A few years back, Santa Clara, California -- headquarters of cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks -- started going after selected companies that matched its ideal customer profile. What began as a tactical approach toward potential clients has now evolved into a full-fledged account-based marketing strategy, which is an integral part of its marketing initiatives. Founded 13 years ago, Palo Alto Networks has emerged as one of the leading global cybersecurity firms, with 50,000 customers in more than 150 countries. It serves over 85 firms of the Fortune 100 and more than 63% of companies in the Global 2000. In an interview with Digital CMO, K. P. Unnikrishnan, Senior Director & Head of Marketing, Asia Pacific & Japan, Palo Alto Networks, talked about how and why the company embraced account-based marketing (ABM) and what has changed since then.

Interviewed by Moulishree Srivastava

/ / How has the ABM function evolved in your company over the past few years?

It started as a tactical approach a few years back. We would identify selected accounts and have sales and marketing teams work together on those accounts. Since then, ABM has evolved into a strategic, integral part of our business growth, and marketing plays a vital role in it.

/ / Do you have a separate ABM team? Do they function under the sales or marketing function?

It is an integral part of the marketing team, and there are people who would focus on ABM accounts, depending on the region and the market.

/ / How do you select your ABM accounts?

We go about it scientifically. We are a data-driven company. We look at the total addressable market, the market potential, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and taking all of that into account, we say these are the organizations that we believe can scale up to become large multi-dollar accounts for us. If an organization has an extensive global mobile workforce and there is a large security component to it, we take that into account.

/ / What are the tools you use in ABM?

At a very high level, there are sales and marketing automation tools that we use. Then there are optimization and personalization tools, social media and predictive analytics tools.

/ / Do you map the customer journey of all your ABM accounts? Have you created individual personas of people within each of your ABM accounts?

Absolutely, right from mapping the prospects' pain points to looking at how we can work with them at every stage of the buying-evaluation cycle.

We have a lot of customers who come back and buy more from us. Which means, it is critical, after a deal is won, that we continue to work with the client and understand what their evolving needs are. Customers would want not only to know if we can help them prevent all breaches but also what is coming and what the unknown threats are that they can be potentially vulnerable to.

Today, we have something called Magnifier, which does behavioral analytics. We look at all the trend data that is out there, and we work with customers using behavior modeling to identify potential threats. We do persona mapping as well. ABM is not a tactical tool. It is a journey of understanding a prospect's business pains and challenges and addressing them.

/ / What are the channels of communication you use in ABM?

We use all channels of communications, but we customize it depending on the target audience. And that is why I said, it is programmatic and customizable; because what we do for a CIO or a CSO could be very different from what we do with security specialists. And that, in turn, would be different from what we do for a CFO.

For instance, we are likely to connect some of our customers’ CSOs with our own CIO. He would be the best person to explain to them what we are doing.

/ / What are the new opportunities that ABM has opened up for your business?

For us, business from ABM accounts has substantially gone up. Obviously, there is more to it than that, like how ABM has opened up doors to senior C level executives and enabled us to become partners with the organizations that are looking at cloud transformation. Today, we measure ROI on ABM.

/ / What are the challenges you have faced in implementing ABM?

The first challenge is acceptance from the sales and marketing teams, as they need to work together closely. The second is knowing the right accounts to target. If you choose the wrong accounts for ABM, you will actually be wasting time, money and resources in driving them.

Lastly, I would say, many of these tools, programs and technology have to evolve, and the foundation for this is data ― the right data. So organizations have to ensure that they work with the correct data.

/ / Do you think companies are investing enough in ABM?

It differs. Sales and marketing automation, account-based advertising, targeted advertising, web tools and optimization tools, these things don’t come cheap. But most organizations today understand the value that they would get in terms of these types of investments and are obviously taking small steps toward investing in them.

/ / Have you invested in advanced analytics?

Yes. The way we look at it, these cannot be standalone technologies. It doesn't make sense to have technology x if you do not have technology y. Let's say you have marketing automation, but you don't have predictive analytics. Then what's the point of having automation? Similarly, if you are looking at social media tools and getting data from social, but you have not tied this with AI and predictive analytics, it wouldn’t work.

/ / What are the trends/technologies that you think will drive ABM in the future? How should businesses gear up for this?

Quite a few things. Over the last couple of years, 20-30% of businesses focused on ABM; that number has gone up to 60-70% in the industry today, and that will continue to rise. So that is definitely going to be a key component.

I think the second component would be technologies and tools. These technologies will continue to evolve as they link back to that level of customization and intimacy and account knowledge that is required to feed in and work with relevant marketing data. If I get my data right, I can use predictive analytics tools, which is one of the top five technologies that are being used for ABM.

Businesses should gear up by knowing and understanding what their customers want. That's it. Today, ABM has become more critical because it is really important for businesses to understand what their customers' needs and pain points are. Companies need to realize that ABM is the strategic weapon that they can use to achieve this.