Strengthening Digital Security Through Strategic Marketing Leadership | Phani from Indusface

Rick: Pathmonk is the AI for website conversions. With increasing online competition, over 98% of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show you value proposition and support visitors in the buying journey separates you from the competition Online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments with relevant micro experiences like case studies, intro videos, and much more.
Stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50% by adding Pathmonk to your website in seconds. Letting the a AI do all the work and increase conversions while you keep doing marketing as usual. Check us out on pathmonk.com. Hey everybody. Welcome back to Pathmonk Present Today. We are joined by Phani is the VP of Marketing in Indusface. Phani, welcome to the show.

Phani: Hello. Nice to meet you, Rick and, great to talk on this podcast today.

Rick: Likewise. Good to have you fa and, let’s get right into things if you don’t mind. I wanna know, and I’m sure our audience too, will wanna know what’s the big idea behind, Indusface and, let’s say you were explaining this to a friend over coffee, right? How would you describe what you do?

Phani: Yeah, Indusface as a company is in the business of, securing websites and APIs against all kinds of attacks. So there have been multiple, multiple, experiments on the internet. For example, you host a website, you don’t do anything on it, and there have been cases where it has been hacked into in minutes. Hackers have, become quite advanced in scanning the internet for vulnerable assets. And, the biggest entry points as it stands today are the websites and obviously APIs because they function behind. Now we are in the business of protecting them against these attacks. that is what Indusface as a company does.

Rick: That’s, that’s super useful, first and foremost. ’cause everything is done online these days. you like, you like the internet police in a way, but, all jokes aside, are there any certain types of businesses or industries where you feel your product really shines? Or do you think it applies to just, you have a website we can help?

Phani: Yeah, so generally speaking, security software is industry agnostic in that. hackers don’t discriminate. In fact, true. They, they find softer targets and then go after them. but if I were to talk in terms of Indusface, we naturally gravitate towards, the regulated industries because by, by and large, the compliance and, regulatory laws require them to have some sort of security in place. if not for the fear of getting hacked, at least these regulations force them to implement some security measures. And that is, that has been our primary market. But of late, what we’ve been seeing is even the less regulated industries, are, coming to us and asking us, to help, to help them secure their websites and peers.

Rick: Makes sense. it doesn’t matter how regulated you are, I think, if you’re, under, potentially under attack, then you still need help. that’s not, that’s a fair point. How do these people discover you? are there any channels in terms of marketing channels that become your go-to for bringing in new, new customers?

Phani: Yeah. security has traditionally been a trust, driven business, right? I’ve worked in various industries before, but, security software in itself, there is a lot of channel play. here because, there have been many managed service providers, managed security service providers, value added resellers who have been selling something like antivirus for decades now. They started with antivirus, then, now they’re calling them E-D-R-X-D-R and then, web application firewalls. And so they have specialized two, to sell these. at Indusface about, let’s say 40% of our. of our lead generation happens through the channel. and obviously we didn’t start that way. we were predominantly a direct business, until, let’s say three to four years back. But, we’ve really built up our channel ecosystem in the last, couple of years and about 60% of our, of our, leads. Of our opportunities actually come, through the direct channel and even within direct, what we’ve noticed is while we’ve done, some performance marketing, and all of that, before, but, given that we play in a market that is highly mature and, there are these huge multi-billion dollar companies that we, compete against, performance marketing is probably not the most. CAC friendly channel that, we have. majority of our direct cha, direct, leads come on the organic, front. So people actually search for a problem. they discover us and, come to us. that is what we have. And then, there are small referral programs that we have, that. That also gives us, some leads. Yeah.

Rick: In all of this, how much of a role does your website play in pulling new business?

