Valentina Kovačić, Vice President Digital & Customer Marketing at Azul, shares her perspective on modern B2B demand generation, AI-driven content visibility, and marketing to technical audiences. She discusses why credibility matters more than volume, how GTM teams can better engage buyers, and what it takes to build trust with developers and technical decision-makers.
Tell us about your role and what your team is focused on right now.
At Azul, I lead digital and customer marketing across our full Azul product portfolio, including Payara, which joined the Azul family earlier this year. The through line across all three is Java, and right now Java is having a moment.
Two things are happening at once. Enterprises are accelerating away from Oracle Java as licensing costs and audit risk have finally hit a tipping point. And separately, as AI moves from experimentation into production, organizations are realizing that most of their AI workloads are running on Java infrastructure and that JVM performance directly affects what they can deliver. Better Java means faster inference, lower cloud bills, and fewer bottlenecks in the stack.
That is where our products sit. Azul Platform Prime delivers the runtime performance enterprises need for demanding AI and cloud workloads without over-provisioning infrastructure. Payara gives Jakarta EE teams a supported, modern path forward. My team’s job is to connect those value stories to the right buyers in a way that resonates with both the architects making technical decisions and the executives signing off on them.
How has your approach to demand gen evolved over the last couple of years?
Honestly, the biggest shift has been moving away from chasing volume toward being more intentional about whom we are actually trying to reach. We have leaned into ABM, tightened our ICP, and started asking harder questions about whether the content we are producing is reaching the right people at the right time or just generating noise.
One thing that has changed a lot is how we think about content visibility. More and more buyers are starting their research through AI tools rather than traditional search, and if your content is gated or not structured in a way that LLMs can surface, you are effectively invisible. That has pushed us to be more deliberate about ungating high-value assets and thinking about how our content gets cited and referenced, not just ranked.
“We have leaned into ABM, tightened our ICP, and focused on whether our content is reaching the right audience at the right time rather than just creating noise.”
What does a strong GTM motion look like for a technical product like a JVM?
You have to earn credibility before you can earn pipeline. With a technical audience, that means leading with proof, including real benchmark data, honest performance comparisons, and customer stories that are not sanitized to the point of being useless. Technical buyers talk to each other, and if your claims do not hold up, word travels fast.
But the GTM motion does not close on technical credibility alone. At some point, you are talking to a VP of Engineering or a CFO who needs to understand the business case and what this actually saves them or what risk it removes. The campaigns that work for us bridge both. The practitioner trusts the technical depth, and their leadership sees the cost and performance story in terms they care about. Getting that translation right is where a lot of B2B tech marketing falls short.
What’s one thing most B2B GTM teams get wrong about demand gen?
The pattern I see most often is treating the entire market as if everyone is at the same stage. Research consistently shows that at any given time, only around 5% of your market is actively in buying mode. The other 95% are not ready yet. But most GTM teams run the same campaigns at both groups, which means you are either pushing too hard at people who are not ready or being too passive with people who are.
The downstream effect is a volume problem disguised as a pipeline problem. Teams keep increasing lead volume, but conversion rates stay flat because the leads were never the right fit to begin with. The other thing I would flag is the marketing and sales handoff. Buyers today complete most of their research before they ever speak to a salesperson. If your content is not present and credible during that self-serve research phase, you are not even on the shortlist when they are ready to talk.
Any advice for marketers building GTM programs for technical or developer audiences?
Do not try to market to them; genuinely try to be useful. Technical buyers have very good instincts for when content is designed to help versus when it is designed to funnel them somewhere. If everything you publish requires a form fill or ends with a sales CTA, you will lose them before the conversation even starts. The other thing I would say is do not underestimate how much peer influence matters in technical communities. A well-written benchmark report or a genuinely helpful migration guide will travel further than any paid campaign. Create things worth sharing, make them easy to find, including for AI tools, and the pipeline tends to follow.
About Valentina Kovačić
Valentina Kovačić is a seasoned marketing leader with over 20 years of experience in PR, digital marketing, and customer engagement. She leads global marketing strategy across Azul’s Java-focused portfolio, including Payara. Her expertise lies in aligning marketing initiatives with business goals, building data-driven campaigns, and translating complex technical value propositions into compelling narratives that resonate with both technical and executive audiences.
