Kevin Kerner: 0:00

Hey there, I'm Kevin Kerner, the host of Tech Marketing Rewired, and today's episode is with Aditya Venpati, vp of Marketing at MoEngage. I'm really excited to talk to Aditya because I've followed his content on LinkedIn for a while. It's sharp, practical and the kind of marketing advice you can really use I know I have. What makes this conversation especially interesting is the complexity of the market that he's in. Moengage sells to marketers, sells in to B2B2C companies and positions itself as an AI-first platform, all while competing with giants like Adobe, salesforce and HubSpot. Aditya shares how his team navigates those challenges, where they're finding success and how he's balancing bold new plays with timeless marketing fundamentals. But before we dive in, a quick note at Mighty True, we help tech brands navigate the complexities of selling technical products to their customers, and right now we're offering a one-time AI search analysis. It's a way to see how findable your brand is in both traditional search and AI search. You know, with all the changes happening in AI, it's a powerful snapshot of where you stand today. So if you'd like one, send me an email at AISearch at MightyEntrycom and I'll get you set up with next steps. Let's get into it.Kevin Kerner: 1:10

This is Tech Marketing Rewired. All right, everyone, welcome to Tech Marketing Rewired. Today's guest is Aditya Vempati. Aditya is an engineer by trade, turned marketer, investor, mentor and now VP marketing at MoEngage, which is a really cool AI-first customer engagement platform, and I've been following Aditya's content for a while on LinkedIn. It's just really good advice for both strategic and in-the-trenches marketing stuff that I, frankly, I've used much of it in my own work, so I had to reach out to him. I reached out to him kind of cold, aditya, to get you on the show, and I really am super happy to have you here. So, aditya, welcome to the show and how you doing.

Aditya Vempaty: 1:58

Good Thanks for having me, kevin. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to speak. You know, share our knowledge. I can share and pay it forward where I can. You know these moments are, regardless of how frequent or infrequent they are. It's always nice to chat marketing and share the knowledge where I can with folks like yourself and be given a platform to do it.

Kevin Kerner: 2:16

So thank you Love it, love it, love it. So I know you've had a really interesting path into B2B and you know you're doing a bunch of stuff at MoEngage that I've been keeping up with. But I'm excited to dig into all that. But before we get into the details, for folks who may not know you, your full background, can you walk us through your career journey and just real quickly and then give us a quick overview of MoEngage, just for context?

Aditya Vempaty: 2:38

Yeah, so I mean career journey. As you said, I was an engineer by trade and I like to say marketing stole my heart. And, as you said, I was an engineer by trade and I like to say marketing stole my heart. And one of the things that really became apparent was, you know, I was good at engineering but I was never going to be a top 1% engineer and what I realized is I could be a top 1% marketer. That's not to like knock marketers, it's just I think my brain was wired where I needed the human interaction and I thrived on the creativity and also using the data where possible. And I, you know, growing up, firmly felt like hey, to be successful you got to be like the top of your craft, you have to be top 1%. And what does that take and what does that look like?

Aditya Vempaty: 3:12

And marketing to me called me and stole my heart and been fortunate to be a running marketing at a few organizations like Amplitude, unit 21, synthego, and been at early stage companies that have been successful like Nutanix, and really seen how things are done, been able to run with things and help them scale and grow and along the way, really realized you know it comes down to your customers and their problems above all, and no matter what kind of marketing, what industry you're in I've been in industries like fraud and compliance, all the way through analytics to genome engineering, and ultimately it comes down to your prospects and their problems and your products really don't matter.

Aditya Vempaty: 3:53

What they're trying to solve is what really matters and how they try to do it and how it impacts their day-to-day and their job. And if you can help them do that, then you start building trust. And if you can educate them on how that that looks like to solve their problems, that also helps build trust. That allows you to have conversations with them to potentially buy your products and your solutions. But that's been like the overarching theme of my career.

Kevin Kerner: 4:12

That keeps coming back over and over, regardless of the ai shift, regardless of new channels I wonder if your engineering background, especially since you're in tech, you've always been kind of like more in the tech side of things. I wonder if the engineering background gives you that like it's got to work for the user, it's got to work for the engineer, the actual end user, you think that's the case?

Aditya Vempaty: 4:31

I think it is heavily actually now that you think about it like, because you're always working backwards like did this solution work? Did it pass the qa test? Did it actually, like when I put it into code, into production, do what it's supposed to do, or even testing to do what it do is supposed to do?

Aditya Vempaty: 4:46

And it's almost like you're always answering to a larger master or a larger like entity that like judges you, and that judgment is usually did it do what it was supposed to do more than like and solve the problem more than like. Oh, it's cool, it's a great feature. So that's a that. So that's a good observation and I think I do lean towards that. And I'm always thinking like, hey, if I was an end user, would I buy this, would I use this product? And like is this how I would talk to somebody? Is this colloquial in the sense like if I'm having a conversation? Are these the things I would say where I'm just writing this, to write it, to sound smart and like? Those are often things that, as an engineer, I started thinking of and you're definitely right, and I think that progressed.

