Field Notes with Adin Mathitharan, Regional Marketing Manager for APAC & ANZ at WSO2

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with field marketers from all over the world, and today, we are thrilled to have Adin with us. Adin, could you introduce yourself and provide a little background?

Surely, first of all, thank you so much for the opportunity. I really appreciate it, and I hope that today’s session will be filled with insights and add value to your audience and talent group. My name is Adin. I work as the Regional Marketing Manager for APAC and ANZ at WSO2. WSO2 is a 20-year-old open-source tech company, and we provide foundational technology for enterprises to build their digital platforms. We have both on-premise and cloud versions of our product. We mainly focus on API and integration, and IAM. We have close to 700 paying customers and over 10,000 non-paying customers across the world. We are present in almost 97 countries. Hopefully, we get to 100 this year; that will be a big achievement for WSO2 in terms of our presence. We have over 750 employees. We are present in close to eight regions: North America, LATAM, Sri Lanka, Australia, Singapore, India, Africa, and MENA. We have a lot of presence and are constantly expanding.

 

To delve into your role as a marketing manager for APAC and ANZ, what is your current focus?

It is heavily focused on pipeline generation because, right now, as a company, WSO2 wants to grow in size and revenue. The primary focus is pipeline generation. If you work backwards, it also comes into looking at key metrics, such as brand awareness, the usual stuff, but primarily, we are just focusing on building our pipeline. Every single activity we do revolves around the end goal of pipeline generation, be it taking part in an event or running campaigns. It is just pipeline on top of pipeline.

 

I am sure you are doing a mix of activities to generate this pipeline. Could you share a specific campaign or initiative that you have been running recently that has seen really good results?

There are a couple that we have done that are seeing results. Generally, when we do something, we start with a brand awareness campaign that we run for about two to three months, using Google and LinkedIn to understand the demand for that particular subject. Then, we put together a few content pieces, followed by an event, and then we start following up.

I will share one of the campaigns we did some time back, which was in India for the government sector. We knew for a fact that in India, there is an open-source government policy. We felt that since WSO2 is an open-source company and the values are very similar, we could share our values. The problem was that awareness was an issue back then. We planned a six-month campaign. We launched a white paper with the objective of reminding government sector folks that there is an open-source mandate, and since we are an open-source company, they should consider us. We promoted that white paper through the usual channels, and we tied up with Economic Times, one of the largest publications in India. We did a content syndication with them, and then we also did a webinar, bringing in about 320 people to that particular webinar. We then saw a huge bump in folks from the government sector visiting our site. We used Demandbase at that time to track and understand these audiences and accounts. Ever since then, we have seen a big jump in inbound leads coming in from the government sector. We did not stop there; we continue to do roundtables, events, and workshops, and we invite them to attend our events. So, we are constantly engaging, and we are constantly feeding them information, keeping us top of mind. More recently, about a year ago, we started our PR activities in India as well. We adopted a lot of PR articles focused on the government sector, explaining what we are doing and how we can help them.

Another big focus for us is the BFSI sector. For the BFSI sector, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is one of our customers. We often use them as a benchmark. We have that logo with us, so we always lead with it, and we push a lot of case studies. The most important thing when it comes to campaigns these days is trust. You are not going to gain that trust over just two or three months. You need to constantly pair them with your analyst reports from Gartner and Forrester, and you also have to share case studies to contribute to that trust. It is not done in isolation. Every single piece of communication is linked to the other.

We brought back our WSO2 conference last year. Last year, we had it in the US, and then this year, early March, we had it in Spain. Now, we are doing one in Sri Lanka. We often use the WSO2Con as a way of getting customer testimonials, meeting customers, and having them meet our leadership. The pipeline essentially builds over time with more touchpoints, and the more you stay top of mind, you are going to get that. For us, that has been the success case, especially with the government sector, with back-to-back touchpoints and constantly being present in India, it is helping us to get there.

 

That is fantastic. It shows that aspect of preparation and purpose with the messaging you are trying to connect, and ultimately, the sale and the trust. As you said, it is a multi-touchpoint journey, and you have to have the right tools in place throughout. You did that very successfully. Would you adopt the same model for the finance sector, or would you make some tweaks for that audience?

