Sales | Meghan Gill

Nov 29 2012

Lead Generation with Developers

Traditional marketing strategies may not be applicable when dealing with a more discerning audience — such as software developers — in a field being transformed by social media and new communication channels. B2B marketers are measured on leads and pipeline generated for the sales team. But how do you generate pipeline without alienating your users in the developer community?

The old school approach to lead generation is to put a registration wall in front of everything. If you want access to a white paper or piece of content, you have to provide your contact information. But I’ve seen gated content result in dozens of junk addresses, immediate unsubscribes, and annoyed community members who rant on Twitter. And that is just what I see — I’m sure countless others felt irritated by the request but didn’t express their displeasure.

In the early days of JBoss, users had to provide their email address in order to access JBoss docs. At the time, developers were willing to provide their email addresses because they knew that they’d get value in return. This registration process was a key driver of leads into JBoss’s sales funnel. Today the idea of gating crucial documentation seems counter-productive, but I think that is because vendors have found better ways to provide value to users such that prospects want to share their information.

Lead Generation Strategies

So if you can’t gate content, what approaches keep a developer community happy while also gathering leads that you can nurture? Here are some things that I’ve seen that work very well.

Provide a free service or trial

Developers are tinkerers, and they like to try new things. Once the developer has signed up for a free trial, you have the opportunity to continue to nurture that lead and encourage continued use of the service. Twilio has nailed this approach, presenting a cool demo of API at hackathons and then offering credit to use their service.

Encourage opt-ins for targeted content

Content can still be a great approach for generating leads. However, rather than taking the risk of irritating your potential user base by automatically gating all your content, consider an opt-in approach by asking users to subscribe for updates on relevant content.

For example, when users download MongoDB, we don’t require that they provide their contact information because we want the download-and-get-started experience to be as frictionless as possible. Instead, we start the download and then display a web form asking if the user is interested in receiving updates on MongoDB and notifications about local events in their area.

Organize great events

Developers love meeting up. It’s a really wonderful and unique thing about people who build software as I’ve never seen any other professional group with such an active and diverse conference and meetup scene. If you organize an event with interesting content developers will register and attend. By keeping your events focused on technology you will build credibility within the community. Seeing colleagues at these events also provides validation that your company and/or product is interesting to other developers.

Allow the community to provide feedback

There are many great tools such as Jira or UserVoice where users can provide direct feedback on your service. The users gain the opportunity to request, vote on, and discuss features. You get great product feedback as well as a way to capture user information. It’s a win for everyone.

Give away swag

I love the simple web form on Kinvey’s website: I want a sticker. This is a low cost, easy way to build a lead database and get developers to decorate their laptops with your logo!

Join the online education revolution

10gen recently launched an online education platform in collaboration with edX to provide MongoDB training. Within a few weeks of announcing our developer and DBA course, we had 30,000 enrollments. While this is a very new program for us, I think it will end up being one of our greatest marketing innovations. We’ve not only captured thousands of email addresses, but we are engaging these users over a multi-week course with interesting materials and exercises for learning MongoDB. I am curious to see how this will influence our sales pipeline over time.

The Takeaway: Provide Value

While all of these approaches to lead generation are different, there is a common theme across them all. Provide great value and developers will give you their contact information.

Once you’ve got someone’s contact information, that’s when the hard work begins. Don’t break the trust by launching into a sales pitch. Nurture your community with great technical content while gently introducing your product and services.

I don’t think that 10gen is perfect at any of this, but I aspire to generate leads through programs that nurture our community. It’s an interesting challenge.

Oct 26 2012

4 Comments

Community, Events, Marketing, Sales

Measuring ROI on developer event sponsorship

I am consistently impressed by the number of great technology conferences, hackathons, and meetups organized directly by their communities. Organizers bootstrap the event with support from universities, corporations recruiting developers, and companies like 10gen that offer technology products and services.

Since 10gen frequently falls into the categories above, organizers of these grassroots events contact me about supporting them through sponsorship. Hence I thought that I would provide some insight into the evolution of my thinking when it comes to investing in community events.

