Generating Demand and Building Trust with Anadelia Fadeev

Anadelia is a B2B marketing leader passionate about building tech brands and growing revenue. She is currently the Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Teleport. In her spare time she enjoys live music and craft beer.

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

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Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. This may surprise some of you to realize, but every once in a while, I mention how these episodes are sponsored by different companies. Well, to peel back a little bit of the mystery behind that curtain, I should probably inform some of you that when I say that, that means that companies have paid me to talk about them. I know, shocking.

This is a revelation that will topple the podcast industry if it gets out. That’s why it’s just between us. My guest today knows this better than most. Anadelia Fadeev is the Senior Director of Demand Generation at Teleport, who does in fact sponsor a number of different things that I do, but this is not a sponsored episode in that context. Anadelia, thank you for joining me today.

Anadelia: Thank you for having me.

Corey: It’s interesting. I always have to double-check where it is that you happen to be working because when we first met you were a Senior Marketing Manager, also in Demand Gen, at InfluxData, then you were a Director of Demand Generation at LightStep, and then you became a Director of Demand Gen and Growth and then a Senior Director of Demand Gen, where you are now at Teleport. And the couple of things that I’ve noticed are, one, you seem to more or less be not only doing the same role, but advancing within it, and also—selfishly—it turns out that every time you wind up working somewhere, that company winds up sponsoring some of my nonsense. So first, thank you for your business. It’s always appreciated. Now, what is demand gen exactly? Because I have to say, when I started podcasting and newslettering and shooting my mouth off on the internet, I had no clue.

Anadelia: [laugh]. Well, to put it very simply, demand generation, our goal is to drive awareness and interest in your products or services. It’s as simple as that. Now, how we do that, we could definitely dive into the specifics, but it’s all about generating awareness and interest. Especially when you work for an early-stage startup, it’s all about awareness, right? Just getting your name out there.

Corey: Marketing is one of those things that I suspect in some ways is kind of like engineering, where you take a look at, “Oh, what do you do? I’m a software engineer.” Okay, great. For someone who is in that space, does that mean front-end? Does that mean back-end? Does that mean security? Oh, wait, you’re crying and awake at weird hours and you’re angry all the time. You’re a DevOps, aren’t you?

And you start to realize that there are these breakdowns within engineering. And we realize this and we get offended when people in some cases miscategorize us as, “I am not that kind of engineer. How dare you?” Which I think is unwarranted and ridiculous, but it also sort of slips under our notice in the engineering space that marketing is every bit as divided into different functions, different roles, and the rest. For those of us who think of marketing in the naive approach, like I did when I started this place—“Oh, marketing. So basically, you do Super Bowl ads, right?” And it turns out, there might be more than one or two facets to marketing. What’s your journey been like in the wide world of marketing? Where did you start? Where does it stop?

Anadelia: Yeah. I have not gotten to the Super Bowl ads phase yet but on my way there. No, but when you think about the different core areas within marketing, right, you have your product marketing team, and this is the team that sets the positioning, the messaging, and the information about who your ideal audience is, what pain points are they having, and how is your product solving those pain points? Right, so they sort of set the direction for the rest of the team, you have another core function, which is the content team, right? So, with the direction from Product Marketing, now that we know what the pain points are and what our value prop for our product is, how do we tell that to the world in a compelling way, right? So, this is where content marketing really comes into play.

And then you have your demand generation teams. And some companies might call it growth or revenue or… I guess those two are the ones that come to mind. But this team is taking the direction from Product Marketing, taking the content produced by the content team, and then just making sure that people actually see it, right? And across all those teams, you have a lot of support from operations making sure that there’s processes and systems in place to support all of those marketing efforts, you have teams that help support web development and design, and brand.

