How to Repurpose a Common Business Metric for Your Community Success

Hi everyone! As ___ said, my name is Mary Thengvall and I’m here to talk to you today about repurposing a common business metric — Marketing Qualified Leads -into a success metric for Community and Developer Relations teams.

Metrics — and the stakeholders who continually ask “what’s the ROI on that?” — have often been the bane of our existence. I know I can relate with this meme… I believe I’ve made that face myself more than once after a frustrating conversation with an executive who just doesn’t understand the value that my team provides on a daily basis.

But what if we shift the mentality — not their mentality… but our mentality? What if we view metrics, not as the bane of our existence and as something that we constantly have to fight against, but as the way to prove our value? I would argue that one way for us to do this is to focus on metrics that reflect the talents that we have. Before we’re forced into metrics that don’t fit our skill set… before we’re given metrics that don’t line up with the work we’re doing… let’s set our own metrics that truly reflect the value of the work that we can uniquely do. What metrics are these, you may ask?

I call these metrics “DevRel Qualified Leads.” In my world of Developer Relations, our primary audience is developers, or technically-minded folks. The long and short of it is that Developer Relations is Community Management for a technical audience -setting these technical folks up for success and empowering them to do their best work. So what exactly do I mean by DevRel or Community Qualified Leads? And how exactly does this apply to metrics?

Let me put it this way… how many of you got your badge scanned at a booth yesterday? Bingo! You’re most likely now a Marketing Qualified Lead for some company out there. In other words, you’re someone who the Marketing team has identified as a potential customer. They got your information — in this case, while at a conference — they then vetted your information to make sure you met their standards or expectations, and then handed your information off to sales for them to reach out to you down the road. Marketing has now done its job of filling the Sales pipeline, and their job is done. They aren’t responsible for making sure that person becomes a customer. That’s the Sales team’s responsibility.

This is a fairly well-understood business metric in most companies. It’s typically accepted that sales is a multi-step process and Marketing has the top-of-funnel responsibilities. Once Marketing’s job is done, they go back to finding new ways to create more “leads,” or people who have found the website, the company, or the product in some way, which they then “qualify,” or vet to make sure that they’re potential customers, and again, pass off to sales.

So some of you may be asking, why did I choose a term like “qualified leads”? Particularly when the jump can so easily be made to sales? For those of you who are familiar with my work, you know that I don’t believe DevRel or Community should ever (EVER!) have sales metrics to gauge their success. It muddies our work too much and changes what should be a genuine relationship into one that revolves around money, which isn’t sustainable.

However… most business people know what you mean when you say “qualified leads.” And while they might initially only think of sales as the resulting success, you can add on top of that foundational knowledge that marketing passes along information which sales is then responsible for rather than trying to introduce a completely new business concept and metric that people aren’t familiar with. Tweaking something slightly is always easier than completely rebranding, and in an industry where we struggle to be accepted for the value we provide, we need to start adopting some of the known business terms in order to gain the respect and understanding of our colleagues. By asking people to adopt the new definition of “leads” to include “folks who can contribute value to the company in some way” rather than just potential customers, we can expand the meaning of the word and therefore insert ourselves into the business conversations in a way that’s not only understood, because we’re speaking the same language, but is also respected by stakeholders and executives throughout the industry.

I came up with this term after meeting with yet another one of my clients, whose team had metrics that were traditionally given to another department, such as sales (how many people signed up for an account this month?), recruitment (how many applicants did we get this quarter?), or marketing (how many leads did you get at that conference?). These are all things that DevRel and Community Professionals have zero control over. Who knows whether the person you met at the most recent conference will even apply for the job, let alone whether the hiring manager will hire them. Maybe their application won’t make it through the system because of the one quirky thing about their education, or perhaps they don’t click with the hiring manager. Whatever the case may be, you can’t be held responsible for whether or not that individual got hired… you have no say as far as salary, compensation, or any number of other negotiating factors go, or whether they’ll be a good fit with all of the other team members once they are onboard. But you ARE capable of passing along those connections to the right team in hopes that together, they will be able to accomplish a task that furthers the overarching company goals. So what does this look like? Here’s a few examples.

Maybe you’ve encountered someone who’s answering questions on your forum consistently and has obviously had a very good experience with your product. They might be a good contact to pass off to Marketing for a Case Study. Or perhaps they’d be interested in turning some of their longer forum pieces into a blogpost.

If you’re getting exceptional feedback from an individual, passing them directly to Product might be a good idea. The Product team will be able to have a longer-form conversation with that community member and parse the important pieces that they’ll implement in future features rather than you playing messenger. Or if you’re getting close to rolling out a new feature that a handful of community members have been asking for for some time, perhaps you pull them in before it’s released to the public for beta testing.

Or perhaps a community member has stumbled on a particularly hard-to-solve bug and is willing to help your engineering team reproduce it and get to the bottom of it.

Maybe you’ve run into a community member at another company who’s willing to help build out an integration that will help customers use your products in tandem. Your Business Development or Partnerships team would be more than happy to handle that conversation going forward.

