AMA: Crossbeam Senior Director Product Marketing, Amanda Groves on Developer Product Marketing

Great question. The main differences between these two audiences are their motivations - which impacts deliverability and construction of enablement materials. B2D (Business to Developer) Audience: Cares about technical details, documentation, APIs, directionality of data, etc. B2B (Enterprise) Audience: Cares about usability, implementation, time to value, outcomes. Keep this in mind when creating materials to enable sales for a B2D audience so you show things like: * the flow of information (a good before and after visual could work well here) * API economy: available information and field type * Data directionality * Roadmap These artifacts are critical to cover when enabling a sales team to sell to a developer audience versus enterprise.

My take on this is assess what's already out there before building something new. Your team could benefit from becoming active in preexisting communities, building content for them, or sponsoring workshops instead of building something from the ground up. My example for this is when I was first launching Crossbeam's Slack App to the market and we wanted to educated the app developers about the product. We partnered with Slack and our engineering team to author a series of blogs targeted for the Slack App community. This resulted in a surround effect where we were able to impact the dev community who in turn go their teams excited about the App and increased utilization.

It depends on the organization's GTM motion. My previous company, Crossbeam is hybrid, eg. sales-led and product-led. They drive leads to sales and follow a traditional "funnel" model where certain criteria is met to unlock sales stages. For example - has the contact reached out for a demo or trial? Has marketing qualified the lead? Upon qualification, this account would be marked as a stage 1 opportunity where the sales team would begin their first outreach the pitch and demo. In a sales-led cold outreach scenario - there could be intent signals that trigger engagement from the sales team to developer prospects. In this case I would advise the sellers to lead with "help" not sales., e.g., new regarding the tech / surrounding community. Invitation to join a workshop to learn - etc.

Agnostic of audience, a good product marketer will speak the common language of the audience they are serving. So when listening to the developer target audience via gong or chorus calls, you notice patterns in choice words/value props - it is necessary to weave those points into the overarching narrative. For example, at Crossbeam we are a data collaboration platform and have to navigate complexities in data sharing + information architecture before our customers can get value. We lightly cover the basics in a "how it works" step by step flow to help operations leaders understand data ingest + destinations so the end users can unlock value. TL;DR: conduct listening tours and apply common points of interest to the narrative to provide a consistent story that resonates.

The biggest lesson is don't sleep on the value of community-led when marketing to developers. Developers are curious and care about continuous learning opportunities. Focus on being where they are and sponsoring existing developer communities that they are a part of or create something new. Create workshop environments where they can organically grow their skills with peers. Meet ups also work very well for this persona segment.

It depends on the GTM motion of the company (marketing-led, sales-led, product-led, ecosystem-led). Let me share some examples for each scenario: Marketing-led: * Inbound leads generated from content, performance marketing, events Sales-led: * Conversion rate from MQL -> SAL, closed/won (competitive win rate), referrals Product-led: * Utilization, tour completion, product sign-ups, WAUs Ecosystem-led: * EQLs, partner-sourced/influenced leads (partner referrals) If you're not sure where to start, test one of these metrics in your existing funnel and see how it goes!

The biggest things to keep in mind when selling to enterprise are the concepts of: * Multithreading * ABM * Personalization * peer influence With these three things in mind, for developer segments the fundamentals don't necessarily change - it just becomes more important to index on the things devs care about: * multithreading: info sec, cto, engineering lead * abm: lead with value and outcomes (efficiency metrics, reducing dev load so they can ship faster with less review cycles) * personalization: use intent technologies to serve just in time messaging * peer influence: this audience will research so ensure your third-party review sites are polished/positive and you're active in adjacent developer communities.

It depends on the GTM motion of the company (marketing-led, sales-led, product-led, ecosystem-led). Let me share some examples for each scenario: Marketing-led: * Inbound leads generated from content, performance marketing, events Sales-led: * Conversion rate from MQL -> SAL, closed/won (competitive win rate), referrals Product-led: * Utilization, tour completion, product sign-ups, WAUs Ecosystem-led: * EQLs, partner-sourced/influenced leads (partner referrals) If you're not sure where to start, test one of these metrics in your existing funnel and see how it goes!