How to Drive Pipeline Growth in 2026: Chats with Vishal

We’d love to hear more about you, your role, and what you do at Datadog. 

“My name is Vishal Alagh, and I’m the senior director of marketing at DataDog. I’m from India, born and brought up there. I came to Singapore about 10 years ago. My core experience has been in the B2B tech industry, specifically in marketing. I’ve had the privilege to work with brands like Adobe, Workday and now with DataDog, my current gig. I’ve been taking care of pipeline generation and leading APJ marketing teams throughout the span of my career. Um, and yeah, that’s about it.”

How did your journey in marketing begin, and what led you to become Senior Director?

“That’s actually, it happened, I want to say, a bit accidentally. My first brush-up with marketing, I want to say, with a real gig, was really at Adobe. It was through, at the time when you’re young, just, you know, straight out of college, you’re trying to go ahead and explore a lot, in terms of which career direction you are going to be, and so on. At that point in time, I think I was really lucky to have mentorship, externally, of a few people, and marketing just happened to be the right place, and I happened to be at the right time, and so on.

Many of the things I want to say, the first real gig of understanding marketing, how B2B tech SaaS marketing works, happened at Adobe. That’s where, I want to say, the pivot point was, if you will, for my career, where I got into marketing. From there, I rose through the ranks, and so on. I’ve experienced all tenets of marketing, some hands-on, some through learning, some through understanding, and I’ve been very privileged to have some mentorship, internally and externally, through organisations.

Then the opportunity with DataDog came along and, yeah, titles are titles. In the end, I became the Head of Marketing for the region.

 

If you had to pick one or two priorities that best define your team’s focus right now, what would they be, and why are they crucial for your company’s growth and success?

“Look, if there are two focuses, I feel like that diverts the attention. The laser focus can ever be one, and that’s for me and for my team, is pipeline generation. Everything else, through the role that I have done in the past or currently at DataDog as well, is, you know, measure of activity. Marketers often go ahead and talk about MQLs. If you do an activity, MQL is going to go ahead and flow in. Often people talk about MQAs, marketing qualified accounts, how much engagement are you sort of going ahead and getting.

That’s segmentation, that’s just going ahead and telling you that whatever activity you’re doing, that’s reaching out to the right audience. Where the rubber hits the road, if you will, and so on. The meat is really on the conversions, and pipeline is the holy grail of everything. That’s the bottom of the sales, marketing funnel, and the top of the sales funnel. And that’s about it. So that’s laser focus, one thing, pipeline generation, and core ability to sort of go ahead and contribute to regional goals, sales goals.”

 

What would you say is the biggest challenge in building or generating pipeline for your team?

“You know, the first part is probably not very challenging, except for pipeline generation. If you do the right type of marketing, and that means orchestrating the right tactics, finding the right audience, and messaging correctly, it is bound to happen. That is blowoff averages. It will happen with a series of activities. That part will run along. The difficult part is to align sales and see that through. You need to make sure marketing is actually working, that the results we are sharing and the programs marketing is deploying are actually delivering.

Um, no one is saying that a million-dollar deal came through a single asset download or webinar attendance. At the same time, the biggest challenge, and this is hard even for seasoned marketers, is explaining in very simple language, without jargon, to sales how conversions flow through and what specific activities are contributing to the sales funnel. The moment you start talking about multi-touch attribution models or lead scoring, you lose the audience, and the audience here is sales. The biggest challenge for any marketer is to keep it simple and show sales how conversions are moving through and how the process is working.”

 

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for Marketing leaders today that might not have been available in the past?

“Look, I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t use the two words, or two letters, AI. And that’s probably the biggest opportunity available to marketers, and I want to say, to businesses at large. The right adoption of it, how do you use it, when do you use it, and for what do you use it. I think simply having that understanding is going to go a long way. Specifically, I feel there’s huge potential in terms of increasing productivity, mitigating the general risks or dependencies that you’d have on disparate or spread teams across continents, and so on. The tactical examples are writing copy or just generating brand-guided creatives, and so on.

The speed to market is, I think, just going to be amazing. The ability to do all of that is awesome. What I love even more is going back to my challenge on solving the narrative with sales, who are obviously marketing’s biggest customers and consumers as well. To be able to challenge myself on the narrative each time and prep myself for what a sales leader would want to think and talk through, and just clear up that language. I think there’s no better co-pilot to do that and validate those thinking points as well. Roleplaying, whether internal or external, is one tool available now that probably wasn’t available before. You can have it play the devil’s advocate.

Could you share a recent marketing campaign where you experimented with a new strategy or approach, and explain the goals behind it?

