What is B2B demand generation, and how does buyer psychology drive it? With Kerry Rana

Introduction to Kerry Rana and ExtraHop

Alex Gluz: We have a great guest for you today. Hey, Kerry, nice to have you here. Can you do a brief intro of who you are and what you do?

Kerry Rana: Hi, excited to be here today. I’m Kerry Rana. I have worked in B2B marketing for the past 15 years, and I am currently the senior director for digital marketing and experience at ExtraHop.

Kerry’s move from psychology into B2B marketing

Alex Gluz: How did you get started? What did you go to school for?

Kerry Rana: I originally went to school to get a bachelor’s in psychology, which many may think, “How did you end up in marketing?” I always had a great interest in psychology. I really admired my career counselor when I was in high school. An aunt of mine is a social worker and therapist, so I thought that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

I went through all of the psychology courses in college, really enjoyed it, did very well. Then, when I graduated in 2010, the job market was not so great. I ended up taking a couple of graduate courses at Rutgers University, where I got my undergraduate degree, looking to pursue a career in career counseling or social work, and I was interning at the Career Services Center at Rutgers.

My mentor at the time had me marketing their internship and co-op program, which is where students can take a course that allows them to get credit for participating in an internship. I loved marketing the program. We really increased enrollment rates, got way more students involved than ever before, and we also recruited more companies to be part of it. My mentor said, “You’re really great at marketing. I think you should make the switch.” I took the jump and never looked back.

Alex Gluz: How do you think a background in psychology influences your outlook on marketing in B2B tech and SaaS?

Kerry Rana: Psychology is all about understanding human behavior, why people make certain decisions, what is the motivation behind all of that and how people really think. The background that I have allows me to tap into people’s emotional triggers and what really drives their engagement.

There’s this whole buyer psychology, which is very relevant in the B2B space, where you need to understand the motivation behind complex buying decisions. The risk aversion, the trust involved, the influence, all of that relates back to psychology and how people think. It also helps you figure out how to improve the overall user experience on a website, or someone’s overall buying experience.

Folks who got business degrees, while that is wonderful and incredibly relevant, usually didn’t take any psychology classes. I didn’t take business classes, but I ended up learning the business world with my psychology background. That’s how it all blended together.

Understanding audiences and the problems they need to solve

Alex Gluz: You have driven demand gen strategy across very different industries. What’s the biggest lesson about adapting campaigns to new markets quickly?

Kerry Rana: The biggest thing is to know your audience. I have worked across many different industries, and I truly believe it doesn’t matter what industries you’re working in. All humans behave the same way in some way, shape or form. There is a pattern that goes across all types of industries and organizations.

With B2B it’s a little more complex in my mind than consumer. But it’s all about the person and the business. All you have to understand is the audience, and you’re able to be successful in any industry.

Alex Gluz: What is your approach when you start on a new project and you’re trying to understand the audience?

Kerry Rana: You have to ask a lot of questions across the entire organization. Usually you start with the sales org. You look at customer success. You figure out what people are really looking for. What are their struggles? What are their problems?

You always want to showcase that you can solve their problems. If you’re not able to showcase that you can solve someone’s problem, they’re likely not going to pay attention to you. You want to come forward and say, “You have a problem. My product can fix it, and here’s how.”

If you’re able to make that emotional connection with someone that triggers them to be more engaged and eventually convert, whether they’re a prospect or within the customer cross-sell lifecycle, then you’re really able to rope them in.

Building a go-to-market plan and testing the value proposition

Alex Gluz: Can you walk us through your process of identifying the must-have components of a successful go-to-market plan?

Kerry Rana: A few big things. You need to know the market you are actually marketing to, which is the ICP, the ideal customer profile. That’s the size of the organizations you’re targeting, the industries, their pain points and the tech stack you’re working against.

You also need to know the buyer personas. That’s where you identify the key decision-makers, the influencers, their goals, their challenges, their buying criteria.

From there you need your product’s actual value prop and key messaging, solidified. Without a clear value prop it’s very hard to go out into the market and be successful.

You also want to build a channel distribution plan. Where are we going for inbound channels? Are we focusing on SEO? For outbound, are we looking at account-based marketing? Are we going to advertise on LinkedIn? All of those have to work well together, with a plan in place ahead of time that is flexible and lets you distribute your resources and your dollars where they’re most profitable.

You also want a full multichannel demand gen plan ahead of time. This can always change, and you have to be comfortable with change to be successful, because nothing ever goes to plan. Come up with a range of channels, whether it’s paid social, paid search, display or affiliate partners, and build them out ahead of time.

Once you have a demand gen plan in place, you’ll want to think about a sales enablement plan. What are we doing to support sales through this cycle? What materials do they need? What decks? Do we need case studies on hand, or testimonials? How can we ensure that sales and marketing are equally supported, because we have to be a team there.

Then there are always metrics and KPIs. Are you goaled off a marketing qualified lead? A sales qualified lead? Is pipeline creation what matters most? You want to know what your goals are so you can lean your plan against them.

