Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 00:00
The CMO’S role is the hardest in the executive leadership be open to ideas for everybody will tell you what you should do in marketing. How you feel about marketing should not be on what side of the bed you got.
Ben Kaplan 00:11
This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. Re ideas after a certain way want to spread. They want to be told that someone else's simple, surprising and significant data to unlocking viral creativity is to make it rapidly scalable. This is TOP CMO with me, Ben Kaplan. today I'm chatting with Ashish Kuthiala CMO at Traceable AI, a fast growing company in the emerging category of API cybersecurity. First time CMO, Ashish brings his background in computer science and engineering, DevOps, and product marketing to the broader brand marketing conversation. Under his leadership Creasman has achieved nearly 300% year over year growth. A veteran of companies like HP and GitLab Ashish relishes the opportunity to build brand awareness and thought leadership in a category still in its adolescence. So how do you establish thought leadership quickly, even with limited resources? And what should CMOs focus on whether a company's only awareness revolves around the founders themselves? Let's find out with Ashish Kuthiala
Ben Kaplan 01:37
Ashish, you describe your role in an interesting way, which is your skill. And what you're trying to help the company do is escape gravity. Escape gravity, I haven't heard the CMO role describe like that, what does it mean to escape gravity?
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 01:53
Yeah, so you know, when I joined tricycle about three years ago, the company was coming out of stealth mode. The company has been founded by Jyoti Bansal, and Sandy Nagarajan. The boy both been serial entrepreneurs in the sense that Joe these, this is Joe's the third startup. So he first founded AppDynamics, that is sold to Cisco, then he found harmless, that's in the CI cd space. And then, you know, he formed Traceable, because he saw an issue, and a big challenge around security around API's that we're exploring. So when I got here, the company had just come out of the stealth mode, which meant that, you know, they had worked behind the scenes to build the technology, the engineering, and we're starting to partner with, you know, some customers to do some, you know, designing partner kind of things, and, you know, trying to find the product market fit, you know, that was the face. So when I got here, the company, you know, those those people who knew jothee knew that he had founded a new company for you know, solving this issue. But in the world of security, nobody actually knew, Traceable, Traceable AI, and so in, that's what I call escaping gravity. So unless you're not, you know, you're looking for God, and then looking for the companies that he worked on or founded, you would not have found Traceable with just yet and done some press releases, you know, some people kind of knew some CISOs were invested in it. But the general kind of buyer personas, the corporations out there, you know, who need this challenge, salt, or the endless community, or the thought leaders out there that didn't know much about Traceable. So, you know, I've worked in companies before where I've helped scale, you know, the, the revenue momentum or go to market, or I've helped companies that have been steady, you know, been in the market for, you know, 1015 years, they have good revenues, and how to, like, you know, get them to the next phase. When I got here, the only way you could find, you know, Traceable was maybe when you were looking for one of the founders, yet to establish, you know, your product market fit your core messaging, you have to identify who you were selling to, you had to connect with them, you had to meet them, you know, where they were looking for solutions. In fact, this was a case where, you know, API security was just starting a lot of times when we ran into you know, are intercepted some of the would be buyers, and you know, would we would be practitioners, we'd have to educate them on what what it meant to do security specifically for API's, then everything from establishing your website, SEO, you know, finding helping be found by those looking to solve such a problem to educating the analysts, to even finding out where people go to discuss such issues or even like getting into the right waterfalls, I call them or water coolers, where people gather to discuss challenges, you know, we had to establish all of that, right? So this just didn't exist. We were a company that had been founded, but nobody knew about it. So I call that escaping gravity. And
Ben Kaplan 04:54
of all of those things you do which is build up a whole sounds like brand platform and marketing platform and marketing channels and all of that. What were some of the things that maybe were surprising, that were impactful? That gave you the most leverage things like non obvious things over the past three years, that made a tremendous difference in escaping that gravitational pull, you know,
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 05:18
I believe basic functional marketing is to educate the market about the problem itself, the magnitude of the problem. And why do you need to solve it? What happens if you don't solve it, and what happens when you solve it successfully? If you take that approach, which was missing in this market, when we came along, there were other competitors, of course, you know, who were starting up as well, most of them in the startup space, because this is a new problem to be solved, you know, now we see a lot of the bigger security companies stepping in, but when you get out there in the marketplace, and have the opportunity to educate the market about a new problem in this domain, or any other domain, and you know, taking an approach that's very vendor neutral, so not pushing your product all the time, but educating the market about, you know, why is this problem happening? Which path is it headed down if you do not solve for it, and if you do solve for it, you know, what happens? That's very exciting for me. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, if you're selling, let's just take the example of, you know, fishing here, you want to educate people about how to fish, right? Where to go, and fish, what's the right kind of bait to use? What kind of techniques do you use, etc. And then, you know, if you're an expert in that, you know, people should associate you with, you know, being the experts in this field that you're trying to solve for.