Aditya Vempaty: 5:28

And one other tidbit that really like set me on this path more than anything else Fun fact, most people don't know this is when I shifted from engineering to marketing. I actually was a SDR and a demand gen person for the first like eight months of my career and I was dialing 80 to 100 people a day, selling them infrastructure, and I got to learn so much and how little like one with the coding side and two with just doing this dialing and getting people's attention, what would get them to continue to talk with me? And that's where it was very much about them and their problems and nothing about what I had to say yeah, yeah, that's like the killer combination.

Kevin Kerner: 6:04

Actually, engineer, sdr marketer, you've had to actually use the product. You had to actually sell it to people on the phone, which I did. I started my career at Advanced Micro Devices as an SDR way back in the day. Man, nothing teaches you like the product and the customer, like getting on the phone and dialing or getting hung up and then doing it over and over again until you're like wait, someone actually talked to me.

Aditya Vempaty: 6:28

Wait, they gave me three seconds, they gave me a minute. What am I doing here?

Kevin Kerner: 6:30

that I didn't do before. Tenacity, total tenacity that's super cool. What really stands out to me about MoEngage and one of the conversations I wanted to get started with you is that you're selling to marketers who are a real skeptical bunch and you're selling in the MoEngage platform a very AI first product. I've talked to a lot of people that have had AI in the product which you guys. You're also a database led product, but there's a strong AI positioning to it Seems like that's a whole added layer of complexity to have both selling to marketers but also kind of ai first in your messaging. I have those dimensions informed how you build your, how you've been building your go-to-market at all yeah, so it's.

Aditya Vempaty: 7:16

We thought a lot about this and and the thinking wasn't so much like, hey, slap a label of AI on it and ship it out the door right. Million gauges existed before the AI. I would say like upturn has happened and everyone's focused on it, and we're more like how do we like our CEO does a great job of this? And we also like getting a line around like how can whatever we do help marketers be more human and be more creative? We should not be obscuring them from that. We should enable them to do that. And what is the AI? Products that we can introduce into our platform that feel native and isn't like an afterthought of bolting on, but something that feels like it's part of the flow and it makes sense to have AI here versus not have AI here, and where I can step in immediately and help you accelerate, versus where it's like, huh, this doesn't make sense. And so a lot of that thought went into making it human centric marketing and like usage based versus you can do AI everywhere and anywhere, and we've seen cases like that, and so that's how it's allowed us to market in a very different way, in being like how do we bring the humans first. How do we make our prospects and audiences heroes? And that's why it's trickled down across the board and that's how we're trying to punch above our weight.

Aditya Vempaty: 8:31

It's like how do we always be creative, have a human element to it, where it's not just like human, like hey, put a picture of a person and call it human right. No, how do we tell the stories of as you said, they're skeptical, especially marketers is trust, and how do you build that trust when they have a plethora of choices to select from? And the thinking was how do we constantly talk about their problems, and talk about their problems across different mediums, but also do it where they do research and learn from? That could be channels or thought leaders or other brands that we can partner with as well, and that's how we've tried to punch above our weight, as you've said, and the way we've been able to do that is working with partners, working with practitioners who may use other competitors to be very honest, but telling their stories so that other practitioners associate us with solving problems, even if they may not use our product, and to build the brand and the trust out.

Kevin Kerner: 9:49

Yeah, super interesting. And then the the fact that the product also takes into account the human nature of trying to humanize using the AI inside the product. It's kind of a cool tie that you actually focus on the human aspect of marketing, sort of trust-based stuff. How has that played out for you, because I've heard a lot of people talk about focusing on the customer and making sure that the customer voice is in everything. How has that actually played out in some of the strategies for you?

Aditya Vempaty: 10:21

Yeah, so oftentimes I joined MoEngage about like two, two and a half years ago and oftentimes when you come in and you're marketing to marketers, I think, marketing to marketers, there's a fine line between being really cheesy and over the top to get their attention versus like being too serious, and it's not easy to cross that line, versus like being too serious and it's not easy to cross that line. The reason I bring that up is we actually try to focus on being funny and human and using nostalgia as a way to reach these marketers, because a lot of the marketers that are now in VP roles, c-level roles, are people that were kids in the 80s and the 90s, and what I found is nostalgia really triggers a sense of positive emotion and that is where a lot of our marketing comes from. Like how do we drive positive emotion? Like when you associate with monogamy, if you don't buy, even if you don't think it's the right fit, how do we make you feel a positive emotion? And everything we do in our marketing is focused on that.

Aditya Vempaty: 11:24

Like you mentioned the customer engagement book. Yes, it's called Adapt or Die, but if you look at the entire thing, it doesn't look like die, it looks like adapt and everything around. It is like a positive message of how you should go and adapt. But the die is there to be. Like, hey, you need to think about it, because if you don't adapt, this is the consequence. But we want you to adapt and everything is about adapting.