Obviously, you have to tweak your messaging to suit the banking sector. The problems these organisations are trying to solve are entirely different from what the government sector or telecommunications audience, or whatever the vertical, are trying to solve. We often keep the messaging unique to banking.For instance, we talk a lot about open banking because we have done many open banking implementations in the past. We talk about that, customer experience, security, and access management products. This is especially true considering that if you take India as a market, we see they are focusing on modernisation, moving from legacy systems to more robust, future-proof, AI-supported products. This also mandates that it be implemented by the central banks. Especially in India, there is a new mandate by the RBI that they need to secure their source code in an escrow as a Business Continuity Plan. That is a big thing in India. If you go to Vietnam, there is an open banking mandate coming into place, and in the Philippines, as well, they are working on one. I do not know whether it is active yet. Banks are now thriving because challenger banks are challenging them, so they also need to step up their game. The way to stay relevant is to be digitally agile and to be quick to market. It is not just at a regional level; it goes down to the country market, and we tailor our message to fit the particular market. That relevancy helps us to connect with customers or prospects more easily and better, and helps us to build trust in the long term.

I know it is very common for most marketers in the B2B space who do field marketing or similar roles. Number one, you need to bring that sales and marketing alignment. I know in many organisations, sales and marketing do not see eye to eye, but I feel that for pipeline generation to happen, you need to align on your strategy, your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and your focus in a particular market. You have to align on those. If you cannot align, that is when you butt heads, and it does not work.

Number two, obviously, is the scrutiny of your budget and the crazy thing about your ROI. With sales cycles and buying cycles becoming wider, you are not going to deliver an ROI within the same year. It is going to take some time. The justification part of it and the explanation to leadership is one of those challenges you still need to push through and make it work.

Another challenge I see is that you have to balance your digital and physical experiences. If you look at many markets, especially within APAC, a lot of these are driven by relationships. If you are doing too many digitally driven campaigns and activities, it will not help you. Doing physical activities all the time will not help either. So you need to strike a balance.

Another challenge I see is that you have to start planning things ahead. That does not happen in many cases. I strongly believe that you should start planning your 2026 marketing calendar by now, and you have to start putting the messages together. That becomes even tougher when you are working with a cross-section of stakeholders within an organisation, such as sales or business unit teams. It becomes even more challenging. The reason I say that is if you do not plan, if you miss one quarter or even one month, you are losing a lot in terms of the pipeline and revenue you need to bring into the organisation.

And, obviously, you cannot track your ROI to the dot because there are gaps. When you do an event, six months down the line, there will not be any ROI unless you close. So you need to align internally on what the success factor you are looking at to track ROI is. Is it just the leads or pipeline, or are you looking at closed logos? I think you have to align as well. I believe that a marketing department or marketing team should have its own revenue target instead of just sticking to SQLs, MQLs, pipeline, and BANT. I think you need to find a way to evaluate your success with the revenue factor. To a great extent, we do that at WSO2, but I feel it can be made even better. That again brings another layer of challenge, whereas we need to get your housekeeping in place, such as updating your CRM on time, keeping track of your CRM, what you are doing, and updating communications. The bigger challenge is that customer behaviour has changed a lot. It is not the same as three or four months ago; the buying committee is even bigger. These are common challenges. But then again, that is something you can tackle, but you see a lot of challenges internally because that is where you need to align first to go out there. These are not just my challenges, but I believe many other marketers would agree.

 

Definitely. What you said about forward planning, everyone has seen it where you do not do as much pipeline generation as you should, and you feel the effects of it. You do not feel it at the moment, but then there becomes a huge gap, and everyone is a bit surprised, but deep down you know why it is there. It is very hard for sales teams not to focus on the here and now. How do you incentivise the sales team to go two quarters in advance, or at least a quarter in advance, to build that ICP? Unless everyone is swimming in the same direction, especially sales and marketing, campaigns can fall flat on their face, or people are puzzled why it was not a success.

I look at things a bit differently, in the sense that everything starts with your alignment. Number one, you need to look at what the success factor will be at the end of the year. If it is revenue, these are the activities we are going to do. These activities would bring us this many leads. Once a lead comes into play, what are you going to do with it? Do you also want to look at an outbound effort, or do you want to entirely depend on inbound? Depending entirely on inbound approaches is not enough. You also need to look at that outbound approach.

You have to be open, and you need to have the ability to say that you can hold me accountable the same way I am going to hold you accountable. This breaks down to a very practical level. If you are meeting someone at an event, how fast are you going to update that data into your CRM, how fast are you going to reach out to them, how are you going to continue to be in touch with them, and what can we offer? This is important. From Sri Lanka, we are going to meet a customer. We are going to spend a couple of thousand dollars on your flight and hotel. If we align the events that we are doing during the year, and you also align your visits at the same time so that you are visiting customers to attend the event, and you are also able to stay a couple more days and set up meetings with those who attended the event, and then do things, it goes down to that tactical level.

