GTM intelligence for OSS

Rebecca: Just now, right? The power of being able to tell database narratives that point to revenue generation. This hopefully will be a continuation of that. So we have seven minutes. Is it working? Okay, sure. We skipped a slide, but it's all good. So I'm Rebecca, the head of community at Common Room. You already introduced me so well, so I'll skip over the rest of that. Essentially what Common Room is, is an end-to-end customer intelligence platform. So everything that you see on the left, whether or not that's product usage, data, community channels, social channels, CRM, website visits, visits to your documentation page, things that you pull in from LinkedIn. We take all of those signals and every engagement or activity from all of those channels that you steward, enrich them into common room at both the person and account level and then let your GTM teams take action on them.

And so our goal today is to talk about specifically the revenue generation side or that's tied to the last mile of revenue, which is most commonly your sales team or your success team. If expansion in renewal or churn list lives on your success team. So about a hundred of you got workbooks here, feel free to give those to someone else if you're not a tactile type of person. But those workbooks are also online for free. It's a free guide to help community and DevRel folks understand what their GTM teams are doing, both how they're measured and their daily tasks so that DevRel and GT and community teams can understand how to better add value and prove their value to the entire GTM organisation. Ooh, I'm really nervous. We only have seven minutes, so I'm like, let's go. So GTM is a team sport. And what is the challenge of that sport?

GTM teams must reach out to the right person at the right time with the right message, and that means the who matters, the timing matters and the message matters. So that means what is the strategy, right? Your GTMT must collect as much relevant, timely, contextual information as possible so that you or you can feed to your sales team, to your success team. This idea that it's like I know what their pains are and now we know which compelling solutions to reach out to 'em about the GTM roster. So who is on this team? This is simplified, but you got sales, you've got SDRs, you've probably heard sales development representatives, BDRs, AEs, ses. So that could be sales engineers, solutions engineers, sales leaders. You have people on marketing success ops. I know that DevRel and community don't always live under marketing, but if you're on the GTM side, you most likely do unless you're your own function.

But most folks are going to be on the GTM side under marketing unless you're in EPD and that's a seven minute talk for a different day. So we're only going to look at sales, although the guide online and the ones you have in your hands really goes through all of those different functions. So how can community and DevRel teams deliver improve value to the function of sales? So your SDRs, BDRs, AEs, ES, and sales leaders, this is how they're measured. It's so important to know how your audience or your colleagues in this case, but in this way, sort of your clients are measured, right? They're measured of number of prospects that they are actioning on. They're measured on meetings booked from those prospects. They're measured on number of deals that they've closed from a winning point of view, and they're measured on amount of revenue generated and not just measured.

They're compensated often on amount of revenue generated. So that's super important to them. And so what they're trying to do on the daily, right, they're trying to identify quality prospects or you might hear the term ideal customer profile. They're trying to book meetings through compelling outreach often, which can be based on really contextual community information. They're looking at trying to understand pain points so they can nail that first call just to earn that second call and really dive deeper into the use cases that they can solve for their prospect. And they're looking to move deals through stages until close in a timely manner because time is literally money for them. So ultimately the way that you're DevRel and community of teams can provide value is by stewarding the channels that you already do and delivering value that delivers value to attract ideal customer profiles and high fit prospects within those channels.

You can also nurture engagement that offers context and depth about a prospect, and you can offer a sell less space. And I say sell less because no matter what, whenever we're interacting with someone who is a user of our product in some way, we are selling them our solution, our brand, our company, and what we do. That's why we're spending time there from that company point of view. And then you can be an early bellwether for both positive and negative sentiment. So exercise time, let's hop to it. Option to get up and hop if you want to. And if you're not using common room, what we're just going to do is walk through an exercise of creating an ICP or an ideal customer profile and understanding how that cascades across the next things that you would do from the community and DevRel side. So you can define and apply an ICP manually as folks stream in and out of your stewarded channels.

You could do things like if you don't have customers, look at company persona, have a spreadsheet. If you have customers, you can look at the patterns that they share and understand what their ICP is based on people who are already getting value out of your product. Or if you do have common room or a tool like it, I happen to use Common Room. You can identify quality prospects by going into the backend, defining your tag criteria for an ideal persona, looking at the signals for the channels that you stored. Maybe it's GitHub, your newsletter, your LinkedIn, your Slack, your ex, maybe they're a contributor and economic buyer, which means that they have purchasing power decision making. And then you can go super granular. What if you wanted to be like, I know developers with SecOps titles who know how to code in Python and Java with a recency of the last 60 days at an organisations that are bigger than 1000 who have an annual revenue of 25 million who have had at least three pull requests submitted on GitHub are absolutely right now ready to buy high intent prospects.

And that is going to be my granular ICP. So with that criteria, you could run, let's say a workflow where you're like, Hey, anytime anyone across my stewarded channels, that's an ideal persona post in any of these channels, a bug or an issue or a product question, send alert directly to my DevRel or community team so I can federate out to my sales and success team members exactly what's happening in the context they need to know to understand how to approach that prospect or customer. You can do this. I'm looking at time, so I'm like, okay, I know we're almost there. So you can also set up all sorts of other workflows, right? This one is basically like any negative sentiment at any company that is listed as an opportunity or a customer because we want to make sure to prioritise those first. Send an alert directly to our internal slack.

This is what an alert looks like in the wild when we see it, when I see it on my side. And then so that's a quick example of what you'd do with an ideal customer profile, but I also want to show you what your sales team would be seeing or what they might see. So for example, this is a segment or a cohort of folks that fits a certain set of criteria, and this is economic buyers within their ideal customer profile that are also hiring for at least 10 or more finops roles based on jobs listings that we pull from the internet and Crunchbase. So they're like, okay, great, I see all these listings here, but I actually need more context before I reach out, pop up in their profile. And they can automatically enrol like, oh, I see what they're doing in the community, what posts they're liking, who they're interacting with, and this gives them immediate context and relevancy when they're reaching out.

So there's more things that you can do, but there's more, more and more and more. So if you'd like to do reporting, you can report on those tags and understand how your ICP is growing within your company. So let's say you wanted to set an OKR with your team to say, it's not just that we want our community to grow and membership to grow. It's not that we just want engagement to grow. We want engagement from our particular ICP because we know those are high propensity buyers. So you can say, okay, we're only going to report on our ICP or ideal persona total contacts. It has grown by 4%, but our engagement rate has gone down. So you can start reporting based on much more relevant data or those OKRs that you set with your GTM leaders. You can do this in a bunch of ways.

Look at membership and where they're interacting, responsiveness, how they're responding to each other versus how your team is responding. And then ultimately, to finish up, there are just things to try. These are both in the workbook, in your books and online, but things to try in terms of making sure that you are working across functions within your GTM team and helping to drive that revenue and contribute to it. Understand your IFCP build community programmes specifically designed for them. Ask your sales team for their Target 500 or a thousand guarantee. They have some kind of list like this. How might you build programmes that help them reach those target 500 or a thousand accounts? Ask your sales teams, which plays and messaging is working and most effective, and then review those conversations in your community. Bring your community members along with you and then ask which deals need additional support. So often there just needs to be one more nudge or one more touch or one more voice or one more person that makes one more intro. Whichever those deals are that need help and support. Oftentimes you can lend that support from knowing and having built a relationship with your community members in a really respectful way. So y'all are the best. Thank you so much. Did I do it? I'm definitely over, but I'm Rebecca, please come find me anytime.