Anadelia Fadeev

Franco Caporale:

Hello, welcome to new episode of the DemandGen Club Podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Anadelia Fadeev. Director of Demand Generation at Gravitational. Gravitational empowers engineers to access and distribute computing resources anywhere on the planet. At Gravitational Anadelia is in charge of scaling the leads and pipeline for the growing sales team. She's extremely process-oriented and has a strong experience building high-performing marketing teams at B2B tech startups. Before Gravitational, she was The Director of Demand Generation at LightSte, and before then, Senior Demand Generation Manager at InfluxData. I'm really happy to welcome today Anadelia Fadeev, Director of Demand Generation at Gravitational.

Anadelia is really great having you on the show today. Thank you for joining us.

Anadelia Fadeev:

Thank you for having me.

Franco Caporale:

Well, I want to understand immediately from you something about your story and your background. Tell us how did you get started with Demand Generation? What were some of your previous roles and what you're doing today?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah. I always knew that I wanted to be a marketer. That's what I studied in my undergrad. And while in college, I entered into the small business administration and the chamber of commerce. And those internships really gave me an opportunity to work closely with small businesses. And I knew that's something I liked. I started become more active in some of the meetups in the Bay area, like tech and motion and SF startup. And that's really where I fell in love with startups. And that's where I got my first job at a company called Visage Mobile. And I started doing a little bit of everything. Email marketing and social media. And then about two months into the job we got Marketo. I got my first experience with Barton Marketing Automation and I've been using them ever since. I've worked. Commissioned at Visage Mobile episode, Tout up, at Inkling. these companies were marketing to sales leadership.

Anadelia Fadeev:

And then about four years ago, I joined the company called InfluxData. That markets to developers and engineers. And I really became really passionate about marketing to that audience. And I have been doing that ever since. Currently The Director of Demand Generation at Gravitational. And we help enable engineers to really quickly access computer resources anywhere. Our product teleport is an open-source product that provides a unified access plan that is used by developers and security professionals to help them simplify secure access to their environments, applications, and data. Very technical audience, but I very much enjoy it.

Franco Caporale:

And you joined pre recently a couple of months ago. What were your first steps as soon as you join Gravitational? What are the few things that you immediately started focusing on?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah. I mean, the very first thing that I do when I joined any company really is to almost do an audit of what are some of the programs they've done in the past? How are they measuring success? What tools are available? What tools they're using? And what's really interesting is you won't believe the amount of companies that I've seen that I've worked at. And that I've also seen from peers who are still paying for subscriptions for tools that they're not using. That's the first thing that I do is looking at, what's been done in the past? How are we measuring results? And what tools are we using to help support those things? And then once you do that initial audit, you find areas of opportunity. You find areas where there might be some challenges that you can help address. And then you really start building a plan on how to fix those things and how to implement some of the new processes.

Franco Caporale:

And what's your team like Gravitational today? And what do you think is going to go in the next few months?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah. We are a series A startup. The marketing team is fairly lean, but really have all the key players. I mean, on the marketing side. I would say demand generation, product marketing content is what I call the Holy Trifecta. These are the people that you want initially on your team. At Gravitational, our SDR team reports into marketing. They're part of the team as well. And then that's where we are today. I can definitely see us growing as the company grows into having more focus on PR and communications. And some of those other areas where as you were getting started, you're probably getting support from agencies rather than having house.

Franco Caporale:

And from a tech stack point of view, what's your favorite tech stack? When you join your company? Or what you try to have as the ideal tech stack?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah. I'm definitely all about being lean. For us today at Gravitational, of a super series A getting started. Using Marketo Salesforce, Apollo for as there are emails and then zoom for webinars. Which I think is one of the best webinar platforms out there. Other tools that are used in the past as we grow on the complexity of maybe lead routing increases, then we'll want to look at something like main data to help with that. As more resources are being put into the marketing investment, we'll want to start looking at some of the attribution tools that can help us make sense of our investment and for our resources. Where they're making the most impact. But getting started, I think those will be good for a while.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. And I also want to know and understand more how you track your success? How you measure your KPIs? Obviously you're new in the company, you already had a feeling of what are the opportunities. But what are some of the methods that you looked at to understand what are the opportunities to work on and to focus on the next few months?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah. I mean, my top metric really is pipeline. Obviously here I've joined two months ago. But pipeline is my main metric and it has been for many, many years in a Demand Gen role. If pipeline is great, then we're doing what's working. We want to dig in to see what are the activities that are actually driving the most pipeline. So that we can continue to do those and focus our resources there. If we're not meeting our pipeline numbers, then it's looking at what are the other metrics that are leading indicators to pipeline. Whether that's as your meeting set, whether that's sales engaged, leads and accounts and all the way to the top of funnel. Those are some of the metrics that I look at to make sure that we are putting our efforts and resources into the right activities, but it all comes down to pipeline.