Aditya Vempaty: 11:43

And so all our marketing is very like not like rah, rah positive, but like, hey, there's a go, be do the thing that makes you feel happy and excited. How can we help you do that? And that's how we believe you can build trust and that's how we believe we should be a media outlet or a news source for you to learn from. Like, hey, there's something new about MCPs. Let's go talk to someone who's a practitioner who doesn't even use our product, may even use our competitor's product, but can we get them to give us a quote and tell us how they're thinking about it and can we put that onto our site? And or, literally again, customer engagement book. We have 13 authors from nine different companies, like Grammarly, hulu, wealthsimple, equinox, and a lot of them aren't using, but we want to still tell their stories through the book and we want to still let that resonate. So it's like, oh wow, these guys are actually solving the problem of customer engagement and telling and using examples that drive the industry forward. Hey, maybe this is an entity I can trust.

Kevin Kerner: 12:34

Yeah, I think that the book is a really great example of that. I guess customer led marketing, or maybe thought leadership led marketing, is really a unique asset because it's both in a bunch of different ways. I mean, you're getting other people's opinions on how they actually do, sort of in the trenches stuff. It's a well-designed piece. Like from a creative perspective, it's something that's like a coffee table book.

Aditya Vempaty: 12:58

You took the words out of my mouth. Yeah, yeah, we wanted to be a coffee table book.

Kevin Kerner: 13:02

Yeah, you kind of want to read it. How did you pull that off, cause it seems like quite a big effort to get that done.

Aditya Vempaty: 13:09

Yeah, it's a big undertaking, it doesn't. I would be remissed if I didn't say I had the pleasure of having an awesome design team and an awesome content team and without those equations we would not get that book. Uh, the book, to give you context, took about eight well, seven months to do to coordinate those 13 authors. And the real key behind that was we wanted to put an asset out there that was for the industry and that was done by practitioners in the industry and not led by a vendor. Yes, we led it, but we have very, I would say, few vendor-led comments throughout the book. We have more practitioner-led comments through these big brands that others can learn as an example from.

Aditya Vempaty: 13:49

And it was really about how do you make you learn, how do we make you feel like your job is difficult but there are ways to solve it, and how do we make you feel that you can consume this asset in a novel nostalgic way. Hence the physical book. There's a PDF of it, but we felt like, as you said, having that book on your coffee table, the way we designed it, like it was meant completely to drive a sense of nostalgia, because it's in the physical format, but also the design and creatives to feel like, hey, this is a marketer who's marketing to me, but speaking my language of marketing, which is like the design and the aesthetics and the layout, and obviously the content has to back that right. If you think about it this way, the content is the fuel to the engine that is the creativity and the assets that are representing.

Kevin Kerner: 14:36

Yeah, you know, the other thing about that book too is and I've seen it on LinkedIn a bunch is that because you got all these other brands and marketers actually talk about you know, whatever they were talking about, they actually promote it too. So there's quite a bit of it's like. It's like you built an asset, you had other people involved in that asset, but then those other people are promoting it and there's a lot of people in the book. So it's this amplification effect across all these other people that had to drive a lot of trust in your brand because you're the, you know, the guys putting it together. It was really smart yeah, thank you.

Aditya Vempaty: 15:11

I mean again, it's a team effort, but we really want to make anything. We do want to make sure distribution is baked in to any asset, produce and people assume distribution is an email list, posting on linkedin social media, putting ads behind it. Me and the team think about it differently and I push the team to think about it differently also, because distribution actually should be innately built in to the asset, meaning it should have a partner, it should have a practitioner, it should have a customer, someone that also is tied to the outcome, with you, like they win, you win, you win, they win. So there are shared interests and this is why the book did so well is because there are 13 different authors, as you said, that were amplifying this and sharing it, because they themselves are so excited that they're a part of a book, a written asset that isn't just on the web that someone can download, but they themselves can send it and give to their colleagues, et cetera, and so forth.

Kevin Kerner: 16:00

Yeah, there's a certain amount of like built-in virality to it, like when you think and I DG, I hadn't thought about distribution being that you invite additional people to actually be part of the content and that's almost guaranteed distribution. So it's super smart in that regard. Can you share any success from that early on? I mean, it's only been a couple months, but is it working?

Aditya Vempaty: 16:22

Yeah, it's been about two months since it launched and we have over about 2,200 downloads, yeah, and about 600 physical copies and we've penetrated into, I would say, like getting awareness and out of our you know top 400 accounts, we've gotten awareness because of the book into 25% of them. That's amazing Copy. It's been delivered to them physically. They know who we are. Now we're seeing them engage with our brand in.

Kevin Kerner: 16:55

Yeah, it's very interesting, especially given that you're tying it to kind of a nostalgic piece of the buyer persona, the fact that people might want a book and it's even looks even it's designed a little nostalgic looking. So it's really interesting. I wonder if the other thing that I've noticed you guys do quite a bit of and you post quite a bit on this is events, and I've seen a lot of other customers sort of lean into events because it is very personal. How have events become part of your, this trust-based go-to-market strategy?

