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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Aditya Vempaty, VP of Marketing at Coram AI.

Summary: Aditya has built marketing functions and named categories from nothing at Amplitude and Moengage, but today he takes apart the ‘make your customer the hero’ cliche with a test you can run on any case study in about 4 seconds, then explains why he pays customers $100 for 30 minutes before he will even look at the product he was hired to market. There’s a story about harvesting a competitor’s free tier badge off customer websites, a telco onboarded in 6 weeks, and a VP of marketing spending 15 minutes making a poster so his team would actually use AI.

In this Episode…

• Why Expansion Revenue Beats New Logos When Channels Are Saturated
• Why Customer Empathy Means Knowing What Gets Your Buyer Promoted
• How to Tell If Your Case Study Makes the Customer the Hero
• Why Single Channel Attribution Hides the Journey That Closed the Deal
• How to Find Real Customer Problems by Paying for 30 Minute Interviews
• The 3 Levels That Connect Marketing Strategy to Tactical Execution
• Why Implementation Speed Is the Real Answer to a Migration Objection
• The ABM Play You Can Build From Your Closed Won List Today
• How Marketing Leaders Get a Team to Actually Adopt an AI Tool

About Aditya Vempaty

Aditya Vempaty is the VP of Marketing at Coram AI, an AI physical security platform running across more than 1,500 locations. Before that he spent 3 years as VP of Marketing at MoEngage, where the company grew from $58M to $100M in ARR. Earlier in his career he built the marketing function and named the category at Synthego, Amplitude and Nutanix, work that spans 2 IPOs and several unicorns.

He also invests as an angel, mentors at First Round Capital, and is known for 2 rules he repeats often: market the problem first, and distribution is the strategy.

Why Expansion Revenue Beats New Logos When Channels Are Saturated

Every marketing team has a number on the board for new logos. Far fewer have one for what happens to a customer 6 months after the contract gets signed. That made sense when acquisition was cheap and a paid dollar reliably bought you a lead. Channels are crowded now, budgets are flat, and the math has moved.

Aditya has spent his career at the loud end of marketing. He helped name the product analytics category at Amplitude. He helped define the agentic customer engagement platform at MoEngage. Those are top-of-funnel plays, the kind where you plant a flag and get the industry to repeat your words back to you. So it’s a fair question why the category creation guy now spends his time talking about heroes, lifecycle and retention.

“It’s way cheaper and way more valuable and way easier on marketing teams to show their impact by retaining and driving engagement and expansion after the sale.”

For a marketer defending a budget, the second half of that sentence matters more than the first. Cheaper is the obvious part. Easier to show impact is the part that should change how you plan. Every acquisition attribution fight you’ve ever lost, where the CFO wants to know which of your 6 channels made the lead buy, goes away when the account is already in the building and you can see exactly what they did and didn’t adopt.

The shape of the products matters too. Amplitude and MoEngage are both multi-product suites. Customers land on one thing, get value, and then expand into the rest. So the second, third and fourth sale are already sitting inside your customer base, and nobody has to be convinced you exist. Aditya points to HubSpot’s version of this, where the funnel is a loop rather than a line, and treats the loop as the actual revenue machine instead of a diagram in a deck.

Here is the uncomfortable version. Most B2B marketing orgs are staffed and measured around the most expensive, least provable part of the job. If expansion is where the margin actually is, the demand gen team should carry a retention or adoption number, and most demand gen teams would fight you hard on that.

Key takeaway: Pull the last 4 quarters of revenue and split it into new logo, expansion and renewal. If expansion is the bigger line and nobody in marketing carries a number against it, claim it before the next planning cycle starts. Pick the one product line your existing customers adopt second and build the campaign for that.

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Why Customer Empathy Means Knowing What Gets Your Buyer Promoted

Customer empathy is the most repeated phrase in B2B marketing and the least examined one. It shows up in every kickoff deck, every messaging workshop, every values page. Ask what it produced and you usually get a persona document nobody has opened since it was made.

Aditya spent years on the vendor side of exactly this, at 2 companies that sit in the middle of the funnel where marketing ops and lifecycle people live. He saw how the sausage gets made, and he came out of it with a low opinion of the word.

“Everyone says that shit. Like, let’s be real. That’s just a tagline. That’s full of crap.”

What replaced it is much more specific and much more useful. Sitting inside those companies taught him that the thing worth understanding about a buyer is their job justification. How does this person prove they were worth their salary this year? How do they get promoted? Your product either helps them say that sentence out loud or it does not.

