AMA: Salesforce Director Product Marketing (Heroku), Srini Nirmalgandhi on Developer Product Marketing

Pricing is hard, especially when the product price has to extract the maximum customer willingness to pay and still leaves some customer value. There is plenty of resources on the web you can find and I don’t want to recommend anything here. From my experience, here are a few things that will be helpful when pricing your B2B product. Good research from interviews and surveys from existing / potential customers, supplemented by consulting firms’ pricing models is a great start. Trade-offs between long-term commit vs discount are a must. Keep the pricing window open for sales leaders to build customer relationships by offering personalized pricing terms. Think of other levers such as modules, solution / vert-based, marketplace, live support, etc. to customize pricing to maximize customer value. If there are multiple distribution channels, channel conflicts (with price, sales incentives, product availability, etc.) are to be addressed so your customers benefit the most. Analyst / third-party firms’ research report on pricing and TCO / ROI analysis is a good asset to validate your product pricing and move customer conversation towards value-based. As a growing developer tools or platform company, you want to think about ensuring your pricing packaging strategy can grow as your customers grow and your company grows. You want to make sure your pricing is approachable for any legitimate business that wants to solve business problems using your products and solutions while ensuring you have the safeguards in place to protect from abuse or onboarding lots of low-value, non-commercial customers.

To keep it simple, it’s important to have metric-based goals and channels to reach your target audience i.e. developers. The goals of these campaigns could be awareness, trial signups, sales lead, adoption, contribute to your open source project, or a combination of the above, etc. Content has some dependency on the channel, whether it’s social media, email, events, etc. In collaboration with your demand gen/growth marketing team, you can build a matrix of campaign goals vs channels to get a quantitative / ROI view on the programs that are resonating with your audience, tests to be run, and areas that could use additional help.

Key elements to building a developer marketing program are – relevant jargon-free content, a good understanding of target persona, segment developers based on business context, hands-on trial with access to expert support, medium for interaction i.e. communities, the ability for the audience to contribute - just to name a few. The emphasis of the program shouldn’t be about marketing, rather it’s more of creating awareness, build transparent communication, listening to devs, and helping them to innovate faster. As marketers, we articulate how our products are solving business problems. Developers are the strongest influencers and if we can make them a champion for our products internally in their organizations, that is a huge success for the developer marketing program. In most cases, a single piece of content may not resonate with both developers and dev leaders / CxOs and that’s okay. You can have a bottoms-up campaign to cater to developers through a developer marketing program and a tops-down campaign targeting enterprise leaders, thereby delivering on your business goals.

If you are targeting developer mindshare and attention, be ready to discuss your product in a detail-oriented, transparency-driven way and explain the business value for their situation. So naturally, for being successful in developer product marketing one has to put the product first when talking to developers, not marketing. Typical product marketing managers are great with up-leveling the conversation which might not always work in their favor with developers. Developers generally are well aware of equivalent/substitute products that exist in the marketplace, so developer product marketing managers require an additional inquisitiveness to go beyond their domain and hit refresh fast to be relevant with their developer conversations. Focus on building your PMM skills and then supplement them with good product knowledge (maybe even hands-on) would be really helpful in building a developer product marketing career.

This is a classical problem for many developer-first companies. Without mentioning names, many have successfully figured out the working model with both strong developer engagement alongside a thriving enterprise revenue stream. Learning from these companies, they always focus on the developer success by doing things such as corporate hackathons, architect support, engineering blogs, etc. that helps to build advocacy for their products. It will be hugely beneficial if the sales enablement programs can incorporate a developer-first mindset by acknowledging that developers are the key influencers in the sales cycle. That will then navigate the sales conversation away from selling towards minimizing the friction in the sales process. Developers use your tools for speed and scale to solve their problems but as the company/usage of the product grows, enterprise buyers ask for justification/business value for these products. As a developer product marketer, in addition to educating developers, you have to enable the sales enablement teams to engage in value discussions to justify the premium compared to DIY from the open-source distribution / low-cost providers.