Aditya Vempaty: 17:26

yeah, so one of the things right if you zoom back, like any industry whichever I've had the privilege to work in like I always think about how can you make things personal and experiential. And because the entire goal again is to make someone feel something, if they don't feel something when they interact with your brand or come to your event or any asset, you have you kind of lost them right. And if they just eye roll, checkbox, move on, you've lost the narrative, you've lost their attention, you've lost, you know, the potential to get them to engage with you again. And so with events, we always think is, whatever events we do, can they walk away feeling like they had a great experience? And it doesn't matter if it's a trade show, doesn't matter if it's a lunch and learn, it doesn't matter if it's a dinner. Like, how can you make sure the experience feels personal and they walk away being like, damn, that's pretty awesome. I'm going to think of them when I have something else coming up.

Aditya Vempaty: 18:15

And the way we use it is we have a plethora of things, but we are a customer engagement platform, so how do we engage you? And we talk about personalization at scale and cross-channel marketing, so how do all our events support that level of engagement At Shopify. This year we were at Shopify, we were at MAU, we had Stanleys that were custom engraved with your name. That's the engagement aspect of it. But the other aspect that actually worked even better than the Stanleys was we had hangover kits at ShopTalk and it's a three-day event and the hangover kit or sorry, we called them hydration kits we had eye masks, advil liquid IV for anyone to come up and take. We had a bunch of them at the booth and we actually saw people.

Kevin Kerner: 18:56

I bet you got rid of all of them. I bet everything sold out.

Aditya Vempaty: 18:59

Oh man, it was for free right. And people just walked up and said these are so great, these are so great.

Aditya Vempaty: 19:04

I need this. And we would see people coming doing that and start having conversations with us. And then they're like, oh, you're giving me a Stanley. What is that? Like, what do I need to do to get that? I'm like, well, are you an ICP? Like, yes, you're a great. Like why don't we chat? Let's set up a meeting and we'll give you a custom engraved Stanley, like on my wife or the loved one.

Aditya Vempaty: 19:30

And so, like that's how the entire customer engagement, we're engaging you, we're making it personal for you and you're getting something of value from us out of the gate, before we even ask anything of value exchange back from you. And that's how we thought about events. And then we do events, usually like dinners we try to keep a little smaller, but do them in like nice, intimate restaurants, Even 10 people, even if it costs, like you know, five to $7,000, like it's a restaurant. You're like I want, been wanting to go to that, but damn, they have a restaurant there. Oh, the guest list looks good. I'm going to get some value out of this. And that's how we try to curate everything. It's not easy, Don't get me wrong, and we don't try to do a bunch of them.

Kevin Kerner: 20:11

But whichever ones we do, we try a tech marketing rewired event about a month ago and it was great and it was. You're right, it's about 5,000 bucks. We've got about 20 people there, but it was really great conversation. I'm sure people took away a little bit about our brand and the podcast and stuff that we're doing. That's really good. I think I see more of those in the future for either. The other thing I was thinking is breakfast, like doing some sort of a meetup. Breakfast is a great thing. Have you tried any of that type of? No, we haven't done the breakfast.

Aditya Vempaty: 20:40

I was actually going to ask you like what you know, to a conversation here. It's like where have you guys seen work? Have you done it before? What's the value there?

Kevin Kerner: 21:01

I've been to a kind of stimulating conversation. I think that's good for breakfast and we had topics and then we discussed the topics. It was great. It was really good. That was more networking, I guess. Yeah, like you know, more of a like coffee talk sort of thing, so it was really cool yeah, the breakfast thing we had.

Aditya Vempaty: 21:23

We did brunch sponsorship at bigger conferences and, like mau, it worked in a sense. We got leads, but we realized there was nothing personal about it. Like that, 300 people there that came for brunch and you scan a badge, they scan your badge and like, okay, this, like it's not personal, it's not going to leave to like you feeling any better of like getting breakfast and knowing who we are, and so that's where, if we're doing breakfast, we're definitely now like, hey, let's do it smaller, let's do it more intimate, yeah, and let's like pick up a spot where people know this is a brunch spot. They're like I've been wanting to go to that spot. Okay, I'll come by and I'll, I'll try it out. And that's how, again going back to like the experiential that drives the engagement and the emotion, trying to tie that back constantly to build trust.

Kevin Kerner: 22:05

It's really smart With all these tactics and tools and channels. I mean you're leading a marketing effort at a really fast growing company. How do you decide where to focus, like what's the process of your system you put in place to say this is where we're focusing for the quarter?

Aditya Vempaty: 22:21

Yeah, we think about it actually we do yearly planning but the bigger part is we think about it in like two quarter sprints and we look at hey, what are the bets that we're going to take for this quarter and what are the long term bets we're going to take for the next two quarters? And then the thinking becomes okay, what are these short-term bets going to yield? And the short-term bets usually like the dinners, like the blog post, content from, like other practitioners that we can get in, things that we know will boost the brand visibility immediately are like the current quarter ones. And the reason like you hear me say brand and not like pipeline, is because our industry, in the space we're in, is very brownfield. It's not a new category. There's like big players already that have had accounts come in and that they're in and we're not doing full rip and replace, because that's not what we want to position ourselves. We want to say we coexist with the big players, but we still need them to think about us in the sense that we are like an addition to what you have, because rip and replace takes way longer and so, as a result of being that space, we need to constantly get our brand appearing in front of them over a timeframe, constantly, and that's when they start. When they have the need, they'll come in and look at us.