Then, what is your tech stack? Are you leveraging Salesforce? Google Analytics? An intelligence data platform like ZoomInfo to get extra intelligence about the prospects or customers you’re targeting? All of those aspects come together into a go-to-market plan. Once that is solidified you can start thinking about the customer journey and the lifecycle. Market, value prop, demand gen plan, channel distribution, sales and metrics first, and then the customer set. All of that is basically the blueprint I work from.

Alex Gluz: Let’s say you’ve identified your ICP and your persona, but it’s still early and you’re trying to fine-tune the value prop. What is your approach to testing or refining it?

Kerry Rana: Every successful go-to-market plan has A/B testing in place, or different variations of your plan. You can’t just have one set plan and think that it’s going to go well. You have to have a backup, or things on the back burner, to ensure that when this isn’t working, you can try that instead.

Usually with messaging I try to narrow it down to three separate campaigns or three separate messaging priorities. What is going to apply to the industries we are targeting the most? What applies to enterprise-sized companies? What is a campaign slogan that would differentiate us against our competitors in the market?

If we are looking at one of our top competitors, and say they have this new fancy AI technology, but we also have it and nobody knows about ours, how do we redefine ourselves within the marketplace to be able to compete with that?

Understanding digital advertising and personalization

Alex Gluz: Demand generation often sits at the heart of a go-to-market plan. What do you think is the most overlooked component of an effective demand gen strategy?

Kerry Rana: A lot of folks think they understand digital. Then you get into it and explain what you’re actually achieving, and they don’t even realize that they don’t understand the basics of it. That has always been a challenge since I’ve worked primarily in digital marketing.

There is paid social and there is organic social. A lot of folks don’t understand the difference, or don’t even realize they’re seeing a paid advertisement, because the sponsored callout is in very small font or has a very light background. It blends in with your browser or whatever platform you’re searching on. Folks are always like, “Oh, that was an ad? I didn’t even realize that.”

A lot of ads are set up today to blend in with your feed so that they look like a natural part of your browsing. They are not meant to be the old-school display ads you used to see, where they would pop up and take over your full screen and you couldn’t X out of it. That’s a 2010 way of thinking. We’re in 2025. There is so much personalization that can happen with advertisements today, and so many ways to optimize and hyper-target. All of that is really misunderstood by folks who aren’t in the nitty-gritty of digital daily.

Alex Gluz: When you say folks, do you mean inside your company, the executive team?

Kerry Rana: It could be executives at companies I’ve worked at currently or before. It could also just be my parents entirely misunderstanding different generational viewpoints of what advertisements are.

I try to compare connected TV as the new type of commercial, when you’re on a streaming service, whether it’s Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime, and you get those commercials that pop up. I always tell my mom, those are ads. People have a whole strategy behind that. You are being targeted for a product you likely bought at the food store last week and you don’t even know it. If you have a couponing app on your phone connected to the same Wi-Fi as your television, you’re going to be targeted with products they believe you’re interested in.

Alex Gluz: Maybe because we are so much into this at work and in everyday life, for us it’s a big part, but it’s not like that for everybody. There are still folks who do business the old way and are still very successful, but they have their own ways of doing things.

Using analytics to improve website conversions

Alex Gluz: Can you share a moment when analytics led you to pivot a campaign or strategy in a way you never expected?

Kerry Rana: I like to lead a very data-driven, fact-based marketing team. The data is able to tell you so many things going on in the background that you would never know, whether it’s heat mapping on your website or Google Analytics reports.

About a year ago, when I was managing the digital experience team, we were testing different calls to action on our website. We were trying to figure out where people were clicking, where they were going. We were in the middle of a website redesign, and we needed to figure out why our conversions were down and why folks weren’t clicking through to do demos or book meetings.

It was really a poor design of the homepage, and we were missing key CTAs in places where they typically should be. In the top right-hand corner I would expect to see one or two CTAs, whether it’s Book a meeting or Contact us. What we discovered is that our demo had some technical issues. That probably wasn’t the best CTA at the moment. Folks would click through, there’d be a broken experience, they’d lose trust in our product, drop off the page and not return.

A very atypical situation we discovered was that folks were actually going to our Contact us CTA and filling out a form, which would typically be seen as a customer service format, but it actually wasn’t. We ended up leveraging it to book meetings and drive more demo conversions, and it actually worked. We disabled the demo CTA until it was fixed and used Contact us. It was probably our highest-driving converter for the year.

Marketing to the cybersecurity audience is an interesting battle because a lot of these people prefer to be anonymous. They prefer to withhold their information. They don’t want to engage with you until they are totally ready to pursue buying. Once they were ready to be contacted, they made the jump. Folks who fill out the Contact us form are more likely to stick to a meeting, to attend it, to have further conversations, to move through the buying cycle and eventually convert to closed-won deals.

