Devang Sachdev

Franco Caporale:
Hello and welcome to new episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. I'm your host, Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Devang Sachdev, vice president of marketing at Snorkel. Before Snorkel, Devang was leading the product and partner marketing teams for emerging products at Twilio. Originally a developer, Devang has previously led engineering teams at NVIDIA focused on HPC and AI. Snorkel's mission is to empower everyone to solve their most impactful problems through data-centric AI. Snorkel empowers Fortune 500 enterprises such as Chubb, BNY Mellon and several government agencies to accelerate AI application development by 10 to a 100 times. Devang has extensive marketing experience, including strategic and tactical marketing planning, new product introduction and launches, competitive positioning, strategic alliances, customer engagement and demand generation. So, I'm really happy to welcome today, Devang Sachdev. Devang, I'm really glad to have you on the Demand Generation Club Podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Devang Sachdev:
Franco, it's a pleasure to join you.

Franco Caporale:
Perfect. Let's start right away with your background, your career. Tell us more about how did you end up becoming the VP of marketing at Snorkel, and what's your story?

Devang Sachdev:
Yeah, for sure. I'll start from my early days. I started as a developer at a company called NVIDIA. I worked on building chips and writing code that would be turned into transistors, but there was a little problem that I wasn't a very good engineer. So I would call myself a marketer by happenstance and I got lucky in the way that NVIDIA continued to offer me opportunities where I could take my technical skills, start owning some of the more technical marketing aspects for the company. And then, from there on, I joined a product group. I was leading product and engineering as well as marketing for a small division at NVIDIA. That grew quite a bit while I was there. And that gave me a pretty good understanding of how do different functions come together and what is really critical to bring new products to market.

So that led me to my next job, which was at Twilio, and that's where I learned how to really hone in the craft of being a product marketer, especially in the software SaaS world, the cloud product world. So I spent several years at Twilio, growing and building several teams that included product marketing, solution marketing, partnered marketing and took several products to market, incepting them from the ground up and building them into several hundred million dollars worth of business for Twilio. And that has led me to my current job, which is at Snorkel AI. So I lead all marketing functions at Snorkel, which includes communications, creative and design, as well as demand generation and growth, product marketing and solution marketing, sales enablement, developer relationships and others. And at Snorkel, we are focused on bringing a new way of being able to build AI applications, a way in which we're able to build AI applications rapidly with high quality or high performance.

And even when you put these applications into production, you're able to rapidly adapt these applications to any change in data or business objectives. Our founding team is from Stanford and we have spent a lot of time developing this new way of developing AI applications that anchors in what we call programmatic labeling, which is one of the biggest challenges in AI today. Whether you are a very large company, a very large enterprise, a government agency, or whether you are a startup looking to make a name in AI, generally, you are facing this challenge and that's what Snorkel is looking to solve for.

Franco Caporale:
Awesome. This is really strong background and it looks like your experience is really focused on product marketing and that's kind of where you built your career. What's your relationship with the demand generation area of marketing now that you are the VP of marketing at Snorkel?

Devang Sachdev:
At the end of the day, oxygen for the business is leads and opportunities and revenue. At the end of the day, whether you are a product marketer or a demand generation marketer or a communications marketer, your focus needs to be able to drive that top line business for the company. So in one way or another, I've participated in a demand generation activities and throughout my career, I've been responsible directly for demand generation through my team. And that's how I've landed up owning the function here at Snorkel.

Franco Caporale:
And so, tell us about your team today at Snorkel. What kind of role have you covered already or who are you looking to hire to do that function?

Devang Sachdev:
Yeah, we are still in our early stages of building our entire company. We have several jobs open all the way from engineering and product to sales and marketing. So if you're a machine learning engineer who is watching this episode, unlikely, but if you are, we have a job for you. Or if you are a demand marketer, we are looking for folks like yourself as well. But on the team currently, we have a creative team. They focus on our brand, they focus on our web presence. We have a content manager and community manager who focuses on technical as well as business content development across the buyer's journey. We've just hired someone to lead our growth marketing, which includes demand generation as well. And we are building that demand generation stack out. So if you're interested, love to connect. And then we have an event and a field man marketing manager and then a communications manager. We're looking for product marketers, solution marketers and technical marketers. So if you have any folks or yourself, if you're interested in any of these roles, I would love to connect with you.

