Alex Yakubov: Scaling Security Marketing Across Key Industries

Sourabh:
What's the primary difference, in your experience, between security marketing or cybersecurity marketing, for small and mid-size companies versus targeting and winning enterprise accounts?

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Alex:
‍Yeah, okay. So your question is marketing the same product, but marketing it to a small to midsize business versus enterprise… Particularly with Peloton networks, we rely really heavily on the channel. So resellers and distributors, we have a really strong ecosystem around GSIs, MSSPs. The small/midsize business is just gonna have a smaller security team. They may not even have a security team. They might have one person, or they might not have anybody, and they're outsourcing it. They're using a fractional or a consulting CISO. So you're not just selling to that organization, you're selling to your partners that have to go in and curate everything that they're going to provide from a service perspective to that small business versus the enterprise. They likely have a team of people and a true buying committee that you're able to address and identify within your CRM of, like, this person is clearly the architect. This person is clearly one of the 30 practitioners, and then here's your executive budget holder. So that's largely the difference from my perspective of making sure that you're understanding who you're selling to and that they're not all going to have the “@business.com” email address.

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Sourabh:
‍Yeah, absolutely. And there is another question I wanna ask, but what you opened up there is a really big door. I have to walk through that. So, when we're marketing through resellers, you and I have both done this, right, for many of our roles. Okay. You're preparing and you're designing and you're creating this quiver of arrows, so to speak, so that your resellers have everything they need, but attribution. How does attribution get — what — how do we know if any of those arrows are hitting what, and if there's any efficiency, let alone effectiveness? Any guidance on attribution when you're selling through partners?

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Alex:
‍No, I have none. And if I did, I would not be in the role that I'm in right now. I'd be running a business somewhere making millions of dollars. I hope none of my managers watch this. Leading indicators… I think you just have to keep it really basic. And then at the end of the day, it's pipeline and deals that are open. Your sellers will tell you if it's working. Your partner will tell you if it's working, because they'll have their own metrics that they're looking at. But I think it's also, this is gonna sound so awful, but a lot of it’s just feel. Like, are you seeing the website traffic? Are you seeing the form fills? Are you seeing the meetings set and your BDRs are having good conversations and it's leading to pipeline?

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Sourabh:
‍I actually have mad respect for that answer because that's the real answer. Beyond just driving revenue and efficiency, right? Through your partners and partner designated funds, right, there's the bigger sort of risk/opportunity of the partner themselves starting to think about working with another major provider and keeping them with you, which is in its own marketing and relationship and ABM effort. So I actually really appreciate that. That's the reality. Attribution's really hard and taking the partner-centric view of what are they measuring, what matters to them, let's create what they need, I think is actually superb. I hope your managers do watch this.

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Alex:
‍Yeah. There's probably tons of marketing data startups out there that are gonna go, “No, that's not the answer. I can help you measure it”. But having sold media years ago and customers, agencies measuring impressions, clicks, those are the things that you can actually measure from a digital perspective. But when you use some out of home, you're gonna go to clear channel and ask them for a rough idea of, “How many of the eyeballs looked at your billboard as they drove by, you know, route 80?” No. You just have to look at the other leading indicators of, like, “Is my website traffic healthy?”

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Sourabh:
‍And that's just top-of-funnel. With partners, it's even complicated bottom-of-funnel, right? You go do an event together and event data is completely offline. When it gets to you, it's… I hear you. I respect it, but I'm gonna ask my second question now. Okay? I wanna move to some of the industries. The second question is you've been in multiple global roles selling security solutions, right? What has been your experience? What difference have you seen between marketing and driving pipeline in Asia-Pac, Australia, Japan, versus India, versus South America, versus North America? What are the differences in the regions?

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Alex:
‍Off the bat, the difference with North America versus EMEA… North America sellers really like to have control of the entire deal, soup-to-nuts. They will work with the partner, but I feel like most of the time, the reseller is cutting the PO. And there might be other things that they're buying, but at the enterprise level, it's really the sellers at your organization that are doing the whole deal. In EMEA, they really rely heavily on channel and on their resellers. So it's much more of an enablement role and a facilitator role than it is actually selling. If your EMEA team is asking for more channel resources, listen to them and give them their channel resources or enable them to create them themselves. Because what you need to do in EMEA from a language perspective, localization is about more than just language too. There's other aspects of it. If you're gonna go into Israel, is it right-to-left or left-to-right? So I think that's the big difference that I've noticed.