Ben Kaplan 06:38
And for Traceable, you know, as you do that, as you become you establish thought leadership, as you use more content to establish your expertise. What kind of sales cycles are we talking about here? Meaning do you have to? Is someone gonna make a change and realize, you know, this month that oh, gosh, my API's are unprotected, I need to take action? Or are you going to have to kind of stick around for a while, until they look at maybe cybersecurity more holistically? What am I weak points? And API's might be one of them and says, Oh, yeah, there's that company. And they're, they're producing great content. And I love the sheesh on the TOP CMO podcast, and what does that sales cycle look like for you? And then how does that impact the content or thought leadership you create? Absolutely.
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 07:22
So we're seeing a change already. Right? When we started three years ago, a lot of times, we had to educate the security teams, and even the engineering teams of what the risks were and why this was a problem. Because most people would say, I don't have an API security problem. What do you mean by an API security problem? That has changed, you know, so last year, we were talking to a lot of people where they understood the problem, but they said it's not on the top list priority of the priorities we're going to solve for this year. A lot of CISOs shared with us that, you know, API security had bubbled up to the top, but was still kind of sometimes just below the budget cutline, which means they had an allocated budget specifically to solve for this. And now we are starting to see where you know, people in different companies are starting to allocate budget and resources and forming teams to kind of look at the issues around API security. But throughout this process, what we did realize, and what we did do was, you know, we work very closely, we have a, you know, a team, we do, you know, POCs, we get into environments, and we often see that when we are able to expose the issues at hand, those POC sometimes shut down really quickly and become, you know, paid kind of what do you call it opportunities, or, you know, people want to buy and start solving those problems, because API's exist and they have existed, the challenges around them have not been understood, and they're, they're increasing. So most people think they have something in their environments already to solve for that, for example, web application firewalls, but the challenges are so specific around like, you know, API's that you've seen the ship from going to, like, Why should I be concerned? To Yeah, I see, there's a concern, but you know, we will look at it next year on the next six months, to now like, oh, we need to solve for this right away, when can we get started? So the content, you know, as you develop, and the education and the, you know, talk track and, you know, the engagement with our clients, as evolved, you know, from what you call, like, you know, typically the top of the funnel education, thought leadership, you know, of course, you need to always do that. But now we see a lot of, you know, folks want to see middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel content, which is like, Alright, I have these tools. Why do I need Traceable or an API security solution? How does it integrate or replace the current solution? Why don't they work? Why don't my current solutions work for the challenges that I had? All the way down to? Like, you know, can you help me compare the different, you know, vendors out there in the marketplace? Or can you connect me to, you know, those who are solving these problems and solving them at scale? Wait. So the content, you know, definitely varies along the buyers journey. But we have to keep at it, you know, at each stage of it, we're still a very young company, we have grown like, you know, 300%, over 300%, you know, year over year, but there's so much, you know, so many API's out there that people are just not even aware of,
Ben Kaplan 10:30
do you think you're at a phase where competition or competitors makes it more challenging for you? Or are you at the phase where more people competition or competitors that might provide some solution, if they're beating the drum of, hey, we need you need to protect your, you know, your API's, it actually helps you. Because if it's just more people validating that as a problem, that you're all just trying to get awareness together of the issue. And actually, if anyone's good at drawing attention to it, that actually helps the whole category? I
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 11:00
