Measuring the impact of Developer Relations on Revenue

If you've spent any amount of time either in, or within earshot of, a gaggle of Developer Relations (DevRel) professionals, you've probably heard this phrase, or a variation of it:

"DevRel is not {marketing|sales|customer success|insert whatever here}."

I know I've uttered it myself. And the statement wouldn't be wrong. It also couldn't be more wrong. Let me explain.

For many people, DevRel is a practice, a discipline. It's a way of building community with developers using a company's products or services. It's a way of advocating for the community while at the same time advocating for the company. A lot has been written about the importance of DevRel and how it can and should move forward.

But it's also something that is incredibly hard to measure. It's hard to measure the impact of DevRel on the company, and on the community. I spent a little time on that recently, but I wanted to go a little different direction and talk about DevRel's impact on an area no one wants to talk about: Revenue.

DevRel and the bottom line

A friend of mine, Adam Zimman, once said to me, "If you're not building it, you're selling it," and I think that's a great way to think about DevRel and how it fits at a company. For some companies, the DevRel organization is inside of Product or Engineering, where they directly impact the building of the product or service, usually through direct feedback or driving a positive developer experience. For others, DevRel is inside of Marketing where they're really close to the messaging to developers and can act as the "voice of the developer." Often, DevRel will move around over time as the needs and stages (like funding, product, etc.) of the company change.

Wherever it is located, DevRel can bring value to each area. But what is its impact on the bottom line?

One of the first things I did when I joined CircleCI in early 2020 was to start looking into what the Customer journey looked like. During that process, I identified various ways that my team could contribute to the journey a potential customer (developers, DevOps practitioners, etc.) took. What followed was a lot of meetings and interactions with the Marketing Ops team to understand how the existing tooling and processes worked, what the inputs were, and how everything flowed into the reporting (in this case, Salesforce). I then talked to my Demand Generation and Revenue counterparts to identify the reporting and metrics they were using to measure their impact.

What I came away with was a process that helped me not only measure the impact of our activities but also make decisions on what to change or try next time. For example:

• Identify the pipeline generated by an event based on the developers we had conversations with, who participated in a workshop, etc. We then used that pipeline to help understand the company's benefit from the event, and we reported on it.
  • For instance, if we spent $25k on the event (travel, expenses, sponsorship, etc.), then I would look over the next 6-12 months (typical cycle at the time - you might see shorter or longer sales cycles), and see what those leads we were able to generate ended up contributing. In many cases, we would see a net positive return on the investment, often in multiples of 2x or 3x. Other times, we would see a net negative return, and we would need to revisit the event to determine whether or not it made sense to do it again.
• When we reported on the benefit, we would capture things like:
  • Number of DevRel-Qualified Leads (DRQLs) generated
  • Number of big logos we were able to interact with and the connection we made internally for that next conversation to happen
  • Net positive/negative ROI for the event
  • Other things that helped us understand the impact of the event or that provided a specific benefit back to a particular business unit

I do want to stress that I do not, at all, believe or encourage that DevRel should have a KPI for revenue. Once you start driving revenue through DevRel, developers are going to be more hesitant to participate in DevRel activities, and they're going to be more reluctant to join the community if they see that your team is just trying to get sales for the sake of the sale. They know that you work for the company, that the company makes money, and that, ultimately, you want to get paid by the company. But when you put the sale first and the relationship with the developer audience and community second (and even if your product isn't the best thing for them at this time), you're going to see a negative impact on the trust that your Developer Advocates and Community Managers have built, and that will negatively impact the bottom line for a very long time.

However, I believe that DevRel should be taking a closer look at things like Revenue, leads, pipeline, and other metrics to help drive the company to revenue. In times like these, when companies are really taking a hard look at what they spend money on, it's important that DevRel embraces this and starts being able to provide specific examples of what provides value to the company, i.e., what their impact is on the bottom line.

Ways to start tracking

How you track the revenue impact could be different than it was for me because every company is different and uses various tools, processes, etc. The core idea, though, will be the same. So here are some things to think about:

• Talk to your Revenue teams to see how they are reporting on revenue from their specific activities. Talk to your Demand Generation team or the equivalent Marketing team responsible for bringing in the sales pipeline to see how they identify a lead through the customer journey, track it, and assign value and ROI to their activities.
• Talk to your Marketing Ops team or the equivalent team responsible for the tooling (like Marketo and Salesforce) to identify the processes you can use or replicate for your purposes (like Salesforce / Marketo Campaigns, workflows, email segmentation, etc.). Don't recreate the wheel if you can avoid it. Here is a quick example of how I used our Marketing Ops team to help me track the impact of a conference event:
  • The developer community conference didn't provide lead scanners (I hate them, but that's another conversation); instead, we had to generate our own mechanism for tracking leads. We used raffles for things of value that people would want to provide their contact info for ($300 Lego Star Wars sets, Sony noise-canceling headphones, etc.), and on the raffle form, we asked a few questions about how they used CI/CD (which were great data points for our Product teams - HINT HINT ask them what they want to know from users!).
  • We included a question, "Would you like our Sales team to contact you?" and a question, "Would you like to receive developer content and information about upcoming community activities?"
  • After the event, we would sanitize the data (removing dupes, fakes, etc.) and then make sure to mark it with the specific Salesforce campaign for the event, mark it as sourced from the DevRel team, and then depending on the answer to those last 2 questions, they would get routed 1 of 2 ways via Marketo:
  • If they answered "Yes" to the sales question, they would get routed through the CRM pipeline as sales leads. And since they came in from the DevRel team, they were scored higher than just a typical lead.
  • If they answered "Yes" to the Dev Content question, they would get routed through a content-only pipeline and given regular Dev content. But that also meant that if at any time they clicked a specific link or did an activity that put them into a different segmentation, then that activity would still show as being influenced by the DevRel team, and we would be able to track. Once you've talked to the different teams, go back to the Customer journey and fill in any gaps on where you fit in. Then, identify the activities you can perform and how you're going to track them.

Examples like the above helped my team track the impact of our DevRel activities (events, conferences, meetups, content, workshops, etc.) to contribute over $3.5mil of the pipeline while I was there. That didn't count all the connections we made with Partners and how those connections paid off in the future. It would be reasonable to quantify the impact of our work with our Partners and the new connections we made to be 10x+ over the next few years.

One advantage of starting to tie every conversation you have with a developer, a company, a Partner, etc., to a lead or campaign in Salesforce or Marketo is that you can track the impact of that interaction on the revenue pipeline. You'll also be able to see how that interaction influences the bottom line, which means you will have specific data to use to make informed decisions or bolster your case for the value you bring to the company.

As always, don't hesitate to reach out to discuss this topic further.