When I joined 10gen, we were completely focused on adoption, educating the community about MongoDB, and gaining traction. We spoke at local user groups and any conferences that would be interested in learning about NoSQL. We sponsored events to get exposure, but we had a tiny marketing budget so I always negotiated the lowest tier.

As the company grew and hired a sales team, it became necessary to think more critically about how we invest our marketing dollars into developer events. We also had lead generation targets to meet, and events seemed like a great way to accomplish that. It soon became clear that we needed to be more systematic in how we evaluated participation in events.

Initially, it was tempting to measure the success of our participation in an event by looking at the number of leads we gathered, and the subsequent activity. Leads are a concrete, measurable metric, and we can clearly track the conversion to a sales opportunity. This approach biased us towards doing larger sponsorships where we could have a booth. When we have had booths at events, we are able to scan visitors, get their contact information, and sell to them. And with a bigger marketing budget, it seemed logical that we invest in a larger presence at events.

However, after investing in many expensive trade shows, it became evident that the value of a few hundred email addresses couldn’t justify the tens of thousands of dollars that we would have to spend on a booth rental, travel, handouts, and staff time. In addition, the people we met in these booths were generally new to MongoDB. I felt that the conversations we had were valuable for adoption, but most of the leads were not ready for a conversation with a sales rep.

Anecdotally, I knew that the interactions at these events were having an impact. For example, at a MongoDB conference this year, I spoke with a large enterprise customer who told me that they first heard about MongoDB at OSCON two years prior, when one of my colleagues presented. We didn’t sponsor that year, so our investment was just travel and time. It was impossible to track that particular conversion, but that presentation was clearly crucial to that customer’s adoption of MongoDB.

We needed a broader framework for measuring value of each component of event participation. For each event, we started to look at all of the benefits of participation, and assign monetary values to them. What is it worth to us to have 100 people sitting in a room listening to a presentation about MongoDB? How about an attendee speaking with an engineer? How many of those conversations can we have at an event? What’s the value of everyone at the conference going home with a MongoDB coffee mug?

We enumerate each of the items of value associated with participating in the event, assign dollar values, estimate the number of impressions, and total. We then compare to the cost and use this data to prioritize the events. We try to align our budget according to the company expansion and sales goals, so that we are investing in the right territories and so that we don’t end up spread too thin.

Interestingly, I feel that we’ve come full circle: we started as a scrappy startup doing small sponsorships, talking to people at user groups, networking in the hallway track. We experimented with bigger events, but came to the conclusion that the real value of events isn’t in a huge booth, but in the meaningful interactions that we have with individuals. It’s harder to measure this, but it’s a philosophy that is increasingly informing my thought process. Over time, I have started to internalize the values from this model and it’s immediately evident the type of investments we should make.

Based on this model, our approach is increasingly shifting from large trade shows to supporting lots of small community events with small sponsorships. When we participate in an event, we emphasize sending the right speaker and encourage them to work the hallway track. I think that this approach maximizes our reach.

In the next few weeks, I will write a follow up post about how we measure the value of our MongoDB conferences, using some more concrete values.

Aug 08 2012

Open Source Business Part 1: Benefits of Open Source

MongoDB users frequently ask me how 10gen and other open source companies make money. I thought that I’d share a bit about how open source businesses work in a series of blog posts. The series will be broken into roughly three parts:

Benefits of the open source model
Ways to monetize open source
How to build an effective sales and marketing machine

In this post, I’ll address the benefits of building a company around open source software.

Adoption

Making your product free is an excellent marketing strategy. In many ways, the open source model is a version of the “freemium” model that companies such as LinkedIn have embraced. Most people use LinkedIn as a free professional networking tool, but recruiters and sales reps pay a premium to get access to additional features and services. Making LinkedIn a free service enabled the network to gain critical mass so that paid versions would provide significant value to recruiters and sales professionals.