absolutely. It's a very discussed topic. And I think any Mason market, it's hard to beat the drum alone. And so as we've had competitors, who have also spent money educating the marketplace, educating, you know, the buyers, and you know, the practitioners who face this problem, I think it helps the market overall. Right. So in the beginning, there were the smaller startups were very focused on this trying to solve for this problem. But now, we are seeing in the last 612 months that the bigger companies are starting to step into the space and say, Yes, we have an API security solution. Now, of course, you know, we welcome competition, because for the industry as a whole, it's really great that everybody's talking about this problem that needs to be solved, regardless of who solves it the best. But our goal as a company is to, you know, really be at the top of the heap solving this in the best possible way so that we can win in this marketplace. So that's a market tear. That's the challenge for me not only just educate the market, you know, you want to collaborate with some of the other players. And those are not necessarily pure play API security players. So if you take the example of firewalls, they do a lot around the API's. They know a lot about the API's. But we provide, you know, a technology that's very specific in solving certain problems, we want to collaborate with them, we want to go to market with them. They want to talk to our customers, we all talk to their customers, we jointly want to go, you know, educate the rest of the world on, you know, what problem are we facing. And for any one company to educate the whole market is near about impossible, right? It's just just not possible. And it's not just a vendor site, you want to start talking to the influencers and thought leaders in the space, you want to start to talk to the industry analysts. So we collaborate very closely with industry analysts, they're also discovering how to peel the onion on this and you know, what are the things to do to solve this problem? And we collaborate, we collaborate behind the scenes, we collaborate with them in our analysts, sessions, etc. So it takes a lot of effort to educate the work.
Ben Kaplan 13:08
Here's a thought experiment to tell if your messaging has the potential to go viral. Could a person hear your message once and communicate it to someone else? Almost as well as you could do yourself? If the answer is yes, you have the raw fuel of potential virality. If not, you've got to make your message more simple, surprising, and significant to increase its potential viral velocity. This is the bar for the ambitious CMO isn't just that your audience can understand or even appreciate your message. Instead, after hearing it, they themselves become conduits to spread it. Ashish, how do you apply your past experience to the case now, as you mentioned, this is your first CMO role. It's more of the building brand awareness phase or your words escaping gravity, really your your career, whether it's in Product Marketing, previously, whether it's in DevOps, was focused on either scaling something that's already working, and now we just need to scale it up, or reversing maybe downward or sluggish revenues and trying to make it grow. How did those experiences impact you now in a new realm, but you can draw upon all of that to maybe accelerate things for Traceable? Yeah, I
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 14:26
think like my background helps me in kind of approaching how to solve such problems. So I've been an engineer and r&d leader before I've been a product manager, you know, I've been on different roles in marketing. And as a buyer on the other side, you know, I want honesty and transparency by winners. And you know, everybody's trying to say, you know, my widget is better than the other vendors widget, but be able to trust somebody where I can go learn like a you know, I talked a lot about that on what the problem actually is, what's the best approach to solve it. And you know, like, I've used that approach as a marketeer also. So it's not just about educating everybody in a very neutral way, but being very transparent about, you know, what we do as a company. So, we do that here at GitLab, when I was in GitLab, before this, just being the destination to learn about the problem you need to solve for resonating with the buyers problems, being very open and transparent about how we solve problems, what we do, and what we don't do what we do really well, where our holes are in our own product. That trust building takes a lot of time, but when you can build that trust, and that is step one, step two is like, you know, getting external champions to stand up on your behalf and talk about your solution or your product or your company. Because I can go, you know, spent a lot of money shouting from the rooftops that we are the best thing since sliced bread. But so what nobody's gonna believe that. So getting, you know, our customers to talk about us getting analysts to talk about as external champion pieces really, really, really very important, right? Because the proof is in the pudding, if somebody's really getting value out of like the solution that you're building, let them talk about enable that help them build their brand, help them be successful in their jobs. And that's a formula that, you know, I think works every time because if you help people, they'll help you, right? It's mutual. And I've done that a Git lab have done that at HP, I'm doing that a Traceable here now.