Number two, even if you are running a digital campaign, some of the leads you are going to get are not ready to buy yet, but I feel there are different things you can offer to get them to a meeting, like a use case workshop. These things need to be discussed initially during the planning phase with your sales team. At WSO2, we do boot camps every quarter. The objective is to align your quarterly plans and whether we are in line with the overall plan we put together. As a marketer, you need to have the willingness to be on customer calls. You need to make that extra effort to sit in discovery calls and customer calls to understand how these organisations are thinking, how they are working. You need to take those insights. If I am the marketing person, and I am just doing campaigns, if I do not listen to the customers and what they are saying, what benefit does it bring? You have to be humble enough to accept the marketing shortcomings, and you have to be open about it. For me, the starting point is having open communication, being able to hold each other accountable, that is where everything starts. It is setting expectations and sitting and talking a lot about the reality.

During our business calls, I sit in with the team, and we go through numbers every Monday morning and every Friday morning, for at least an hour and a half. We do not just discuss opportunities or leads. We discuss what we can do for those leads. What can marketing do to accelerate those if somebody is not reaching out? If the sales team is reaching out and they are not responding, what can we do to get in front of them? You are constantly in communication, constantly in touch with sales. You are constantly going back and forth, discussing things, agreeing, and working with your corporate team to run whatever strategy you want to run with that feedback and insights. Others would have a different opinion, but for me, it is about sales holding marketing and marketing resources accountable as well. That defines the success of your business, in my opinion, because I, too, come from a sales background. I started my career in sales, and it lasted for about five years. So I do have a soft spot for sales, and I have an even softer spot for marketing. For me, bringing that balance helps you to go that distance

 

I love the point of making sure that you are sitting in some of these sales groups. It is crucial to understand that perspective and relay that back.

When I attend events in countries like Singapore or India, or any other country for that matter, when you talk to these people, they essentially say, “Do we have an office here? How often do you come? We like face-to-face meetings.” They say, “We do not just want a Zoom call. We want to meet in person.” Once you go there, you understand the culture, and that understanding will help you to craft your campaign at a more personal level to reach the audience

 

How do you stay ahead of your competitors in terms of your marketing?

It is about planning things ahead. This is my personal learning: when I started working for WSO2, during the first two years, I did not set aside any time to learn about the market or what was going on, or about the competitors, because you are so caught up with work. Then, I made a point to set aside at least one hour just to learn something new about what your competitors are doing, about the product, about the market, about mandates, about anything that is happening in my region. You sit and you learn and you understand because certain bigger organisations are not able to churn things out fast. They take time. So, if you have the insight and you can take things ahead, it will help you to kick things off and be ahead of the game.
If you look at it, there are certain markets many competitors would not want to enter because they are too small for them. But our team is hungry, so we go wherever there is an opportunity for us. The simple rule of thumb that I follow is that if you can close at least four to five logos in one particular country, there is an opportunity for you. Do not just sit and wait; go ahead and do things there. It depends on what you want to do in terms of your campaign. But again, do something there, at least. Start with a visit, call the prospects. Tell them you are coming to the country. Go and meet them, have a cup of coffee. It goes a long way. Then you can think about doing big stuff. So, start something tiny, and then take it forward. Constantly learn, constantly research, constantly stay hungry for new information. I think that is what keeps us ahead of our competitors. We are encouraged to learn more, and we are encouraged to stay hungry because we do not celebrate our achievements for the year. We want to stay hungry and grab more. That is the place we are in, at least for now. Hopefully, we stay hungry forever.

 

I like the point about not just looking at the obvious countries or regions. When we are running events, I love it when it is a secondary city. As long as there is a reasonable number of people, the response and the learning you can get in a short time are amazing because people are generally more transparent. You can understand the market far quicker than a larger market, because you get more transparency from that customer. It is less competitive as well, so you get more airtime. In terms of opportunities today, what do you believe are the biggest opportunities for field marketers that might not have been available in the past?

AI is playing a big role. AI is cutting down time in terms of everything, literally. Our CEO, Sanjeeva, used to say that he does not think AI will take away a job, but people who know how to use AI will take away your job. It is pretty much the same thing.

There is something new every single day in terms of AI capabilities. You could literally do, for example, about a year and a half or two years back, before AI picked up, I used to spend two to two and a half hours just to craft an email campaign, an email thread. Then, another half an hour just for a grammar check. That time is now cut by just half an hour to an hour.

AI is working, and, you are getting access to travel more, and you are getting access to more and new markets. You have the capabilities of understanding your markets at a deeper level. Then you have amazing tools like Demandbase and 6sense. Leverage that. Data is becoming more and more important by the day. Leverage the data that you already have. Privacy is becoming a big thing, which means you cannot push it your way. You need to do things by the book. You need to do things the right way. If you are authentic and truthful, customers will trust you, and prospects will trust you. I see it as an opportunity because what better way to cut through the noise and be genuine? To me, I see these little things as an opportunity. People could say we are in a hype cycle, but I do not know whether in a B2B space, especially in this region, it will pick up, but maybe for a B2C brand, it could have an impact.

