MarTech360 Interview with Ash Parikh, Chief Marketing Officer at Trellix

Always be exploring new ways to drive excellence – have a try fast and fail or scale fast mentality

Ash, what strategies have you found most effective in scaling both demand generation and brand leadership at enterprise companies, particularly in industries like analytics, data, CRM, AI, and cybersecurity? How do you balance innovative, low-budget brand awareness campaigns with  high-impact ROI-driven initiatives, and what role does AI-powered MarTech play in achieving  these goals?

Demand generation and brand are two sides of the same coin. They cannot be separated or thought of in absence of the other when building a cohesive marketing strategy. However, in most organizations this is not the case, creating unnecessary friction.

The main reason is most CMOs come from either a product marketing or demand generation or brand/ad background. Very rarely does a CMO take the time to master all three core competencies, or even give equal importance to all of them. When done right, demand generation and brand can create a 1 + 1 = 3 effect. And when you have a growth marketing mindset (metrics, data and analytics, inspect what you expect) to everything you do in marketing, while taking advantage of modern and AI-powered martech tools, brand can quickly transform into brand gen, as everyone and everything in a company is in the business of “selling.” If you then take this line of thought and overlay the fact that marketing budgets are not getting any bigger, you can quantify the ROI of almost everything you do in marketing, including brand gen.

Here is where creativity comes in. It shouldn’t take millions of dollars to drive an impactful awareness campaign. Especially in B2B, companies that spend an inordinate amount of their marketing budget on say, Super Bowl Ads, F1 sponsorship, or other grand displays of branding, very rarely see the return on their investment post the initial excitement of “go-live.” This puts marketing squarely in the cross-hairs of scrutiny by company boards and the CFO.

For a small fraction of that investment, and with some scrappiness, a business can run an end-to-end demand gen and brand gen campaign with engaging content built from differentiated and provocative positioning and messaging. At the end of the day, modern customers are extremely intelligent: they are doing their research on the market and available solutions, well before they contact a vendor. Hence, marketing’s job must be to invest valuable time and resources in making the customer’s decision easier.

Ash, can you tell us about your professional background and your current role at Trellix. Also tell us how does Trellix differentiate itself from other companies in the same space?

Over the last 25 years, I have touched all aspects of B2B go-to-market, across both strategy and execution, working in sales, product management and marketing. I started my career carrying a bag selling enterprise software as well as fielding customer support calls, which have helped me deeply understand a day in the life of the salesperson and the customer. My technical background took me into the exciting world of sales engineering, doing demos for a living, followed by a final foray into product management, product marketing, and finally marketing, where I spent a lot of time sharpening my skills in every aspect of marketing.

I am what I consider a modern full-stack CMO. My inherent skills in product positioning, messaging and storytelling, coupled with a hunger for data and analytics, while moonlighting as an artist, have all contributed to my ability to balance the “art and science” of modern marketing. Having served as an interim general manager for a company’s flagship product gave me a growth mindset, which I bring to the table as a CMO.

Trellix is a rare cybersecurity company with a rich heritage spanning decades. Unlike other security companies, Trellix offers a scalable security platform built on a modern intelligence foundation covering threat intelligence, machine learning, artificial intelligence and GenAI, to reduce the time to detect and respond to cyber threats. Not many cybersecurity companies can boast of a comprehensive, open and flexible platform of best of breed products that span endpoint, email, network, cloud and data security. Most companies can support one or two of these at the most, and none of them offer the openness to work with solutions from other vendors, like Trellix does. Why is this important? Because threats don’t come in through just one way such as endpoint devices – they could also hit hard via the network or email. Companies need to be vigilant across the ever increasing threat landscape. Additionally, only Trellix offers the promise of leaving no alert behind – ensuring that the security analyst and CISO are not caught off guard because of the sheer volume of threats and the time it takes teams to triage these threats. Our AI-powered foundation, Trellix Wise, makes sure of this with hyper automation.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview with Mark Emond, Founder and CEO at Demand Spring

In light of increasing concerns over data security and compliance with stringent privacy regulations in the Martech industry, how does your company’s advanced cybersecurity solutions ensure the protection of customer data and uphold regulatory requirements?

Ensuring customers can meet the regulatory requirements of their industries across any region is of utmost importance for us at Trellix. We build and update our products with compliance as a top priority to ensure customers can continue to get maximum benefits.

