Min Erh MAH, Senior Director, JAPAC Marketing at Palo Alto Networks, shares her perspective on building impactful B2B marketing strategies across diverse and dynamic markets. She explores regional localisation, ABM, cross-functional GTM alignment, AI-powered personalisation, and the metrics that connect marketing engagement to meaningful business outcomes and sustainable growth.
Welcome to the interview series, Min. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?
I’ve spent my career in B2B technology marketing, with much of my experience focused on JAPAC. What I enjoy most about regional marketing is that there is never a single playbook. You have to understand the business, the market, and the customer, and then figure out what needs to be localised (not just translated) versus what can be scaled. Today, I lead GTM marketing and the center of excellence activation, with a strong focus on using data and AI to make marketing more relevant and scalable.
Having led marketing across APAC and JAPAC, what leadership principles are essential for building strategies that resonate across diverse markets?
For me, it starts with one regional strategy, but not one regional execution. You need a clear common direction, but give markets room to adapt based on their customers, maturity, culture, and business priorities. The other principle is staying close to the field. A strategy can look great on paper, but it won’t scale if it doesn’t work for the people executing it or the customers they’re trying to reach. That balance between consistency and local relevance is what helps teams move with greater agility while still staying aligned to the broader business goals. It also creates stronger ownership within local teams and allows them to respond more effectively to changing market dynamics.
What are the key elements of a successful ABM strategy, and where do organisations most often go wrong?
I think about ABM like how a bank manages its customers. It doesn’t treat someone with a basic savings account the same way it treats a business customer with multiple accounts, investments, and financing needs. The bank looks at the customer’s relationship, needs, potential, and behaviour to determine where to invest and what experience to provide.
Where organisations often go wrong is treating ABM as simply a target account list and a campaign. Revenue is one factor, but we should also consider strategic importance, whitespace, engagement, intent, and propensity to buy. And importantly, Marketing can’t do this alone. The best ABM is built with Sales (not for Sales), combining their account knowledge with Marketing’s data and insights to decide where to focus and how to engage.
What practices have helped you build strong alignment between marketing, sales, and GTM teams to drive growth?
I’ve found that alignment happens when everyone is working from the same view of the business, rather than just attending the same meetings. Each function will naturally have a different perspective on what matters. Sales may focus on opportunities, BDRs on reach and meetings, Marketing on engagement and pipeline, and GTM on business priorities. The key is to step back and align on the ultimate common business goal and then work backwards on how each function can contribute.
We bring Marketing, Sales, BDRs, GTM, and Analytics together around common priorities, account insights, and outcomes. I also believe in creating fast feedback loops where you test something, see what is working, adjust, and scale. That keeps everyone focused on the business outcome and execution, rather than spending too much time debating the plan.
“A strategy can look great on paper, but it won’t scale if it doesn’t work for the people executing it or the customers they’re trying to reach.”
How do you balance short-term pipeline goals with long-term brand building and customer trust?
I don’t see them as opposing priorities. The key is having different roles for different types of content and engagement. AI is helping us make that balance much more scalable. Using data and AI to understand what different audiences care about, personalise engagement, and identify where we should invest for immediate demand versus longer-term brand building.
It also changes how we create content. Instead of producing one large asset and pushing it to everyone, we can use AI to break it into different formats and experiences for different personas and stages of the journey, while keeping the core thought leadership consistent.
The test I use is simple: are we creating value for the customer, or are we just asking them to buy something in the short term?
Which metrics do you prioritise to measure the success of demand generation and ABM initiatives?
I look beyond lead volume. I want to understand engagement, progression, and business impact. For example, are we reaching the right accounts and buying groups, are they moving through the funnel, and ultimately are we creating pipeline and revenue? For ABM, account penetration, buying-group engagement, and pipeline progression are much more meaningful than simply counting MQLs. I also look at the quality of engagement over time and whether our efforts are influencing key buying decisions. This helps us connect marketing activity to tangible commercial outcomes rather than focusing on activity alone. Ultimately, the goal is to understand whether marketing is creating meaningful momentum within the accounts that matter most.
As AI continues to transform marketing, what skills and capabilities will define the next generation of B2B marketing leaders?
I think the next generation of marketers will need to be strategic generalists and AI operators. You don’t need to become a data scientist or AI engineer, but you need to understand what AI can do, where it can remove operational friction, and how to use it to make better decisions.
At the same time, human skills become even more important—judgment, creativity, curiosity, storytelling, and the ability to influence across functions. AI can help us move faster, but marketers still need to make informed decisions on where we should go and why. The strongest leaders will be those who can combine technology with strong commercial thinking, using AI as an enabler while keeping customer needs and business outcomes at the centre.
About Min Erh MAH
Min Erh MAH is a dynamic B2B technology and SaaS marketing leader with extensive experience across JAPAC. She specialises in ABM, demand generation, digital marketing, sales enablement, and marketing automation, with expertise spanning cybersecurity, AI, cloud, networking, CX, and workplace technologies. A strategic and collaborative leader, she combines data-driven marketing with strong commercial thinking to drive growth, engagement, and measurable business outcomes.
