How Salesforce’s Product Marketing Team Built a Comprehensive Enterprise Marketing Strategy for Developer Tools

About the Company

As part of Salesforce’s ecosystem, Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to build, deploy, and manage applications easily. It provides a platform for developers to deploy and scale applications without worrying about infrastructure management. Heroku supports various programming languages and frameworks, making it a popular choice for developers looking for a platform to host and run their applications. 

The needs to promote our platform to Developers

In March 2022, Salesforce found itself determined to show higher value to our customers and elevate its business through stronger promoting the Heroku platform to developers. The trigger was the post-COVID economy, which left our pipeline weaker than we desired. We saw an opportunity to leverage our existing customer base and focus on driving profitability while increasing revenue.

There were two main factors in place that led us to kick off this project: 

1. We wanted to capitalize on the momentum of the economy's recovery and take advantage of the growing interest in our offerings. 

2. We saw an opportunity to expand our customer base, particularly by growing existing customers into enterprise deals. 

We believed that by effectively demonstrating the value we could deliver, we would be better positioned to close larger deals and enhance customer loyalty. Measuring success was a critical aspect, and we set our sights on several key performance indicators (KPIs). 

The project was not just about executing marketing tactics, but also establishing with our customers. Partnering with our customers on marketing initiatives would create mutually beneficial opportunities. This collaborative approach not only strengthened our relationship with customers but also allowed us to amplify our brand reach through their networks.

To be successful, we worked with the following stakeholders:

• Product Marketing (4 PMMs were on the team)

• Product Team

• Sales Team

• Solutions Engineering Team

• Marketing functions beyond PMM

  • Demand Gen

  • Events Team

  • Analytics

  • Sales Enablement

Goals:

Our success metrics were 

1) pipeline growth: we aimed for number of stage 3 opportunities (opportunities that are midway in the sales funnel) generated and also measured qualified leads with a high probability to close 

2) new relationships with customers: we measured the number of new relationships built at the customer (ABM-like) and our level of engagement (e.g. could we ues them for co-marketing? Could we invite them to the customer advisory board?)

3) overall revenue generated: we measured ACV and ARR uplift

Framework

Within developer-first companies, the journey often begins with enthusiastic developer adoption, driven by a product-led growth (PLG) approach, which allows developers to easily sign up and start using the product for their projects without requiring approvals.

You need a Bottoms-Up and Tops-Down approach

However, a challenge presents itself here: developers aren't fond of marketing. But you still need to sell to them and the companies they represent. My strategy to navigate this challenge is two-pronged.

First, there needs to be a bottoms-up approach. Start with the developers and map out their journey and gradually work your way up to the enterprise level. This approach allows you to gain a solid foundation and gradually grow your influence within the company. This requires mapping the entire customer journey: how different personas enter the journey, how and why they progress in their journey to ultimately utilize all your product features, and how you design growth plays to move cohorts of users along the journey. 

Diagram: Customer Journey

Simultaneously, a top-down approach should also be in place. This involves using enterprise sales to gain a seat at the table and the mind-share of the company hierarchy, such as the VP of IT, VP of Apps, VP of Engineering, and so on.

The key is to have these two motions running concurrently in the company. You'd see this strategy reflected in everything you do. When these two strategies nicely fit together, that's when marketing comes into play.

The ultimate goal is to unify these two strategies, creating a robust pipeline and a revenue stream for the company. The customer journey will help identify which entry point should be top-down and which should be bottom-up.

Remember, this is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. You need to look at the person, understand the business, think of the business, and solve it. This approach might seem daunting, but it's certainly helpful and can lead to significant results.

Principles for Marketing to Developers

Here are my key principles:

1. When targeting developers, understand that they may not be your primary buyer, especially for enterprise-level solutions. Instead, they are influencers in the purchase process.

2. Developers prefer learning to being marketed to. Instead of webinars, consider hosting hands-on workshops.

3. Understand your customer journey. Are customers starting with developer tools from day one, or do they onboard your existing software and then graduate to the developer platform?

4. Keep a healthy mix of technical people and core marketers in your team. Over-indexing on one or another may yield an underwhelming program.

Diagram: Principles for Marketing to Developers

By following these steps and keeping these insights in mind, you can effectively navigate the increasingly developer-led landscape.

Through this framework, we successfully bridged the gap between developer love and enterprise success, providing a roadmap for product marketers to unleash the full potential of their developer-first products and turn them into flourishing enterprise solutions.

7-Step Process to a successful Enterprise Product Marketing for Developer Products 

Our approach  followed 7 key steps:

• Building the Customer Journey: Understanding the entry points and growth path for customers to maximize product value.

• Defining Growth Plays: Crafting strategic initiatives to propel customers forward within the product ecosystem.

• Identifying the Propensity List: Analyzing usage patterns to identify promising candidates for growth plays.

• Getting Sales Validation: Collaborating with sales leaders to gain approval and direction for growth plays.

• Scaling to Sales Team via Sales Enablement: Empowering the sales team with compelling content and stories on growth plays.

• The Nurture Deal Clinic: Creating office hours and deal clinics to support sales with deal-specific insights.

• Promoting in Marketing Channels: Highlighting growth plays in outbound events and marketing efforts to drive demand

Throughout this whole process, measurement and metrics were fundamental. We closely tracked our progress and measured our success, allowing us to continually adjust and improve.

Diagram: 7-Step Process to a Successful Enterprise Product Marketing for Developer Products