MarTech Interview with Juliette Rizkallah, CMO, SailPoint

Tell us about your role and journey into Technology. What inspired you to start at SailPoint?

I began my career as a strategy consultant with a passion for business and finance. After graduating from Harvard Business School, I moved to San Francisco and spent two years at Bain & Company. I then realized that the best way to stay in the Bay Area was to get into the high-tech industry. I took a job at Oracle, shifting my focus to product management and marketing and taking on more responsibility with encouragement from my champions. Over time, I moved into a pure marketing role, but I never lost my passion for business strategy. By having a general management view of the business, I have always been able to get the most impact from my team’s marketing activities and have always collaborated well with other functions, especially sales, to perfect the go to market process. What inspired me to join SailPoint was the opportunity to continue to grow the brand of an already successful company, which I knew was just getting started. SailPoint was and is at the intersection of security and business enablement, so there was an abundance of opportunity for me to really make an impact at the company and in our industry.

What is SailPoint and how does it help to manage digital identities effectively?

SailPoint is the leading provider of identity governance for enterprises of all sizes and is led by a team of tenured identity veterans. We help our customers govern all digital identities efficiently and securely, including contractors, business partners, and non-human identities. We give enterprises of all sizes the critical visibility they need into who currently has access to which resources, who should have access to those resources, and how that access is being used.

Our fundamental belief is that identity is power. When identity is central to security, several things happen. They find a lot more hours in their day, ones that they were normally spending on several manual processes like provisioning and access requests. Identity also meets many of their compliance needs, and with GDPR and the cascade of regulations following it this is a big one. Ultimately, they are allowing their users to securely access the tools and data they need without the cumbersome manual processes and run arounds typically associated with user access.

According to you, which businesses are fastest to the adoption of digital Identity and Access Management platforms?

The core industries that have specific identity needs continue to be those that are highly regulated such as financial services, insurance, and healthcare. However, given the escalated attention to data breaches in today’s enterprises and the mounting governmental regulations, we have seen an uptick across all industries as they increasingly recognize the need for identity governance.

How do you see Customer Experience standards evolving in your industry?

Our approach to customer experience is what makes SailPoint stand out in the industry. SailPoint makes customers its top priority. As a result, we consistently maintain a 95%+ customer retention rating that is virtually unheard of in our sector. Our customers love us. Our customers flock to our annual Navigate conference, not just for the chance to learn more about how to evolve their approach to identity, but for an opportunity to spend time with the entire SailPoint team. We are very proud of our growing customer base, and we are all very committed to helping them solve incredibly complex identity and security challenges.

Which markets and geographies are you currently catering to?

We are a global company and we target enterprises with 1,000+ users. We market to these specific companies through a few different channels with a very account-targeted focus. We target several audiences in these targeted accounts to encourage them to read about what SailPoint and identity can do for them and create a strong thought leadership presence before any prospect interacts with us. This strategy allows us to reach more potential customers in our target market in a way that was not possible before, as we are now sending them the right message at the right time.

Tell us about how the industry cares less about creative and the way ad effectiveness is suffering as a result?

Marketing—across industries—has become extremely data-driven in the last decade. Along with the rise of marketing technology, people are using that data to blast users with targeted messages on a daily or even an hourly basis. We are seeing a lot of noise right now, and to be effective, we want to cut through that noise at SailPoint. With the emergence of conversational marketing and the rise of account-based marketing, we are engaging in a real conversation addressing their most critical challenges.

We want to capture the emotion of the audience at a specific time. That in and of itself is an art and science, where a traditional ad does not permit that level of targeting. To put it plainly, we are not creating an ad for a mass market, we are extremely targeted to an account and audience. To do this, we are building something that is specifically talking to them, and the creative may differ from one audience to another. With so much noise it is important to balance a data-driven strategy with the right people at the right time.

Which Marketing and Sales Automation tools and technologies do you currently use in your current roles?

We are embracing more marketing technologies that focus on account-based marketing. To do this, we have a foundation of systems such as Salesforce and Eloqua for marketing automation. A lot of our tools integrate to them for different things like lead generation, lead scoring or SEO optimization and so forth. The trick is, we always make sure that we define our strategy up front—as we mentioned before with our ABM strategy—and then we leverage technology that amplifies our strategy and helps us execute it. For example, if you Google ‘account-based marketing,’ you will see various vendors that you can add on, but we are being very prescriptive with the technology we acquire.

We also use tools like Madison Logic and 6sense with a robust predictive algorithm to help us target those accounts and can focus on where we think the most significant opportunities are. At SailPoint, the demand generation function, which cuts across marketing, sales, and partner management, is ‘one motion’ team that works in concert. With our account-based marketing strategy, we can zoom into specific accounts, or clusters of accounts, and jointly define the strategy for awareness and education. For example, we serve companies in financial services that are very regulated and educated on identity tools. Yet, as we go down market enterprises do not have the education or resources around what identity can do for them. Each industry segment of market, geo and audience needs dedicated marketing strategizing, messaging, targeting and engagement.

Thank you, Juliette! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.