Corey: One of the challenges that I think people have when they don’t really understand what marketing is they think back on what they know—maybe they’ve seen Mad Men, which to my understanding does not much resemble modern all workplaces, but then again, I’ve been on my own for five years, so one wonders—and they also see things in the context of companies that are targeting more mass-market, in some respects. If you’re trying to advertise Coca-Cola, every person on the planet—give or take—knows what Coca-Cola is. And the job is just to resurface it, on some level, in people’s awareness, so the correct marketing answer there apparently, is to slap the logo on a bunch of things, be it a stadium, be it a billboard, be it almost anything, whereas when we’re talking about earlier stage companies—oh, I don’t know Teleport, for example—if you were to slap the Teleport logo on a stadium somewhere for some sports game, I have the impression that most people looking at that, if they notice it at all, would instead respond to some level of confusion of, “Teleport, what is that exactly? Have scientists cracked the way of getting me to Miami from San Francisco in less than ten seconds? Because I feel like I would have heard about that.”

There’s a matter of targeting beyond just the general public or human beings walking around and starting to target people who might have a problem that you know how to solve. And then, of course, figuring out where those people are gathering and how to get in front of them in a way that resonates instead of being annoying. At least that has been my lived experience of watching the challenges that marketing people have talked to me about over the years. Is that directionally correct or are they all just shining me on and, like, “Oh, Corey, you’re adorable, you almost understand how this stuff works. Now, go insult some more things on Twitter. It’ll be fine.”

Anadelia: [laugh]. The reality is that advertising is a big part of a demand generation program, but it’s not all, right? So, good demand generation is meeting people where they are. So, the right channels, the right mediums, the right physical places. So, when you look at it from an inbound and outbound approach, inbound, you have a sign outside of your door inviting people to your house, right, and this is in the form of your website. And outbound is you go out to where people are and you knock on their door to introduce yourself.

So, when we look at it from that approach, so on the inbound side, right, the goal is to get people to come to your website because that is where you are telling them what you do and giving them the option to start using your product. So, what reason are you giving people to come to you, right? How are you helping them become better at something or achieve certain results, right? So, understanding the motivations behind it is extremely important.

And how are you driving people to you? Well, that’s where SEO comes in, right? Search engine optimization.So, what content are you producing that is driving the right search results to get your website to show up and get people to come to you, right? There’s also SEM or Search Engine Marketing. So, when people are searching for certain keywords that are relevant to you, are you showing up in those search results?

And on the outbound side of things is, what do you do to contribute to existing communities, right? So, this is where things like advertising comes into play. So, I know you have a huge following and I want to be where you are. So, of course, I’m going to sponsor your podcast and your newsletters. And similarly, I’m looking for what events are out there where I know that our potential customers are spending their time and what can we do to join that conversation in a way that adds value?

So, that can be in the form of supporting community events and meetups, giving community members a platform to share their experiences, and even supporting local businesses, right, it’s all about adding value, and by doing so, you are building trust that will allow you to then talk about how your product can help these communities solve their problems.

Corey: It’s interesting because when we look at the places that you have been, you were at InfluxData, they are a time-series database company; you were at LightStep, which was effectively an observability company, and now you’re at Teleport where you are an authentication and access company. And forgive me, none of these are your terms. These are my understandings of having talked to these folks. And on the one hand, from a product perspective, it sounds like you’re hopping between this and that and doing all those other things, and yet, we had conversations about all three of those products and how the companies around them are structured and built, and you’ve advertised all three of those on this show and others and all three of those companies and products speak specifically to problems that I have dealt with personally in the way I go through my engineering existence as well. So, instead of specializing on a particular product or on a particular niche, it almost feels like you’re specializing on a particular audience. Is that how you think about it, or is that just one of those happy accident, or in retrospect, we’re just going to retcon everything, and, “Yeah, that’s exactly why I did it.” And you’re like, “Let we jot that down. That belongs on my resume somewhere.”

