthought after all that is, hey, how much of this have you actually invested in your customer experience, in your customer engagement?

6:40Have you actually made your buyer's journey that much less friction, frictionful, more seamless on your website? You could have absolutely used the money that you've 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 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. That's when you do branding around that, with thought leadership and great content, that's when you actually convert that good old traditional branding to brand generation.

7:19And I think that's absolutely important. I'll step back and tell you this, 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.

7:54So 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 bring people in because it reduces the friction for sales. Imagine if the sales organization has to go out every single time and say, 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.

8:30I love it. And I'm sure there are many executive leaders that appreciate you're the scrappy full stack CMO, right? And I love that you really lean towards how can we be innovative over, 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? Excellent.

9:10So the team does a fantastic job 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 100 global CISO awards. So once that was in place, kind of engaged with the entire ecosphere as far as social media is concerned. Got almost 450 nominations as far as CISOs are concerned. And what we did then, so this is where I mean brand gen. Also, it's less about brand gen as thinking about the customer in. Once you do that, the money flows, your business flows.

9:54So 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 100 winners from 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 are 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.

10:28So that's one of the ways you would actually use your dollars 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 hand raisers. 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.

11:00Thanks for bringing that up, Jeremy, because I've actually walked into that concept almost over the years because it's always been around, 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 when you draw that picture, it's one pipe, the marketing pipe, then 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're 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.

11:42I 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 was walking by a booth at a trade show and kind of comes by and picks up a t-shirt of yours. And 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.

12:18What do you believe is a higher engagement or a higher score as far as a lead is concerned? I mean, to me, if they're stopping by and spending time and engaging at that level, that's pretty high. That's one example, right? So that's just at trade shows. Now let's look at your website. 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?

12:46Products or solution areas, etc. The other thing could be a product tour. You could also have people 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't just leave it at that. Oh, he asked a question. Now what? But create ways within your infrastructure to basically have that one-on-one engagement with that person who's asking questions. You can go back and forth, get the lead followed up by MDRs who also have to be enabled in the right way.

13:24And 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. Is there a CRO at Trellix? Is there someone that's responsible for all sales? Excellent person. He's responsible for customer success. He's responsible for our sales. Yes. Okay. So talk about the relationship there in terms of what's important? What's table stakes between the CMO and the CRO? Sales and marketing alignment, we talk about that in lots of different ways. You seem to have an opinion and you have a strong opinion on how to align these two areas.

14:03But to me, the two leaders have to be on the same page. Are you sharing goals? Is there a tug of Or sometimes where, you know, hey, we think this is more important. You think that's more important. How do you bridge that trust and that gap between you two, arguably, you know, two very important leaders, you know, driving growth and demand and top line? What is that? How does that work well? How have you navigated that? And how can other CMOs, you know, really tighten that bridge with their CROs? 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.

14:38Absolutely. down to the very last person. So I'm here at Trelix 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 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? The frustrations of a customer and the frustrations of a salesperson.

15:12Every 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 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?

15:52So 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. 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, you know, what are you doing for my specific product area?

16:29where you could be a single one-trick pony or a single product company or a 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 selling solutions. And by aligning my campaigns, the framework goes from business outcomes So as the CEOs go down to the sales place, the product level sales place, and then finally the campaigns that we run at the marketing level.

17:06This 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. Is there like, 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. And 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 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 know, is there, is there kind of a measured approach that you have to, to knowing, okay, when do you need to get involved?

17:54When 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 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 balance that? As one more of my 10 points or 10 principles right here that I have. 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.

18:29Always question your results, right? 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, you know, have a micromanager, 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 a 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.

19:05Have those dashboards ready for yourself. Work with the right growth marketing leaders within the teams to make sure you have those metrics. Let's look at brand gen. Let's look at thought leadership. What is your share of voice on a quarterly basis? Have those metrics ready. always be looking, expect, 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.

19:43So I can just pull out any metric that I need. Maybe it takes five minutes to update something 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 the teams have learned that, you know, Ash is going to be looking for this. So let's actually make sure we have it ready in advance.

20:16How 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've got a strong share of voice and that you're gaining ground there? Absolutely. So look, it is definitely subjective, right? 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. you know, 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.

20:51For 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. And we can then compare that. We actually use, you know, third party tools, et cetera, and third party agencies to do this for us, but it is, you know, it's fair. And we compare ourselves with 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 power security platform. Yeah, I noticed that there's been a lot of really cool PR on Trellix lately.

21:22One 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 US Department of Defense is saying, hey, we're trusting Trellix to protect millions and millions of emails, it's absolutely exceptional. Yeah, absolutely. I think not just the US Department of Defense, but I think generally the ecosphere at large.

21:58Look at what happened at the July 19th outage, right? The very first thing that happened, right? I mean, so 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 19th 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.

22:34We'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 customer. But to your point, it's not just DOD. I mean, we've been bringing down tons and certain things I can't even talk about because it's top secret, right? But we are absolutely at the beck and call making sure of all agencies to make sure that you and I, the common individual, is absolutely safe from a cyber perspective. And just for those who aren't aware, and correct me on this, Ash, on July 19th, this was the CrowdStrike issue, this update to host devices.

23:13I 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? Look, a fantastic company, CrowdStrike, great vendor in the space, a great leader, and wish them absolutely the best, but it could happen to anyone. 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, intrusion.

23:51That 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 kind of 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. 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?