At Amplitude the answer was retention. Product managers in B2C couldn’t track what they were doing and couldn’t justify their own existence and investment. The industry was obsessed with mobile acquisition at the time, so the question that actually kept a PM up at night was how to keep the users they had already paid for and how to show the product was giving those users value. Amplitude built the whole marketing motion around that metric because that metric was the PM’s career.

At MoEngage the pain had moved. Retention was table stakes by then and everyone was already on mobile and web. The problem had become execution across channels, and the version Aditya describes is painfully familiar to anyone who has run campaigns at a big company. You have every channel available to you and no ability to say what you actually did. He describes marketers who legitimately can’t come back and report which campaign hit, where it hit, and which users it reached across the full cycle. Teams operated as channel owners rather than as one coordinated effort.

Then he gives the number that makes it real. One customer took 6 weeks to launch a campaign, because getting the segments required 20 people on a SQL query team pulling across 5 databases. 6 weeks. For a campaign. That’s the daily texture of the job for the person you’re selling to, and no amount of empathy language on a website touches it.

Here is the payoff. When your product lets someone explain their value in a simple way that other people understand, they stop being a customer and start being an advocate. As Aditya says, they will rave about you because you made their life easier and their job explainable.

Most vendor positioning is aimed one level too high. It addresses the company’s pain, churn and efficiency and cost, while the person signing the order form has a smaller and more urgent problem, which is that they can’t prove what they did last quarter. That mismatch is why so much martech messaging reads as true and lands as nothing.

Key takeaway: Write down the exact sentence your champion would say in their performance review if your product worked. Then audit every asset you shipped last quarter against whether it helps them say it. If your case studies only report company outcomes and none of them name what the individual got credit for, you just found the gap.

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How Selling to B2C Marketers Doubles as a Marketing Lab

There’s a strange loop that happens when you market a marketing product. You’re the persona. You’re also selling to the persona. Most people in that seat call it dogfooding and move on.

Aditya got something better out of it, because at MoEngage his buyers were consumer marketers. He was running B2B campaigns at people who spend their days running B2C campaigns against millions of users, with real budgets and real measurement, testing things B2B teams would never get signed off.

“I’m not even dog fooding. I’m talking to the audience and learning from the B2C marketer that’s allowing me to go market to them because the B2B marketing is so dull and so laissez-faire.”

He describes it as having a purview into a lab that everyone knows exists and almost nobody gets to walk through. Customer calls turned into free tactical education. Someone would be on a call talking through a case study, walking him through a campaign they had shipped, and he would be sitting there working out how to run the same mechanic back at them in a way that spoke to the problem they had just described.

His word for the experience is school, and the framing is generous rather than extractive. He got to celebrate how good these teams were, publicly, and take the technique home at the same time. Both of those things happened in the same conversation, which is roughly the whole thesis of this episode compressed into a working habit.

B2B creativity has a ceiling and the ceiling is set by the fact that B2B marketers mostly read other B2B marketers. The consumer side runs more experiments in a quarter than most B2B teams run in a year, and none of it is patented.

Key takeaway: Pick 3 consumer apps whose lifecycle messaging you actually enjoy receiving and sign up for all of them this week. Log every trigger that fires, how fast it fired, and what the message was trying to get you to do. Then rebuild one of your own nurture sequences around the mechanic you liked most.

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Speaking of B2B vs B2C… are you still operating your B2B lead routing and qualification like it’s 2013 and you haven’t updated your chatbot? We recently started collaborating with the Docket team and what they are building with their Inbound Demand Agent is super cool. Check it out.

How to Tell If Your Case Study Makes the Customer the Hero

Make the customer the hero has been floating around since Donald Miller’s StoryBrand and Ann Handley’s work back in 2014. It’s now the kind of idea everyone agrees with in a meeting and almost nobody ships. Aditya says the people who actually execute it are easy to spot, and the tell is smaller than you would expect.

Look at who goes first in the case study.

“Most case studies will open with block company allowed X to do Y, and that block company is the vendor. That is a very strong tell of the culture.”

Flip the sentence and the whole posture flips with it. The customer did the thing, the thing produced a result for their business, and your name never appears in the opening line because your branding is already all over the page. It costs nothing. It changes everything about how the piece reads. On Aditya’s teams it’s a standing rule: the customer’s logo goes first, the customer is in the case study first, we’re not, and we never put ourselves above them.

The part where he departs from the original framework is what happens after you accept the role of guide. StoryBrand hands you the Yoda seat and mostly leaves you there.

“Yes, I am their guide. Yes, I am Yoda. But how did Yoda allow Luke to win? He knew when to step back. He knew when to push and back out of the spotlight.”

