DISCLAIMER: No, I don’t believe I’m the universe’s gift to DevRel. I don’t have all the answers, all the skills, or even all the Pokemon. What I have is my experiences, collected over the 11 years I’ve been doing this work. That – my experiences and observations – are what I’m sharing in this series.
Sales. Demand Generation. Product Marketing. Technical Marketing. Plain old MARKETING-Marketing.
And then there’s Developer Relations.
Depending on the company, the leadership, and sometimes the season, DevRel might be slotted into any one of those silos. Or more than one. Or all of them. For my money, it kind of doesn’t matter – at least not nearly as much as how the functions of a DevRel advocate fit into the overall conversation with the target audience, and how those conversational moments are carried over from one to the other.
Maybe Demand Gen sets the direction, and Product Marketing (PMM), Marketing, and Sales follow their lead.
Maybe Marketing creates the message and the other groups build on it.
Maybe… well, maybe a lot of things. But I’ve been doing this a while and (with the caveat at the top of this post firmly in mind) I’ve hit upon a structure that allows each group to play to its strengths and more importantly creates a consistent and coherent “thread” of conversations with customers, prospects, and users.
Top of Funnel: DevRel
At the top of the conversational funnel – meaning the broadest approach, the most varied set of topics, and (perhaps most importantly) the most vendor-agnostic type of conversation – sits DevRel. Their job – my job (our job if you’re also in DevRel) – is to talk about the problems, issues, and experiences faced by IT practitioners.
The goal at this stage is to tell a story (not a fiction, but rather a narrative of an experience) that is so credible, so real-world, so on-the-nose that the reader has an almost visceral reaction:
OH MY DOG, that was ME last week! Were you looking in the window of my office?!? What did you do next????
At that point, I might simply focus on the problem, leaving the solution up in the air. I’ve written about this before as part of the Texas Sharpshooter technique.
Or I might write about a an actual solution, putting it into the most vendor-agnostic terms. Even if the screenshots show my employer’s software, there’s a bit of latitude because my toolbox has to have SOMETHING in it, and these are just the tools I happen to have at my disposal. The key is to talk about the problem, the solution, and the techniques without mentioning the tool.
Same Story, More Detail: PMM
Product Marketing Managers are – in my (not so) humble opinion – close relatives to the evangelist / developer relations advocate role described in the previous section. They should have just as much technical acumen, and should understand the problem space and the user personas just as well.
In a different world, the PMM could write the same story as the evangelist. In fact, that’s exactly what they SHOULD do, with one tweak.
“Last week, Leon wrote about (some particular problem). He brought up a lot of good points, but he wasn’t exactly specific about how to go about solving it in a particular tool – OUR tool, in fact. So today I want to revisit that blog but offer up some advice on how you can fix this issue, in XYZ’s software. Let’s get started…”
Presuming the reader is coming to this blog having read the first one (or if they take a moment to read it now), the PMM has effectively earned the privilege to be vendor-specific. By virtue of their click, the reader has bought into the idea that THIS blog (compared to the last one) is going to talk about a product, feature, or module.
Offer More Value: Demand Gen
So “Demand Generation” (or just “Demand Gen”) is, as the name would imply, the group that finds ways to get people into the sales funnel. While part of that job lies in promoting the content generated by the previous two sections, another action they can take is to track the folks who interact with those pieces and reach out to them directly, offering – no, NOT a sales pitch – but rather another “gift of knowledge”. That might be a whitepaper, related blog post or video, an ebook, an upcoming webinar, or something similar.
It builds on the understanding that
“You’ve engaged with us on a specific topic, here are some additional ideas, use-cases, and solutions that we help you with.”
At this stage, Demand Gen is both broadening the conversation and narrowing the funnel – helping the audience to self-select whether they are only interested in a single specific problem or use-case, or if their needs extend beyond that, into the realm of things a company would pay money to fix, if a solution was available.
Close The Conversation: Sales
“Sales”, as a concept, doesn’t require much elaboration. What I want to emphasize is that, as the final stage of the previous sequence, it is a lot less intrusive and a lot more natural than other types of sales interactions.
If the reader/audience has been engaged to this point, a call or email from sales makes sense. There’s a context to the conversation and, once again, the individual has more or less agreed that this is the next logical step. There’s no guarantee, of course, but there’s much less time that has to be spent on what the company does, what problems the prospective user is having, and so on. That all is a known quantity, because it was validated in the previous stages of this funnel.
The Mostly Unnecessary Summary
This framework is, (somewhat) obviously, not fool proof. It’s not the One True Sales Funnel that will win you the client every time. It is – much like the software your company sells – another valuable tool in your tool belt.
But if you believe in speaking to users with an authentic, human voice; in telling stories that are problem-forward and put the user’s needs first, then it’s a framework you probably ought to consider.