Once again, I see a massive opportunity in terms of your thinking as well. I have come to realise that B2B customers are human beings, and we often treat them as businesses. So I feel like you need to start thinking a lot like a B2C brand and also talk to their emotion. How do campaigns have that emotion and personality, and portray the brand as a person, because ultimately, the decisions are being made by human beings? I feel like you need to bring those B2C principles into B2B, and that will help you to be more authentic and truthful. I see a massive opportunity there, and I do not think many brands are utilising it, except for a few, like Slack, which bring humour into their ads, which I love. I love their campaigns. They are executed blatantly. We need to bring that personality into the campaigns we are doing and be more human.

Exactly, you just need to break that cycle and see yourself as a human being. Ultimately, I see brands as human beings with a personality, a particular tone, and a way they behave. You need to have that in your communications, as the brand often takes on the personality of the founder and their values. You need to bring it out. Essentially, you need to start treating your brand as a human being. I am curious to know what the future holds in terms of that thinking, but I hope we will see a difference in how we look at things.

 

That nicely segues into my next question: In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like? You touched upon AI, but are there any other points you would like to add?

If you look at it, the future of marketing is not going to be just this or that. It is a cycle. For the longest time, we have been talking about the future of marketing being AR and VR, and an immersive experience. Digital marketing is going to be integrated, autonomous channels, strategies, and so on. It has been in discussion for the longest time, and I feel that cycle will continue for many years until something new comes in. That new thing will be something super old that we have already tried, like fashion trends redoing the 60s with a twist, making it a bit more for the time being. Marketing is just a cycle, as far as I can remember. For seven or eight years, this AR and immersive experience has been a thing, and it will always be the future of marketing. Obviously, the biggest change would be in terms of your mindset and your way of thinking about what type of principles to follow. In terms of technology, it is going to improve day by day. But it is essentially just a cycle, in my opinion. Even if you look at what is written in January, if you read all the top 10 marketing trends for 2025 or 2026, it will be very similar to last year’s. I think it is the similarities, and sometimes it is even the same, because I think it has been the same thing for the past five or six years. What is going to be new? I feel this whole AI and automation thing is going to be a massive future for marketers because setting up campaigns and defining audiences will get a lot easier for us. So, I see a massive future with AI, tech, and automation.

 

Fantastic. And this is the hardest question: what is the role of a marketer in one word?

I would essentially summarise my role as building trust within the region, building trust for innovation. That is my simple idea because if you do not trust anybody, you are not going to give money to them. So it is all about building trust. To build trust, you need to do a number of things. It depends on what you want to do, but ultimately, you need to check whether the activities and campaigns you are doing are actually building trust within your community, your region, and the world. It is that simple, if you ask me. It is that simple.

 

What piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t apply to modern Field Marketing?

That is a good question. I do not really know how to answer that, but I will tell you what should be the case. You should have an open culture, openness, and transparency. I feel that would work. Many things have not worked well in terms of leadership style. The two things that I have only seen work well, at least for me at WSO2, are transparency and openness in what you do. That would definitely work, but others, because it is my personal experience.

Okay, I will tell you what does not work. When I started working, there was always this thought that you have to stick to that long-term marketing plan, and you need to stick to it to the last dot. I do not think that should be the case. I do not think it works. You have to be able to pivot as soon as possible because people change, behaviours change, and there is so much change between today and tomorrow that you cannot stick to it. It took about two years for me to learn that. Now, even though I work on my annual marketing plan every other month, I change it to make sure that it fits the direction the region is going and the direction the world is going. For me, that does not work at all.

 

What would be some pieces of advice that you would give to other people working their way up the marketing ladder?

Number one, constantly learn. Number two, always stay curious. Number three, be as confident as possible in terms of your strategies. And number four, you have to care about the ROI, but do not obsess about the ROI. Do what you feel is right for the region, do what you feel is right for the company, and do what is right for you. I think there is no forced input principle that I follow. And then, be as vocal as you can.

 

On that ROI point, it is often the case. The less you think about the end goal, and instead think about the steps, you are not thinking about the ROI, you are thinking about the value proposition, and then it just comes so much easier. There are things in life where if you focus too much on the result, you sabotage quite a lot of people’s enjoyment of getting there and the success of that.

Absolutely. I see this in my previous workplaces, where before you even present your plan, you get questions about ROI from the outset. That puts a lot of thought in your mind about whether things will work. What am I going to do about ROI? You are not focusing on what needs to be done. For me, do not just give them what the ROI is. Focus on what needs to be done, and ROI will come. That is why I said, “Do what is right for you. Do what is right for the company. Do what is right for the vision.Very simple.