Knowing when to disappear is the skill, and it got harder for a boring structural reason. StoryBrand was built on film, where there’s one arc and one audience watching it in one room. Aditya’s point is that a movie lets you spread the technique like peanut butter on bread, because there weren’t that many channels to worry about. Now the same story has to work on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on TikTok, in email and on your own website, and people are drowning in information on all of them. Who gets to be the hero, and how you stage it, changes per channel and per target account.

At Amplitude the channel was content and SEO, with no paid ads at all, and the artifact was a physical book called the retention playbook. Calm and QuizUp got run through the framework in it. The Calm story is the one worth stealing. Their team found that people who set a daily reminder timer during onboarding were retained at 2X the rate in the first 3 days, while the people who skipped it fell off. They moved the timer into the onboarding flow and their retention numbers, by Aditya’s account, jumped roughly 80% in 2 weeks.

Notice how he tells it. They had the problem. They discovered it. They analyzed the issue. Amplitude appears in the book as the tool they used while going through the framework, and the sentence “Amplitude allowed them to discover it” never gets written. Same facts, same product, same result, and the credit lands somewhere completely different.

Making Heroes Out of People Who Have Never Paid You

This is where Aditya pushes past the standard version. The heroes don’t have to be customers. At MoEngage the play ran through the physical channel and small events, and the people put on stage were chosen because they were known and respected in the space rather than because they were on the customer list. Scott Brinker. Natalie from Grammarly. Angela from Meta. None of them were paying MoEngage anything.

The logic underneath it’s a trust argument, and it’s sharper than it first sounds. If somebody with a reputation and no commercial relationship is willing to stand next to your brand in public, they’re telling the room something about you that your own marketing can’t say. As Aditya puts it, that tells you a lot about us and who we are.

The byline order is a diagnostic you can run on anyone, including your competitors. Open 5 of their customer stories and count how many words go by before the vendor name shows up. That number will tell you more about how they behave after the contract is signed than any analyst grid will.

Key takeaway: Open your 3 most recent case studies and read only the first sentence of each one. If your company is the subject of that sentence, rewrite it so the customer is the one doing the verb and the discovery. Then fix the headline and the logo order, because that’s the part a reader registers before they read a single word of the body.

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Why Single Channel Attribution Hides the Journey That Closed the Deal

Walk into most companies where marketing is underperforming and you’ll find a stack that works perfectly and answers the wrong question. Every tool in it is built to report what one channel produced. Nothing in it is built to describe what a person actually did on the way to buying.

Aditya hedges first, then says it anyway.

“Most of the martech setup is aimed at not actually orchestrating campaigns. It is very single channel focused.”

The pressure comes from above and it comes from a reasonable place. CEOs are product driven because product is what they sell, and sales driven because sales keeps the lights on. What gets lost in between is that marketing is a journey, from a person becoming a lead, to that person engaging with a rep, to a purchase months later. So the question that gets asked in the board meeting is whether a dollar into this channel returns Y out of it. People don’t buy that way and they never have.

By his count, 9 out of 10 times the tooling can’t track all the ways a person is engaging with you. Which means 9 out of 10 times, after running a campaign across 5 or 6 channels, marketing can’t say which parts of it moved anybody toward pipeline. Here is the journey he actually has to reconstruct by hand when he sits down with the data:

1. The source event, which is the only touch the CRM will give credit to
2. A book they downloaded
3. A second event they showed up to
4. A paid ad they clicked
5. A meeting they took
6. The sales rep they met at it
7. The customer engagement summit they were invited to and attended
8. 4 months later, the moment they became pipeline

And the response he gets, every time, is that the source says the event did it, so let’s do more events. His answer is that you’re ignoring everything else that happened. Anyone who has sat in that meeting knows the specific frustration of watching 7 real touches get erased so one field in Salesforce can look decisive.

Vendors don’t teach the harder version because they leave it to the consultants, and the consultants often set up the basics and stop. Nobody is left holding the job of saying yes, the source was the event, and these other 6 campaigns influenced this lead, so now let’s map the journey. That gap is where the money leaks.

“There’s no golden bullet, but there is a journey, and you can see the journey by where you got the lead.”

Vendors have a structural reason to stay quiet about this. A platform that tells you there’s no single source of truth for why a deal closed has just argued itself out of the clean ROI slide it needs to close its own deals. So the honest version gets outsourced, and the work that would actually change how a company plans never gets bought by anyone.