Ben Kaplan 16:40
And what is something you wish you could do better? When you're kind of building that marketing stack, you're building out other functions, there's a lot of needs, you don't necessarily have personal everywhere, but your three years in? What would be an impactful thing now that you can't do quite yet, but you're trying to build up? Um,
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 17:00
that's a hard question. But you know, I wish I couldn't be at every water cooler, where every second security practitioner and leader is to be able to talk to them about this issue, right. So as a smaller company, you have a limited reach, you build that reach, you know, you try to do the most impactful things, you try to get other people to talk on your behalf. You know, I wish everybody had a viral component to marketing that just took off so that you know, everybody in every nook and corner, you know, where this problem needs to be addressed, understands that, I think you just have to find ways to make the most meaningful impact. So that that impact is talked about, you know, across so that everybody else kind of looks at it. And the way we do this is, you know, we're very, very deliberate about looking at the key data metrics that help us understand it, the message is reaching the right places or not. And like any other marketing organization, you know, you can always wish for like unlimited money to push more through more channels to more people, you know, across the globe. But you have to be very, very, very smart about that. Right? So unlimited resources don't necessarily mean that you're reaching the right audiences with the right people getting to do this smarter. So you know, my wish list would be, I could get smarter and smarter with, you know, the AI, you know, that's coming out out there to help me measure the impact of my marketing. And we're making a lot of kind of effort and understanding how to use those signals to understand what's working, where are we reaching? What were we not reaching? You know, what can we do that's different? Do you
Ben Kaplan 18:36
have experiments you run and more than just trying things, but experiments that are measurable, that high of hypotheses that have, you know, an expected outcome of what success looks like, if this experiment is successful? How often do you experiment versus how often do you just like double down on the tried and true, low, so I'm
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 18:59
in a small company, I've been in bigger companies. And one thing you'll never has have is unlimited resources, like we just talked about. So with the resources you have, you have to be very, very agile. And you have to test a lot of things. And as you test the you have to know a way to measure whether what you're trying to pilot or trying to run is working or not, which means really thinking about the goals that you're trying to reach, and then setting the right metrics to see you know, whether that will help you reach those goals or not. So we tend to run late, you know, we very quick experiments, get the data, get the feedback, look at whether that's working or not. And there are times we double down on something that seems to be working well, but we may not be working. So we still keep measuring, you know, we take 369 months to figure out sometimes something's working or not and sometimes, you know, when something works really well we really will double tripled down on it. Because you know, that's the thing that is the most effective way for us to market. I'll give you an example of, you know, something that I've tried, and there's multiple things we do do around this, whether this is ABM, and Account Based Marketing, whether these are different events, meeting services, you know, where, you know, when there's promise to, you know, get you in front of the buyers, we're always experimenting, the experiments that are most in our control, I believe are like, you know, our website, we are always AV testing, they're always looking at, you know, what's the value we are providing, you know, to those who reach our website, which failures, you know, provide most value, get people engaged, people stay there long. So there's all kinds of AV testing, we run there all kinds of tests we do there. But But this kind of experiment, you know, for us extends throughout our marketing initiatives. So I'll pick an example like, you know, I talked about meeting services, there's so many agencies out there that promise you that we will take you and intersect you with the CISOs. And practitioners of companies, you know, that you're looking for. We try that very early on when you know, when I started in this company, and figured out that, that wasn't really working. And so, you know, we tried it for, you know, a quarter, two quarters, we tried switching, you know, the different meeting services agencies and realized that, that wasn't the way to educate the market properly. That wasn't the way to, you know, intercept the demand curve that was out there for this problem. And we invested in that, and we invested more in like more digital, go to market strategies. So we do a lot of Account Based Marketing. For example,
Ben Kaplan 21:44
at top marketing, our digital agency, we use a technique for improving website performance called Lead intent mapping. We leverage real time data from site visitors to determine where they are in their decision journey, and what their key considerations are every step of the way. For instance, if we say site visitor, go from a service landing page to a local office Contact page, to a related blog post. And then back to the landing page. Again, we might infer potential interest in a discovery call with a team in their local area on specific trending issues. By mapping hundreds, or 1000s of these journeys across the website, we can start to categorize the primary user flows that visitors follow and assign those flows to specific phases in the decision making journey. Ashish, what are the things that I believe in tell me if you agree or disagree is that scarcity, whether that's scarcity of resources, where that scarcity of time, or that scarcity of team members is a huge driver of innovation, meaning that maybe having unlimited resources would actually not be the good thing, because you do hear startups are growth companies that do have that, and those are the ones that usually burn through a lot of cash and are throwing lavish parties and over hire and all these sorts of things. And I don't think anyone intended to do that from the start. It's just, we have this and it's sort of the nature of companies and you have budget, and you're trying to show growth, and your investors need to see a return. And you're also protecting your budget, right? So you're like, Okay, if we don't spend it this year, then we get less next year. So we've got to find a way to spend it. So to what extent do you think as marketers that we want some resources, but too many resources can be just as big a problem as too little resources for the growth of companies?
