Humans of Martech238: The System to make your prospects the hero before they buy, with Aditya Vempaty
What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Aditya Vempaty, VP of Marketing at Coram AI.
(00:00) - Intro
(01:07) - In This Episode
(05:05) - Why Expansion Revenue Beats New Logos When Channels Are Saturated
(06:07) - Why Customer Empathy Means Knowing What Gets Your Buyer Promoted
(12:38) - How to Tell If Your Case Study Makes the Customer the Hero
(18:16) - Why Single Channel Attribution Hides the Journey That Closed the Deal
(22:00) - How to Find Real Customer Problems by Paying for 30 Minute Interviews
(30:29) - The 3 Levels That Connect Marketing Strategy to Tactical Execution
(36:32) - Why Implementation Speed Is the Real Answer to a Migration Objection
(42:12) - The ABM Play You Can Build From Your Closed Won List Today
(48:46) - How Marketing Leaders Get a Team to Actually Adopt an AI Tool
(53:26) - How Marketing Leaders Decide What Deserves Their Energy
Summary: Aditya has built marketing functions and named categories from nothing at Synthego, Amplitude and Nutanix, and he shows up here to argue that the loud top of funnel work is now the cheaper half of the job. 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. He also has a very short answer for what your ChatGPT persona document is worth. Stick around for the part where 95% product parity turns into the only argument that reliably wins a migration deal.
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.
His answer is arithmetic.
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.
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.
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 ...
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