Learning from marketing to quantify developer relations impact: Kevin Lewis and John Booth

Summary:

  • Marketing and developer relations teams have similar goals around creating content, messaging, and community engagement, though DEVREL acts more as peers.
  • Terms like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) and ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) help identify and understand your ideal community members.
  • Metrics like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and LTV (Lifetime Value) are important to understand and can be impacted by DEVREL work.
  • Attribution tracking tools allow you to demonstrate the impact of DEVREL on the customer journey and revenue.
  • Long term community building with students is valuable but focus also on short term revenue impact to justify DEVREL's existence.

Date 2023/09/07

Transcript

(00:00) we've got a really interesting topic coming up now because as you know death ra work is really difficult to measure and our next talk is going to be aiming towards making it easier for us and approaching it from a marketing perspective as well as our typical defil analysis and we've got a really nice dynamic duo speaking for us so that is for one the de developer relations person at directus um who's also the director of you got this I think you spoke to us yesterday as well and from the more marketing side or

(00:41) sales side of the perspective we've got the chief marketing officer at Garden for wildlife who has 25 years of marketing and sales under their belt and on the other hand we have 10 years of deeral experience so please a warm welcome for Kevin Lewis and John Booth [Applause] thank you so much you're thank you okay uh thank you for spending some time with us here today this afternoon and that warm welcome uh my name is John Booth I'm currently the CMO of garden for wildlife and before that I was at directus um so when I was before

(01:27) directus I had no experience or exposure to devell teams I had no idea the value they brought what their goals were um and while at dirus I realized I wasn't alone there that my peers also did not understand the value that Dev RS brought and that this highlighted a need to educate um my co-workers and colleagues and also it created the opportunity for Kevin and I to work together together to build a devil team that could then create value for the other teams within the directus organization a few just a couple of

(02:13) words um we put obviously we put this pitch together when I was at dirus back in January I've since left and I'm now the head of marketing at the Garden for wildlife which is not technical um we are all about promoting and increasing the awareness uh the ex the access and the adoption of native plants so if you're interested in promoting native plants come see me afterwards and my name is Kevin I run developer relations at directus where I met John I also run you got this which is a core skills education initiative we ran the track

(02:50) the core skills track downstairs yesterday um if you've not heard of directors we're an open source data platform you connect it to a SQL database we spit out developer API and a nice web UI to make sure everyone across your organization regardless of their technical skill can make the most use out of that data we're really interested in partnering with other developer relations teams around content and building extension so if you want to talk to me about that by all means do after our talk okay so let's um let's

(03:20) talk about the goal of marketing which is somewhat dependent upon your company's business strategy um if you are are a plg Le uh organization you might have a marketing goal where you're generating Revenue through credit card swipes or self- serve activities if you're a part of a larger organization the marketing team might have a responsibility of generating qualified leads for the sales team to turn into Revenue but so while some of the goals May differ the activities that you do are predominantly the same so think

(04:00) about you're creating content often educational content uh you're forming messages messaging around your product and how your product uh solves your customer's problems and then your Distributing that content and that messaging throughout the different channels that you have effectively to your customer base and your prospects or your future customer base and the goals of developer relations teams are largely the same we also create content including education we form messaging around products including how it solves

(04:36) developer needs and we distribute that to our communities now there are a few differences of course firstly we act in the capacity of peers to the people we are speaking to as developers ourselves and also the way we are assessed is also rarely against those same sales goals uh but in reality what we are assessed against is often a lot more subjective and unclear which is a kind of uncomfortable place to be in there are of course other contributions we make to the business around product and tooling uh but in large we are very very similar

(05:08) to our colleagues in marketing and this is the 18th we think edition of devalon but there are still some challenges that are common between our teams and by standing on this stage we're basically obliged by law to remind you of them once again uh one of them is understanding who the ideal Community member is in the eyes of the business secondly how do we Drive positive behavior from the community that could be generating Revenue getting their credit cards out it could also be uh creating a community of peer