Franco Caporale:
Awesome, perfect. And this leads me perfectly on the main topic of the episode, which I really like. When I was discussing with you, your focus on this is how do you hire an A plus, a rockstar demand generation marketer? You have a very good angle I think, and I'm dying for asking you more question. But tell us a lot of the audience here are today looking to hire someone, they have a job description open or they just got budget approval to bring in a rockstar demand gen. How do you approach this?

Devang Sachdev:
Yeah, and it's a very good question because, especially within tech organizations, there are lots of jobs open and we are finding it harder and harder to hire people who are well fit for the rules that we have open. So I've gone through a big hiring sprint in terms of all the different roles that I've described. And in particular, when I think about demand generation, the one thing, the north star of this role is the person who's in this role is responsible for the marketing funnel or funnels if you have multiple and making sure that it's perfectly tuned up or tuned in. So you need someone who can cover at least four areas of your marketing execution and operations. One area is around designing and executing campaigns, another core area is marketing analytics. A third one is what type of tech stack would you develop and how do you make sure that it's well used and maintained?

And the last one is a little bit more creative exercise, which is around growth hacking. Do you have that mindset and how do you apply that mindset? So if you're looking for an A plus demand marketer, you want to make sure that you're evaluating them on all of these four pillars. And through the conversation, I can describe how do you evaluate for each of these pillars? And then, if you're looking for a leader, someone who will run the demand generation team and hire more folks on their own team, then you want to also evaluate them for certain things about leadership, about team management. Or if you, yourself are looking to become a team leader, team manager, then you want to ask yourselves the same question and see how would you respond to these questions so that you're ready for a leadership role.

Franco Caporale:
So before we get to the detail of the question, which I found them very interesting, and this is a common problem on how do you figure out who is a rockstar, who is not, is the job description. How do you attract the right resumes? We talked about also the distinction between product marketers and demand marketers, that sometimes the job description doesn't make it clear who you're looking for, but how do you write a good job description that doesn't attract the wrong profile but also doesn't discourage the right people from applying?

Devang Sachdev:
For sure. And demand generation, I certainly would call, it's as much of an art as it's a science. But it's quite a different science, art, art compared to some of the other functions within marketing that are in your company. And it's true that a lot of people, especially who are building their marketing from the scratch, especially for founders who are trying to develop marketing team with one function at a time, rather than hiring the leader and let the leader develop the different functions needed. In that case, sometimes there is this crossover where you'll have different roles mixed in the job description and that certainly makes it harder to attract an A plus marketer. I think it was maybe Bruce Lee who said, "I don't fear the person who's practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I do fear the person who's practiced one kick 10,000 times." And you want to look for those people because demand generation is that kind of craft.

It requires you to be really good and on point and current with all the different techniques that are happening in that space. All the recent tools that have come in that space and have that personality to be able to pull things together and drive people. So one clear distinction between a demand generation marketer and a product marketer would be that a product marketer would focus on positioning, messaging and launches, would participate in campaigns but more as a contributor or a stakeholder rather than an owner of the campaign. They would focus on product strategy and market research. They would focus on things like sales enablement or pricing, rather than focusing on some of the core areas that we talked about for demand generation, marketing like campaign design and execution, marketing analytics, the tech stack and growth hacking.

Now you said, how do I approach developing a job description? So first of all, I would keep it tight to this domain. If you write a job description that is resonant with the skills needed for that domain, then an A plus growth marketer will feel that yes, this company knows what they're doing and they exactly know what the value I can bring to the table and what would be needed for me to be successful in my job. And that's a big first impression that you want to set up right. Because that's how you going to attract good sharp talent. Now, the second thing I like doing is once I write my job description that's relevant for this role, I like to make sure that I'm removing bias from my own way of describing this role. So whether we want it or not, all humans have a little bit of bias and a way of describing your needs or your specifications.

In this case, it happens to be the job description. And we at Snorkel, across multiple different functions, we use a tool called Textio. So you input your job description into it and through their AI based engine, it gives you suggestions on how to change the language of your job description to make it more gender neutral. So we use some words that are more male oriented, some words that are more female oriented. And it helps you develop a more gender neutral job description and also helps you make that job description more age neutral. Because at the end of the day, some of these biases are not necessarily intentional but are still, they make their way into the job description. And Textio can help you remove that bias and gives you a score. So you're able to also discover objectively how unbiased or how this resume will appeal to different candidates.