Aditya Vempaty: 23:30

And because we're in a greenfield space sorry, brownfield space, not a greenfield space so that's why you'll see us talk about practitioners more using their brands, as I said earlier, and like how do we get blog posts from practitioners who are not even our customers? Those are like the short term bets that we're thinking of. How do we do webinars with them? How do we, you know, get them to share LinkedIn wins, as whatever they have and campaigns they're doing? And those are like the short term. The longer term bets are like things like the book what are things that have a built in virality, that takes longer to execute but has that like design bar and that has that brand halo cachet that now you'll be known for for like the next 12 to six to 12 months, and that's how we think about our planning.

Aditya Vempaty: 24:17

And obviously this all relates back to pipeline and relates back to generating pipeline and supporting the organization. All of this doesn't happen if that doesn't happen, right. And so in anything I'm doing, we always talk about one, as I mentioned, distribution, and then two how does this make someone get into our database? How does this? How can we target this to the target accounts we want to break into, to stand out from the noise, right? And so a lot of the quarter to quarter stuff is always focused on breaking into target accounts and then the longer, bigger halo stuff is again ties back to breaking into larger accounts that are brownfield. But now we have a bigger piece, like the book. It's gotten us into target accounts that otherwise wouldn't care about us because this is so different, so unique and had so many other authors baked into it. And that's how we think about it from the long-term breaking accounts to the short-term breaking into accounts Is that?

Kevin Kerner: 25:01

is that influenced how you structure your budgets Like do you have an experiment sort of experimental budget or a big anchor content budget and ongoing budget?

Aditya Vempaty: 25:10

Yeah, so ongoing budget, usually like, you have your ad spends, right, and you have the content investments on a monthly basis to rank for you know the GOs and the AIOs and whatever acronym is for AI with search. Now, right, we have those budgets, we have to make those investments. But the experimental budgets, yes, they're there. The book was an experimental budget, right, and we're going to do something else. That's another experimental budget, and what's interesting is it's the experimental budgets take more time and creativity than money. The money aspect actually isn't the big part of the experimental budget. I often find like the book actually didn't cost that much, like if you look at the grand scheme of things, but the time it took and the creativity took was way more. And so I find like when you budget for experiments, you actually have to budget time more than you do money, because it involves more manual labor, because it's something people haven't done or they haven't operationalized or it's not as smooth. So that's what I found Like.

Kevin Kerner: 26:07

When I do that the experiments definitely it's in a different realm of measurement than the normal ones Super interesting, and you could probably make the case that the experiments, if they pay out, if they're different, they may even pay off bigger. So you might it sounds like in this case you might've spent less for the actual production, more in terms of like brain power and time, because it took a long time to do, but it seems like it's paying off bigger too because you took a bigger bet exactly and in like planning and stuff, what I found is the bigger, bolder bets have worked out way more often than, funny enough, the ones you expect to work.

Aditya Vempaty: 26:43

Yeah, like I've actually found, going back to what you're saying, like the channels I thought would work are not working anymore and these bigger bets are the ones that are really moving the needle more and more now than the channels.

Aditya Vempaty: 26:54

I thought that would work and that's where you're like everything is flipped all of a sudden and it is happening because of AI and because of the entire way people are searching has shifted, I'm sure with you, with me, like the fact that we just go to chat GPT and look up something like is this a source actually right? Let me dig deeper and the entire workflow of how you consume and learn for purchasing something or a problem you have as, as changed, and I know everyone's talked about it, but the downstream effects are how you buy, even for b2b's, has changed, right, and we sell the b2b's, we sell the b2c's and thus, like the channels I think should work aren't working and we have to rethink those channels. And that that's where my budget goes to and that's's actually become more of the experiment than the big bets, where the big bets seem like big bets and bold, but in fact they're more, I would say, dependable than this right now.

Kevin Kerner: 27:45

Yeah, isn't that wild? And I don't. It's a really good advice because I don't think people not all of the marketers that I know budget for experiment. Not all of the marketers that I know budget for experiment. They don't have an experiment budget. It's just kind of all in and you might think of an experiment every once in a while and kind of have to sell the ELT for some budget there. But the really smart marketers that I know are actually like planning in percentage 15% or whatever for experiments and they're paying off. I don't know if you've read Udi Ledergore's Courageous Marketing, but it's really good in that regard. It talks about punching above your weight and experiment budget but Gong.

Aditya Vempaty: 28:27

I think, does a good job of that. I saw that book everywhere too, and I was like I need to.

Kevin Kerner: 28:31

I didn't get a chance to read it.

Aditya Vempaty: 28:33

But I haven't read it yet.

Kevin Kerner: 28:35

Yeah, plug for the plug for that book. Um, you mentioned the, the big, the, the big giants in the category. So you're not, you're competing against some small little players called like Adobe and Salesforce and you know ginormous companies and you mentioned before like the platform play, versus being a direct category competitor. How do you approach competing in that kind of environment without you know, waking one of them up that you're, you know, a major competitor and going after you Like what's the strategy?