Anadelia: [laugh]. No, so prior to me joining InfluxData, I was at other companies that were marketing to sales, HR, finance, different audiences, right? And the moment I joined Influx, it was really eye-opening for me to be part of a product that has an open-source community, and between that and marketing to a highly technical audience that probably very likely doesn’t want to hear from marketers, I found that to be a really good challenge for myself because it challenged me to elevate my own technical knowledge. And also personally, I just want to be surrounded by people that are smarter than me, and so I know that by being part of a community that markets to a developer audience, I am putting myself in a position where I’m having to constantly continue to learn. So, it’s a good challenge for a marketer in our industry. Just like in any others, there’s always the latest buzzword or the latest trend, and so it’s really easy to get caught up in those things. And I think that being a marketer whose audience is developers really forces you to kind of look at what you’re doing and sort of remove the fluff. This happens everywhere.

Corey: Well, I have to be careful about selling yourself too short on this because I’ve talked to a lot of different people who want to wind up promoting what it is that their companies do, and people come from all kinds of different places, and some of the less likely to be successful—in many cases, I turn the business down—are, “Well, this is our first real experience with marketing.” And the reason for that is people expect unrealistic things. I describe what I do as top-of-funnel where we get people’s attention and we give them a glimpse and a hook of what it is the product does. And I do that by talking about the painful problem that the product solves. So, when people hear their pain reflected in what we talk about, then that gives them the little bit of a push to go and take a look and see if this solves it.

And that’s great, but there has to be a process on the other side, where oh, a prospect comes in and starts looking at what it is we do. Do we have a sales funnel that moves them from someone just idly browsing to someone who might sign up for a trial, or try this in their own time, or start to understand how the community views it and the rest because just dropping a bunch of traffic on someone’s website doesn’t, in isolation, achieve anything without a means to convert that traffic into something that’s a bit more meaningful and material to the business? I’ve talked to other folks who are big on oh, well, we want to wind up just instrument in the living crap out of everything we put out there, so I want to know, when someone clicks on the ad, who they are, what they do for a living, what their signing authority is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And my answer, that’s super easy, “Cool. We don’t do any of that.”

Part of the reason that people like hearing from me, is because I generally tend to respect their time, I’m not supporting invasive tracking of what they do, they don’t see my dumb face smiling with a open mouth grin as they travel across the internet on every property. Although one of these days I will see myself on the side of a bus; I’m just waiting for it. And it’s really nice to be able to talk to people who get the nuances and the peculiarities of the audience that I tend to speak to the most. You’ve always had that unlocked, even since our first conversation.

Anadelia: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you. And yeah, the reality is that, especially within my world, right—and demand generation, we are very metrics-driven because our goal [tends 00:13:00] to be pipeline, right? Pipeline for the sales team, so we want to generate sales opportunities, and in order to do that, we need to be able to measure what’s working and what is not working. But the reality is that good marketing is all about building trust, right? So, that’s why I stress the importance of providing something of value to your prospect so that you’re not wasting their time, right? The message that you have for them is something that can help them in the future.

And if building trust sometimes means I’m not able to measure the direct results of the activity that you’re doing, then that is okay, right? Because when you’re driving people to your website, there are things that you can measure, like, you have some web visits, and you know that percentage of those visitors might be interested in continue further, right? So, when you look at the journey across the buyer stages, you have to have a compelling offer for a person on each of the possible stages, right? So, if they are just learning about you today because this is the first time that heard your ad, it’s probably not expected that they would immediately go to your website and fill out your form, right? They’ve just heard about you, and now you start building that recognition.

Now, if all the stars align, and I actually have a need for a solution that’s like yours today, then, of course, you can expect a conversion to happen in that time point. But the reality is that having offers that are aimed at every stage of the buyer's journey is important.

Corey: I’m glad to hear you say this. And the reason is that I often feel like when I say it, it sounds incredibly self-serving. But if you imagine the ideal buyer and their journey, they have the exact problem that your product does and there’s an ad on my podcast that mentions it. Well, I imagine—and maybe this isn’t accurate, but it’s how I engage with podcasts myself—I’m probably not sitting in front of a computer ready to type in whatever it is that gets talked about.