Similarly, at 10gen, most of our customers started using MongoDB because of an independent decision by a developer. The developer builds a prototype, and once it’s working the management team asks how its built. At that point, the management team sees a working app and starts asking about support and services for the underlying technology. In this way, open source technology enters large enterprise through the “back door” via an internal advocate on the development team.

Shorter sales cycle and lower cost of customer acquisition

Because open source software tends to be introduced by developers, by the time companies start talking to an open source vendor, they’ve already decided to use the software. The conversations with the sales team are about the services the vendor offers, rather than the software itself. Hence, sales cycles can be quite short — typically weeks or months.

For proprietary software companies, the first interaction with a prospect is usually much earlier in the decision cycle. A sales rep would approach someone in the management hierarchy about doing a proof of concept using the software product. In this scenario, the selection of software is a top-down decision that can take several quarters or even years to close. These long sales cycles expose vendors to a high degree of risk. They are time consuming and if the deal doesn’t close, the costs are sunk.

Open source sales reps manage many smaller prospective customers across a high-volume of transactions. At open source companies, inbound interest comprises the majority of the sales leads (i.e. people completing a “contact us” form requesting information about pricing). Sales and marketing must focus on scoring and prioritizing a high volume of leads over cold calling or outbound prospecting.

It’s true that many users will continue to use the open source software without paying for services. In that case, the sales rep can quickly and easily move on to the next prospect.

Feedback and Contribution

Open source businesses also have reduced R&D costs. Providing feedback is an important part of the social contract in open source. The user community is extremely willing to provide feedback on features, report bugs, and even contribute fixes. While many users may never pay a vendor for services, the majority of users will contribute to the overall ecosystem and create value for both the vendor and the overall community.

Partners

For any software startup, a key to success is building partnerships with software vendors and systems integrators. Partners help you reach new audiences and deliver services more effectively. Integration with other vendor technologies enables long-term traction.

Partners are much more likely to invest technology with a large community of users, regardless of whether those users pay. Offering your software for free makes it much easier to create a critical mass of users, and, in turn, attract partners who can further proliferate your software.

Free software disrupts entrenched players

When established vendors dominate a market, an open source company has an opportunity to disrupt the market by offering a high-value alternative at a lower price point. Vendors like 10gen can afford to charge lower prices because they benefit from shorter sales cycles and reduced R&D costs through community feedback. Closed source companies cannot afford to lower their pricing as their whole business model depends on charging customer licensing fees. (For more on this topic, you should read Max Schireson’s excellent blog on the value-based pricing trap.)

As I mentioned above, open source software is usually introduced at enterprises through an internal developer champion. In companies accustomed to paying expensive licensing fees, demonstrated cost savings from using open source on a single project can be very powerful. That project becomes the beachhead from which the open source vendor can start to penetrate other groups within the company, and ultimately replace entrenched closed source vendors.

In my next post, I’ll outline monetization strategies across several open source companies.

Feb 12 2012

WebFWD Presentation on Building an Open Source Community & Business: Lessons from MongoDB

I recently had the opportunity to present to the Mozilla WebFWD program. WebFWD is a Mozilla incubator for startups building businesses around open source software. I talked to the group about how we are building the MongoDB community and ultimately, the 10gen business. My talk is now featured on the Mozilla blog, and I think that they actually did a better job of summarizing my points than I would:

Pivoting from being a Platform provider to being a database provider.
Getting people to “pay for free software” by developing revenue models around support, training and subscriptions, etc.
Treating support “as the most important marketing.”
Scaling their community by breaking it out geographically, achieving a multiplier effect: in Meghan’s words, “We see our community as a product manager.
Growing from zero sales reps to a position where they are now investing in their sales & marketing team over the past 1.5 years (12-15 sales reps worldwide today).
Managing and prioritizing large volume of users and lead flow that comes from being an open source project.

You can watch the entire talk on the WebFWD blog.

Meghan Gill

On Community Management, Open Source, Marketing, and More

Category Archives: Sales