Aditya Vempaty: 29:03

Yeah, I mean, the big thing is we are just coexisting with you. We're not trying to rip and replace right. There's years of relationship, data, trust that they have built with the brands who use them, but often as new methodology not new methodologies, but new consumer behavior patterns have emerged for these B2C brands and how their audiences consume and engage. The folks who are running these systems are looking to engage people on these platforms, like an Instagram, like a WhatsApp, like a web, and tie those together. And what we found? These giants are good at what they do. I'm not even going to deny that, but how to get the most out of them takes a lot of time and effort, and so it's often when they're thinking of adding a new module. At the giants of Adobe or Salesforce, we're like, hey, we can do that too, and we do it really fast and quick, and that's kind of like what we're known for. And so we're like, hey, you're using email already. Great, you're doing web personalization Great. You want to do mobile? Hey, we're here to help you with that. We can do that and we can integrate. We work with Salesforce. We integrate with them directly. You can pass the data email to make sure it touches WhatsApp and it's syncing and it goes back and gives a better web experience.

Aditya Vempaty: 30:15

And we found just doing things that way does two parts. One it's actually about the buyer, not even the competitor. I'm going to say that the buyer feels at ease, that it's worth making the investment with you Because they again, they've had these relationships for years and years as a company. They're not going to trust who you are just because you said you could do it. So one they feel okay, you're integrated, great, you're certified by them. You're saying you just want this part and you're saying that because it's going to make it easier for my life and what I want to do, not because you have the better product and you're understanding I'm still going to use these products. Okay, cool, you're making very much about me and the problems and the challenges I have to solve, not about you and your product.

Aditya Vempaty: 30:54

And that's how we try to position it and engage and talk to the users and our potential buyers, because we're trying to put ourselves in their situation and be like what would make them actually like consider us, not kick out these current vendors, but consider us and any person that's a purchaser that has whatever decision makings they're always thinking about hey, do I know you? Are you reputable? What's it going to take if I want to use you, like to get you up and running, and who else can I talk to you? In my space, my industry that has used you? And these are three things we try to constantly cover our bases on, and that's when we talk and market to the giants and engage with people who are using them. We try to focus on like, hey, it's easy to get up and running with us. This is how our migration looks. Here are other people that have done it. This is a scale at which they've operated.

Aditya Vempaty: 31:37

This is where, going back to where we talk about, like the fundamentals of marketing. These are the fundamentals of marketing, and it's not like I knew these fundamentals. I got them by talking to customers when I'd be like hey, why aren't you considering us? What does it look like? They're like well, these are three things. Why do I care about these three If I don't?

Kevin Kerner: 31:58

have these three, I have a high likelihood of getting fired or not being able to purchase a solution or question for what I did. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, the, the, the, uh, the platform play is a smarter one, uh, because they also your cost of acquisition is probably lower if you're actually just working as a plot, you know you're, you're leaning into that, pull their plot, those bigger platforms to take. Uh, you're leaning into those bigger platforms to take not take business from them, but be in the wake of some of the opportunities that come from. So I think that's great and you have to use some of those fundamentals of trust. You know, customer understanding, listening to the customer, those are all really important things.

Aditya Vempaty: 32:32

They totally are, and it's what fuels us and, as you said, ast, astutely, it drives down customer acquisition costs. And then also, you know, sometimes you have to take the positioning of hey, we're, we're the new innovative toy you want to come play with. Right, and what you realize with these big players and these big organizations is everyone has budgets to go experiment with new stuff, as we just talked about, even for tooling. Yeah, because they want to try something new. And it's like, if you prove yourself there, you get the wedge and you can start expanding. But you need to prove yourself at least in a small wedge before they give you the big pie.

Kevin Kerner: 33:01

Yeah, makes sense. I wanted to ask a question about your team because, given the way that you're building your go-to-market heavily trust-based, using customers as the voice of your company it seems like you'd have to build a team that also has the same, or can learn, let's say, the same sort of go-to-market approach. How have you built the team Like? What type of roles do you have in place? What's most important that you've put in place over the last year? What type of education, training do you need to give people?

Aditya Vempaty: 33:38

Like I'm just curious how you built your team. Yeah, so first off I'll say this none of this happens without a great team. So like bar none, I can tell all these strategies and everything and you hit the nail actually on the head. Like all of the marketing and anything you do, I think requires with the team that buys into what you're saying and really like, internalizes it and works to make sure it's part of them. And I've been blessed with a team that does that. A few folks on the team I've worked with for previous companies also well, and they've moved on to MoEngage with me and fewer new additions. And one of the things I tell them, like there are four non-negotiables to be part of this team, right, and the first non-negotiable is it's always customer problems first. That's like non-negotiable.

Aditya Vempaty: 34:14

The second one is growth mindset. You have to constantly push yourself, try new things, and that comes from talking to customers. That comes from learning what others are doing. You need to constantly push yourself in doing that.

