Ash Parikh on the Evolution of the CMO role and the Influence of Tech on Marketing Management Style – EP4

Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing, art and Science. I am CMO advisor and host Lisa Martin.

And I'm so pleased to have the CMO of Trix on this episode, Ash Par. Ash, it's so great to have you on the program. Thank you for giving us some of your time.

Thank you so much, Lisa. Great to see you again and reconnect after all these years. Yeah, likewise.

So guys, we're gonna be talking about with Ash in the next 20 plus minutes, the evolution of the role of the CMO and the influence that technology has on management style. Let me brag a little bit about Ash guys. I've had the privilege of working with him for a couple of years now at other companies.

He is zero fluff, he is growth minded. He's a hands-on marketing leader that has a passion for things that I completely agree with. That's data and analytics.

It's sales alignment, it's digital marketing, it's storytelling. And if you can believe it, for more than 20 years, Ash has built world-class teams attracting and mentoring top talent across the industry. One of the things that's very cool about Ash is that he uses ai MarTech to inspect what's expected and to operationalize and scale to drive growth.

And one of the things that that really drew me to Ash when I worked for him when he was CMO at Druva a few years ago, was he has, we're so aligned on marketing as an art and a science. You might ask why this is perfect. He's a published author and speaker on the art and science at marketing.

He's gonna drop some knowledge bombs on you today from his team and what he talked about with them with perspective to marketing, art, and science. He's won a ton of awards, and I have to tell you that Ash is the reason this shout is named Marketing, art and Science. We spoke about it a month or two ago, and I was telling him about my idea for marketing science and he brought any art concept.

So Ash, thank you for joining again. You will always get my homage and appreciation for naming the webcast. Wonderful.

No, you're too kind, Lisa. Um, I, I'm just thrilled that you know, this is called Art and Science of Marketing. And as you said, just this morning, I pulled my team, I mean my amazing world class team of great marketing leaders, and I asked them, Hey, why do you think, you know, marketing's all about the art and science?

Because I was also trying to make notes for our conversation. And, you know, it's faster all people who are potentially better thinkers than you and they are. So some of the things I'll read, read them out.

I made some points for you to just, uh, you know, to just, uh, think through, you actually said this. So in a world of human psychology, it's all about creative expression as well as data-driven decisions. It's both.

Right? Another person told me, so not all impact can be Right? Yes.

Then the other one is, move humans to action. That's the art and science. And, and the other one, which is really, um, you know, touch a note for me was it's all about the human connection.

It truly is. Right? Lisa, as much of data that we can throw at all these things, you know, all the bots that are out there, I don't click on things today unless there's that, that emotional touch, that emotional element in an email, or if you've known me or if I, I can read through things and I, I know it's a, but I know that it's a but that's writing to me or talking to me or whatever that might be.

So that those relationships, the community, the social influence, and I, the affinity, the trust that you build with those personal relationships, that's what you actually need to empower with that sliver of data. Right? I think that's where, that's why I loved it when we were talking, you said, Hey, this is the science of, uh, of marketing.

I said, why not the art and science? Yeah. So thank you to my team.

Amazing ideas, and I'm just passing them along. Oh, thank you. Team Trello marketing, this is fantastic.

I'm sure we could chat forever. We'll only keep you guys for about 20 minutes. I wanna give you a background into Ash.

Then we're gonna be talking about marketing management styles across all these things Ash has experienced with, that's mid-size, public, late stage, I-P-O-I-P-O exit, et cetera. We'll talk about MarTech in action. We'll get Ash's perspective on AI's impact on the customer journey.

And then as we always do with this series, we're gonna leave you with a fail to fab story that Ash has gonna knock your socks off. So, Ash, with that said, you, I mentioned you've been in the business for over 20 years. Give us your story and, and how you got to the level of CMO.

When I first started, Lisa, I never thought I would, I was gonna be a CMO. I'm a technical guy. I have an engineering degree, and, um, basically on top of that, an MBA, so the, the only claim to fame as far as marketing is concerned, I had a major in marketing in my MBA, so great.

However, my first foray into actual work was in customer support and customer success. I was, I used to scratch my head and think, well, am I picking up all these phone calls and, you know, people are irate on the other side of the, uh, of the phone. You know, people who have used actual phones in those, in those days, right?