I’m probably doing dishes or outside harassing a dog or something. And if it resonates is, “Oh, I should look into that.” In an ideal world. I’ll remember the short URL that I can go to, but in practice, I might just Google the company name. And oh, this does solve the problem.

If it’s not just me and there’s a team I have to have a buy-in on, I might very well mention it in our next group meeting. And, “Okay, we’re going to go ahead and try it out with an open-source version or whatnot.” And, “Oh, this seems to be working. We’ll have procurement reach out and see what it takes to wind up generating a longer-term deal.” And the original attribution of the engineer who heard it on a podcast, or the DevOps director who read it in my newsletter, or whatever it is, is long since lost. I’ve commiserated with marketing people over this, and the adage that I picked up that I love quoting is half your marketing budget is wasted, but you can spend an entire career trying to figure out which half and get nowhere by the end of it.

Anadelia: And this sort of touches on the buyer's journey is not linear. On the other side of that ad, or that marketing offer is a human, right? So, of course, as marketers, we’re going to try to build this path of once you landed on our website, we want to guide you through all the steps until you do the thing that we want you to do, but the reality is, that does not happen in your example, right? You see something, you come back to it later through another channel, there’s no way for us to measure those. And that’s okay because that’s just the reality of how humans behave.

And also, I think it’s worth noting that it takes multiple touch points until a person is ready to even hear what you have to say, right? And it sort of goes back to that point of building trust, right? It takes many times until you’ve gained that person’s trust enough for them to listen to what you have to say.

Corey: Building trust is important.

Anadelia: SIt is very important. And that’s why I think that running brand awareness programs are an extremely important part of a marketing mix. And sometimes there’s not going to be any direct attribution, and we just have to be okay with it.

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Corey: I tend to take a perspective that trust is paramount, on some level, where we have our standard rules of, you know, don’t break the law, et cetera, et cetera, that we do require our sponsors to conform to, but there are really two rules that I have that I care about. The first is you’re not allowed to lie to the audience. Because if I wind up saying something is true in an ad or whatnot, and it’s not, that damages my credibility. And I take this old world approach of, well, I believe trust is built over time, and you continually demonstrate a pattern of doing the right thing, and people eventually are willing to extend a little bit of credulousness when you say something that sounds that might be a little bit beyond their experience.

The other is, and this is very nebulous, and difficult to define so I don’t think we even have this in writing, but you have to be able to convince me if you’re going to advertise something in one of my shows, that it will not, when used as directed, leave the user worse off than they were when they started. And that is a very strange thing. Like, a security product that has a bunch of typos on its page and is rolling its own crypto, for example—if you want an easy example—is one of those things that I will very gracefully decline not to wind up engaging with, just because I have the sneaking suspicion that if you trust that thing, you might very well live to regret it. In other cases, though—and this is almost never a problem because most companies that you have heard of and have established themselves as brands in this space already instinctively get that you’re not able to build a lasting business by lying to people and then ripping them off.

So, it’s a relatively straightforward approach, but every once in a while, I see something that makes me raise an eyebrow. And it’s not always bad. Sometimes I think that’s a little odd. Teleport is a good example of this because, “Oh, really? You wound up doing access and authentication? That sounds exactly like the kind of thing I want something old and boring, not new and exciting, around, so let’s dig into this and figure out whether this might be the one company you work at that doesn’t get to sponsor stuff that I do.”

But of course you do. You’re absolutely focusing on an area that is relevant, useful, and having talked to people on your side of the world, you’re doing the right thing. And okay, I would absolutely not be opposed to deploying this in the right production environment. But having that credulousness, having that exploratory conversation, makes it clear that I’m talking to people who know what they’re doing and not effectively shilling for the highest bidder, which is not really a position I ever want to find myself in.