“I want to say the experimentation in terms of doing any B2B tech marketing is very limited, specifically in a role where you’re doing technical product marketing or trying to encompass that chasm where you’ve got the classic demand funnel from awareness, consideration, decision, up to advocacy. You have a set defined framework, and you often tend to work across your larger pivot strategy on brand demand to cash. Therefore, anything that you do in that realm is probably going to be more or less similar. You could try a different approach, which could be considered experimentation, and still reach out to your audiences through digital, offline, and online experiences.

And so on. Well, just to bring it back to an example, I want to say a different approach, a recipe that’s been used long before my career even existed, was one campaign that I can specifically talk about. One thing I often find very useful is building customers into champions. There is no better voice to take your message into the market than having your customers do that on your behalf. Those are proof points. Those are customers sharing their success stories. We started this roundtable series internally and then expanded it into a full-blown campaign. The idea was very simple: have a customer come in and speak about how they utilised the product, what ROI they achieved, and how they shared their best practices.

The other side of the table is listening to those who are either early adopters or prospects. That became a voice of authority for us in a sense. That program, again, is a recipe used time and again. We do this in a very informal environment, very intimate, 15 to 20 people, either in our office or a casual restaurant, sharing best practices. It helps build community, develop champions, and so on. Again, nothing innovative, but it’s something every organisation and marketer wants to do, the ability to create and play the right card with your customers so they talk more about you than you have to talk about yourself.”

 

What will be at the top of your to-do list for 2026?

“It’s again coming to the basics, which is a perpetual way of looking at marketing. You’ve got that big structure of brand amount to cash.

Things that are working in any of those tactics or within that framework. What do we continue to run? What do we expand and what do we drop? Um, run, expand, drop, from a tactical program perspective, and so on. What could be the innovation? Reducing speed to market is going to be one of the biggest priorities for next year. And again, increased use of AI. The ability to enable teams, my own team, to do that is certainly going to be top of mind as well.  And then I guess the last bit is, again, laser focus. Everything that you and your teams are doing should have a very singular focus on what you are trying to achieve. For me, that marching order is pipeline number, which I absolutely need to focus on.

Everything else is going to be concentrated on that exact goal. Anything that happens outside of it is a plus, the bread and butter of pipeline. Get focused on that. Prioritise and deprioritise if it doesn’t contribute to the numbers and goals.”

 

How would you describe the role of the CMO or the marketing leader in one word and why?

“I want to say one word is wow, that’s difficult. it’s challenging because when you ask a marketer to describe something in one word, that becomes a challenge in itself. Marketing is always full of so many words. I want to say orchestrator. That’s the conductor, if you will, the one who’s just kind of telling everyone what to do and orchestrating that symphony. That is probably the best analogy I can come up with. You’ve got responsibility over various teams dealing with public relations, digital, field marketing, events, and partner marketing.

The ability to dial up, dial down, and get that symphony created is exactly the role. I want to say, at least from a regional CMO perspective, that’s certainly it. The audience on the other side, which is sales, should understand that the symphony is in motion. That’s the best analogy I can come up with.”

 

For those interested in starting a career in marketing, do you have any advice you could share?

“Wow. I’m going to give very radical advice. If you want to start in marketing, try and get into sales. That’s probably the most radical advice you would ever hear from a marketer. But if you’re a fresh graduate, if you’re fresh out of college, you might not even know why you want to do marketing. I know now, I hope I do. The idea is that if you have never been close to customers or have not heard from them, you don’t know what the challenges are. You might assume these are the challenges because somebody told you so. Sales is the absolute way for marketing to tell you exactly what they want. Start at the SDR, CSD, or inside sales level. Whatever title exists in that organisation. That is going to give you a lot of discipline. It’s a hard job.

It’s going to give you a chance to repeatedly understand what different people are saying, how you are being challenged, and how you are overcoming those challenges. Once you have that knowledge, you can take a lot of it and apply it to marketing. Marketing involves good program management, segmentation, and understanding of the function. The baseline is being close to customers, and having done that will take anyone a long way. So at the start of your career, try sales first. Get the hard things done, hone yourself, and then move to marketing.”

 

If you could ask marketing leaders such as yourself one question, what would it be?

“It’s easy to ask questions of others than of myself. When was the last time, again going back, when was the last time you were in a sales meeting or in a customer meeting, either one? It’s extremely important. People’s calendars are busy, and core jobs take so much time that marketing people often forget the pulse of the market, of what customers or prospects are probably objecting to. I guess the question I keep asking myself is, what’s the pulse of the market? That’s going to keep you true to whatever messaging you are drafting. So yeah, I often ask myself, when was the last time you spoke to a customer or were just a silent observer within a sales meeting?”