And, um, after that I got into sales engineering. I actually used to ca carry a bag. I've done demos for a living.

Nice. So I used to fly from the Bay Area all the way to the East coast in the dead winter of New Hampshire. You can imagine.

Right? Exactly. Brutal.

So I used to do that every week and do demos, but these things taught me a lot. They taught me to put myself in the shoes of a customer. So customer experience is very important.

And the second thing is, um, in the shoes of a salesperson, right? These are two very, very important aspects of what a marketer should internalize, right? A lot of marketing has, has over the years, become a little bit more fluffy, if I may, but with the advent of data science, the advent of data-driven analytics, et cetera, every CO is asking, in fact, every company and every board is asking, justify yourself, show us the efficiency of marketing, right?

I mean, you only have that much of a rope as far as, you know, trying to spend on things that are glamorous. You then have to start showing a lot of ROI and you have to balance the balance both of them, which is why it's the art and the science of market. It's a balance.

It's that scale. It's a balance. I, I think it's fantastic.

But you talked about, I love, you have a background that's very broad, and I think it's so incredibly important when you get to the CMO level to understand the engineering component, the sales component, the customer component. Tell us how you've seen the buyer's journey from a, from a customer lens, it's changed so much in your tenure. Talk about some of the changes that you've seen in, and how do you pivot and react with team TRX to be able to meet customers where they are and what, and give them what they want?

These a great question. So I've been talking about this for the last four and a half years. I mean, even right before the pandemic, right?

We had this amazing amount of budget, if you may, as I was exiting 2018, walking to 2019 and exiting 2019, a ton of budget for everything, right? Ash, go and sponsor every single event that's out there, let's do it. Right?

We, we, we were living large, but what happened, right? The, the, the floor was just pulled, the rug was just pulled from under our feet When the pandemic happened, what exactly happened? That was a pivotal moment for all of us, for buyers, for sellers, for the whole go to market engine.

And really, I mean, what really happened was this, right? You and I, we started staying at home, right? We started staying at home.

We started doing our research for a lot of things online. We weren't going to events because we just couldn't, right? And a lot of those decisions, those buying decisions were made.

How, actually doing our research, talking to peers, talking to analysts, taking demos, doing a lot of things ourselves, and a lot of the B2C concepts started to creep into B2B. So you, the B2B marketer really had to be on so many more channels because the customer was making his or her buying decision almost 70% before talking to a vendor, right? 70% of the decisions already made before talking to a vendor.

And that just continued to happen. Yes, we are in a hybrid world today. There's, there's a lot of in-person events that are happening, very successful, as well as stuff that is virtual.

But now the conversation is about, if I could do it virtually, why should I actually travel? If I could do it virtually, why should I actually create an in-person event? Right?

The ROI justification has become a lot more important. So that's why I basically feel that the buyer's journey has become and remained a lot more complex. But we as marketers and sellers have to know, you know, what actually makes them tick?

Where are they going for their information? How can we actually con have a conversation with them? 'cause that journey is no longer linear.

Yeah. It's no longer about Ash and Lisa meet our customer, favorite customer at a golf course. We have a nice dinner and the deal is done.

It's no longer about relationships alone. Yes, relationships are absolutely important, but you have to know the psyche of the buying person by buying customer, the buying committee as well, well in advance. And then serve up all that content in any channel.

I actually have this adage, which I used at one of the conferences, uh, recently meet them where, how and when they want to be met, right? So That's a mic drop moment right there. Meet them how, where and when they wanna be met.

So with that perspective in mind, what is, how could you and the t trellis marketing folks that were so wise in sharing their opinions and marketing, art and science, which I loved, how are you designing the customer experience that gets someone from lead who's done all this research on their own, all the way to advocate? What does that look like within your marketing organization? Look, it's a great balance, right?

Between the art and the science. So, you know, you let, let me, let me step back a little bit because there's a lot being talked about around science. Let me talk a little bit about the art.

If something is not visually appealing, if something doesn't grab my attention, if there's no storytelling, if something's not pithy, if there's no emotions in that story, right, in that copy, et cetera, I potentially, I'm not gonna open that piece of e that email or that video, whatever that might be. That's why we are seeing a lot more graphics ads, a lot of videos on LinkedIn, et cetera. That's where I'm actually gonna gonna click something and actually take a, take an action, right?