Key takeaway: Take your 5 most recent closed won deals and list every marketing interaction each account had, in order, from first touch to signature. Build it by hand in a spreadsheet if your stack can’t produce it, because the gap between what you can reconstruct manually and what your tools report is the real instrumentation project. Bring that spreadsheet to the next pipeline review instead of a source report.

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How to Find Real Customer Problems by Paying for 30 Minute Interviews

The fastest way to get a persona document in 2026 is to describe your audience to a model and ask it for their pain points. It takes 30 seconds, it reads convincingly, and it’s now the default first step at a lot of companies. Aditya’s advice on that output is to generate it and then throw it in the trash. He goes one further and suggests writing the skill that tells you to ignore all of it, so at least you have something to point at when somebody asks whether you checked with Claude.

What he does instead is old, slow and almost nobody’s favourite. In his first month at a company, before he looks at the product at all, he talks to 15 to 20 customers. He has done it at Quorum, MoEngage, Amplitude, Synthego and Unit21. His line to the internal team is that he doesn’t want to hear the product stuff yet, he wants to go talk to the customers and then come back to the product.

He also pays them.

“I pay them for half an hour of their time, and I literally will send them money. I have no qualms about it.”

100 bucks for 30 minutes, to customers and to prospects who picked somebody else. He treats the payment as a mechanism rather than a courtesy, and the reasoning is about speed.

“If you expect people to do favors for you, for not paying them for their time, you’re not gonna be moving as fast. You’re gonna be at their behest. Incentivize them. That’s your alpha.”

Half the value is the offer itself. Plenty of people wave the money off, and the gesture still shifts the meeting from a favour into an appointment somebody has agreed to keep.

The calls give up more than pain points. Aditya says the most useful material in them is what people volunteer about how they hate being treated by vendors, and the same complaints surface over and over:

• Don’t put other vendors down
• Don’t say you’re the best solution
• Don’t act like you know my problems
• Don’t pontificate to me

That’s a positioning brief written by the buyer, and no amount of listening to recorded sales calls will produce it. Call recordings still have a job, and Aditya keeps listening to them, but a recording is a fixed object. You can’t steer it. You can’t follow the flicker of irritation in somebody’s voice and ask the second question that gets you the real story. He keeps the first 3 questions identical across every conversation so the answers stack up against each other, and lets everything after that go wherever the person takes it.

The money is doing something more interesting than buying time. It removes the obligation, and obligation is what caps how hard you can push in a conversation. Teams that will sign off $40,000 on an intent data subscription without blinking will route a $2,000 research incentive through 3 approvals, and that budget line is a big part of why so much B2B positioning is written from guesswork.

Key takeaway: Block the next 4 weeks for 15 customer conversations and offer every person $100 for 30 minutes of their time. Keep the first 3 questions identical across all of them so the answers are comparable, then let the rest of each call chase whatever the person gets animated about. Ask every one of them what they hate about how vendors treat them and write the answers down word for word.

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How to Turn 20 Customer Calls Into a Survey That Validates Them

A set of 20 conversations is still 20 anecdotes, and any analyst worth their salary will say so in the first review. Meanwhile the product team has a research report, the data team has a pile of test results, and half of it disagrees with what you just heard on the phone. Aditya’s sequencing solves this by refusing to treat the 2 kinds of evidence as competitors.

“The conversation allows me to know what to ask, and then the validation happens with the data, and then it unearths other things I may have not been thinking about in the conversations to put in as questions.”

The order runs like this:

1. Run the 15 to 20 customer interviews, and listen to call recordings alongside them
2. Use what came out of those calls to decide which questions are worth asking at scale, capped at 15 to 20 questions
3. Field the survey across prospects and customers until 500 or 600 people have filled it out

Now the qualitative and the quantitative are pointing at the same thing, because one built the other. And he gets a second win out of the same work, which he calls a twofer. The survey results become a research asset you can give the audience, since you actually studied them. Sales gets educated on the real problems immediately. The response list grows the database. One project, 3 outcomes, and it also happens to be a fast way to put a win on the scoreboard in a job where you’ve been there a month.

Most B2B research reports are dull because they were designed as a lead magnet first and a questionnaire second. Running it this way inverts that, and the reason the asset ends up with something in it is that every question started as a sentence somebody said while they were annoyed.

Key takeaway: Write your next survey only after the interviews are done, and build every question from something a real person said on a call. Cap it at 20 questions and push for 500 responses so the numbers survive being quoted by a rep. Hand the results to sales before you publish them anywhere.