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Sourabh:
‍I would say this is something that very few people talk about is the actual difference in the selling motion, and how in Europe when people buy technology, some of their leading questions is around the relationship and support. It's not as transactional as we have it here in the states and in Canada, you know, “Yeah, I’ll buy it, I'll figure it out”. No, “I won't figure it out. I've done this for a while, it's a nightmare. So are you gonna be with me?” Which is, to your point, why the partner is front and center through the whole relationship, not just for the purchase. This is such a valid point, and it matters a lot to us specifically because we are one of the only, you know, certified lead providers in DOC and GDPR regions. So I think this is a really big difference, and Ihope people do hear that advice, Alex, is that if your EMEA marketing team is asking for more channel resources, approve it.

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Alex:
‍Yeah.

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Sourabh:
‍Right? Or give them the budget to do it with a consultancy or an outside agency. Yeah, I thank you for that. Okay. Those are my questions level-setting for security. Let's get into portfolio and, um, and sort of industry marketing. So first things first, before you got into this role and you managed this portfolio of products across huge global industries, right? What would be the big thing that you think, “I did not realize this would be what I'd be working on”, and that now you're like, “Oh, I spend a lot of time working on this”?

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Alex:
‍That's a really good question. I'm pausing and I don't know how long, if that seems like an eternity to the people that are watching. So, good question that I hadn't thought about…I spend a lot of time... So, we are, in my role, doing portfolio marketing within Palo Alto networks. We have different business units. They all have their own products that they're trying to push. And there's anunderlying, like… The way that we are pushing our products, our customers don't buy products that way. When they're buying across the portfolio, when they're buying multiple platforms and they have. So we offer cloud security products. We offer dev products for the development cycle. We have firewalls, which is a traditional part of our business. And then security operations, even some services around threat intel management and so forth, um, that's gonna hit on multiple practitioners that sit in different parts of the business at the enterprise level.

So when you get to the CISO level and you're having that, or the CEO and you're talking to the CFO around consolidation. The message is we're not going in and saying cloud security, we're talking about digital transformation. So selling to the customers around the business challenges that they're trying to solve for us, using their language and then showing them, “Here are all the products that we offer”. So, let me get back to answering your question, which was, what do I spend a lot of time doing? Um, it is helping other marketers understand what the buyer's challenges are. I spend a lot of time talking to other marketers within the company around the challenges that the C-levels and their buying committees are trying to orient their minds around, “Okay, here's all the problems that I have to solve for, the buckets of money that I have to put towards things. I'm gonna borrow some dollars from these different departments to put it all together to buy a couple hundred million dollars worth of products from Palo Alto”.

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Sourabh:
‍Yeah. No, that's the reality, right? And then of course, there's a dozen very experienced salespeople involved across all of this. So this brings up a really good point about portfolio marketing is that numerous regional product, right, social, digital, newer events. Numerous teams will turn to you and your team on the portfolio side and say, “Hey, how do I come across correctly to the buyer? What's their core about?” Right? “How do these two roles interact?”, “Teach me”. That's great. How do you and your team learn? How do you continue to know what buyers care about and how things have changed going into a recession versus two years ago during a pandemic? Where's your firsthand knowledge coming from

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Alex:
‍Sellers. So sitting in the field is the best from that perspective because you have relationships with your sellers and their solutions engineering team, the architects. Sitting in on customer advisory board meetings and listening to the customer trade shows. I'm one of probably one of the few people that you'll meet that loves to go to trade shows and actually sit in the booth for eight hours a day and just talk to customers and ask them questions. You can't be afraid to, and this might be my selling background, not being afraid to ask the customer questions and then a follow-up question when it's triggered another thought.

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Sourabh:
‍Yeah. Well, it is your seller background, but I'm equally guilty of that, and I competed against where you are for years, right? Going as a marketer, going to events, standing side by side, and sometimes in place when your salespeople, you know, have to go to the restroom, whatever, in place of them. And talking to both prospects and existing customers, that's extremely rewarding for me. I would do it all day if we didn't have to run a session or something else, right? Yeah. By the way, we got our first question, but it's not a question, it's just straight-up love for you. It says, “Love the transparency and realistic viewpoint. It's not all science, it's freaking art + science”.