Franco Caporale:
Do you think that enterprise sales or sales in general, software sales is a skill that a good demonstration director or manager should have or should have been exposed to?

Devang Sachdev:
I would say the answer would be 100%. Because as I said, if your goal is to own the funnel, you have to know the funnel deeply. You have to understand what sit within this funnel and how do I move people from stage to stage. You don't have to execute or own every bit of the funnel, but you need to have command over the funnel. And especially for a demand marketer, that funnel begins with awareness and maybe goes down until an opportunity is created. Sometimes even further along until a sale has been created, but at least until an opportunity has been created. So you need to have a pretty good understanding what your sales process is. If your sales process is, it's all self-service people click online, buy a product, that'd be it. If your sales process is more involved, which is a lead comes in and you walk them through several realms of sales meetings and demos and POCs and contracts, then you certainly need to be aware of that situation around you.

Franco Caporale:
Yeah, I saw multiple times some very good SDR successfully transition to become the manager because they really understand what it takes, what do they need, what type of leads they want, what they don't want, and all of that. So they understand the bottom of the funnel, they just need to learn the other steps. But they were very successful at that.

Devang Sachdev:
That's correct. I've seen someone with that background also be very successful. I've seen folks who come from a little bit more analyst world also be successful. So where they're coming from a lot of data analysis, they have done marketing or sales operations before and now they're looking to expand their skills and add a little bit more creativity to their job. I've seen them successful as well.

Franco Caporale:
And let's go back now to the interview because that's probably the most crucial part. Now that we have a good job description, we're getting your resume. Actually first of all, when you look at the resume, is there a way to quickly disqualify someone, you know get a 100 resumes. Just by looking at them, what makes you take out certain resumes from the pile?

Devang Sachdev:
I look for a few things, and this might be relevant for everyone or not. But I give a lot of value to how much experience someone has had within my domain. So for us, for Snorkel, it's machine learning, AI data platforms, types of domains. It's one where a demand marketer understands how to connect with this product technically and also connect with the audience who uses this product. They don't have to have such a deep technical depth, but if they don't understand the product, it's going to be very hard for them to do their job. So that's, important, domain knowledge. Oftentimes, I'll hinge towards looking for people who are from companies who are very similar or contemporaries and this way at least one parameter is checked. I also look for, in what environment is this person operating in the next few months or in the next few years?

So at the end of the day, the job for the demand generation team is to help grow the company. And if your goal is to become twice as big as you are today in a year, then you want to have someone who has experienced that type of growth. But if you are looking to become 10 times the company that you're today, then you want to look for someone who's experienced a different ramp of growth. And people are smart, they learn different scenarios, but it's better if someone has already experienced it. And this way, you can trust that when the time comes they'll know what things to do. Now, the other thing that I am very conscious of is that I know that as I screen resumes, as I talk to people, I have my own bias. We get biased by where did they go to school? What was the last job that they held? How long were they in this job? How is the resume laid out?

What are they mentioning in the resume? We look for those keywords and once you've gone through that process a few times, I think it'll become more and more easy for you to suss what is the right kind of profile that you're looking for. The way I do it is initially, I'll have my funnel quite large, so I will not let the resume always dictate who I have a face to face screening conversation with. I will have quite a few screening conversations in the first week and that will help me triangulate between this is what I discovered from the conversation, this is what I saw on the resume. And I'll correlate that, okay, next time I see this resume, I should expect to have at least this type of conversation. So it creates a baseline for me. But really, where bias comes in is when you are talking to someone in a screening call or in a deep dive. Yes, human beings, we have the tendency to make a decision that, hey, we like this person, we kind of have a connection with them.

And then, throughout the rest of the interview, we seek for confirmation biases that, oh, yes, this is what this person said. That is what I was thinking about too. So the way I try to avoid that or I try to manage that is I will experience that interview as it is including my confirmation bias. But I'll ask other people to interview the same candidate if I'm very positive about a certain candidate, to see are they able to identify any blind spots that I may have in my conversation. So that's, one type of bias. Another type of bias is that you may instantly not connect with someone.

And in that case, you spend the rest of the interview kind of just finding points to say no. And that's okay, but you might miss out on a really good candidate just because you had an intuition and you made an internal decision without full information. So in that case, when I experienced that, I tried to take a step back in my own head and just try to listen to what exactly the candidate is saying rather than trying to identify what they're saying wrong or something that I disagree with. So I pay attention to it. And again, I use my interview panel as a way to really break down my own bias, whether it's positive or negative.