Aditya Vempaty: 34:25

And the third one, right, it comes down to ask for forgiveness, not permission. I want you to try stuff. You fail, that's fine, just keep me updated. You're trying stuff and tell me how you're trying stuff like document it before you go try it, but go try it and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and you tell me why. And the fourth is trust. We trust you. You have to trust us. Expect that all of us have each other's backs, meaning if shit hits the fan, tell me shit's hitting the fan and I can help, because we're doing marketing and, in the grand scheme of things, whatever you do, as long as it's not illegal, we can reverse it. And you don't. You know, murder somebody, like those are like the two things I can't do anything about to help you. But everything else I can help you with in any shape or form, and it's not that bad, trust me, it's not that bad.

Kevin Kerner: 35:11

But those are go ahead. I was just gonna say that's really good and get letting people have the because you know I run an agency as well letting people have the room to make mistakes, because we're all going to make mistakes and the good stuff usually comes from some mistake that was made previously. I think it's really really smart. And a lot of marketing organizations, especially some of the bigger ones I mean you were at dell you feel really you're kind of hamstrung a bit, just kind of frightened by making the wrong not that Dell does this, but just making the wrong decision and it's a terrifying position to be in if you're a marketer because, like you said, most of the marketing decisions, if you make bets that are not like, considered internally, like solid, like everyone's eyes are on you right At those organizations, there's way more pressure and you need that environment, as you said, to let people experiment.

Aditya Vempaty: 35:59

And so most of the team that's where I push them, or I push them in the growth mindset, to be creative. I push them to take those bets and be like I need you to do this. And then the customer. And it's almost like a de-risking mechanism where, if you talk to the customer, you understand what they care about, don't care about what gets them excited and doesn't, which allows you to go and try new things, which allows you to go and put new campaigns into place and like tell me afterwards and if it doesn't work, you had a reasoning and a justification on how you approach it and why you did it. And the last part is you're trusting your team, one and each other. That is like a key, key thing. You trust this person will have your back and you trust that you'll have. They trust that you have their back.

Aditya Vempaty: 36:39

And without those four tenants, like I don't think, at least for me, I can't build a teams that will buy into this type of thinking, because this type of thinking is very much not your traditional marketing. It is, I would say, pushing the boundaries to think very differently and not think so much internal focus but external focused, which is what not most marketing teams do. And so the team has bought into it, right, and it takes time and effort. But I'm always like hey, how would you talk to the customer? You wrote something like this.

Aditya Vempaty: 37:01

Do you really think the customer like gives a shit what you just wrote? Like reread it and like and tell me and oftentimes that question, funny enough out of everything else for growth and creativity is read it out loud and tell me is this something you'd want to send? And man that so quickly? They're like oh wow, I would not say this out loud. Then I'm like then why'd you put it on the paper? And it's not meant to be like a knock. It's like giving them the tools so they can like do this without me around, without having to lean on me, that they can be self-sufficient and have the creative ideas and outputs 100, 100 like would you buy this?

Kevin Kerner: 37:36

would you buy this piece of content? Well, no, I wouldn't know, it's not good. No, yeah, and I've done those. I've written that type of stuff myself.

Kevin Kerner: 37:43

I'm like, oh my gosh, this is yeah, and like if you can't say it out loud with the straight face and you feel good about it, it's like yeah yeah yeah, for sure, Give me the X, you know so so you guys, so you've been in this position for a couple of years, over the next, let's say, 12 months. Obviously, there's a lot of change. Right now, it's crazy for other CMOs or marketing leaders that might be listening.

Aditya Vempaty: 38:13

What's the one thing you'd say they should double down on for the next 12 months? I think the biggest thing that you need to double down, regardless of what industry you're in, is understand, I would say, how your audience digests information from who, from where and what channel. That is going to change so much and if you constantly don't ask them and get that information, that is what's going to lead to, you know, jobs being lost. It's not the asset you produce, it's not the webinar you're doing or the event you're doing. It's that you didn't spend time understanding how they consume, where they consume and who they consume from and what's the medium they consume in. Because, yeah, it's as simple as that. If that's a fundamental thing and that's a foundational thing, that will never shift how they do. It may shift, but that learning needs to constantly happen. And, like on my team, back to structuring, like I should cover that real quick.

Aditya Vempaty: 38:58

And this relates is we have someone who owns demand gen for North America. We have someone who owns content for North America. We have someone who owns events. We have someone who owns design, and they have tertiary support systems underneath that are from India and everyone has employees in India. And then we started a PMM. We have a central PMM team.

Aditya Vempaty: 39:14

This PMM is going to focus on North America and one of the things I'm commissioning her is hey, every month you get X amount of budget, but I need you to talk to a customer every week, or prospect or practitioner, and give me feedback and feed the team this information every week without fail, and you can pay them like X amount of time, x amount of money for 30 minutes of their time, but this is non-negotiable.

Aditya Vempaty: 39:34

You need to do this every month and I told them all in the interview process. And this goes back to knowing the channel, what they're looking to solve, who they learn from, why they learn from, and this gives us a constant pulse on it. And with AI now you can put it all into a doc and be like and put the date and be like how are things changing, what are the channels they're using, how are they shifted by industry or vertical or company size, and that way, the entire team starts to have, I would say, a Wikipedia or customer Wikipedia to learn that. Yeah, long story short, I think that's what CMOs should focus on.