On occasion, we’ll come across community members who just get it. They click with everyone at the company. They understand the product. They’re passionate about the cause. They’re already contributing during their free time anyway… so when a position opens up, they’re a perfect person to pass off to recruiting.

And of course, if you run into someone who’s interested in purchasing your product, you can pass them (or their manager or team lead) off to sales. You get the idea… these connections are incredibly valuable and might not have ever happened were it not for the Community team’s direct involvement in the community who now knows and trusts them.

These DevRel/Community Qualified Leads are incredibly important to keep track of for a number of reasons, the most obvious reason being, of course, that it’s a definitive way to attribute value to the activities that the Community team is involved in. Additionally, in aggregate, it’s a valuable way to see which activities overall are more effective than others in the long run as well as track themes throughout the industry. For instance, if you run across three front-end developers who are really interested in your product, which is traditionally focused on the ops or security professionals, you’ll want to make a note of that. Or perhaps you start to see more interest from a nontechnical group of folks. Keeping track of these outliers and reviewing your notes once per month, quarter, or year, will help you determine new patterns in your audience, which can help inform the personas that the marketing and products teams work on.

These leads also contribute community value, because as you’re making these introductions between community members and your coworkers, you’re also making introductions between community members. And this leads us to my favorite analogy for Community Building, thanks to my good friend Amy Hermes: Community Management is a pseudonym for cruise director.

How many of you here have been on a cruise? I haven’t, but I dressed up as a tourist on a cruise ship for Halloween a few years back… which is where this picture is from. You know the person who makes sure that you have everything that you need… that you’re not feeling left out… that you have someone to talk to and relate to, so that you’re having the best possible experience? We’re the cruise directors of our communities.

Those people who all mentioned the new topic that they were pursuing? I, as the community cruise director, am responsible to introduce them… to foster that relationship… to make sure that they’re not only pursuing that topic and reporting back to me with interesting tidbits, but that they’re enjoying doing so. Part of what we can do to ensure this is build a community around that topic, which, of course, requires other people. So Marie, let me just introduce you to Bob over here, and the two of you can chat about the latest doodads and thingamabobs that you’re looking into, and let me just fade into the background while the two of you get more and more excited about this fascinating topic.

We as Community Managers have a unique talent — we don’t tend to wind up in community by accident — we’re already doing all of these things in our personal lives, and many of us just seemed to stumble into this work by default. We have this talent of connecting people, bringing people together, making people feeling comfortable and confident and empowered. This slightly expanded definition of Qualified Leads allows us to highlight this value rather than be forced to find a more traditional metric that encapsulates our unique abilities.

But… so what? Who cares? Why, at the end of the day, do these connections truly matter? They matter because of the core definition and purpose of community building. At its foundation, the purpose of community building is to build relationships with, empower, and enable our various communities. And this empowerment is beneficial for both the community and the company.

I love this quote from Zan Markan’s blogpost “Developer Relations is Developer Enablement” and I think it applies to all communities, whether they’re technical or not: “Enabled developers are productive, less likely to churn, and better suited to champion our products and services inside their teams, organisations, and wider networks.”

Twilio’s Developer Evangelism team puts it this way: Our job is to inspire and equip developers to build the next generation of amazing applications. This means understanding what they are trying to do, pointing them to tools and training, and generally helping them be successful. Is this an inexpensive endeavor? No! But is it worthwhile? Signs point to yes! When Twilio was first founded, they were told they didn’t stand a chance with a developerfocused, community-driven strategy, but they went on to land a 1 million dollar seed round from a group of angel investors and one VC. The first full-time employee that they hired, Danielle Morrill, built out what is now acknowledged as the startup world’s most effective developer marketing program and is now an investor and startup founder in her own right. Now, with customers like Dell, Twitter, Lyft, Salesforce, Hulu, Twitch, Intuit… the list goes on… they continue to cater to developers and build out what is now known as one of the top Developer Relations teams in the entire industry. Twilio has invested a significant amount of money into something that they were told would never make them successful, because they understood the true value of

And this leads me to my final point. We need a single metric of success that can be used across the industry. Far too often, our answer to the question “what are your metrics of success?” is “well… it depends!” and let me be clear — that’s not a BAD or WRONG answer. What success metrics you use really does depend on the company! I even tell my clients, “Your goals for the community need to be aligned with goals for the company,” which means, realistically speaking, that your community initiative is not going to look exactly the same in every company. But having a single metric across the industry that everyone can point to and understand is an important part of moving our industry forward, because it helps executives and stakeholders hold onto something. Even if they know they won’t be able to understand all of the nuances and that it will take time to pull all of the correct levers and figure out all of the good practices specific to their company, they’ll be able to point to the connections that the team is making in and through the community they’re serving. They’ll be able to point to a known value, which, as we all know, is an important piece of maintaining a sustainable community team.

It’s because of all of these reasons that I propose this metric: DevRel, or Community Qualified Leads, as one accepted metric by which to prove the value of our Developer Relations and Community teams across the industry.

Thanks so much for your time today! You can find my information up on the screen behind me. My DMs are open and I’m always happy to chat more about community building and developer relations!