(05:39) support So third is how does devil establish or contribute to the revenue within your organization and then lastly how do you know that your team is doing the right things at the right time so the main goal of this talk is to give you the tools and terms that will help you in the parts of your job that are known for being difficult and to show you how other areas of the business are able to show and track their success a little more objectively so what we'd like to do is is create a shared vocabulary that your team can use with

(06:13) other teams in this case sales and marketing teams within your organization so we have 19 minutes and 50 seconds to do that so it's going to be a whirlwind tour and we'll start right now so uh first we want to start with some terms used to describe who is in your community and who you should be targeting the same way that marketing and sales teams Target a persona for selling you should be doing the same building a community that ultimately will prove business value bant is a sales tool that helps salese determine

(06:46) the likelihood of a successful business relationship with a person or an organization and we wanted to talk to you about it so you're thinking about these characteristics and gathering information in a way that not only equips you to help that person more effective ly but also equips your salespeople to have the most productive conversation at the time of handoff so band stands for Budget Authority need and timing and we're actually going to start with authority most decisions in a business uh around adopting Technologies

(07:15) or paying for things are made by more than one person so when you're chatting with someone try and map out what that decision-making group looks like and what this person's role to play in it is and dependent on that mapping you can then be more adap in the conversations that you have with them being adaptive could be the level of detail that you use it could be talking about the business value that your solution brings not just the technical value and it may allow you to equip the person you're

(07:44) speaking to with the knowledge and the materials that they need to go back and ultimately be your Champion when talking with the rest of the people who make a decision so you want to try and determine who the stakeholders are and and ask who's going to be using that technology those end users of the either the project or or whatever it is that you're building next we're going to talk about need and the need describes the importance of the problem that you and your Technologies are helping to solve

(08:17) so firstly you want to understand what that problem actually is what the pain points are and then you can ask what happens if you don't fix it and when you start to unpack this you start to understand the urgency of the problem you also want to understand what else is on this person's plate and their team's plate are there other initiatives that may eventually compete for their attention and their ability to make a decision to use your Technologies you should be asking all of these questions because it's quite often that when

(08:44) developers are coming to you and asking you questions they're not doing so just for study just to learn another tool for their toolkit or a skill for their skill set it's often because there is a need and when there's a need there's often a project so when talking about timing this one is a little tricky and a little different because bant is traditionally used to talk about timing it's a decision or a buying timeline so when is the purchase going to be made but we can kind of extrapolate it out and talk

(09:15) about a project timeline including maybe where your product fits in to that timeline so you can you could also use it to maybe help understand how best you can help that person that you're talking to to like where they are in that decision making and what's the level of urgency of the tasks that they're trying to solve you can simply ask something inquisitive like so when's the project going to launch when you're hoping to get it out the door it at least equips you with some kind of order of magnitude

(09:45) as to the length of the project so all other points in B The Authority the need and the timing are ones that we can use our unique position as inquisitive peers to access people are less suspicious of us but also it genuinely helps us do a better job at helping the person we're speaking to if we understand all of this additional context now budget is an interesting one if someone wants to just give you a number fantastic note it down but that's exceedingly unlikely and my personal belief is that budget the

(10:15) budget item is probably something best not touched as a developer relations professional because it fundamentally changes the type of conversation you're having from one of an inquisitive peer to one of a salesperson so while you might not come out and just ask for a budget much like a salesperson would on on a call you could still ask things like has budget been assigned to this project yet or is it a part of you know the already approved budget yeah so if done well Gathering someone's ban allows you to do a few things

(10:49) firstly it allows you to understand with data how much of your time What proportion of your working hours you are able to spend on an individual or a individuals from a company it helps you be a more active party in the customer Journey it it's also important to remember that when helping someone buy something or selling something to someone that that in itself is a very noble cause so you're if you're the right solution and you're helping someone solve their problem that is something that has value and is a