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 23:39
Yes, absolutely. So you're touched upon a few different things. So if you look at the space we are in right now, and you know, about two, three years, prior to this, when I started, there were two or three startups that raised a lot of money. And were valued really quickly, really high. And I'm very well aware that some of them had anywhere between 15 to 22x, my marketing budget, which meant more staff, more program money, bigger, you know, five times bigger boots and trade shows, everything that you talked about. My founder, you know, has says, this is his third startup, he has done this a lot. And you know, I sat down with them. And this is where the CEO CMO relationship is really, really important. You can do everything. Wait, what are the top three things that you're going to do this year? But also what are you going to do the year after and the year after? So having a one to three year vision? And then very clear goals on how we are going to measure that and how are we going to execute against that has helped me work with my CEO very openly with the budget needs that you know, I need to go to market with and you're right. You don't want to throw a lot of money at this because you know, everybody can To do that, you got to be smart. So they if you look, one of the things was, you know, we understood very well to be found, because everybody's doing their self exploratory journey of finding the right solution. Like when you and I buy a car, we do a lot of research on the website, we talk to our friends, we talk to our peers, that's how we sometimes know about which car which company, I want to buy it from, what are the features I want, those are, so let's say that I've invested a lot of money and right on the website, and on the SEO on, you know, like intercepting people digitally. And the relationship I had with my SEO has been very, very open. There are times when like, you know, history is just this much money isn't going to cut, I think you need a little bit more to do X or Y and other tiny slices, let's not spend on this one, what do you think, you know, we should spend so we have a very open dialogue back and forth in which you know, the budget has been defined for the year or the next year. But there's flexibility in that to kind of invest in what's working, and then to pull away from what's not working. And I think that relationship is really key to have, you know, for a CMO with the staff with the with the CEO, and you know, your manager as well as the board. Because when you see something is working, there's always money to do something, it's just a matter of where do you want to prioritize it to get the maximum return for your company's growth. And it definitely helps us think harder. When you're working on a budget, it definitely helps us be more efficient, it definitely helps us like to measure and to calibrate as you go along. That's one of the hardest things, right?
Ben Kaplan 26:32
When you look at kind of that mix of media you have at your disposal, where that's like kind of earned, owned and paid. One of the things I often feel is that doing something like earned or owned first, before you do a huge amount of paid has a lot of benefits, because money is a powerful thing in terms of marketing. And if you can spend a lot you can kind of hide, you know, deficient messaging, you can hide other things, because if you just spend enough, you're gonna reach enough people, and you can't really see it. But if you're forced to be a little scrappy, early or, and you have to create earned media that resonates, you have to create own media that people actually want to consume, you get better at it, you have to, otherwise you're not seeing any results. And then you put the fuel of paid on top of it, and a much and you get much better overall results than if you had paid too early, or tried to do it all simultaneously. That's just my opinion of startups. I
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 27:26
always call paid money. And I like burning money, right? Because it's very obvious, like, you know, if you want to pay more money, do more ads, put a billboard up on 101. And you know, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, it's easy. But it's so so hard to measure the return on that, or the effectiveness of your positioning and messaging and the you know, value proposition that you put out in the market, like you said, Because paid gets you in front of more eyes. Sure. But as soon as you step off that gap, you know, pouring down in the pay channel. Effectively, everything just disappears, paid advertising, for example, or paid, you know, as its value, but it does not stand on its own. Unless your core positioning messaging, the value proposition, you know, that you're delivering is own, you know, like you said, it doesn't stand on its own. It's a good supplement, or, you know, just running paid ads, having the biggest booths and events. Eventually, like, you know, every business is a business that needs to measure ROI on its investment. And you know, like, you have to be very, very smart on where you spend your money. And
Ben Kaplan 28:33