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Alex:
‍Yeah.

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Sourabh:
‍I can just throw that out. Thank you, Alex. I think the candor's coming across really well. So I'm gonna build on what we talked about here with portfolio marketing and say, have you, in your experience, especially this year. Are there any marketing rules that you think that portfolio marketers need to just stop listening to and focus on what's working?

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Alex:
‍Marketing rules? I am not a rule follower in general. So I think that if you're looking at your metrics and questioning why things aren't doing better, then literally question everything that you're doing. So that might be a cop-out but when everybody is swimming in one direction and everybody's going towards particular trends within marketing, I'm the one that's like, “I'm gonna go”. Actually, I used this example earlier. Also print, analog things. Nobody is doing them because everybody's been so focused on, “I need to be able to measure how many eyeballs we're seeing this. I need to see eyeballs to clicks, to form fills, et cetera, conversions on digital”. I immediately went to, “What are the things that other people aren't doing?” So when I was at Yubico several years ago, we started doing direct-to-mail within our products when people were— so I was in an ecosystem marketing role, and one of the easiest ways I found to convince partners to do something for me is if I was offering them something and it was great, we will fund and do the creative for you.

You can have control over that, but I'll get my creative team to design a flyer that will go inside of all the envelopes for every single person that buys UB keys from us and will ship it. And so when they open up their package, they're expecting their Yubikeys. And then also amongst it was something about Okta, right? Aand Okta was getting leads from that because it was unexpected. Question everything that you're doing and why you're doing it and what would be the opposite or something different that you could attempt and just try it.

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Sourabh:
‍You just touched on something which would be a completely separate discussion, I just realized, is mastering the art of the buyer moment. Because that unboxing experience, and I know people don't think of that, they think of a PS3. But for someone who buys a YubiKey, that is an unboxing experience. They've been waiting for this, it arrived, they want to touch it. And in that moment of delight, right, in that dopamine rush is something else. Positioning someone really well, right? To someone who's clearly a deci— I think it's brilliant. Screw the digital! I think that is actually where you make—  seriously! I think that's where you make a human connection. Yeah. 'cause it, it, you know, especially most of the people we're selling to, they're pretty seasoned professionals. They're not kids, right? Outta college. They appreciate the thought that goes into something like that. They're like, “Huh, this is helpful”. I would take action on it right away. Yeah. I mean, I think that's brilliant. I don't know how many marketing rules you broke there, but it's driving sales, so isn't that our job?

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Alex:
‍Yeah, exactly.

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Sourabh:
‍Okay. I love it. Let's go a little deeper into the nature of the industries that you target. Because like you said, you're at a very large brand, you have very large customers and they continually buy very large portfolios, right? From you, you guys are very successful. What's the difference when you're targeting a similar portfolio of solutions to someone in say, healthcare versus someone in retail?

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Alex:
‍The problems that retail as an industry face are fairly different from what healthcare is facing. As an example, we're doing the National Retail Federation Protect Conference in June. And that's a loss prevention, largely a loss prevention conference. There's a cybersecurity track to that because the two are starting to merge thanks to digital transformation healthcare. On the other hand, we were just at HIMS in April, and healthcare is hyper-focused on delivering patient care from anywhere. That's one of nine different use cases that we were able to develop that were specific around healthcare. And I just said nine, that is huge. Customers cannot remember nine things. They might remember one or two when they walk away from you, but we had enabled our sellers at HIMS with nine different use cases. So I think your question was what's the difference between the two of them.

And it's really understanding what larger things are affecting the overall industry that you're selling into is a huge component of that. And if you have… First of all, as a marketer, if you're considering doing industry marketing or verticalizing your marketing, if you don't have sellers and solutions engineers with expertise in that particular industry, don't waste your time trying to customize your message for healthcare. If you don't have a solution that is going to fit within that industry, don't waste your time customizing your messaging for that. Especially when you're selling a technical product like we are, you cannot just go shoehorn in a solution that wasn't built for healthcare. You have to have a product that will meet those needs and your sellers. If you have a white paper and you did a webinar that was brilliant for healthcare and then your seller walks in and has zero experience within a hospital setting, a provider setting, they're gonna smell that and go, “Oh, you know what? This is not the vendor for me because they actually don't understand my problem and my challenges”.