Franco Caporale:

And in terms of pipeline, I assume you mean source by marketing? Or is overall pipeline of the company?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Overall. Obviously we want to drill into to see exactly is which efforts are paying the most? When I look at pipeline, I like looking at as hot, warm and cold. Hot would be your hand raisers. People that want to request a demo or when a contact sales or signing up for trials. Those are great. They convert to opportunities at a higher rate, but it might be harder to influence something that takes time to build trust. With those prospects and provide enough value where they want to do that action. Warm would be all of your other marketing activities. Are people downloading eBooks? Are they attending our events and webinars?

Anadelia Fadeev:

And are we able to then convert them into opportunities? And cold is direct prospecting. Even though it's not necessarily a DemandGen function. At the end of the day, we're not successful if the company is not generating revenue. Even though I'm not the one that's cold calling and doing those prospecting. I also want to make sure I still want to track that metric and understand. What are the activities? What is the messaging that's actually influencing that? And support the SDR team in those efforts.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. We're going to touch later about your relationship with sales because I know it's a big component. First, I would like to understand a little more how you track this pipeline? And how do you see the contribution of marketing for the pipeline? Because I know many companies maybe look at the last task. For example, from an attribution perspective of saying, "Oh, this campaign was the last one that's actually before we go to an opportunity." Or is more first starts depending on the business model. How do you prove that your efforts and the budget that you are investing is actually driving by plan and then revenue.

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah. That's a tough one. I don't think anyone's solved that issue yet. I know there are several tools out there that can help you with some of this attribution. But I don't think that's something that will ever be 100% solved. You can't attribute something where someone saw you at an event, they didn't stop by your booth. You didn't get that lead, but they went home and Googled you. And now they're lead. It technically should be attributed to the event, but there's no way of putting those two activities together. That's number one. Knowing that not everything can be attributed to. And then I would say, it depends on the stage where you are. We're so early stage that we really don't need an expensive tool, or complex attribution model at this point. And I think it also depends on your sales cycle.

Anadelia Fadeev:

For us, I like to start with first touch as my attribution. And I do that because our sales cycles not very long. And we don't really block our SDR team from reaching out to someone who maybe downloaded an eBook or sign up for a webinar. And they might not be quite ready to talk to sells yet. In early stages of a company I think it's definitely fair to have SDR team engage early and have SDR team nurturers if needed. First touch it works for me. And as we grow and things get a little more complex, I've used tools like LeanData in the past. You look at pipeline attribution, especially influence pipeline.

Anadelia Fadeev:

It's good to understand what activities are driving the behavior that you want. Which includes generating pipeline. But I think it's also important not to get too hung up on that fact. Because then you get into a situation where you're talking about credit, who gets credit for what and that's never healthy conversation to have. It's important to understand what campaigns are working and what campaigns are driving the results that you want. But as long as it doesn't turn into a conversation of who gets credit or who's doing the most work. That's never healthy conversation.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. I agree 100% is always detrimental when you see the sales team arguing on who sourced the opportunity? If it was marketing or sales that's never leads to something good. And it kills all the collaboration that should happen between marketing and sales.

Anadelia Fadeev:

I agree.

Franco Caporale:

And you mentioned you like to start Lean, especially when you're working on with series a companies. What are some of the programs and campaigns as well that worked out really well for you to generate leads and pipeline without breaking the budget?

Anadelia Fadeev:

It's all about content. If I'm on a limited budget, I want to make sure that I'm working very closely with our content team. Focusing on SEO to drive those organic leads, to come back to your website. That's probably my ideal lead source would be that, you're bringing people to your site. They're learning about you, they're finding value and then working on ways of making sure that their conversion points on your site. And I know there's a whole debate of, should we gauge? Should we not gauge? I think each company, depending on their audience and their industry it might make sense or not. I personally don't feel strongly either way, but I think that having a place where someone can convert is important. And it can be as simple as, maybe there's a free trial of the product that someone can use, or maybe there's an online training coming up that they want to sign up for. So they can learn more how to use X, Y, and Z, or solve certain problems or challenges that they have. Definitely, content is key especially when working on a limited budget, driving people back to your site, making sure their conversion points. And then making sure that you're touching on your prospect's pain points and are articulating in a clear way, how you solve those pain points will help you attract the right customers.

Franco Caporale:

And you mentioned you use zoom webinars. I assume you're going to do webinars as part of your content repurposing or to push your content out in different forms.

