CMO Chats with Min Erh Mah, JAPAC GTM Marketing Director of Palo Alto Networks

Hello everybody. We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all over the world. And we are thrilled to have Min with us today, who is the JPAC GTM marketing director at Palo Alto Networks. Min, please introduce yourself.

Hi, thanks, Sabrina. Hi everyone. Welcome to CMO Chats. My name is Min, and I look after the JAPAC Go-to-Market Marketing across Palo Alto Networks.

Thank you, Min, and we are super happy to have you here today. Can you tell us a bit more about your role and what your company does?

Definitely. Palo Alto Networks is a cybersecurity company, and what we envision is to help our customers make every day safer than the day before. Obviously, with a lot of the breaches, AI, and things like that, it is definitely increasingly more important for companies to embed cybersecurity as part of their entire design. 

At JAPAC, I’m based out of Singapore, and I look after all the solutions that we have across the market. On a day-to-day basis, I help bridge between the global teams coming up with campaigns, localising that, ensuring that it makes sense for our local markets in terms of content, the customer journey, etc., and working hand in hand with the field marketing teams to ensure that we have the localisation requirements and content messaging that makes sense with the local markets.

As a marketing leader, what is your current marketing focus at the moment?

Definitely, we work with different stakeholders, not just within marketing, but with sales, with the go-to-market teams, Customer Success teams, etc. One of the things that we are focusing on is definitely brand versus lead generation. On the whole, how do we ensure that it’s not either-or, but both, because you need both working hand in hand to help create that awareness, that branding for your brand out there in the market, and at the same time, it’s about tying that back to lead generation, because definitely what your sales are after is, how do you create leads for me? How do I get my next deal closed? It doesn’t come as one or the other, because in order to get that lead generation to reach out to new prospects, you need to have your brand awareness out there and the entire customer journey funnel, from the top of the funnel, how do you create that awareness and then slowly nurturing and engaging the leads down to the mid and bottom funnels? Brand and lead generation work hand in hand. 

Next top of mind will definitely be AI. How can we talk about anything without AI today? From a user perspective, we are using Chatgpt and things like that in our day-to-day work. Of course, this will help us as marketers in terms of getting things done more efficiently at a faster pace. But it also comes, especially with a cybersecurity company, to play whether we are using AI securely. Are there any data leaks or data poisoning? How do we ensure that employees are using it securely and using it efficiently, tying that back to other applications and software that we are using? Just making sure that we are leveraging the right tools to help us and not just embarking on something because it’s top of mind right now. 

I agree with that. As a company that represents security, being able to apply it to yourself and even show other clients that this is something that you don’t just go through rapidly, but you’re very thoughtful to make sure that it is efficient, but also safe. I also liked what you said about brand awareness and lead generation, the importance of them being together, because at the end of the day, the brand speaks for itself, and you have the generated leads to be able to absorb that. My next question actually is more on what is a particularly innovative marketing campaign your team recently executed, which yielded success in terms of engagement and lead generation.

I will say that typically what we like to do is that the campaigns or the programs that we are running are not just a single activity or tactic in silo. When we look at the entire customer journey, you need a lot of different touch points, be it B2B or B2C. It doesn’t mean that once you reach out to a prospect, he or she will convert immediately. But how do you create that funnel, that journey to continuously engage and build awareness, education, and then finally convert? What we find works well is that, at least from a GTM perspective, we create an always-on platform that continuously engages. So it could start with digital campaigns, paid media at a very high level, but ultimately we will anchor that with a big rock activity in the country, in the field. For example, we have flagship events in Ignite, which is the single biggest proprietary event that we host in all our tier-one cities across JAPAC, and that is the anchor event, a get-together where we present the latest, the greatest, the roadmaps, and invite customers to share their successes. Again, after the event, it doesn’t stop there on the day itself. But how do we continuously tell that story, continue that journey with follow-up activities? All these will tie up very nicely into a customer journey that we are looking at. Which is why the activities that we are looking at nowadays don’t stop at just one or two, but the most important thing is how we connect, making that connection from point A all the way to the end.