Phani: to be honest, a hundred percent right. our website serves, as two ways. One is we get a lot of inbound inquiries from, people who want to partner with us. So we’ve done a lot of optimization of content as well as landing pages around, signing up more partners. So every month we get, multiple maybe, like last month we at least got 15 to 20, partner inquiries across the world. and we get from places like. Chile, for example, or, South Africa, we even get it from Kenya. We get it from Malaysia. so that is one bit, right? So website has helped us sign up more partners. and those partners, again, feed into the funnel. And the second bit is on the direct channel where, that is where a bulk of my time goes in actually. given that, we play in a mature market, but still we are thriving, we have our right to win and we also know where we win. So we go very deep into. Creating clusters, right from the problem to the solution to the comparison and battle cards. so there have been leads that come to us who say something like, Hey, I am using this competitor of yours. I have X, Y, Z problem. I see that you solve these. Can we do a free trial to? So that is the level of research that people do on the website. Our website is enabling them to do that, and then they come and fill the form. even within the form. We have, multiple levels of qualification. so that, our SDRs, know exactly what. Two send. And, we’ve been fairly successful actually. for every lead, that fills up our free trial or, demo form about the meeting setup and completion rate is, close to about 60 to 70%. And within that, again, 60 to 70% of those le leads go into advanced sale sales stages. And they’re also even, quite handsomely. I think. two parts, right? So to answer to your question, what does a website do? So one thing is it educates people and the second thing is we capture enough information and enrich the leads, through the form and through the SDRs. Even the demos, everything are. Tailored and that helps us in, in, getting very good conversion rates on the website. And by conversion rate, I don’t mean the form conversion rate. By conversion rate, what I mean is, converting into, a sales opportunity, which is will, which is my core KPI.

Rick: Okay. Is that what you follow Most of, most of the day, let’s say that what you focus on trying to do that. Okay. Makes sense. to stay on that subject, What you do. I wanna, switch gears for a second. Talk about you Phaninie, as as a leader, as a marketing leader, and maybe get a glimpse into. What you do, what does a typical workday look like for you? What are the main you focus on, what keeps you busy? What keeps you excited, if you will?

Phani: Yeah. I think, given that most of our performance marketing runs on autopilot and we only refresh our ads maybe once every 20 days, I don’t spend a lot of time on that part of the business where I definitely spend a lot of time is on the product marketing front. so I spend a whole lot of time on, on the new feature releases and, the product releases. I think all the vibe coding or whatever the new terms are. it has really, blown up the speed at which, the features are getting released and, features don’t sell themselves, right? So as marketing people, we need to, create a lot of supporting collateral around, around that. So I work with the team on creating everything right from a updating website data sheet through. Improving the, SDR email templates, the call scripts that we have and, the sales presentation deck. So I look at it end to end and, it is not an exaggeration to say that I spent a lot of time there because we release, features almost every 15 days. and, yeah. And. That is also helping us, differentiate ourselves, quite well among, these behemoths that we, compete with. that is on the performance marketing, front and, sorry, that is on the product marketing front. The second thing that we, that I spend a lot of time on, Rick, is, As I told you, majority of our, lead acquisition is from the organic channel, right? So and how do people discover us? We religiously follow this, clustering, based content, creation. where, we map the, so basically we do two things, right? So first thing is we first map all the objections that people have on why they would not want to buy us. We map that all the way to the problem, right? and then we create a lot of clusters around that, including, what those myths are, how we do on those aspects, vis-a-vis the competition. So we go extremely deep with, the, there is a pillar article and then, there is a lot of cluster around it. so I spend a lot of time on this. just to. How do I do that? So not only we do keyword analysis. Now, we’ve, also started using the LLM tracking tools where, every day we get queries on, are people, where are our competition, showing where is our competition showing up and where we are not. And, LLMs, recommend based on, whatever they find on the internet, right? So if they can’t, if they don’t find us in any of those places, or, if we don’t have a lot of content around that, then we pick up that cluster and then again, do the whole thing. So it isn’t. Endless process where, every week we are able to find something new that, we need to optimize for. And, the, I also look at all the, all the, feedback that s sts give on, is the lead moving for mainly focused on okay, which leads are not moving forward. If it is moving forward, then that’s fine. Which leads are not moving forward, and what are the objections that they have? So those also, we create a lot of content. So product marketing, content marketing, and then, the third part is mostly around reporting to my management. So I spent a lot of time in, analyzing, okay, how did we do last 15 days versus, the, are there any cha changes? I, and, in fact I go deep into things like, what I’ve realized is for the longest time, I’ve always looked at the site traffic. as a thing. But what I’ve noticed I started seeing is that site traffic has become, there is no correlation between site traffic and the number of, free trials or demos that, we used to get. So we go more narrow and only focus on the traffic that our product pages and our conversion pages get. I do a lot of that analysis to see what more improvements, we can make and all of that.