What I discovered is it’s not always that simple. You actually have to look into the data, dive deep and figure out where the customer journey is on your site and where people are going. That reveals a lot more than downloading a spreadsheet and asking why the demo count is down. There’s obviously a reason for everything.

Alex Gluz: We’ve worked with quite a few cybersecurity companies, and that’s a very interesting exercise. You made the decision, and now you understand the buyer journey. You have two CTAs because different people are at different stages.

AI, emerging technology and the return of in-person events

Alex Gluz: What emerging trends or technology do you think will shake up the B2B market in the next few years, and how are you preparing?

Kerry Rana: The most popular answer you probably hear is AI. If you can’t beat them, join them. Become an expert yourself. Get those certifications. Learn more about it. I believe it’s only going to drive more efficiencies for us with the hyper-personalized campaign content and the optimizations it has in place.

Quantum computing and the impact there is probably going to get more intense over the next few years. There are a lot of personalization capabilities within advertising coming out of that field. It could really revolutionize the way we engage with our targeted audiences.

Also, in a post-COVID world, now that we’re about five years out, experiential marketing and in-person experiences are actually coming back. We’re seeing a lot more attendance at our in-person events and conferences than before. Folks are seeking that in-person interaction, to physically meet someone and have a demo in person. There’s definitely been a change in how we invest in those channels. Even smaller-scale dinners with executives, or roundtables, are becoming more popular.

Personalization that earns a prospect’s attention

Alex Gluz: When you’re on the prospect side and somebody’s trying to prospect you, what personalization stands out?

Kerry Rana: Typically people have to reach out to me quite a few times for me to start engaging. I probably have 40 unread messages on my LinkedIn. Not everyone has the time to go through that inbox when you have all these other inboxes.

What usually catches my attention is if they figure out where I went to school, whatever was popular at that time, or where I live and a local coffee shop. Sometimes personalization isn’t on point. They’ll say they saw me on our website, and I’m thinking they’re probably confusing me with another person on the marketing team, and their data only gave them a marketing contact at ExtraHop.

Usually what catches my eye is when people drop in videos of themselves introducing themselves. That’s a little different. I know the feature has been around a while, but it shows effort. When they say your name and point out something very particular to you, that usually catches my attention.

Attribution, market competition and sales alignment

Alex Gluz: What do you think are the biggest pain points for B2B SaaS marketing leaders in 2025, and what is your approach to solving them?

Kerry Rana: There are a few. With certain channels coming back into the mix, like in-person experiences, you have to quantify the ROI. What has always been a big hurdle anywhere I’ve worked is accurate attribution. Justifying your budget and your future strategies based on what channels drove the most revenue. There’s a lot of what we call dark funnel activity going on, and a lot of connections to data lakes that need to be made. I am typically always working on some type of attribution initiative to get ahead of that.

Buyer behavior is always evolving. Folks learn something new, they tend to have different behavior. You have to keep track of that and keep ahead of industry trends.

I also think standing out in an oversaturated market is key. In cybersecurity, AI is taking a huge role. There are all these small startups coming into the mix that probably can’t offer what we can, but they are trying to market themselves that way. You have to provide messaging and a strong value prop that stands up against that.

Also, the battle that has always existed, along with attribution, is making sure sales and marketing are aligned. I am not a fan of sales and marketing being against each other. I think we should be helping each other from the start through the entire buying cycle. Whether that’s enabling sales with materials from the start, or getting their feedback on campaigns and the lead quality that comes out of them, you really have to partner together.

Mentorship, leadership lessons and closing remarks

Alex Gluz: Who are your mentors, and what’s the best advice they gave you?

Kerry Rana: I have quite a few previous leaders who really inspired me. There was one woman I worked for at American Express years ago. We worked on the Lowe’s partnership together, and she always told me, “You can be nice, and you can be good at your job.” She was the most kind and intelligent leader I had worked for at that point in my career. We were trying to win the RFP with Lowe’s, and it was a very intense experience. She conducted herself with such professionalism and kindness. I really admired that and started implementing it in my own work ethic and leadership.

I also had quite a few leaders who were always of the mindset that there will always be a job for someone who works hard on a day-to-day basis. I really try to show up for work every day. Even though I’m remote, sign on and be ready to work, and there will always be a job for you if you are able to do that.

I’m a very logical thinker, a very rational thinker, and I’m fair. If you’re always looking at the data and progressing through your initiatives with a fact-based mindset of making informed decisions that are customer-first, best for the company and will actually drive revenue, then you know you’re doing the right things to be successful.

Alex Gluz: Kerry, where can people learn more about you?

Kerry Rana: You can go on my LinkedIn profile and find me at linkedin.com/in/ranawilliamskerry. Thank you so much, Alex. It’s been wonderful speaking with you today.

Alex Gluz: For our listeners, if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you build marketing revenue engines that empower growth, visit tamonroe.com or contact me on LinkedIn. Kerry, thanks so much.

Kerry Rana: Thank you.