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The 3 Levels That Connect Marketing Strategy to Tactical Execution

Tactics eating strategy is the most common failure mode in marketing and it never announces itself. Nobody decides to let the content calendar become the plan. It happens because the strategy was a document and the calendar was a deadline, and deadlines win.

Aditya runs it as 3 levels, each one gating the next.

“Anything we generate has to address customer problems, and it has to talk about their problems and not us first, because then we will get distribution and get trust and then get demos and get pipeline and closed deals.”

1. Set the ground rules. Customer problems come first, and it’s non negotiable. Every asset faces 2 questions before it gets made. Is this of value to the customer, or does it only put us in the limelight? And does it have distribution, whether that’s a partner, a syndication network, an influencer, a customer or a prospect?
2. Make sure it helps sales. Who does this serve, and which of the audiences you’re going after would care? This is where account based marketing does real work rather than sitting in a tool. You pick the target accounts, you pick the influencer who represents that audience, and you map the 2 together so distribution is baked in and the stack is already pointed at them. Sales knows why you’re doing it before you do it.
3. Build the mechanism that tracks what happened. You should be able to see the campaign in Salesforce, see which leads it reached, and see reps following up on them.

The first 2 levels are the ones that get written down. The third is the one that decides whether any of it survives contact with a quarter, and Aditya is blunt about what it actually requires. No martech in the world will do it for you if you’re not sitting with the sales rep, or the sales VP, or the CRO, going through the leads week in and week out. He means the actual list, with names on it, and somebody accountable for whether anyone called them.

“The martech tools will give you the plumbing. You can architect that. I’ve done that. But if you are not sitting there and doing the work of reviewing it hand-in-hand, it will all fall apart.”

Every framework for keeping strategy above tactics eventually arrives at a recurring meeting that nobody enjoys running. The plumbing is the easy half and it’s the half that gets budget. Tactics take over at most companies because the person who owns the strategy quietly stopped showing up to the pipeline review around week 6.

Key takeaway: Add 2 gates to your content brief template before anything gets built, one asking whether it addresses a customer problem without leading with you, and one naming who will distribute it. Then put a recurring 30 minutes on the calendar with your sales VP to walk the lead list from your last campaign name by name. Skip that meeting twice and the whole system reverts to a content calendar.

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How to Hand a Lead to Sales Without Losing the Trust You Built

There’s a specific moment every marketing ops person has felt from the receiving end. You have been jamming on a problem with a peer, comparing notes, enjoying it. Then the tone changes and there’s an account rep on the other side of the thread. You already know how this goes. There will be 5 follow ups, they don’t really understand your world, and they have a quota this month.

Aditya puts the handoff exactly where it belongs, which is at the point where tactics start eating the strategy. Somebody has to execute that transition, and it’s his team’s job to make sure the execution doesn’t undo the work.

“It feels sleazy when you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m introducing you to this person. Hey, are you ready to take a meeting?’ No one wants that.”

The first check is on the signals. Look at what the person has actually been engaging with. If the assets are all buy now material, the intent reading is worth very little. If they have been in high value conversations, the relationship is real enough to introduce somebody into.

The second check is on what the rep knows before they open their mouth. From a martech perspective this is small and specific: the rep should be able to see what the lead engaged with and what their history is. At MoEngage that meant knowing the person had the book, an actual physical object that got shipped to them and is presumably sitting on their desk. The rep opens with that context. They know you got the book.

Then the next step gets designed as another point of interaction rather than a closing attempt, an invitation to a webinar or an offer to go deeper on something. Aditya’s take on the psychology is that everyone involved already understands where this eventually goes. When somebody says sure, introduce me to your sales guy, a purchase decision is unspoken but present. The introduction lands well because they trusted him enough to take the next step, and that trust is the asset the handoff either spends carefully or burns.

The technical requirement here is almost embarrassingly small, and almost nobody meets it. A rep needs to know which asset the person already has before they dial. Most CRMs can show that. Most reps never look, which turns every carefully built trust asset into a cold call with slightly better targeting.

Key takeaway: Write the first sales touch for your next campaign yourself, and open it by naming the asset the person already has. Give the rep one next step that costs the prospect nothing, like a seat at a webinar or a question you actually want their answer to. Push the meeting request to the second or third contact so the introduction never opens on a close.

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Why Implementation Speed Is the Real Answer to a Migration Objection

Downloading a book doesn’t mean you’re willing to rip out a customer engagement platform. Anyone selling into marketing ops knows the objection and mostly answers it with more features, which is roughly the least persuasive thing available.

Aditya says migration is the single biggest headache his audience carries, and his description of the buyer’s internal math is the most honest thing in this episode.