Kevin Kerner: 40:05

Yeah, 100%, 100%, because it's changing so much. It's just crazy how you wonder what channels that are in place today that are the best, or maybe they're the channels that everyone always uses and how that's going to change a couple of years from now. It's just, it's just really wild. Even things like in the B2B space, like LinkedIn. What will be the future of LinkedIn as it gets more crowd, just more crowded, as more people are using it? Like, what's the? What about video content? Like, how will video content change Because everyone's using video now? So so if everyone jumps on one bad wagon or the next, like what is the next thing? So watching channel is really an interesting thought. That should be like. It should be watched because it's I don't know. I couldn't tell you what's going to happen unless I was talking to customers and watching it, but things are going to change really wild. But you hit the nail on the head right.

Aditya Vempaty: 40:55

Change is just like the symptom right. But the root cause not root cause. I say, like the foundation to tackle change is constantly talking to the customer and having a pulse on them, Like that won't stop. If you do stop it, then the change will kick your ass. But if you're constantly talking to them, you'll see the change happening. You'll see how they consume, You'll see what matters to them as it's happening, or it's about to happen, or or you're in the midst of it. So it's almost like having answers to the test, even if the test questions keep changing.

Kevin Kerner: 41:23

Yeah, that's right. That's really well said. Okay, cool. Well, this has been great. I want to keep you for so much longer. There's so many things I have to ask, but I wanted to end on something I do on all these podcasts called AI roulette questions. So I've put your profile into perplexity, along with your company, all your recent posts, the kind of outline of the conversation that we put together for today, and I'm going to press send. It's going to give me a question, and I have no idea what the question is. My only advice to perplex you is to just make it a spicy question, or?

Kevin Kerner: 41:55

something that I wouldn't have thought of myself, and that's pretty. I'm not that smart, so it should be able to outdo me here. So let's see what it does, and some it's come up with some really crazy stuff. Let me.

Aditya Vempaty: 42:04

I'm excited, I press send here, Interesting.

Kevin Kerner: 42:11

Okay, well, this is good in line with the questions that we just had around team. So if AI had to pitch itself for a job on your marketing team, what would its biggest exaggeration be during the interview?

Aditya Vempaty: 42:21

Biggest exaggeration. The biggest exaggeration is it would tell me to talk to all my customers. It would tell me these are the problems my customers have. Then, when I looked at it, it would be just blog posts that are found on the internet and it would work, and it would just use generic language and tell me that my product is the best product ever and that my competitors are garbage and that everyone loves me. That's the exaggeration. I would say everything I'm doing is great.

Kevin Kerner: 42:45

Everything's fine, you don't need to do anything and you're the best. I don't know if you saw this, but in the latest iteration of ChatGPT-5, they're explaining now that the AI is now using primarily search what it finds on the web. So it's using its reasoning agent but it's not trying to memorize all information itself, which is really interesting because you're going to have the AI more reason on publicly available information, versus what they were thinking was that it would have some, you know, knowledge beyond knowledge of everything itself, I mean what does this mean?

Aditya Vempaty: 43:25

This tells me more and more they don't know how to make the AI reason. Yeah, let me do this. Oh, it didn't work. Wait, let me. More and more. They don't know how to make the AI reason. Yeah, let me do this. Oh, it didn't work, let me try this. It didn't work, let me try it. That's where you nailed it when you said everything's changing because those fundamentals they're not sure which is the fundamental thing to go invest in.

Kevin Kerner: 43:38

Yeah, yeah, totally. I haven't been super happy with ChatGPT 5, really. It was like when they first announced 4, when they had 4 and they were saying that 5 was going to be amazing, and then 5 came out and it just kind of underwhelmed me up to this point. So I'm a little less AI at least Chachapiti AI happy right now, because I was really expecting it to be a giant leap.

Aditya Vempaty: 44:03

I've had to retrain it. Yeah, I agree, like hey remember this, remember this, remember this. So I, yeah, I agree, like hey, remember this, remember this, remember this. So I had to retrain it to get back on the, on understanding how I talk and how I say stuff.

Kevin Kerner: 44:15

Yeah, so I mean, I'm not complaining, I still great. I wouldn't want to lose it. So please, sam altman, don't listen to this and take it away from me.

Aditya Vempaty: 44:24

But I definitely need it don't take my ai friend away from me, please. That's right well it's Well.

Kevin Kerner: 44:30

it's been great. It's been great getting to know you here on the podcast. Really good advice on a lot of different things. I will urge people to follow you on LinkedIn, and is there any other way that people should get ahold of you if they want to talk more? Learn more from you?

Aditya Vempaty: 44:43

LinkedIn is the best. Send me a message, I'm, you know, try to respond as much as I can and I truly believe in paying it forward. If you're going to send me a message and you need some help, please go for it. Just don't send me a message and try to sell me things, because I'm open to being sold. Don't send me a message under the guise of trying to sell me something.

Kevin Kerner: 44:59

Yeah, well cool, I did just great. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it and hopefully we will catch up soon, yep.

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