Yeah. Now, the data part of it, and I'm coming to the, to answer your question around how credits is doing this. The data part of it is infused with a lot of metrics and KPIs.

There's a lot of ab testing, fail fast, scale fast, right? Faster. That's, that's what the thinking is all about.

Uh, we ask our, our product marketers, our leaders within the team, we all ask ourselves, how many people have actually come to your own product webpage, not the homepage, but even your product webpage to see, to probably check out a piece of content, maybe a particular aspect of that page is not working so well. So we do heat maps. We try to find out the ROI on the in on investment, where are people bouncing off?

Where are actually, where are they actually linking from? Where they are, they're landing. So are they looking for more information or are they just disappearing?

All these things are leading to better efficiency, and it's all data driven. So this is what the world class team at market marketing team at Trellis is actually doing. Right?

What is this leading to? Because it's a great set of art with a lot of science behind it. It's bringing both of these together.

Yeah. You know, the human touch, the human element, et cetera. We started to see extremely high, better than industry benchmark, open rates, clickthrough rates for our content.

We've seen higher engagement rates for any of our virtual, um, workshops or events, et cetera. Even the social ads, even the LinkedIn ads that we actually put in and the LinkedIn lives that we actually host. We have a ton and thousands of impressions and people who are viewing this, it's because content is queen.

I would actually like, like to actually say that. And is the way you actually trigger a person's emotions. You talk about something and putting your context and then map it with the data, I think that's what's making us successful.

That's so fantastic. The emotional component that you talked about. You talked about the changes in the buyer's journey, especially given the last, the challenges we've all faced in the last four years.

Buyers just seem so much more empowered now. But to your point, the mix of the art and the science, the emotional component, meeting them where they are when they're there, giving them what they want, is this nirvana mix that you seem to have nailed. But you've been through, as I mentioned, in in your career history.

You've been CMO at mid-size companies, pre I-P-O-I-P-O exit, trx, you're, you're in the, the m and a post m and a stage with Mac, McAfee, and FireEye. How do your marketing management styles change depending on where the organization is and its lifecycle, Throw one more curve ball into that whole mix and move from subscription to, to, uh, from, from perpetual license to subscription to subscription on-prem is selling to the cloud. So that was yet another, another curve ball as well.

So yeah, I've had, looking back, yes, it's been pretty diverse, pretty rich, and ev every single time I've had an experience at a company, it's been very rich. It's actually enriching for me, both working with the 10 CEOs, with my own marketing teams. I learned a lot.

But yes, absolutely. Things are different in every single experience. Like, for example, at a pretty large, you know, pre IPO, but already been a public company, taken private like Informatica, you know, I think the most important thing was to make sure that we kept our number one position or actually created that number one position or leadership position in the market across, not one but five market categories, right?

Once that was done, because we were probably, you can call us a mid-size call info maga, mid-size company, right? It's still a, it's a large company from a perspective of number of customers, et cetera, really growing well. But that impact needed to happen through leadership in the, in the market, because they were going up, up against the, like IBM and LL Boomi and Salesforce, MuleSoft, et cetera.

So you really had to bring innovation, uh, to, to the mix. And that along with digital marketing, the onset of digital marketing, and you remember the Covid days, you know, people are not meeting in person. So, you know, virtual events and virtual user conferences, that was the saga.

That was the, the, the flip that pivot that I actually helped them do, going from complete in-person to, um, mostly, uh, digital kind of, uh, uh, marketing, uh, movement. And then that moved into hybrid, right? And at Drew White was all about, you know, product led kind of growth.

A lot about, Hey, make your decision on the website, because they are all SaaS. They are, they are a fantastic leader in what they do, but their competitors are doing the same thing in a legacy manner, right? They're doing things on-premise, they're doing things with an app within an appliance, et cetera.

So they really had to stand out and show a quick little product to show a quick little demo, really cut to the chase and give customers a decision, a decision tree almost on, on the website saying, if, if we are not good for you, don't consider us. If we are, here are some proof points. And finally, at trx, it's all about the scale.

Hey, McAfee, uh, FireEye, trx TRX is a huge name. It's a household name, right? But the point is all about showcasing that storytelling aspect of things.