You make a great point about the customer journey not stopping at just the event itself or just one touch point. Many touchpoints contribute to how that person or that customer eventually decides in the end. We talked about the exciting success of how these types of events bring together customers. But what I want to know now is, what is your biggest marketing challenge at the moment?

Finding the right channel and the right tactic is always a constant challenge, because we know that our prospects are always bombarded by a lot of things, and many of your competitors out there are doing similar things. Understanding, fundamentally, boils down to understanding what the customers’ needs and requirements are. It’s not a cookie-cutter approach. If we are selling the same solution, understanding what the customer needs and requires, and how you tailor that message to meet the customer’s challenges, is a constant thing that we always need to remind ourselves as marketers or as salespeople to be relevant, to really understand and create that unique customer experience. That’s really important. That then ties back to what the channels are that you’re reaching out to. Today, they are multi-channel, omni-channel, not just email, not just events, but all these different touch points, they add up. That’s one, when I talk about externally, but internally, I wouldn’t call that a challenge. But something that we as marketers always have to remind ourselves is how do we have better alignment with sales, with internal stakeholders, because at the end of the day, we are a team. We don’t just go to market and try to promote something in silo. It has to be relevant to our customers and to our sales, and taking directions from the sales as well, in terms of what they are hearing from their customers, getting their feedback. That alignment and understanding that we are working as a team with a common set of goals is key. For example, nowadays we are looking into the ROI of the activity or program and how much pipeline we are creating for sales. All this needs is a common alignment and goal that we are all working towards, this pipeline creation, not ‘I’m doing my thing, you’re doing your thing,’ but that constant alignment and conversation.

As you mentioned a while ago, it’s really important for the alignment to happen, because you are, at the end of the day, sharing one goal and sharing one message. So, it is very good to have everyone on board when you create these types of initiatives. What I want to focus on better now is marketing leaders. What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for marketing leaders today that might not have been available in the past?

Traditionally, we were just focusing on marketing, staying in our lane of marketing, doing what we were best known for as marketers. Historically, the brand leaders, the CMOs, were seen as brand stewards and campaign owners, focusing a lot on the creative output and the lead generation part of things. But today, increasingly, marketers, or marketing leaders, are expected to be growth architects. How do we help, impact, and influence? We are deeply involved in product strategies, in revenue generation, customer experience, even the data infrastructure, the martech, and the technology choices. It has evolved. We are not just doing promotion and awareness, but we need to know and collaborate across functions with sales, products, finance, and customer success. Collectively, we are all held accountable for pipeline and customer retention. What is the ROI that you’re driving? Those are the key indicators for the business. Being cognizant and aligning with the business requirements is really key and important, which is something very different from traditional marketing. Hence, marketing’s role is increasingly about orchestrating, like a conductor in a symphony. How do you orchestrate the entire customer journey, and not just look at demand generation or tactics?

I couldn’t agree more. I love the word orchestrating, weaving through the symphony of everything that you mentioned a while ago. And that goes to our last two questions, one being, what is the role of the CMO in one word and why?

I would really have to lean back to what I just used earlier, orchestrator, because that is really the key. Modern marketing is about connecting everything, building that customer journey, the brand with the revenue, product with the customer data and creativity, because data is just numbers, statistics. But how do we make sense of the numbers? Data is the new oil; data is the king. But how do we make sense out of that and infuse creativity into data and use that to help us in our campaigns, and then with internal teams and external markets? It’s dynamic work that we are working on today, not just leading campaigns, but how do we align the strategy, the operations, and the technology across everything? Hence, orchestrator, that’s really the key role of marketing. Love it.

My last question for you, Min, is given that you have been in the marketing role for many years already, what career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

Just be yourself, dream big, and own the end-to-end customer journey, because it does not stop at being marketing. I have known my ex-colleagues who have grown and moved out of the CMO into a CEO role. Don’t be bounded by limits. Be accountable for what you’re doing and continuously learning. That’s key, especially with AI technologies and quantum out there in the market. We need to keep up, and hence, continuously learn and not be limited by what we are seeing. The future is now.