(11:27) positive thing and I think that Sal tends to get a negative connotation to it but I think that that's more because they're bad salespeople and not because the activity of helping somebody solve their problem is a bad thing yes absolutely and it reminds me of Wesley's talk yesterday including Integrity so as long as you are doing this well and with integrity and your salesp people are good and also have integrity you can help yourselves people ride off of your authenticity and at the point of handoff

(11:59) hand off of a more educated uh and more educated and I suppose disarmed prospect there we go next we're going to talk about the ideal customer profile and this is the perfect customer for everything your company has to offer it's a document that contains things like demographics company size location sector funding also a person's role seniority experience Tex act things like that it it can also include things like their object Ives um their desires kind of the challenges and the pain points that they're experiencing right now

(12:35) where their trusted sources of information are developing an ICP really means understanding why your current customers are using you and that might mean chatting with them and gathering this data if you don't already have it it might not be our job as developer relations professionals to do this but someone has to do this job um if you don't already hold it so there are many things that people often forget about the ICP and one is that this is not a real person this is the ideal so this is what you what would what would be the

(13:14) perfect so what we don't want to do is focus on you know the probable prospects or the possible prospects that aome is a trap that salespeople fall into when they're trying to sell something to anyone so you really want to have as many matching points within your ICP as you know your Community member or the people that you're talking to so the more characteristics they share the more qualified you know the better fit the person might be and for us like it gives us a Vibe right it gives us something to

(13:49) compare our work against it gives us a person to build content and Community initiatives around it also helps us identify which communities we should get involved in based on their audience and which ones are probably yes less likely to yield results for us so with each of your icps you should be identifying kind of the the the answers to these four scenarios that you see here kind of these quadrants within the Matrix so if we start in the upper left we're talking about the before scenario so this is the current state

(14:25) all right and then the negative consequences so what is it that you know what will happen if we don't solve this problem today because there we all live with problems that we just we aren't able to solve today for various reasons so next think about how does your ICP look at the ideal scenario so this is ultimately a scenario that includes Your solution in their future State and then lastly and this is important thinking about the positive not just the positive business outcomes but also those positive personal outcomes for that

(15:05) individual so a small and perhaps conceited example uh using directors right before scenario there's a database I'm not a technical person but I need to run reports against that data regularly to understand whether my team is doing the right thing or not if we're moving the needle uh but at the moment I have to go to an engineer to generate those reports and just make like database queries in this conceited example the consequences are sometimes I'm not their priority there's other things going on

(15:33) people are sick or on leave and I don't get the reports I need to help my team understand what's happening well an ideal scenario would then be a one where I can generate those reports myself the positive business outcomes is I always have a report I can always uh you know justify the value in my team and so on perhaps the personal positive outcomes is at the time of a performance review I intend on using this successful project to negotiate a promotion arrays and so on so when you're putting together or

(16:01) you're talking about your icps make sure you include not only kind of the demographics and the characteristics that we were talking about but also kind of the answers to the quadrants these four quadrants that we see here in this Matrix now we believe in the value of working with a wide reaching Community people at all levels of experience but we are in a market that doesn't really appreciate that as much as we do and to have the opportunity to do right by those people we have to be more intentional now in

(16:31) the direction of Revenue otherwise we don't have jobs and to have a seat at the table that helps everyone you need to have access to the building and this is the key reason we're talking today about bant and the ICP Okay so we've gone through bant and we've gone through the ICP and so now I want to introduce you to a couple of terms that are used to describe your customer's Financial characteristics all right and the first one is is CAC so this is the customer acquisition cost so these are the overall costs that your

(17:07) organization spends to acquire one new customer so it would include things um that you would expect paid advertisements events sponsorships things like that it might include um the cost of producing content certainly it'll include salaries salaries for your team your sales teams your marketing team maybe you have Consultants Etc and the thing about CAC is that all companies calculate it differently so they have different categories and they have different percentages that they assign from different teams so while