given all of that. And given you know, all you've learned over the last three years, what is your advice for other CMOs that are still trying to escape gravity? Now? What should you be focused on? What should you definitely say no to? What would you do differently, if you were going to do these these kind of past three years over again,
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 28:54
I think if you're stepping into a CMO role, or you know, head of marketing role for a company that's either trying to escape gravity, or even like, you know, that's in its growth phase, like we are right now, you know, we're in a very hyper growth phase. Now, having escaped that phase, or you're a big company trying to scale up or you know, become the leader in your space. It is really, really, really important to do. Couple of things. One, have a clear understanding of your goals and what you're expected to deliver with your leadership, whether it's the board of directors, or whether it's your CEO, whoever you report to. And help them understand that, you know, marketing results typically take six to 12 months, six to nine months to start delivering and showing the results that you're trying to achieve. You have to invest, you have to kind of like keep at it. And then you start seeing the results. So what are those results and goals and goals that are expected? How are you going to measure them? You have to have that to understand I mean, you know, with your leadership, and you may disagree, but agree to disagree, but you know, set them up, and then be very maniacal about like, tracking that progress, you know, adjusting so that you know, you reach your goal and exceed your goals, and maybe near one, you know, you will not exceed your goals because your links so much, you know, foundational work out there. So, for example, when I got here, we have to build a marketing and sales stack, there's no return on investment on that right away, it takes time, you know, before that starts to show up and you know, your efficiencies, but keeping, you know, a dashboard with the key metrics, whether this is pipeline generation, whether this is you know, awareness Share of Voice, whether this is website, visitors, conversions, how many deals, you know, what are you able to help close, be very clear about those goals, track them and likely, you know, study them jointly share the results, you know, with your leadership, adjust as needed, take the feedback, are some of the leaders out there who are founded these companies have a clear vision, all leaders have a clear vision. So, a lot of experience in building companies, you're always learning, right? Never hesitate to kind of like, you know, keep an open mind and learn. But stick to your goals, stick to your vision. I always joke that the CMO's role is the hardest in the, you know, executive leadership. Number one, everybody will tell you how to do marketing, right, they have an idea of the next great marketing thing and it's your budget, your goal so you have to see whether that's going to work or not, that's a good idea or not, whether you can accommodate or not willing to help you achieve your goals or not be open to ideas, but everybody will tell you what you should do in marketing. Secondly, you know, I always say how you feel about marketing should not be on what side of the bed you got. So somebody said something to you yesterday about a great messaging this hour that can we feel good about marketing?
Ben Kaplan 32:06
I heard Purple's a great color. Let's do more purple? No, I heard this blue. I heard buyer blue is calming. Yeah, no, it's Wait, it's orange. We gotta have conversion. We need orange. Right? It's your whims
Ashish Kuthiala - Traceable 32:15
your goal visions and results be dictated by that right if you have a clear handshake and understanding with the you know, the key leadership that you're driving the results for. That's where you point know it's working or it's not working? Not because like you know, the competitor use purple color and look at it. It's all over the web and it looks pretty, you know, they do better marketing. There's no way to judge that. Wait, what are your goals? And that's a dashboard you create it takes time. It takes effort to create those dashboards, it's not easy. And things always change underneath and the metrics need to change but that's what you point to. That's what you drive your goals were the budget when your people your resourcing everything right? Marketing is as much about data as it's about you know, The Color Purple. Let me just
Ben Kaplan 33:11
according to Ashish Kuthiala helping a little known company gain brand awareness is like escaping gravity. You need a burst of coordinated marketing activity to escape the forces that hold the company back.
Ben Kaplan 33:29
So create ideas that are so sticky that others can easily spread them after sharing them once. Transformed, transform scarcity into an opportunity to innovate. You've earned and owned media to hone your message before you use paid media to amplify it. And when you find something that works, double down or triple down on it to reap the rewards of your energy TOP CMO I'm Ben Kaplan.
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