“Platforms are so similar. They’re 95% similar in product features. So for that 5%, do I wanna spend half a year moving things over, resources, time, money, but also my political capital on this?”

Political capital is the term that should stop you. Everything else on that list belongs to the company. The political capital belongs to the person, and they’re the one who has to walk into a room and tell 6 other stakeholders that the thing they championed is worth 6 months of pain. If it goes badly, the budget recovers and their reputation does not.

So the argument that works is time to value, told through customers bigger than the one you’re talking to. At MoEngage, Aditya can point to the largest telco in the US, onboarded and running in 6 weeks. He can point to SoundCloud, migrated off a competitor in 12 weeks with 100 million active users and more than 200 campaigns live. Say those numbers in a competitive deal and the other side of the table has nothing to say back.

That record proves something bigger than product quality. It shows the company treats getting you live as the thing it’s best at, which lands with a buyer as evidence that somebody will still be there after the contract closes. The failure case is the one everybody has lived through, where a vendor sells hard and then goes quiet while a year, or a year and a half, goes by and nothing happens.

“How quick you can implement and get them onboarded, that is actually where you make the customer the hero.”

Why the Free Plan Won Paid Customers Instead of Free Users

The Amplitude version of this is a good story about how buyers actually behave. Amplitude was the challenger to Mixpanel and had a technical advantage in how it structured and queried its databases, which meant more capability at the time. So the offer to Mixpanel users was aggressive: we will pipe your data over, we can have you onboarded in a week, and what you’re paying 2K a month for is free here.

The expectation was a wave of free users. What came back instead was people saying they had 2K a month allocated and weren’t about to lose that budget, so they would take the paid plan. Amplitude ended up with more paying customers on its lowest tier because of a free offer.

Vendors spend their differentiation budget on the 5% of features almost nobody switches for. Parity is the actual market condition now, which makes time to value the product. The services function most software companies still run as a cost centre is the last thing on the table that can win a competitive deal outright.

Key takeaway: Calculate your median time from contract signature to first value in production and put that number on your website. If it embarrasses you, fix it before you build another feature comparison page, because your buyer is weighing 6 months of their own credibility against a 5% feature edge. Name your fastest migration in every competitive deal, by customer and by week count.

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The ABM Play You Can Build From Your Closed Won List Today

Asked for the literal thing a lifecycle or ops person could change tomorrow, a subject line or a trigger, Aditya declined the small version. He says he could give you one email tweak and it wouldn’t go as far as the alternative, so the alternative is what he walks through.

It starts with the list you already own and never look at properly.

“It’s easier to sell someone who’s in the same business than it is to go find people who you’ve never sold to.”

1. Pull up every account you’ve won and get the segmentation out of it
2. Build a lookalike audience from that list in Salesforce or HubSpot and turn it into a campaign
3. Go find the case studies you already have from those same wins
4. Work out which channels the target accounts are actually on, and more importantly which ones they’re not being hit on
5. Architect the connected campaign to reach them in the quiet channel, which might be physical mail or a phone call
6. Sit with sales and confirm the target accounts match the ones they’re already chasing
7. Instrument one metric, the percentage of those accounts that moved from unengaged to engaged

Step 4 is where the thinking is. Almost every ABM program is designed by asking where the buyers are, which is how every vendor in your category ends up in the same LinkedIn feed on the same Tuesday, competing for the same few seconds of attention. Aditya inverts the question and asks where these people aren’t being hit up, then goes there. Physical mail sounds dated until you compare how much email a marketing ops manager gets in a day against how much post they get in a week.

The reason he calls this tactical and strategic at once is that the segmentation work doubles as a positioning exercise. When you sort your wins and see the pattern, you’ve also learned which problem you’re genuinely good at solving, and that shapes the campaign and the case studies and the sales conversation together.

“That is a very tactical thing, but it’s also a strategical thing you can implement literally today.”

The channel avoidance logic deserves more attention than it gets. Crowding is now the dominant cost in paid and in social, and the cheapest arbitrage available to most B2B teams is a channel their competitors have written off as old fashioned. That’s exactly why it still converts.

Key takeaway: Export your closed won accounts from the last 18 months and sort them by industry and company size before you open a campaign tool. Build the lookalike list off that segmentation, then pick the one channel your competitors are ignoring on those accounts and run there first. Track a single number, the percentage of target accounts that moved from unengaged to engaged.