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah. Absolutely. And 2020 is a little bit different. But in prior years, marketing tool such a technical audience, such as developers and engineers, we found that they're always seeking knowledge. Whether it's how to solve a problem that they're having at work, or how to get the results that they want on a certain project. Or even learning new skills. Because they're trying to change not jobs, but job functions. Maybe stay within the same company. But the more educational content out there, the better for this type of audience. And we found that to be successful. And that's in the form of webinars, online trainings, workshops, things where people can actually join have some live Q and A, or really hands on. They can start solving some of the problems that they're experiencing. Especially, I don't know if I mentioned, but we're open-source. And when you're working for a company that has an open-source offering, it makes getting started that much easier. Online workshops and training via zoom are great.

Franco Caporale:

I absolutely agree. I worked for an open source company in the past and webinars and workshops are by far our number one source of opportunities even from very large accounts.

Anadelia Fadeev:

Because you're providing something of value. It should not be a sales pitch. And I think the fact that your product is open-source helps with that. Because it means, "Hey, you don't have to buy from us. You can start using this tool and it's going to help you solve some of those issues." But let's say, you don't have an open-source offering. I think when doing these presentations, it's important to be able to show the audience how they can address a certain challenge in many ways. It doesn't have to be, "Oh, you can only solve it with our tool." Obviously, the fact that the company is spending a lot of engineering efforts into building this tool makes it easier for people to solve their problems by using the tool. Others can try things in-house, or it can try to piece together something that resembles the offering that you have. I think it's very important to show options. It should not be a sales pitch. It should be, "Here's different ways of how you can do it. It happens that your product is the fastest to getting started easiest to get results."

Franco Caporale:

And I remember when I was... Couchbase is open source. At some point we were doing four webinars a week. What is some of your suggestion to maintain a very high sequence of webinars? Meaning doing webinars so frequently and still adding value all the time? How do you maintain that?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Well, if there's demand that means that there's a need. As long as people are signing up and actually attending and finding value from them. Then that might be the right cadence. I think it really depends on the company. But in terms of, how do you make sure that you're actually providing value in all these? Is, hey, maybe on your registration page you have a field that as people are registered and they can submit their questions. That increases the chances of them attending because they want their question answered. And what better than those expert that's presenting those webinar. That's one way of continuing to drive attendance and engagement. Another way is especially for these companies. I've mentioned Couchbase and open-source. A lot of companies that have open-source products will have a community forum or a Slack channel where people in the community can engage. Take a look at what are the most frequently asked questions there. If people are continuing to ask these questions then this is something that's of interest. Doing a webinar or training session on those topics would be a great opportunity to address those. And then...

Franco Caporale:

But honestly... Sorry. Webinars takes a lot of time. And I see a lot of companies, maybe they do it once. And then it's so much work and so much effort to do it regularly. Do you guys have someone assigned to come up with new webinar ideas and do the whole logistics behind it? Or is something developed by the entire team?

Anadelia Fadeev:

I mean, right now it's all hands on deck. We're all working to help contribute with this. But as company grow, I've seen in different companies having a devil team. Developer advocates, whose job is to do exactly that. Well, work with the community of open-source users or the community of people that care about the product. And do these training sessions, speaking sessions. As companies grow there can be a dedicated resource for this. But for us early stage, it's all of us. Because at the end of the day, the more people know about who we are and know how to use our product. The more chances that percentage of them will turn into pipeline and then we're all happy and hitting our numbers.

Franco Caporale:

That sounds awesome. I know webinars can really grow very fast once you start doing it regularly. And that's probably the hardest thing to do. I want to switch away a little bit from webinars, but I want to stop talking about ABM. Because I know you mentioned ABM and it's something that in B2B high ticket SaaS. Is the primary way to monitor to this audience. How do you implement an ABM strategy from scratch in a new company that hasn't done it before?

Anadelia Fadeev:

That is a very good question. And this is something that before you go on and spend six figures on software that helps you with ABM, I think it's important to take a step back and really think about what is it that we're trying to accomplish? I found that few years ago, ABM was the word of the day. And saw a lot of companies that said that, "Okay, we have to do ABM." But because everyone else was doing it. I think it's important before you even dive in into that is understanding, what is it exactly that we're trying to accomplish? And also really, for us on the DemandGen side, work very closely with the sales team and product marketing. Because product marketing, part of their job function is to research who was the total addressable market? Who are the personas are by? Who our ideal customer profiles?

Anadelia Fadeev:

And oftentimes, maybe the answer is we don't need to do ABM. And not every company needs to move into an account-based model. If you've identified that there is some value in doing ABM, then the next step is to start thinking of, at what level of ABM do we want to do? Is it 100%? I want to bet that the majority of companies are going to say no to that. Unless you're in some very specific industry, you're selling to oil and gas and there's only so many oil and gas companies. Something that I like doing is before investing a lot of money and time into launching ABM programs is to test that and put that as the whole team. Let's do some outbound prospecting into these programs so we can validate any of the targeting. Are we targeting their companies? And the right personas of those companies? And do we have the right messaging that is resonating with them? That's a great way to validate some of those before you put a lot of money and time into building out an ABM program.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah. And what I see a lot of the issues are a particular at the beginning, choosing the right accounts. If you start doing ABM, the fundamental step is having the right list of target accounts. Not from a feed perspective, but also from potential intent of this accounts of purchasing your solution. How do you think that STEM can be accomplished in the ideal way? Obviously you talk about product marketing team to look at the time and who would use it, but how do you see the collaboration between marketing and sales in choosing the accounts that will be part of the program?