Anadelia: And look, you have only one opportunity to make a first impression, right? So, being clear about what it is that you can do, and also being clear about what it is that you cannot do is extremely important, right? It kind of goes back to the point of just be a good human, don’t waste people’s time. You want to provide something of value to your audience. And so, setting those expectations early on is extremely important.

And I don’t know anyone that does this, but if your goal is only to drive people to your website, you can do that, probably very easily, but nothing will come out of it unless you have the right message.

Corey: Oh, all you do is write something incendiary and offensive, and you’ll have a lot of traffic. They won’t buy anything and they’ll hate you, but you’ll get traffic, so maybe you want to be a little bit more intentional. It’s the same reason that the companies that advertise on what I do pick me to advertise with as opposed to other things. It is more expensive than the mass-market podcasts and whatnot that speak to everyone. But you take a look at those podcasts and the things that they’re advertising are things that actually apply to an awful lot more people, things like mattresses, and click-and-design website services, and the baseline stuff that a lot of people would be interested in, whereas the things that advertise on what I do tend to look a lot more like B2B SaaS companies where they’re talking to folks who spend a lot of time working in cloud computing.

And one of the weird things to think about from that perspective, at least for me, is if one person is listening to a show that I’m putting out and they go through the journey and become a customer, well, at the size of some of these B2B contracts between large companies, that one customer has basically paid for everything I can sell for advertising for the next decade and change, just because the long-term value of some of these customers is enormous. But it’s why, for example—and I kept expecting it to happen, but it didn’t—I’ve never been subjected to outreach from the mattress companies of, “Hey, you want to go talk about that to your guests?” No, because for those folks, it is pure raw numbers: how many millions of subscribers do you have? Here, it’s—the newsletter is the easy one to get numbers on because lies, damned lies, and podcast statistics. I have 31,000 people that receive emails. Great, that’s not the biggest newsletter in the world by a longshot, but the people who are the type of person to sign up for cloud computing-style newsletters, that alone says something very specific about them and it doesn’t require anyone do anything creepy to wind up reaching out from that perspective.

It doesn’t require spying on customers to intuit that, hmm, maybe people who care about what AWS is up to and have big AWS-sized problems might sign up to a newsletter called Last Week in AWS. That’s the sort of easy thinking about advertising that I tend to go for, which yeah, admittedly sounds a lot like something out of that Mad Men era. But I think that we got a lot right back then, and everything’s new all the time.

Anadelia: [laugh]. And actually, that’s exactly what demand generation is, right? We want to find the right channels to reach our audience. And so, for a consumer company that sells mattresses, right, anyone might be on the market for a mattress, right? You want to go as broad as possible. But for something that’s more specific, you want to find what are the right channels to reach that audience where you know that there’s—it might be a smaller audience size, but it’s the right people.

And we’ve talked about the other core areas of marketing. So, with demand generation, it’s all about finding people where they are, right, and providing them their message to you and attracting them to come to you, right? It kind of goes back to that inbound and outbound motion that I mentioned earlier. But at the end of the day also, if you don’t have the right messaging to keep them engaged, once you got them to your website, then that’s a different problem, right? So, demand gen alone cannot be successful without really strong product marketing and without really strong content, and everything else that’s needed to support that, right? I mentioned the—if your website is not loading fast enough, then you’re losing people if your form is not working. So, there’s so many, so many different factors that come into play.

Corey: Oh, God, the forms. Don’t get me started on the forms. Hey, we have a great report that’s super useful. Okay, cool. I’ll click the link and I’ll follow that. I talk to sponsors about this all the time. And it’s, you have 30 mandatory fields on that website that I need to fill out. I am never going to do that.

