By 2010, Ping Identity had a genuinely category-defining product and the enterprise pedigree to match — but sales stalled at around $20M in revenue, with the same technology treated as a critical purchase in some accounts and an optional one in others. The Artesian Network was engaged by Ping’s Chairman and CEO to find out why, and rebuilt the company’s positioning, messaging, and buyer strategy around the answer.
Key Results
- Diagnosed the real reason deals stalled — through 40 executive interviews and a three-year win-loss pattern analysis — and reframed identity management from a security “nice to have” into a cloud-and-HR efficiency imperative.
- Remapped the buyer journey to bring HR executives into the deal alongside IT and security, and retooled messaging and the marketing mix — including HR-focused conferences and demand generation — around the buyers who actually closed the biggest, fastest deals.
- Delivered bigger, faster deals within months — the shift showed up in the pipeline as early as the second half of 2010 — and helped catalyze the aggressive cloud stance Ping rode for the next several years.
- Built the go-to-market foundation the company scaled on: roughly 40% average annual growth through 2016, a ~$600M majority recapitalization by Vista Equity Partners in 2016, a 2019 IPO on the NYSE, and a $2.8B take-private acquisition by Thoma Bravo in 2022.
The Challenge
Ping Identity, founded in 2002 in Denver, was an early pioneer of internet-scale identity — its flagship PingFederate server used the then-new SAML standard to authenticate users across domains and the cloud, well beyond what LAN-era approaches could reach. The company was conservatively run, consistently profitable, and had come off a record 2009 while less-disciplined competitors folded or were forced into early sales. It had assembled top talent and an A-list of global enterprise customers.
But at roughly $20M in revenue, growth had plateaued — and the pattern made no sense on the surface. The same product that some enterprises treated as mission-critical, others treated as optional. Deals that should have been comparable behaved completely differently. The company was managed with a heavy technical bent, selling a security product to security buyers, and it lacked a clear read on why the value that was obvious inside the building wasn’t landing consistently in the market. Before Ping could scale, it had to understand what actually separated the accounts that raced to buy from the ones that stalled.
What We Did
Operating as Ping Identity’s marketing leadership, The Artesian Network ran a dual diagnostic and rebuilt the go-to-market on what it found:
- Conducted an external interview program with 40 senior executives — CFOs, CIOs, HR leaders, and the risk and audit partners at major firms including PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and McGladrey — spanning verticals and geographies, paired with a three-year historical win-loss analysis of Ping’s own sales data.
- Tested, and ruled out, the assumed drivers. There was no regulatory “hammer” forcing single sign-on across SOX, PCI, or HIPAA; audit-cost savings were real but modest; and to non-technical executives, identity management read as a “nice to have” roughly half the time — not because the return was in doubt, but because SSO carried a reputation for being painfully hard to implement.
- Isolated the real signal in the win-loss data: the largest, fastest-closing deals consistently had HR executives as key constituents, even though Ping sold as a security product. With cloud applications proliferating inside the enterprise (cresting near 18 per large company at the time), the acute pain wasn’t abstract security — it was efficiently on- and off-boarding employees across a sprawl of SaaS apps. That is an HR and operations priority with a hard, relatable ROI.
- Rebuilt positioning and messaging around cloud and workforce efficiency alongside security, and reframed Ping’s most underused advantage — comparative ease of implementation — into a central proof point against far more expensive incumbents.
- Remapped the buyer journey to include HR executives, and adjusted the marketing mix accordingly — adding HR-oriented conferences and demand-generation targets, and equipping sales to run multi-sponsor deals (IT, security, and HR) instead of single-threaded security pitches.
The Outcome
The new positioning changed the shape of the funnel. With messaging, buyer mapping, and the sales approach realigned around cloud and HR efficiency, Ping began closing bigger and faster deals as early as the second half of 2010 — turning a product that had read as optional into an essential purchase for the buyers who felt the pain most acutely. The company leaned into an aggressive cloud stance and grew at roughly 40% on average per year through 2016.
That trajectory is what carried Ping through its next chapters. In 2016, Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in the company in a recapitalization valued at approximately $600M; in September 2019, Ping Identity went public on the New York Stock Exchange; and in 2022, Thoma Bravo took the company private in an all-cash transaction valued at $2.8B. The engagement did what early-stage go-to-market work is supposed to do: find the one insight hiding in the data, rebuild the story around it, and give a strong-but-stalled company a foundation it could compound on for a decade.
Jonathan is one of those rare individuals who just instinctually gets the future. His insights mix with his creativity to see things others just don't see when looking at the exact same data. Jonathan's passion for technology is unbridled. When Jonathan gets excited about something, there is only one option, get on board or get out of the way, because he's going there. It's an infectious passion that's simply fun to be around.