Anadelia Fadeev:

It has to be very close the line. And that's why I think it's especially important also to bring in product marketing into this conversation. Because I've seen companies where product marketing thinks that their ideal customer profile is this person and these companies, or this industry. And then sales has a whole different idea of it. It's important that the three of us are in the conversation and that we're in agreement. And that's why... I mean, I think validating with the SDR team is a great first test to see if this works. Once product marketing, sales and DemandGen are in sync on. We've identified exactly the industries or the company types. Then sales does a really good job at identifying good prospects based on some additional research that they're doing. LinkedIn sales navigator is key for some of these. Once we have some of the intelligence for product marketing, is working closely with the sales team to ensure that who they want to target is also who product marketing says is a good fit for a product. And is also someone who we on the DemandGen side know that we can target through some of these various channels.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome. And touching again on your relationship with sales. Which if you're doing ABM has to be very close and it's really important. What a cadence do you recommend for a small marketing team that want to work effectively with the sales team?

Anadelia Fadeev:

I want to be on every meeting that sales is in. I joined their weekly meetings. I think it's important to not only learn some things, maybe some of the feedback they're getting from prospects, or some of that feedback they can bring back to the marketing team. And help make some changes into the programs you're running. But also building those relationships. For me on the DemandGen side, my customer is sales. The job that I'm doing is to help sales hit their number. And the closer relationship that I have with my customer and the closer I understand what their needs are and what their pain points are today. And find ways that I can help alleviate that. Then that makes all of our jobs better. Definitely, be on all the weekly meetings with them. And I think the most important part is knowing your audience. We're marketers. We were always thinking about who our audiences size? And what they care about? That should also be the case when we're interacting with the peers on the sales side.

Franco Caporale:

And do you have a specific dashboard that you guys share to review the weekly progress? Or do you just share your regular marketing dashboard?

Anadelia Fadeev:

It depends. For our weekly meetings, sometimes we'll look at some numbers. Sometimes it's mostly having those conversation and getting some anecdotal feedback. Or sometimes it's sharing, "Hey, we have this big event coming up, you can invite your customers to join us." Depending on what's going on and where we are in the quarter. That's how I'll adjust what I'm sharing. If it's end of quarter, I'm not going to be talking about, "Hey, we have this marketing campaign coming up." Because I know that all focus is on closing the quarter. At the beginning of the quarter, I want to get the team pumped on what we have coming up. Because that it's got to mean potentially pipeline within that same quarter.

Franco Caporale:

That's awesome. I have one very last question. Since you joined the company recently is a series a company. What's your advice for someone who is in your same position joining early stage company that there is a lot of things to do? What would you recommend to do as a first step in someone in your shoes?

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah, I mean a couple of things. One is do an inventory of what's been done. What's worked and what hasn't worked. And chances are, maybe you're coming in fresh and there they've never really done any marketing campaigns in the past. And that's all right too. Then you have to be comfortable with experimenting, trying different channels, trying different vendors, recording all of your results and then getting feedback from sales and seeing what's actually working on driving pipeline. I also think, definitely start lean on the tool side. It's really, really easy to add on tools. But it's really hard to add it out. And it's also really hard to get out of contracts. I said, start lean and then you can always build up. That's easier to do. And finally, I would say definitely have a very close relationship with sales. I know that it's challenging now that we're all working remote, but schedule one-on-one. Have a casual conversation. Join the virtual happy hours or coffee chats that your office is putting together. All of those things really matter and really make a difference. I think having those opportunities to build trust and build relationships is really important.

Franco Caporale:

And we all know that sales they all always knows where the coolest events and coolest happy hours. I always wanted to join them.

Anadelia Fadeev:

Yeah, it's important. And I'm, "Hey, I'll..." I invite myself to QBR to sale kickoffs. Well, first of all, if you're in demand gen  you should be at sale kickoff. Even if you're not presenting. Which I think you should present, but stay for all of the sessions. You should be at all the QBR, should be... Invite yourself to the sales meetings. I invite myself to the sales happy hours. That's totally fair. I consider myself an official member of the sales team

Franco Caporale:

100%. I think that makes a huge difference. Once you start developing the relationship 100%.

Anadelia Fadeev:

Absolutely.

Franco Caporale:

It has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks again for spending the time with us today.

Anadelia Fadeev:

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

‍