(17:46) those are going to be different from company to company you know you can look at these categories which often have very large totals with them when you start thinking about marketing teams and sales te teams and devil teams and all of their salaries so if we just take an example of let's say we have a project that has a total cost of $10,000 and through that project or that activity we generate a hundred new customers in that scenario we would have a CAC of $100 so what's important here is as Devils all of your activities have

(18:25) an impact on CAC and that is either by increasing those costs or decreasing those costs so what might this look like for a devil team well things that cost money are easy things like salaries tooling and Equipment sponsorships and our own events and initiatives your salary is interesting because it starts to bring your time into the equation what is your effective hourly rate of your job and are you spending it effectively there are also ways of course which we can decrease the CAC working on projects that are really

(18:56) popular and bring more people into the awareness of your product or company and also establishing a community of practice of peer support meaning you can spend a little less time perhaps answering questions so where you spend your time establishing your ICP and your community members bant that's going to go they're going to go together hand inand and if you do a good job in the ICP and bant work the odds are that you're going to spend more time in your community and have a positive impact on your CAC

(19:35) metrics and some other Financial metrics that we'll talk about in just a second and it's important here you don't need to know all of the inputs of your CAC because it's a very broad calculation but you do need to ask and you need to understand what's the algorithm what's the equation that's being used because with that understanding then you can understand how you can lower those costs so you're also not going to have control over all of those costs and and that's also all right but just the exercise of

(20:13) understanding the CAC and how it's calculated is going to make you more intentional in the work that you are doing within your devil teams so if we think about the impact in being intentional okay the next term that we want to talk about is LTV or lifetime value so let's take another example you're at a software firm a company that has um a software product that you sell for $10 a month the average customer stays with you for 15 months you you have a lifetime customer value of $150 okay so why is this important right well

(20:58) knowing the LTV that allows you to strengthen your case for making longer term or larger investments in your team so if we go back to our $10 a month subscription you might think well I can't spend more than $10 a month acquiring this customer my CAC needs to be below $10 but that's not the case once you know that your LTV is $150 you know that you can spend more than just that one month subscription price so there are some Universal benchmarks that companies use so if you're looking at LTV to CAC ratio so

(21:41) lifetime value to customer acquisition costs if you are in a ratio of 3 to 5x LTV to CAC you're in a good to a very good position so you know my ask to you is if if you don't know what your LTV is right now this should be one of the first things that when you come back when you go back to work that you ask someone within your sales or your marketing or organization hey what's our LTV and and they should know just off of the back of the hand like oh and be able to tell you this LTV is obviously on the

(22:20) scale of your entire business relationship right through to the end but there are also smaller periods that are often looked at monthly and your recurring Revenue they're kind of what they sound like but we want to equip you with these terms because dependent on your organization's age or maturity you might not they might not yet have a solid view on what that entire lifetime value looks like and these numbers can be used as somewhat of a proxy uh to understanding what you can spend so understanding that the the LTV

(22:54) and how you have an impact on that so if we think about that so as devs that what what could that be well it could be getting customers to use multiple products or increasing the usage of your product within a customer it could be making your product stickier so that your customers stay around longer you know Devil's your teams have the opportunity to impact all three of these different areas you know it could be supporting developers and the implementers in the beginning of a project it could be you know increasing

(23:31) educational materials you know so the important thing here is to you likely have large projects that you want to fund and these projects probably have timelines that span quarters or maybe even years and thinking about those projects and how they're going to impact your LTV might be exactly what you need to position those projects to make them more attractable and more likely to get funding so what just to repeat again you don't re like you don't need to really obsess over these numbers but you do

(24:12) need to understand roughly how they are derived and how your work positively and negatively impacts them and the reason these particular metrics are really important is because is because when push comes to shove you will be assessed against the performance of marketing and sales teams who use these very quite objective quantifiable numbers and so we should be doing the same too so there is at least a fair you know a fair chance that our teams are assessed uh on the same merits and all of this talk is predicated on the idea that you actually