How, how do we actually resonate with the CISO, make sure that we are an ally for the CISO and make sure that we can probably, you know, help the world by reducing the number of cyber threats that are out there in the most efficient way by reducing silos and giving up people a platform, kind of, right? So those are the three variants of experiences that I've had. One was more public to private to public.

So it was a pre IPO journey. One was a complete SaaS complete, uh, private company. And then now I like how you talked about this as curve balls.

Um, you must be a good baseball player. Um, how have you, so when you think about, when we think about the science part, and I wanna ask you another question on the art part, especially because your background is so fascinating. But when we think about the science part, what does it mean to you as the leader of marketing to own the numbers?

And how do you pivot your management style to accommodate There's no other way to actually survive in marketing without owning the numbers? You have to, and that's probably why, because I, I come from a sales background, right? The first thing I ask is how can I make a, um, actual impact on revenue marketing source revenue?

I don't talk MQs, I don't talk leads. The only thing I typically start out with this is the impact dear, CRO, dear CCEO that I've actually had on revenue. I've moved, I, which means my amazing team and I, we've actually moved the, the, the ball for you by bringing real quality opportunities, maybe even helping you close some of these opportunities ourselves.

And what we started to talk about, you know, in the last six months or so, is hand raisers, right? When things are really hot. Like, you visit me at a, at a demo demonstration, at a booth, at a big trade show.

You spend 25 minutes with me. You've taken that demo, you've internalized all the information, awesome. You're a great hot lead, right?

Ready to actually get into, you know, the opportunity cycle, or you've spent about three hours with me and we've done a workshop together. That's yet another opportunity cycle, right? So truly driving that engagement with people is what we are focused on.

You talked about your background, like I mentioned, I wanted to ask you another pivot question before we move into talking about Rex's MarTech stack and how it's moving, enabling marketing to enable the company to move the needle positively from a revenue perspective. But you come from the engineering background, the sales background, but you're so passionate about the science and the art. What did you see back in the day as a bag carrying demo giving sales person that where the art just spoke to you?

'cause sometimes folks, talk to me about the art being in the relationships. What does art mean to you? Oh, well, um, I probably would not have been an engineer.

First of all. I would probably have been a painter because I do paint. Ah, Yeah.

My, my, my sister is actually a pretty much a renowned painter out there. So it kind, it's probably in the, in the blood. So I was probably going down the path of being an architect, an interior designer, and decorators.

Oh my gosh, wow. I never knew why, why for heaven's sake, why was I an engineer? Yep.

Then, then walking into sales, et cetera, you know, these are so exacting as, as professions. But then I realized that, you know, somewhere deep down there, something was helping me connect that, that soft aspect of marketing with the hard aspect of it, which is numbers, et cetera. So the emotions, the, you know, the, the creativity, et cetera with, with the data.

And yeah, that was the foray, and that was a very, very interesting journey. But yeah, looking back, I, I don't think I figured out, I would never have figured out this path for myself, but it, it happened naturally. I think it's about listening.

Yeah, listening to your inner voice, right? Taking that guided inspired action, that next action, and then just trusting, trusting the person up there or the universe. Definitely you, your artists and scientists kind of combined.

I love that. I know we could talk so much more about that, but I wanna move on to talking about the MarTech stack at t trx, you talked about owning the numbers and it's incredibly important, but not measuring m qls and leads, but really measuring how's marketing and what we are doing, the art part, the science part, really moving revenue in a positive direction. Walk me through, if you will, at a high level rex's MarTech stack that you've deployed and how it's helping the overall revenue of the company go and up to the right, Right.

Absolutely. So look, um, every MarTech stack out there is pretty comparable, right? There's, there's, there's enough to be done around CRM, around Marketo, around Adobe analytics, all that kind of good stuff.

But where, where the rubber really meets the road is, I think, how you actually leverage the market stack. I think that's what we do to our advantage, because I've been in companies where we spent a ton of money and we have every single tool out there. We never use it.

Well, I've also been in companies where we hardly had anything and we were doing things manually, and the marketing was awesome. Yeah, but you have both, both those dichotomies, right? Well, where we are at TRX is we've got a pretty decent stack.