What is the absolute bare minimum that you need in an ideal world? Don’t put any sort of gateway in front of it and just make it that good that I will reach out to thank you for it or something, but just make it an email address or something and that’s it. You don’t need to know the size of my company, the industry we’re in, the level of my signing authority, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Because if this is good, I might very well be in touch. And if it’s not, all you’re going to do is harass me forever with pointless calls and emails and whatnot, and I don’t want to deal with that. There’s something to be said for adding value early in the conversation and letting other people sometimes make the first move. But this is also, to be clear, a very inbound type of approach.

Anadelia: It’s a never-ending debate, to gate or not to gate. And I don’t know if there is a right answer. My approach is that if your content is good, people will come back to you. They’ll keep coming back, and they’ll want to take the next step with you. And so, I have some gated assets, and I have some that are not, and—but—

Corey: But your gates have also never been annoying of the type that I’m talking about where it’s the, “Oh, great. You need to, like, put in, like, how big is your company? What’s the budget?” It feels like I’m answering a survey at some point. AWS is notorious for this.

I counted once; there are 19 mandatory fields I had to fill out in order to watch a webinar that AWS was putting on.

Anadelia: [laugh].

Corey: And the worst part is they asked me the same questions every time I want to watch a different webinar. It’s like, for a company that says the data is so valuable, you’d really think they’d be better at managing it.

Anadelia: You know, like, some of the questions keep getting stranger. Like, I would not be surprised if people start asking what’s your favorite color, or what’s the answer to your—

Corey: The one they always ask now for, like, big data seminars and whatnot, is where this really gets me, is this in relation to your professional interests or your personal interests? It’s… “What do you think my hobbies are over there? Oh, yeah, I like big enterprise software. That’s my hobby.” “Okay, I guess.” But I really do wonder what happens if someone checks the personal interest [vibe 00:25:33]. Do they wind up just with various AWS employees showing up want to hang out on the weekends and go surfing or something? I don’t know.

Anadelia: As somebody who has been on the receiving end of lists like this—for example, we sponsor a conference and we get people stop by to talk to us, and now we get the list of those people. And there’s 25 columns. Like, honestly, that data does not come in helpful because at the end of the day, whatever you’ve marked on the required question is not going to change how I am going to communicate to you after, right, because we just had a conversation in person at this event.

Corey: My budget is not material to the reason I let you scan my badge. The reason I let you scan my badge because I really wanted one of those fun plastic toy things, so I waited in line for 45 minutes to get it. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be a buyer; it just means that now I’m in your funnel, although I could not possibly care less about what you do. One thing I do at re:Invent and a couple other conferences, for example, is I will have swag at a booth—because I don’t tend to get booths myself, I don’t have the staff to man it and I’m bad at that type of thing. But when people come up to get a sticker for Last Week in AWS or when of our data transfer diagram things or whatnot, the rule that we’ve always put in place is, you’re not going to mandate a badge scan for that.

And the kind of company I like doing that with gets it because the people who walk by and are interested will say, “Hey, can you scan my badge as well?” But they don’t want to pollute their own lead lists with a bunch of people who are only there to get a sticker featuring a sarcastic platypus, as opposed to getting them confused with people actually care about what it is that they’re solving for. And that’s a delicate balance to strike sometimes, but the nice thing about being me is I have customers who come back again and again and again. Although I will argue that I probably got better at being a service provider when I started also being a customer at the same time, where I hired out a marketing department here because it turns out that fixing the AWS bill is something that does a fair bit of marketing work. It’s not something people talk about at large scale in public, so you have to be noisy enough so that inbound finds its path to you a bunch of times. That’s always tricky.

And learning about how no matter what it is you do, in the case of my consulting work, we are quite honestly selling money, bring us in for an engagement, you will turn a profit on that engagement and we don’t come back with a whole bunch of extra add-ons after the fact to basically claw back more things. It’s one of the easiest sales in the world. And it’s still nuanced, and challenging, and finding the right way to talk about it to the right people at the right time explains why marketing is the industry that it is. It’s hard. None of this is easy.

