Cracking the Code of Demand Generation with HackerRank’s Senior Manager
This interview by Research NXT highlights the professional journey and demand generation expertise of HackerRank’s Senior Manager of Demand Generation, Ridhi Malhotra. With extensive experience across industries, she delves into effective campaign strategies, marketing automation, and the challenges of lead attribution, offering actionable insights for practitioners.
Key Takeaways
- Inbound marketing is the most effective channel for generating qualified leads, with account-based marketing as a close second.
- Demand generation impacts primarily the top and middle funnel, with the bottom funnel requiring collaboration with sales teams.
- 10-20% of the marketing budget is typically allocated to campaign management infrastructure in SaaS organisations.
- Attribution remains a challenge, with no single “magical view” providing complete campaign performance insights.
“The key lies in putting out the right content that resonates with the market and reaches the right audience. Being visible and providing valuable information is crucial.”
Can you share your professional journey leading up to your current position as Senior Manager of Demand Generation at HackerRank? What motivated you to specialise in demand generation within the tech industry?
Ridhi: I have over 15 years of marketing experience and hold an MBA in Marketing from SP Jain School of Global Management. My journey began at HCL Technologies, where I spent three and a half years working across various verticals, including financial services and healthcare. My roles have largely been generalist, encompassing product marketing, demand generation, partner marketing, social media, PR, and business relations.
After HCL, I joined Capillary Technologies for a year, managing their content calendar, understanding market needs, and refining published materials. Following this, I spent three years at Akamai Technologies, where I focused on customer marketing—organising customer events, advisory board meetings, and running upsell and cross-sell campaigns to enhance engagement and drive revenue growth.
From Akamai, I moved to Zycus, where I spent another three years. At Zycus, I established their customer marketing initiatives, including setting up a loyalty program and building upsell and cross-sell campaigns with revenue targets of approximately $10 million. Later, I transitioned into demand generation for the U.S. market, focusing on persona-based messaging, campaign planning, and achieving defined targets.
Next, I joined 75F, a startup, where I led APAC marketing. In this role, I managed end-to-end marketing efforts, including product marketing, demand generation, content strategy, PR, and analytics. Currently, at HackerRank, I began as the APAC Demand Generation Lead. Over the past one and a half years, my responsibilities have expanded to managing global demand generation. This includes crafting market-specific messaging, defining campaigns, and delivering measurable ROI across regions.
In summary, my career has been a diverse blend of roles across demand generation, customer engagement, and strategic marketing, with a consistent focus on achieving measurable business outcomes.
You’ve been deeply involved in demand generation throughout your career, which often requires a clear focus on specific funnels and strategies. Could you share your insights on where in the marketing funnel demand generation has the greatest impact?
Ridhi: In my experience, demand generation impacts all stages of the marketing funnel, but the level of influence varies. Through marketing campaigns, I focus on building a strong top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel pipeline by driving awareness and engagement.
When it comes to the bottom of the funnel, the approach shifts to a collaborative effort. At this stage, demand generation works in partnership with the business development and sales teams to enable deal closures. This involves providing specific use cases and tailored assets to support the sales teams in converting opportunities.
While the top and middle funnels see the most direct impact from demand generation efforts, the bottom funnel impact is delivered through close alignment and collaboration with sales. This ensures a cohesive strategy for driving conversions.
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What key strategies do you employ at HackerRank to drive demand and generate qualified leads? How do you tailor these strategies to meet the unique needs of your target audience?
Ridhi: For me, a qualified lead is typically someone who requests a demo or where at least one meeting has been scheduled with the sales team. These are the leads we categorise as marketing-qualified.
When it comes to channels, I believe inbound marketing is the most successful in today’s market. Buyers are already doing extensive research about us online, progressing through the awareness and consideration stages of the buying journey on their own. This trend has been evident for the past four to five years.
The best conversions I’ve seen come from inbound marketing. The key lies in putting out the right content that resonates with the market and reaches the right audience. Being visible and providing valuable information is crucial. For me, inbound marketing consistently delivers the best results and the highest return on investment.
When it comes to qualifying leads or ensuring you generate more qualified leads from your demand generation campaigns, what key factors do you consider, and how do you approach your strategy to achieve this?
Ridhi: We follow a lead scoring model, which I believe is standard across most organisations. For example, if a lead requests a demo, they are automatically categorised as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). For leads that don’t meet these criteria, we engage them through multiple touchpoints and assign scores based on their interactions.