Franco Caporale:
And let's go into the main core of these areas that you mentioned earlier, the four key areas. We have the campaigns, analytics, tech stack and ops, and the growth hacking. I would like to hear some example for each area. So starting from the campaigns, what kind of question will tell you if that person could be good at handling that?

Devang Sachdev:
So for campaign design and execution, the kind of questions that I like to ask are, when you think about campaign design and execution, are there any existing frameworks that you use? Some people will talk about omnichannel campaigns, some people will talk about multi-touch campaigns. I just want to hear, do they have a philosophy or do they have an approach that they use? And then, I'll ask, is that approach something that would be applicable to our company and our needs? And this showcases two things. One, do they have enough experience or experienced multiple of these frameworks? But it also showcases, have they done the research about my company in order for them to have an opinion whether the approaches that they have fit or they need to be different or tuned up. So that's, one of the things. The other thing I'll ask is what are the campaigns that are currently running? Which ones are yielding the most results? Which ones are yielding the least amount of results and why is that the case? Why are some yielding high, why are some yielding low results?

I'll ask them questions around, what is the budget for the campaigns and then, how do they allocate a marketing mix? Which is around how do you spend money on social versus email versus content versus other things that might be involved in the campaign. And then, just a basic question is around what are the target customers segments that they focus these campaigns on? What I'm looking to hear is this information about target segments arise organically through the conversation. But if it doesn't, then that's a little bit of a flag because either they have not thought about campaigns with enough segmentation or they might have just not thought about mentioning it to you. So sometimes I would explicitly ask this question on segmentation.

Franco Caporale:
I think that that will kind of form already an opinion. What if someone is not great kind of walking through this? Is it like a deal breaker at this point or is there still hope even if someone is not really phenomenal in campaign design and execution?

Devang Sachdev:
Campaign is very central. So if there is a pillar that is an essential pillar, this one needs to be quite strong. But it also depends upon what level of experience are you looking to hire for. If you're looking to hire for a leader, you would expect to have a very deep experience in not just this pillar but all pillars. But if you're looking to hire someone with mid-level in their career, they may have deep experience on one of the pillars and a potential to grow deep into other pillars. But have at least some knowledge about the other pillars, the three other categories that we talked about. But if you're not looking to hire someone who's a little bit more junior, you may go through all the different pillars that you haven't discovered that they're good at one of the pillars rather than having a full scope. And that's okay too. It just depends upon, do you believe that this person can meet the needs that you have in front of you at that time?

Franco Caporale:
Absolutely. And so, let's go into the analytics. What question do you ask to evaluate that?

Devang Sachdev:
Yeah, so a question I like to ask, again, to discover how much of a command they have over that funnel, I would say what is your lead management process and then, how do you define different stages of your funnel? And if it's a sales and marketing funnel, meaning it's not a full self-service funnel, then, I'll ask how do you manage the transition between marketing and sales? And this one sometimes can lead to very interesting conversations because this is where a lot of times sales and marketing teams have a little bit of rub where leads are not either passed properly or the quality of leads is not deemed to be good. Or sometimes, it would be like the sales team is not following up on the leads that are being delivered. So what I'm looking to hear at this point is operationally, how much experience do they have working on a bit of these common but gnarly issues. So that, would be one.

Next thing I would ask would be, where are the opportunities to improve this funnel? Where can you spend more money to increase the size of this funnel or increase the quality of this funnel? Then another question I ask around attribution. So how do you determine what part of your pipeline is marketing generated? Which campaigns attribute to what percentage of that pipeline? And then I ask about cost. So how much does it cost per lead or per opportunity or per dollar earned in sales? And see how much of radar do they have around making sure that ROI is maximum when it comes to generating demand?

Franco Caporale:
Absolutely, a 100%. The ROI part usually is what it gets tricky and understanding the [inaudible 00:28:15] and all these other metrics for each campaign and how do they track contribution can really tell you if someone has experience or not. And then, we also want to talk about tech stack and ops. Do you normally look for someone to have certain preferences on tech stack or is just the fact that they have some philosophy and some background in one of the main platforms?

