Revolutionizing Demand Gen with AI Insights

Full transcript

Welcome back to the podcast guys today we're joined by Anadelia Fadeev. Anadil... Wow I am very bad today with my pronunciation. Okay well let's retake this. We use that for bloopers. Yeah, okay, I'm still on a day. Is it daily or daily? So like, in English it would be an Anadelia, like in other languages it is an Anadelia. So like I was born as an Anadelia, but now that I live in the U.S. I'm just pronounced slightly different. Okay, let's roll. welcome back to the podcast guys. Today we're joined by Anadelia Fadeev. Anadelia, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. Do you mind giving us uh a rough background about what you're currently building and up to? Yeah, absolutely. uh So I've spent my whole career building demand gen engines for technical B2B companies. uh What is demand generation? It's a part of marketing that drives pipeline. And I've spent my career focused on mostly companies that have PLG, SLG motion, that are sort of in the developer and infrastructure uh space. And uh yeah, this is what I'm passionate about.

Nice, so you're heavily involved in demand gen for B2B SaaS. What kind of trends are you currently seeing in that space right now? Yeah, I mean, the world is rapidly changing around us, right? With, you know, the like, just how AI is changing the way that we do things. But some of the found some of the found, uh foundationals are still the same, right? Is our Global is marketing is to find people that have a problem that we may have a solution for and and convey a message to them on how we can help them and give them an easy way to get started. And so that hasn't changed, but the channels by which we reach those buyers, the ways in which we communicate to them, those are rapidly evolving. And so right now, myself and other peers that I talk to are all looking at how is AI changing the way that we reaching our buyers. And so that's sort of been the uh exciting part of navigating this because we're all in it together, right? Everyone that I talk to is in the same journey.

Got it. Could you tell me more about your so-called ICP at HiveMQ? Yeah, so our buyers are highly technical. They're enterprise architects, they're IT platform leaders, uh industrial automation teams, uh primarily in the manufacturing energy and data center space. And so again, they're trying to solve really complex problems that require solutions that can meet their needs. so it's, again, as a marketer, it's an interesting challenge because... we're talking to a highly technical audience that is working on critical uh projects that require a solution like ours. And so it's a fun challenge for me. I know AI is a big part of your work and mine too. How are you currently using it to drive demand? Yeah, I again, I think the channels by which we're reaching buyers are changing, right? And so if you think about your day to day and I mean, my day to day too, like what used to be a Google search is now, you know, like you're chatting with an LLM to try to find those solutions, right? And so again, as we think about the buyer's journey is this is what users are doing. They're trying to find solutions. ah using, let's say, chat GPT or Claude, or you're talking to the AI chat to try to figure out how to reach a certain point. And now as marketers, we need to find ways to be in those places, right? How do you show up in those search results? so, um that's one aspect, right? But it's this idea of the channels by which you're reaching your buyers are changing. um I think another aspect it of this is also the in-person opportunities become even more critical. so events we're seeing uh becoming even more important in the marketing mix because people are looking for that human connection, right? They want to hear directly from their peers on, how are you approaching this challenge? How are you solving this pain point that you have? so getting that, so it's an interesting sort of balance of like, you know, how are you how are you using AI to reach your buyers, but then also how are you finding those opportunities to do that in-person human connection?

And what has been the most fruitful channel for you in terms of Demand Gen? um You know, up until now, really, has been a combination of digital and in-person. So events are a big part of my marketing mix, but then also digital, specifically, the organic and the paid side of search, let's say, right? But again, that is rapidly changing because we're seeing the decline in organic. um website visitors and what we're seeing now is we're showing up more often in those LLM searches. so uh even the ways that we measure the activity at the top of funnel, let's say, right, it used to be like, how many people are coming to your website? And then where are they coming from? And they're either coming from, you know, an organic search or they're coming from an ad that they saw. That is also changing because people are no longer coming to your website in the same

in the same way that they were before, right? They're doing a lot of their research outside of it. They're doing a lot of their research inside of an LLM. And so what are the sources that are feeding the data that's showing up for those users ah is critical part of that. And so I guess to answer your question, events continue to be a top channel for us and then digital ways to show up in digital channels, uh except the channels are, some of that traffic is moving away from the traditional search into the LLMs. And so the way that we measure the impact of that is very much evolving still. Yeah, and with running a business, there must be challenges that you have to face. What has been kind of the toughest part currently about scaling your demand gen team, if there is any. Yeah, I mean, I think the how we measure the outcomes of what we're doing, right? Because I mean, I gave you the example of the website traffic and that's true. Like that is currently, every day is changing, right? And this is a metric that if you've been in marketing for a while, it's a metric that you were constantly reporting on. Like, hey, like this is your top of the funnel starts at how many people come to your website, how many people fill out forms. of those how many are entered into a conversation with sales, right? For a traditional product-led growth, sales-led growth motion, those were the metrics that you're measuring as leading indicators to pipeline and revenue. And that is no longer the case. You have agents now consuming your content in addition to humans. have um filling out forms on someone's website also feels a bit outdated, right? What are you replacing those key indicators um with? um I think we're all trying to figure it out. um I think some of that is how are you showing up in em those searches across other channels? um then, think, how do you know when a buyer is in evaluation mode? it's no longer happening on your website, it's happening outside of your site. And so finding those signals that help you determine how much interest there is in a market for your product is, I think, question that maybe hasn't been answered yet.

I have a tricky question for you. If there is something that you could change about demand gen in the industry, what would it be? uh I think a pain point that and maybe other marketing people listening to this podcast will feel the pain with me is attribution has always been such a challenging uh thing to tackle, right? It's the, do you measure, you know, a percentage of revenue, what percentage of revenue or pipeline is each channel or is each program driving? It's just, The more complex your product and your sales cycles and all that, the harder it is to pinpoint, right? Buyers are not, it's not a linear journey and there's multiple people involved in a variety of different things across a variety of platforms. so attributions has been a challenging topic. um And I think with the introduction of AI, it will be even more so, right? Because a lot of that research is happening outside. of our own domains. so that's one thing that I'd like to change. I don't know what I would change it to, but I know that it's a challenge that many of us have had to deal with.

What's your vision for HiveMQ MQ in the next upcoming months? I mean, as many other companies, right, we're on our own AI transformation journey. And for us in marketing, what that means is, is understanding, like, what are jobs that I'm doing today that I should have um an agent do for me, right? And I'll give you an example. If I'm managing events, um there's a lot of aspects of events cannot be done by AI, right? Like there's still a human component, but things that I used to do, like, Ahead of an event, I would research the website to understand who are the speakers that are going to be there, who are the other sponsors, and then I would cross-reference that with our customer accounts and our competitors so that can be better prepared for once we're actually at this conference. That is a great job for AI, right? And so, again, it's sort of building the agents as teammates so that we can free up our time to do...

other things that require more of our attention. so that AI transformation journey is where we're at right now. And um it's a fun challenge to be working on. Yeah, and for listeners who want to learn more about your strategies and what are you doing, where can they connect with you? Reach out to me on LinkedIn, connect with me, send me a message. I'm happy. I love talking to other marketers and hearing what they're doing. oftentimes, we find, I find that in those conversations, regardless of the company size or stage, we're all kind of running into uh similar challenges. And so it's always great to hear someone else's perspective on how they're thinking about those problems. And yeah, so. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, happy to connect and I love chatting with other marketing people. Got it. Okay. Thank you for joining the podcast and in Delia today. And thank you guys for watching. I will leave links for uh so people can check you out and see you in the next one. Sounds great, thank you for having me.