For instance, if a lead attends a webinar, downloads an asset, and responds to an email, they accumulate points, and once they reach a threshold score of 25, they are converted to an MQL.
Additionally, we account for exceptions. For example, if we receive a lead from a high-priority account that the team has been targeting, and it’s a relevant title or persona, we might classify it as an MQL even if it hasn’t met the typical scoring threshold. This ensures we don’t overlook valuable opportunities from key personas or accounts expressing interest in our organisation.
To develop a successful inbound strategy, there must be significant backend efforts, such as warming up the target audience through emails, social media, webinars, and other engagements. How do you build a multi-channel strategy that drives maximum traction and aligns with your core objectives?
Ridhi: At a high level, every quarter, I define three key strategies or messages to take to the market. For example, one of our current top campaigns focuses on AI thought leadership, as AI and generative AI are trending topics. Organisations are exploring how to integrate AI into their solutions to optimise processes and drive efficiency, so we align our messaging with this demand.
In addition to thematic campaigns like AI, we identify specific product-related goals—either expansion initiatives or growth opportunities for particular products. Typically, we define two to three such themes or messages per quarter to guide our strategy.
Once the themes are established, we plan the channels and assets to support them. For the top of the funnel, we create research papers, white papers, short video content or podcasts to spark interest. In the middle of the funnel, we publish blogs and execute a mix of one-time campaigns and always-on campaigns. Always-on campaigns include monthly newsletters to customers and prospects, as well as social media, which is a key channel for us with a highly active presence and over 1 million followers. These campaigns generate consistent traction.
Apart from always-on campaigns, we execute specific campaigns tied to the quarterly themes. These include webinars, events, and product launches. For the bottom of the funnel, we develop case studies and demos, which we host on our website to support conversion efforts.
Our strategy is fully integrated. For example, if someone engages with a top-of-the-funnel asset, they are guided toward middle and bottom-funnel resources through strategically placed links. This approach ensures a cohesive customer journey and maximises engagement across all stages of the funnel.
What role does marketing automation play in your demand generation efforts at HackerRank? How do you leverage automation tools to streamline processes and improve lead nurturing?
Ridhi: Like most organisations, we use Salesforce (SFDC) and a marketing automation tool. Additionally, we leverage Full Circle Insights to map the complete multi-touch journey for accounts and assist with attribution. We have built a customised chatgpt that helps build draft content that we further build on.
On the analytics side, we utilise Salesforce dashboards and BI tools to build reports and track performance. Despite using these tools along with UTM tags, there are still gaps in our attribution process. Even with Full Circle Insights, SFDC, and the rest of our tech stack, refining attribution remains a work in progress, which I suspect is a common challenge for many organisations.
With such a complex automation system in place, does it become challenging to manage and track everything effectively? Are you able to achieve the ideal 360-degree view of your campaigns through a unified dashboard to monitor and calibrate them in real time? What are some of the key challenges you face while running campaigns?
Ridhi: In my previous organisations, where the database sizes were smaller, attribution was much more accurate and easier to manage. Here, while we do achieve some level of attribution, there are still gaps. I don’t yet have that one magical, unified view that clearly shows what has worked and what hasn’t.
Instead, I rely on multiple reports to track performance—whether it’s at the MQL stage, SQL stage, or even at closure. However, these are fragmented views, and there are still unanswered questions. As I mentioned, our attribution process still requires further refinement.
Based on your experience across organisations, what percentage of the overall budget is typically allocated to campaign management, including marketing automation tools, dashboards, and infrastructure? Would it be less than 10%, 10-20%, or more than 20%?
Ridhi: In my current organisation, around 10-15% of the marketing budget is allocated to infrastructure. For most SaaS organisations, the typical range tends to fall between 10-20%.
Before we wrap up, we want to know your expectations from this report. What do you think would be most valuable for the readers of the report?
Ridhi: I’m always curious to learn what’s working for other organisations. For instance, at a previous organisation, during our win-loss analysis, we found that 90% of our wins originated from being listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which drove prospects to reach out to us.
Each organisation has its unique strengths and strategies, and it’s fascinating to understand what differentiates their success. I’d love to explore insights into how various organisations are generating leads and driving demand in their own ways. It’s always valuable to see what’s working differently across the board.