What unique features does Trellix XDR offer to enhance unified threat prevention, detection, and response across multiple security controls and data sources, especially in integrating with both Trellix native security solutions and over 1,000 third-party sources?

Trellix XDR integrates with our broad portfolio of endpoint, email, network, cloud, and other security products, while easily connecting with third-party security apps. This connectivity equips businesses with intelligent threat sensing, analytics, and automated response. With XDR from Trellix, customers are empowered to:

1. Detect advanced attacks across all vectors
2. Move from attack detection to threat prevention
3. Embed next generation security into your operations

Our customers value the unified and simple experience of Trellix XDR, which is especially important for Security Analysts and SecOps teams.

Ash, how does Trellix Email Security ensure the secure collaboration of organizations across their extended enterprise, particularly in addressing the challenges posed by digital transformation and complex ecosystem interactions? We are particularly interested in how Trellix  integrates with popular collaboration platforms like Slack, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace  to safeguard file integrity and mitigate risks associated with shared content.

Digital transformation initiatives have broadened the attack surface in the enterprise ecosystem, posing significant challenges for security teams and requiring additional security measures. While tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Workspace have made it easier to share information, these largely unprotected attack vectors are actively exploited by threat actors – like the Midnight Blizzard credential theft phishing attacks via Microsoft Teams. At the same time, while enterprise SaaS applications for sales, HR, and finance simplify business, they become new vectors for attack.

The interconnected enterprise of today needs to think beyond securing email and instead secure all forms of communication and collaboration – and this is the approach we empower for our customers. We designed Trellix Collaboration Security to offer consistent, comprehensive protection from compromise across email, collaboration tools, and SaaS applications. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and security analytics, the solution inspects shared files and URLs continuously and unobtrusively, delivering verdicts in seconds.

What role do you see AI-powered technologies playing in the future of marketing, and how do you integrate these technologies to drive competitive advantage and customer engagement?

While pipeline targets are increasing every year, marketing budgets are not going up at the same pace. The only way to do more with less is automation.

Every martech tool out there is looking for new ways to improve marketing results by lessening the need for manual work, thus increasing productivity. I see a ton of AI-powered innovation in the way these solutions now deliver more granular and predictive analytics, segment target audiences based on intent data, personalized content for specific personas, and come up with new ways of engaging the buyer. As the CMO of Trellix, I am extremely sensitive to the fact that the customer’s time is money. My world-class team is leveraging some of the best and latest martech tools to help and inform the customer throughout their buying journey, upholding one of Trellix’s core values – customer satisfaction.

What advice would you give to other leaders which helped you personally?

I am grateful to have had a number of mentors and guides throughout my career. Maybe they saw in me the ability to think beyond marketing and look at business strategy as a whole, which is why I have had innumerable conversations around company and platform positioning, go-to-market strategy, creating blue oceans vs. competitors, including transforming marketing organizations for excellence with both scale and ROI. Based on my years of learning, and I continue to learn every day, there are three things I would like to pass on. One, the appreciation should always be for the team but the criticism should always be for the leader (me). Two, always be exploring new ways to drive excellence – have a try fast and fail or scale fast mentality. And three, always be your true self – authenticity is the most cherished quality of a leader – people truly appreciate it if they get what they see.

What is the biggest problem you or your team is solving this year?

The world is at an interesting juncture today. While the macroeconomic conditions have been somewhat questionable, keeping businesses and individuals safe has never been more important. Hence, the biggest challenge my team is focused on solving this year and I am sure for the near future as well, is to help customers separate the marketing noise from the signal coming from the myriad of cybersecurity vendors. My marketing organization is singularly focused on providing customers with clear, unbiased and reliable direction and help around the ever increasing threat landscape and how to become more resilient. Here is an example – https://www.trellix.com/solutions/trellix-response-to-global-tech-outage/.

Is there anything that you’re currently reading, or any favorite books, that you’d recommend?

I depend on a monthly diet of audiobooks picked to help me understand the world better, contribute to business strategy, continue to develop as a leader, and get up to speed with the latest and greatest in marketing and sales. I have three favorite books – you could say that they have served as the foundation for the person I am today. One – Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. Two – Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim’s Blue Ocean Strategy. And three – Olivia Fox Cabane’s The Charisma Myth.

Thanks, Ash!