We, we are continuing to invest in things around predictive analytics, et cetera. Just last year we invested in, uh, you know, our chat bot around Drift, and it's, it's, it's been amazing within the website as well. So I'll give you a little bit of, due to drive hand raises, I'll give you a little bit of philosophy and as to what we are seeing, the, the mark, mark STA mark MarTech stack is pretty standard and it's starting to bleed into a little bit more cutting edge, leveraging things like predictive analytics, you know, analyzing behavior, analyzing intent.

We, we have a number of tools around that optimizing, you know, basically ROI as well and the use of resources. But we are also making sure that once that data, once that analytics is coming out, we are actually measuring the right things. Um, this is where I think this is an important point for all marketers out there.

Make sure you're measuring the right things. I'll give you a couple of examples. One, you definitely need, you definitely need to report on M qls because that's how you model your entire, um, go forward, you know, plan for the year, but you don't stop there.

You have to look at how MQs are converting to sqs. You have to look at how those are actually getting followed up by, by sales. So maybe you wanna start tracking wind rates.

Is sales having more stronger wind rates, which they should for sales driven pipeline and partner driven pipeline. But is it terribly lower for marketing, uh, based kind of pipeline? You really need to look into that.

And then it's an introspection for, for a marketer to see, Hey, the pipe that I'm developing for you, dear sales, is it not actionable? Is it not of good content, uh, quality content? Is it not something that you can do anything about?

Are we hitting the wrong audience? Are we hitting the wrong people? Yeah.

So all these are learning. So I'm, I look at marketing more from a humility kind of approach where, tell me where I can do something better. And then I go to go to the CRO or the CO and say, listen, I actually drove so many add-backs or so many hand raises for you.

And they, they question me. So what does that mean? Well, this is anyone with actual intent, actionable intent to do something with the company Intent.

That's where I believe marketing can truly make a difference. And the reason I've, I've been basically evolving my thinking around this is because I've been working for companies which are owned by private equity, right? Yeah.

You never have a free ticket to anything with private equity companies. You have to sh you have to prove your ROI. And it's fine that that makes a marketer even more brilliant, right?

You gotta talk time to value. You gotta talk about how you're using your resources and how you minimizing risk of impact to, you know, to the business, whether it's pipeline or whatever else that might. So I feel, you know, picking up the right things to measure, regardless of what the MarTech stack is, is the right way to go, Really focusing on measurement.

That's great advice. You know, we've been talking about every conference you and I've been to the last 18 months. ai, everything's about AI chat.

GPT just revolutionized things, made it a generative AI, a household word. I use it all the time. And some of the things that they do, especially for first drafts, I know a lot of marketers do as well.

What are your thoughts on leveraging ai, maybe gen AI to drive the customer or influence the customer journey that's changed so much as you've described? I think when we first, great question and very timely. I mean, when we first started talking, um, we started talking about gen ai, right?

And I talked about a couple of emails that I open, et cetera. So we started leveraging it within our own marketing team, and we started to develop certain templates for emails that sales could use, et cetera. It started to look very robotic.

Mm. And it started to look pretty lack of emotion, right? Lack of the personality, et cetera.

So what I feel is, look, there's a use and need for every, every single thing in the world. Take it as far as you need to like, automate some of your manual tasks, automate some of your repetitive things, maybe even start out with a template and then optimize it. Personalize it the way you would like to, because you know, there are a few things that you absolutely wanna say, Hey, please join us on this and such and such webinar on such and such date.

You don't have to keep repeating those things. But the personal pieces, dear Lisa, I really feel you are a leader in what you do in MarTech. I feel the way you bring your, you know, the, the synergies between sales and marketing, what you do around metrics, et cetera, are really key.

I, as a MarTech vendor, can probably make you do X, y, and Z faster. And we talk, here are some examples of, of companies in your field, your size of your company size. I think it starts making a little bit more, it's a little bit more exciting.

It's a little bit more personal. And by the way, here's a quick little video. Do it, do things with as much personalization as possible.

Yes. I think you go for, Oh, we can totally have a conversation on hyper-personalization, which is something that absolutely fascinates me because we have these expectations you talked about earlier. And, and I've got only one more question for you 'cause I know we have to go.

