🍐#88: Learnings on pipeline and sales from Datadog, dev tool growth toolkit, and two tweaks to self-reported attribution

Hey,

One of the readers sent me this awesome pear meme🍐.
I love it, thank you Mariia!

This week on the agenda:

• Growth toolkit and other resources from Product-Led Geek

• Learnings on pipeline and sales from Datadog CMO

• Two tweaks to self-reported attribution

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Growth toolkit and other resources from Product-Led Geek

Ben Williams is a dev tool growth advisor and the content he’s been putting out has been incredibly helpful to me. After getting Ben as an advisor we 3x our activation numbers. Yeah. Wouldn’t be surprised if he forgot more about growth than I have ever learned ;).

In that post above, which got super viral recently, he shared a resource that contains:

• Growth Process Blueprint

• Growth Database (Notion template)

• Growth Loop Template and Examples

• Impact and Learnings Templates

• Friction Logging Database and Template

• And more

Actionable, relevant, useful. Just go to the LinkedIn post, drop a comment, and get a link.

His newsletter plg.news is one of a few that I actually read. I learn something new every time. And his articles on the ”Growth Product State Model” and the ”Guide to Product Engagement” changed how I look at growth and made things click for me.

So if you are looking for help around activation, engagement, and monetization in the context of PLG dev tools, I really cannot think of a better advisor than Ben. Seriously, my #1 recommendation by far.

BTW, we also wrote ”The Ultimate Guide to building Developer Tool Websites” together which I keep sharing time and time again where we combined our learnings. Good stuff.

2. Two tweaks to self-reported attribution

You often hear me talk about self-reported attribution. “How did you hear about us?” and all that. I know it is not perfect but unless you are going for MMM modeling (which has its problems too) it is the best attribution you’ll get.

I came across this video from a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand founder.

He talks about 2 interesting ideas on the subject of self-reported attribution:

• Fake option: If you are going to show options for people to choose (which I recommend against btw), add a “fake” channel like “billboards” when you are not doing any of that. That will give you a likely misclicked/didn’t care baseline that you can subtract from other options. I’d randomized the order of options too not to bias the first ones.

• Lift tests: For a week or two scale one channel/program while keeping everything else constant. That mostly works only for ads (unless you are willing to wait way longer with other programs) but still can help you see the real impact of a channel.

Read my guide to developer marketing metrics and attribution ->

3. Learnings on pipeline and sales from Datadog CMO

This is an interview with Datadog’s CMO, Sara Varni, who was previously a CMO at Twilio and Attentive.

I often talk about the pipeline as a great metric to align marketing and sales on and having that as the main marketing metric. Sara explains a ton about the pipeline in this talk.

My takeaways and comments:

• Pipeline typically consists of 4 sources: Inbound (marketing), BDR/SDR(sales), AE(sales), and Partner/channel (partnerships). Put a monthly pipeline review cadence where marketing, sales, and partnerships come together. That creates a more collaborative environment.

• What works for their inbound (marketing) Sara mentioned paid media (Google, LinkedIn), webinar programs, third-party events, and organic content (SEO-heavy).

• Core metrics she goals her team on are: MQLs, Opportunities, Pipeline value, Win rate. MQLs can be a good measure of awareness WHEN your MQL → Opportunity conversion is stable.

• Marketing role in outbound: product marketing (positioning), enablement. But also “giving excuses to meet enterprise prospects”. You need a solid information flow between sales<>marketing for this to work.

• Attribution trick: together with sales, go through a couple of enterprise customer journeys including all marketing touches and sales engagement. Do a few of these a quarter and your GTM org will appreciate contributions from different teams and fight about source attribution less.

• Tactic for small startups: build your circle of influence within the champion/buyer community. Focus geographically and create small dinners for peers (CTOs at e-commerce etc). Use the first ones who agreed to come to create a FOMO effect and get more folks in.

• Rule of thumb for $ allocation and budgeting: Spend 70% on pipeline generation and 30% on Brand awareness. General headcount vs program should probably be 50/50. Digitital vs Events is probably 70/30 if you are selling SMB, 30/70 when going enterprise. Probably 7-9% of the budget should go to marketing but if your company is PLG it is more. At Datadog it is ~20%.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

See how to work with me ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 Introducing Sponsorware: How A Small Open Source Package Increased My Salary By $11k in Two Days 

• 🍎 How to talk to customers : r/ycombinator 

• 🎧️ Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) 

3. Join our Slack community

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->