Devang Sachdev:
Yeah, I like for people to have at least a deep familiarity using one tool in a specific function. So as you know, the marketing stack is made of many tools, and I may use a tool for marketing automation, a different tool for SEO, a different tool for social management. And within each of these functions, there are many tools available. So what I'm speaking for is at least they have a command over one tool in each of these functions. It doesn't have to be the tool that me and my company use, but it has to be a tool that they have operated before. Because if they've not operated a tool, then that's a experience gap. And that's okay for someone who's in a junior role, they can come in and learn how to use a tool. But if you are a demand marketer, you've never used a Marketo or an Eloqua or a HubSpot, then it'll be hard for you to learn that from scratch, unless you took the time to do it.

So, I prefer at least that one tool in each of the functions. And second, I will describe the tech stack that we have and ask for an opinion and ask, if they say, "Well, I don't use Eloqua, I use Marketo." I would want to learn why. And it's important that they understand how to operate the plane and know all the buttons and knobs because these tools are like a display of a plane. There's so many rich features that if you don't know which buttons to push and which elements to take advantage of that tool, then, it'll be hard for you to do your job or do your job effectively. So that's one thing that I look for. But specifically to the tech stack, I will ask a few questions like, can you use Google AdWords or paid campaigns effectively? What experience do you have with analytics? Whether it's Google Analytics or Heap or some other web analytics tools. Would you be able to design a LinkedIn or a social ad customer presentation and a landing page?

And here I'm looking for diversity that how flexible are they in their skills for demand generation? Can they go all the way from something as simple as an ad or as focused as an ad, to something more expansive or something completely out of their domain, which is a customer deck. Most demand generation folks don't focus on that, but I just want to see how do they react to that? I like to focus on testing. I believe that's part of the stack testing and experimentation and optimization. And then, last one, I like to understand a little bit more about how do they really understand the people who are experiencing their ads or their content? What do you do to connect with that person? Is it focus groups, is it some kind of offer that they put out to learn more about the user's experience? So that's the kind of questions I would have for the tech stack.

Franco Caporale:
And finally, growth hacking, which is very interesting part. How do you test for that?

Devang Sachdev:
Yeah, growth is such a broad term. There are growth marketers or growth managers, so oftentimes in product and they do product related growth or product based growth. There are growth hackers within sales and they have their own techniques. But within marketing as well, given that marketing is not about growth. Growth hacking, which is really discovering ways that are not necessarily natural or organic and ones that can yield a pretty large advantage or robust. So the kind of questions I like to ask is, do they have a growth mindset? And I would ask, what does growth hacking even mean to you? To me, it means what I just described as to being able to run experiments that are moonshot rather than something that's been tried before.

Another one would be, can you give me an example of when you've broken a rule of demand generation and still achieved a very positive result? Have you thought about your campaigns from a customer experience standpoint? And what is one thing that you thought was not obvious? But when you had a chance to talk to a customer, it became very obvious. If you had to start a social presence from scratch having zero followers, what would you do to gain that instance start and expand on that? So those are some of the questions that I would ask for growth hacking. It's quite broad, but at the same time, it's more about the mindset rather than just very specific answers.

Franco Caporale:
This is really great information. I think, like I said, a lot of EPO marketing, how the demand gen are looking to hire that really great person? Love to hear this kind of framework because it gives you some way to understand who can really make it and not. Since we're almost out of time, I would like to close this episode hearing from you, what is one either problem or opportunity that you are really focused on today that keeps you up at night, that you're trying to solve or that you're really trying to capitalize on?

Devang Sachdev:
For us, it is about connecting with a technical user and doing our part in terms of being able to inspire them and educate them. And that's all that there is to marketing for me. How do you make sure that you inspire someone so that they can make a decision within three seconds, I want to connect and learn more. And then, when they take that vision, how do you educate them as to what is the value? What is the credibility behind our brand to be able to meet their needs and change and bring value to the work that they're doing? So for me, those two are the big areas. And for me, it has to be based in a very deeply technical sense. And as much as I would like, the intersection of marketing and deep data science, technology is still very small. And hopefully, over time as data science becomes a bigger and bigger art and there are more people like me who are not very good engineers, maybe they can become future marketers and that base, I'll be able to sleep better.

Franco Caporale:
Devang, this was really great. Thank you for all the information you shared with us today. Again, I'm sure that all our members, all our audience is going to find a lot of value and it's going to help them finding the next rockstar demand gen. Thank you again for joining our Demand Generation Club Podcast. I really enjoyed the conversation today.

Devang Sachdev:
Okay. Thanks, Franco and family. And thanks to everyone for listening to us.

Franco Caporale:
Thanks, again.

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