But you talked about really kind of the change in the B2C, influence on the B2B space, and we have this expectation as consumers, so we can get anything we want from our phones. It's gonna be, we're gonna be connected, it's gonna be personalized, it's gonna be relevant. So the, the double clicking, the hyper personalization, I'm gonna have to have you back on the show because I wanna dive in and I think we can, I think you could have some great insights for the audience, but I wanna, I want you to leave us what you've, you've given, I'm fangirling over this conversation, Ash, because you've given a masterclass in marketing, art, and science, and I will make sure I tell everyone that you did that and that's why the show is named what it is.

But you must have, in your experience, a fail to fab story, which is where we love to end this show that demonstrates a marketing initiative, a campaign, maybe it was, uh, creating personas, but didn't go so well. But you and the marketing team really pivoted that quickly into a favorable, fabulous marketing win share with us one of your failed to fab stories. Absolutely.

So let's, let's take a couple of re one recent example. So marketing in my mind is always in service to the bottom line, which is to make, to drive business for the company, right? And the way we can do it is probably in the discovery stage of a sales process or bringing ad pads or hand raise, as I mentioned before, real quality in, you know, leads to, to, to sellers.

That's one aspect of thing. It's also the aspect around driving awareness for the company and driving category leadership and all those kind of good things, right? Brand gen as I call it.

But let's focus on the first one, right? So if you really think about driving great quality leads and great quality pipelines, et cetera, pipeline, et cetera, I think what you really need is a growth mindset that fail fast, what you just said, right? Fail fast, scale fast.

And that's what we did at at t TRX recently. I mean, it's now a year, year and a half. Um, what we decided to do was bring in this whole thinking around sales.

Why don't you pick three or four topics that you feel are use case-based conversations or value-based conversations that you wanna have with the customer. Now, pay attention. I did not say what products you wanna sell.

I asked what use case and value-based conversations you wanna have. So lo and behold, we went out and asked, like, this was actually my first week when I joined tri. I went and talked to about six or seven different, uh, sales leaders.

And I, instead of asking other aspects within the company or other people within the company as sales leaders, what do you wanna talk to your customers about? What opens the door? And everyone put up their hand and said, ransomware, ransomware detection response.

Awesome. I haven't talked products, I haven't talked solutions yet. I just, I'm talking at a very, very high level.

So we create a whole campaign around this around ransomware detection response, and that was all about value-based selling. And as you started to create the campaign, you go from the top of fu mo, bofu, right? Yep.

Awareness all the way into, you know, basically fulfillment and qualification. So you start creating activities which are more generic, becoming a little bit more specific around the solution, a lot more spec specific around the product, like webinars, et cetera. And finally sit people down in a workshop and, and show them how things can be better in their worlds.

And by going through that entire imaginary pipe, if I may, you actually create a quality lead, right? You are looking for that needle in a big, big haystack. And that's exactly what we've been, we've been able to do at trs, right?

And that was a fail fast and, you know, scale fast. And we tried a couple of those and we, we feel we've, we've, we've hit the right kind of, you know, ringtone as far as marketing Yeah. To, to our, to our, uh, decision makers is concerned.

And I'll leave you with one or two different things, right? That growth mindset really requires that human connection plus creativity. Yeah, right?

It's not just the, the, the, the data piece of it, right? I also have always talked about five dashboards that every marketer should always have, uh, which are, how are we doing by channel marketing channel? How, how, how are we doing from a conversion rate perspective?

Uh, what is the utilization and resource of my MDRs, right? And finally, what are our campaign metrics? How many hand raisers that, how we actually deliver?

Yeah. So a lot of things can be done by inspecting what you expect, but as one of my colleagues actually said this morning, data provides evidence, not the motivation. So I salute that individual who actually used that.

I mean, just, just amazing mic drop moments from my team. Many mic drop moments that you've dropped with us here. Ash, I can't thank you enough for, again, your influence on the show and the direction that it's going, but also sharing with the audience.

I wish I had more time with you because I feel like we're just scratching the surface of, of what you've been able to accomplish. You are artists, you are scientists, you are growth minded leader, as we said in the beginning, zero fluff. And I think you've demonstrated all that.

We thank you so much for your time and imparting lots of, uh, wisdom on our audience today. Ash, my sincere thanks. Thank you, Lisa.

Keep doing the great work. Yeah. Audience, we wanna thank you for watching and let you know we'll be back with the next episode very shortly.

Take care, everyone.