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How Amplitude and MoEngage Turned Product Usage Data Into Campaigns

A customer buying a simple product either needs it or does not. A customer buying a customer engagement platform walks a long ladder of pain first, and every rung of it should be visible somewhere in your data. Asked what that actually looked like inside 2 martech vendors, Aditya gets specific.

Amplitude ran on Amplitude. The team could see how people used the product, so they cross referenced their target account list against who already had a free account, looked at what those accounts had and hadn’t done, and ran campaigns against the difference. Then they went and found the accounts that were on the competitor.

“Mixpanel had this thing where everyone that was a free Mixpanel user, they put a badge on their website saying they used Mixpanel. And we went and got all that, and we looked at how many of them are target accounts we wanna get into.”

A competitor’s free tier branding requirement became a prospect list. It’s a lovely piece of scrappiness and it’s also a warning about what your own logo requirements broadcast.

The execution end of it was miserable. This was the Marketo era, and Aditya describes building dynamic text personalization against segments of 2 or 3 people, workflow after workflow, and the word he keeps coming back to is painful. Marketing had no database access at the time either. The prevailing attitude was that marketing doesn’t need databases, just use the Marketo one, so that’s what you got and that’s what you built inside.

MoEngage is where the constraint lifted. The team had Tableau and Snowflake, and could run an ETL of what each customer had and hadn’t done with the product, then use it to drive expansion into more product lines. The MoEngage NEXT conference invitations were built off it. We’re announcing these things, you already use those things, we think you would like this. Aditya says that’s where a lot of the expansion revenue came from.

He ties it back to the 10 year shift underneath the whole conversation. New business is harder to win, expansion is where the focus has gone, and the channels are saturated enough that no amount of stack sophistication rescues you from the basic problem.

“People will buy from people they trust, and getting that trust is harder when the channels don’t work as well as they used to.”

Warehouse access is the easy half of this now, and every vendor sells it as a feature. The scarce thing is a marketing team that knows which specific product event means somebody is ready to buy the second thing, and most teams have never been asked to define it.

Key takeaway: Ask your data team for the full list of product events your customers generate, then pick the 3 that signal readiness for your second product line. Build one campaign that fires on those events and invites people to something specific rather than a generic upgrade offer. If nobody can produce that event list, your problem is access, and that’s a conversation with engineering rather than a campaign brief.

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How Marketing Leaders Get a Team to Actually Adopt an AI Tool

Good ideas die in organizations for a boring reason. Nobody owns them as a number, so when they stall everyone points at the tooling. That’s true of customer transformation and it’s true of every AI rollout happening right now, which is why Aditya answers the ownership question with an AI story instead of an org chart.

The leader’s job comes in 2 halves, and most people only do the first one.

“You as a leader have to first make it table stakes. You have to call out, ‘This is the direction we’re going. This is why we’re doing it.’ That is a leader’s job.”

The second half is showing people how it fits into their day in a way that removes the fear, and this is where the story gets useful. His team runs an opening and closing marketing meeting, Monday and Friday. In one Friday close he carved out 15 minutes, had everybody open Claude Design at the same time, and gave them a single task with an actual output attached to it. The company wanted its values printed and hung around the office, so the brief was to make one at 24 inches wide by 36 inches long, using the design guidelines everybody on the team already had.

Every person on the team produced one. He ended up with 6 or 7 designs, printed and shared. The designs themselves were beside the point. What he got out of it was a room where, 15 minutes later, everybody knew how to do the thing, together, and had watched their VP do it alongside them.

He acknowledges how silly it sounds on paper. What is a VP of marketing doing making a poster? The answer is that the first hurdle has to be small enough to internalize, and the person clearing it in front of everyone has to be the one with the most to lose from looking clumsy. Now there’s a standing expectation attached to it: before anyone asks him for a resource, he asks whether they tried generating it first.

“The implementation of it and pushing them to do it and making it easy for the first hurdle is what a leader’s job is, and you should never hand that off to anyone else in your org.”

Once the habit exists, he gives it away and tells them they own it now and they drive it. The bar he sets for the work is the part worth stealing: speed at a caliber that doesn’t produce AI slop. On the question of whether anyone should be able to tell, he has no anxiety at all, saying he doesn’t really care if someone knows he used AI, and that if it still sounds good and comes off great, then yeah, he used help.

The detail that makes this story work is that the VP spent the 15 minutes too. Most AI rollouts break at exactly the moment the leader delegates the awkward first attempt to an enablement doc and a Loom video. Adoption is a social problem well before it’s a tooling problem, and the only person who can solve it is the one whose discomfort everybody else is watching.