Anadelia: It is. And you know, in your example, you’re not scanning that badge, but giving the person the sticker, right? Like, it’s all about making a good first impression, and if the person’s not ready to talk to you, that is okay. But there are ways that you can stay top-of-mind so that the moment that they have a need, they’ll come to you. It kind of goes back again to my earlier points of adding value in supporting existing communities, right? So, what are you doing to stay top-of-mind with that person that wasn’t quite ready back then, but the moment they have a need, they’ll think of you first because you made a good first impression.

Corey: And that’s really what it comes down to. It’s nice to talk to people who actually work in marketing because a lot of what I do in the marketing space, I’ve got to be honest, is terrible. Because I’ve done the old engineering thing of, well, I’m no marketer, but I know how to write code, so how hard could marketing really be and I invent this theory of marketing from first principles, which not only is mostly wrong, but also has a way of being incredibly insulting to people who have actually made this their profession and excel at it. But it’s an evolutionary process and trying to figure out the right way to do things and how to think about things from particular point of view has been transformative. Really easy example of this: when I first started selling sponsorships, I was constantly worried that a sponsor was going to reach out and say, “Well, hang on a second. We didn’t get the number of clicks that we expected to on this campaign. What do you have to say about that?”

Because I’m a consultant. I am used to clients not getting results that they expected having some harsh words for me. In practice, I don’t believe I’ve ever had a deep conversation about that with a marketing person. I’ve talked to them and they’ve said, “Well, some of these things worked. Some of these things didn’t. Here’s what works; here’s what didn’t, and for our next round, here’s what we want to try instead.” Those are the great constructive conversations.

The ones that I was fearing somehow would assume that I held this iron grip of control over exactly how many people would be clicking on a thing in a newsletter, and I’m not. We barely provide click-tracking at this point in the aggregate, let alone anything more specific, just because it’s so hard to actually tell and get value out of it. You talk as well, about there being brand awareness. Even if someone doesn’t click an ad, they’re potentially reading it, they’re starting to associate your company with the problem space. That’s one of those things that are effectively impossible to track, but it does pay dividends.

When you suddenly have a problem in a particular area. And there’s one or two companies off the top of your mind that you know work in that space. Well, what do you think marketing is? There has been huge money put into making that association in your mind. It’s not just about click the link; it’s not just about buy the thing; it’s about shaping the way that we think about different things.

Anadelia: And I spend a lot of time thinking about how people think we talk about what are the things that motivate you. When you have a problem, where do you go to look for a solution, or who do you go to, right? So, just understanding what the thought process is when someone is trying to solve a problem or making a purchasing decision, I think that a lot of demand generation is what are the different ways by which someone is trying to solve a problem that they’re having? And I had an interest in psychology growing up; both my parents are psychologists, and I think that marketing tends to bring some aspects of that in business and creativity, which is what led me to a career in marketing.

And you ended up being sort of a connector, right? Like your job was to connect to people who would benefit from meeting each other. Just one of them happens to be a product, or you know, it depends on your company, right, but you’re just introducing people and making sure they know about each other because there’s going to be a mutually beneficial relationship between them.

Corey: That seems to be what so many jobs ultimately distilled down to in the final analysis of things. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time and talking about how you view the world slash industry in which we live. If people want to learn more about what you’re up to and how you think about these things, where’s the best place to find you?

Anadelia: You can follow me on Twitter at @anadeliafadeev, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Corey: Oh, you’re one of the LinkedIn peoples. I used to do that a bit, and then I just started getting deluged with all kinds of nonsense, and let me adjust my notification settings, and there are 600 of them. And no, no, no, no, no. And I basically have quit the field, by and large, on LinkedIn. But power to you for not having done that. Links to that will of course be in the [show notes 00:32:38]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

Anadelia: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Corey: Anadelia Fadeev, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Teleport. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry ranting comment about how we got it completely wrong and that marketing does not work on you in the least. And by the way, when you close out that ranting comment, tell me what kind of brand of shoes you’re wearing today.

Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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