Rick: Wow. That’s, that’s impressive. that’s a lot of stuff on any given day. and I’m sure you, you must have a, some kind of system. I was very impressed by, by what you mentioned, you, guys release a, a new feature every 15 days. That’s, that’s really, that speaks to the volume and the speed right. So congrats on that now. to stay on that topic, to stay on speed. Phani, I wanna close off, with our rapid fire segment of the podcast, if you don’t mind. Now we jump right in and we get a few questions, and then we, we say our good goodbye. Does that sound good?

Phani: Yeah. Yeah. happy to share.

Rick: Yeah. All right, sounds good. what’s the latest book you picked up?

Phani: do Japanese light novels Count.

Rick: Everything counts.

Phani: Yeah. So, I read, I, I finish maybe a light novel every three days. but, so maybe I’ll have to talk about too many things there. But, that’s fair enough. One book that I enjoyed a lot, was, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I think, one of, one of the best books that I’ve read on fundamental mathematics, I almost felt like, maybe I should have read that as a child and I would’ve appreciated mathematics a bit more.

Rick: that’s a classic though, Thinking Fast and Slow. that’s a really, it’s often mentioned will say, now. Let’s go onto, to onto the next one. If you had a magic wand and you could fix one frustrating thing in your marketing life with tech, what would you pick?

Phani: Before I heard what, the nice, tool liners that you talked about, PathMonk, I had, something else, but now I’m thinking that, if I am able to. Yeah, because a small percentage of users actually go, 80% of our traffic is on our blog and learning section. Some of it, goes to our product, and, again, a small portion of it again goes to the free trial. Now, I think whatever you talked about, nudging people to go to the product page, with PathMonk again, so sounds like, sounds like something that, is interesting for sure.

Rick: There you go. You don’t even need a, a magic wand for that. So how awesome is that? What’s, what’s more repetitive task that you like to put on autopilot forever.

Phani: I think all the data related aspects, it’s it’s frustrating to know and, data is perpetually, incomplete no matter how much automation we put. And, and it keeps getting messy and messy. people leave the companies, all sorts of, things if there is something that can help me with, with, let’s say a 98% accuracy, on the data front, because currently it takes too much, time and effort. that is, one. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. No, that’s a good one for sure. Phaninie, Thank you, obviously for being on the show with us today. and before I thank you again, for your contribution. I want to give you the last word. So if someone forgets everything about the interview today, what’s one thing that should remember about the guy that the work you guys are doing?

Phani: Yeah, so one thing that people should remember is, Don’t get too fixated on the amount of marketing budget, that you have. and don’t get discouraged. when you have these big behemoths that you compete with, there is always a way, as long as you have that right to win, I think marketing will be able to contribute meaningfully to the, the goals of the company.

Rick: Okay. that’s a really good one. Again, Phaninie, that was a, that was really good conversation. I appreciated your insights and, if anyone wants to check you guys out, check, what you do and how they can get in touch, how can they do that?

Phani: Yeah, Indusface.com is our website. That is how, they visit us. And then it’s a fairly simple website. You go to the products, and then we have two platforms. One is a web application firewall, or it is now called the web application and a p protection. The second is a, is a vulnerability scanner where, they just have to enter the URL and we’ll be able to tell, okay, what are all the weak points or the, vulnerabilities that exist in your websites and APIs. So these are the two platforms. both of them have free trials that, you can use. And yeah, we’ll be more than happy to, to work with you. Maybe the one differentiator that I’ll call out is that, we provide enterprise class, support and managed service, even for s. Nobody in the world, is able to do that. And that is one of the reasons why, we are among the highest rated, web platforms on Gartner.

Rick: That’s impressive. and I command you for it. And, of course, if you care about security that you know, you have not the choice to check. these guys out. So Phani. Thank you again for, being, with us today, and I wish you a wonderful day.

Phani: Thank you so much and yeah. All the best to you guys too.

Rick: Thank you. Likewise. All right. Bye everyone.

Phani: Yeah, bye-bye.