(24:44) get credit when you do a good job uh a good job is one that either makes the business money or saves the business money so the final quick concept is attribution from the very very first time someone hears about your brand through to the end of your business relationship people in your company are working to increase the revenue uh to support rather revenue and that could be anything from sales calls uh ad campaigns webinars but it is also strong documentation events Community initiatives and toolings your team and

(25:14) your company is well served by understanding what is having an impact along that customer journey and in order to do that you need tools and a practice of tracking uh the attribution so there are lots of tools that you can use to track attribution and different teams use different ones marketing teams often use HubSpot sales teams might use Salesforce um common room is another great tool to use they're here today so we're not here to tell you what tools to use but what we but what we do want you to understand is

(25:52) that today your company is attributing revenue to activities and and it could be something as informal as your CEO's gut feeling and that is where the results are coming from so it's your job to understand how this is being calculated and use that understanding to go out and fund your projects you need to be a part of the conversation ultimately here to get a slice of the pie and the pie tastes like keeping your job and I quite want a slice of that pie and I think you probably do as well so so when Kevin joined the directus team

(26:33) one of the first things that we started talking about was where he was going to focus and he talked about you know his team working on these longer term views and and longer larger projects and one of the first things I asked him was well what's the impact on the CAC for our directus customers and how does this translate to you know an improved or or a greater LTV and and so we started spending time working on this and ultimately that was the Genesis for the talk that we're giving today we like to use this term it's all about the long

(27:09) term we'll see the results in the long term and we know that in our hearts but our companies don't really care about that having an ICP and understanding your community ban means you are being intentional and if you are intentional in the direction of Revenue you will positively impact the CAC and the LTV and that when the hard times come is what your companies actually care about we thank you for your time here today and please remember if you're in the states and you'd like to plant native

(27:36) plants come and see me afterwards excellent thank you thank you all right all right thank you so much for the talk I think we have time for one or two questions if there's anyone in the audience yeah in very large organizations where this information can can be sometimes obscured behind a lot of layers do you have any advice on where to go or like how to find that information I would say if um if we're talking about large um public institutions or Enterprises Salesforce Salesforce okay so um anyone within your

(28:20) Finance team is going to know um certainly your sales leadership will absolutely know you your cacs and your ltvs and um you know odds are your marketing team you know knows it as well because that's what they're using to justify their their budget and spend you also only have to go up so many levels until you reach a peer at a at a senior enough level who has a much better Insight so it might not be that your you know director of devil P VP devil knows it that their manager might or their manager might and you just have to keep

(28:50) marching up that chain until you get the numbers that you need uh hello uh so a part of the conversation that we have yesterday during the opening was about students and how sticky getting to students in an early stage was for their tools so I wonder talking about that does getting to early stage developers increases their lifetime value or how do you measure that I would I I think personally I think that you all are the key to the future of sales and marketing um and and that's why I was so uh excited to be

(29:27) here because it was in a slide presentation yesterday where someone said that developers are a part of the buying decision and that is so true and it's the way that people are building things today the earlier that you can get introduced to the people that are the builders the better and and the more opportunity they'll have to then use your product so I would say yes that will increase the lifetime value of it and I think it can even be in those projects that are the hobby projects because we as we saw yesterday those are

(30:11) often those leading indicators to what is coming into the production environments I don't know if you have anything else to add all of this is all of this working on people who aren't going to pay off right now is a ratio thing you can't throw all your eggs in the basket that doesn't pay off for ages otherwise no one will see return in a reasonable enough time and your and your initiative could be disbanded um I also believe that kind of building that trust in nice and early uh does build that

(30:38) loyalty that I imagine could positively impact LTV but now you have something to measure against now you can say given a sample of people who we haven't spoken to a students and given a sample that does are these people more likely to have an higher LTV and use that to justify long-term success unfortunately that whole thing is obviously quite a long-term play right so it's all about ratios in the [Music] meantime