Key takeaway: Take 15 minutes at the end of your next team meeting and have everyone complete the same small AI task live, with you doing it at the same time. Pick something with a real output you can print or ship, rather than a tutorial. Then make it standing policy that nobody asks you for a resource before showing you what they already tried.

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How Marketing Leaders Decide What Deserves Their Energy

The last question on this show is always about how someone decides what deserves their energy. Aditya’s answer arrives at a ratio, but the useful part is the sorting step that comes before it.

“What are things that suck energy from you and what are things that give you energy, is what I’d look at. You gotta do some things that suck energy, but that can’t be all you’re doing all the time.”

He’s careful to say this is something you have to arrive at yourself, in layers, rather than a thing anybody can hand you. But he’s willing to show his own working.

On the family side, the non negotiable is bedtime with his son. He will go out, he will do the thing, and he will leave at 7:15 or 7:30 so he’s home by 8:00 to put him to bed. He found it gives him energy, so it comes off the negotiating table entirely. At work, the energy comes from playing with new tools and from helping the team get up to speed on them. The drains are also named without any hedging: reviewing copy, editing other people’s material. He has to do it, so he does it.

Then comes the ratio. He tries to hold his life at roughly 75% energy giving work and 25% energy draining work. His plainer version of the same test is that if 3 out of 5 days are really happy, he’s good. That’s a deliberately reachable bar, and it’s a lot healthier than the version of this most ambitious people carry around.

He credits a book called The Angry Therapist with getting him to that state, and notes the author has a podcast that runs in 11 minute segments. The system behind all of it turns out to be sharing. He enjoys handing over what he has learned and bringing people along with him, which is why he posts, why he texts friends about random things that have nothing to do with anything, and why he does this at all.

“We’re in this life, and if we’re gonna live a mediocre life, then what are we doing? And how can we live an awesome badass life?”

Most productivity systems sort work by importance or by urgency. Sorting by whether something returns energy is a different axis, and it’s the one that actually predicts whether you’re still doing this job in 3 years.

Key takeaway: Go through this week’s calendar and sort every block into 2 columns, one for what gave you energy and one for what drained it. If the drain column is more than a quarter of your hours, pick one recurring commitment and either delegate it or kill it. Then name the one non negotiable that gets booked before anything else next week.

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Episode Recap

Aditya Vempaty makes one central argument across this whole conversation, which is that making the customer the hero is an operating constraint rather than a content theme. It gets decided in small structural choices that most teams never examine: who is the subject of the first sentence in your case study, whose logo sits on the left, and whether your implementation team can get a customer live in 6 weeks or 6 months. Every one of those is an operational decision, and each of them tells a buyer more about you than your messaging ever will.

The tactical thread underneath it runs in a straight line. You start with paid customer interviews, 15 to 20 of them, before you look at the product. You turn those conversations into a survey that puts 500 or 600 responses behind what you heard. You gate every asset on 2 questions, whether it leads with the customer’s problem and who is distributing it. You build the campaign off your closed won list rather than off an audience you’ve never sold to. You point product usage data at expansion. And then you sit with a sales leader every week and walk the lead list by name, which is the step that quietly decides whether any of the rest of it survives the quarter.

The bigger shift he keeps circling back to is channel saturation. Acquisition channels are crowded and expensive, which has moved the economics toward retention and expansion, where a marketing team can actually show its impact with numbers a finance team will accept. It also means attribution built around single channels is structurally unable to describe how a purchase happened, because a real buying journey is 8 touches long and the CRM will credit exactly one of them. And when platforms are 95% similar in features, time to value becomes the product. The services function that most software companies still run as a cost centre is the last thing on the table that can win a competitive deal outright.

Aditya is honest about the parts that stay unresolved. He says the tooling to see the full journey is usually missing, that vendors have no commercial reason to teach the messy version, and that the work gets left to consultants who set up the basics and leave. He doesn’t claim the ABM play is new. There are 2 customer stories he can’t name. And when the ask on the table was a day 3 onboarding email rewritten brand as hero versus customer as hero, he went to account strategy instead, which is a reasonable tell about where he thinks the real gains are. There’s also a tension he lives with rather than resolves, because a career built on category creation is a career built on getting the industry to look at your flag, and he now spends his time arguing for knowing when to step out of the frame.

The last thing worth carrying out of this is smaller than the strategy and probably more useful. When he wanted his team to adopt AI, he blocked 15 minutes at the end of a Friday meeting and did the exercise alongside everybody, so the first attempt happened in a room where the most senior person could look clumsy too. Adoption problems are almost always social problems wearing a tooling costume.

Connect with Aditya on LinkedIn

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