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Sourabh:
‍Okay. So, since you mentioned it, right? I didn't think we would go there in the few minutes we have, but this is a classic, not just a conversion and attribution, but seriously as a marketer, it's a career problem. You've got to be careful about delivering, what I call, Dead on Arrival, DOA leads. And I think this is honestly a masterclass, Alex, and that if you are delivering leads to sellers who don't have experience selling to those buyers in those industries, for example, in healthcare, don't know about compliance and governance, right, and documentation requirements and how many PDFs are required to do things as opposed to native digital records, right? Then you are delivering whatever they look like you're delivering DOA leads. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And now the problem there isn't just like, “Oh, bad ROI”. It will permanently affect your reputation in the organization as a marketer because it was something people were really excited about that turned out to be an absolute sales disaster.

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Alex:
‍Yeah, yeah.

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Sourabh:
‍Yeah. I love this.

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Alex:
‍There is a way to recover from that. I think if you have a strong customer advisory board and connection with your PM team, “Hey, we're marketing is seeing interest from a number of hospitals, a number of healthcare providers, but we're running into an issue within the funnel”. That part of your marketing organization can go have those conversations. The product marketing team with your product management team. What do you need to do within your engineering roadmap to get there to be able to solve those problems? And your sales team can recover from that, right? And like, “Hey, we don't meet your needs today, but would you be willing to come in and coach your engineering team on what changes we need to make to better meet your needs?” You can recoup from it, but if you are a smaller company with few resources, then your executive team might go, “No, we're not. I'm not going that direction. Our go to market strategy is focused on SaaS right now, so go focus on selling to SaaS companies”. Don't try to pivot just because you're like, “Oh, this is interesting. I wanna go write a white paper about healthcare”. It's gonna be counterproductive to your sellers, like you said, and debt at arrival.

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Sourabh:
‍Yeah, exactly. And, and then, and I think that is partly your sales background is your just-won't-quit attitude. 'cause that's exactly right. Sellers won't, sellers will go figure it out. But if you really aren't positioning yourself to succeed, especially in hyper competitive markets, cybersecurity and security is incredibly competitive right now. Then like you said, pick the campaigns, pick the industries, pick the products, right, that are going to succeed. I love this very practical advice, and given this very unique perspective that you have as a thought leader in our industry, right? Sales and marketing all in one brain. I'm gonna ask the last question here. It's been a really rough year for a lot of demand gen leaders, right? I'm gonna be really candid 'cause we work with the top 100 tech companies.

There's no secret here, right? Um, folks have gone to “Screw it all! Let's go to bottom-of-funnel. Let's set up appointments. Wait, we don't know how to set up appointments. We're not SDRs, right? Let's go back to nurture programs. Wait, nurture isn't delivering. Oh, people want clicks and brand awareness. Let's go back to top of funnel”. It's an absolute mess for those that aren't like you founded in the product and grounded in what is needed to sell. I'm gonna ask for the positive side of this picture for the rest of this year. Alex, what are you and your team actually looking forward to? What's giving you hope and excitement?

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Alex:
‍Yeah, hope and excitement around. So, ;andemic seems to be kind of winding down. People are somewhat traveling when their organizations are letting them. I think that for the last few years, field marketers in particular that were used to being on the road all the time and setting up lunch-and-learns or being in person with their sellers that were forced to suddenly try to cram all of that in digitally. I'm looking forward to all of us being able to go back to having the omnichannel opportunity, going through full funnel, and assigning things to do at each stage of the funnel that are appropriate for that stage of the funnel. And having a cohesive plan, taking a step back at  all the things that we are doing, questioning, “Do we have the right mix?”

“Are we doing too much in one area and not enough in another?” I think it will be critical for the second half of the year just as we start to normalize ourselves and get back to— not get back to the way that things were because there are some aspects of life that just will not change for a lot of people. But at least for me personally and psychologically, I feel a little more settled and grounded… I kind of understand the way that the world has adapted and changed since the last three years of insanity.

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