DevRel Qualified Leads (DQL)

What's the ROI -- the metrics to measure them -- explaining it to an employee. With DevRel Qualified Leads, you first set your own metrics that truly reflect the value of the work that you do.

Summary:

  • Marketing Qualified Leads

    • Anything that allows a company to have your information, you are now in their system.

  • MQ Lead

    • A lead who has indicated an interest in what a brand has to offer based on marketing efforts.

  • DevRel Qualified Leads - Business Metric To Prove Value

    • IT’S AN ACCEPTED TERM IN THE BUSINESS WORLD.

  • What is DevRel Qualified Leads?

    • It is an accepted term in the business world.

    • It highlights our unique value.

    • The need for a single metric that can be used across the industry.

  • DQL Cases

    • Marketing: Case Study or Guest Content

    • Product: Feedback or Beta Testing

    • Engineering: Hard-to-solve Bugs

    • Business Development / Partnerships: Integrations

    • Recruiting: Potential New Hires

    • Sales: Potential Customers

Scribbles:

Marketing Qualified Leads

  • Anything that allows a company to have your information, you are now in their system.

  • And whether or not you qualify as a qualified lead depends on your company,

    • it depends on your role, it depends on your geographic location, all of those things.

MQ Lead

  • A lead who has indicated an interest in what a brand has to offer based on marketing efforts.

  • More likely to become a customer than other leads.

  • Lead is anyone who can provide value to the company.

What is DevRel Qualified Leads?

  • DevRel Qualified Leads (DQL) - metrics that reflect the talents that we have, metrics that truly reflect the value of the work that we can uniquely do.

Why Qualified Leads?

It is an accepted term in the business world.

  • Initially, people might link it to the sales aspect of it, but it's better to refactor the term a little than rebranding it because we’re speaking the same language but is also respected by stakeholders and executives throughout the industry.

  • Metrics to not lose out on potential leads that can be an asset to the organization. (. 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.

  • DevRel has no say in whether that individual gets hired or not, it's totally circumstantial, but DevRel can pass 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.

It highlights our unique value

  • It isn't magic that makes community managers turn into DevRels

    • all the things that they already have been doing that makes them stumble upon that job in the first place.

  • The talent of connecting people, bringing people together and making people feeling comfortable and confident and empowered

The need for a single metric that can be used across the industry

  • “What are your metrics of success?... "It depends" ... that’s not a bad or wrong answer.

Your goals for the community need to be aligned with goals for the company.

  • DevRel initiative is not going to look exactly the same in every company.

  • Able to point to a known value, which, as we all know, is an important piece of maintaining a sustainable community team.

DQL Cases

  • Marketing: Case Study or Guest Content

    • It's someone who might bring value to the marketing team.

    • They might be someone that has written an awesome article in your forum

    • Might be a great person to write a case study

    • Give a customer testimonial

    • What kinds of questions are you looking for us to answer?

    • What type of information might be helpful for your efforts?

  • Product: Feedback or Beta Testing

    • A particular community member who continues to come back with more and more feedback.

      • They’re really invested in giving back to our products

      • pass them directly off to someone on the team who can have that in-depth conversation and really benefit from the community.

    • They could also be beta testers.

  • Engineering: Hard-to-solve Bugs

    • Hard-to-solve bug or someone who’s posted an issue in an open-source repo.

      • Engineering teams’ willingness to sit down and help them figure out what’s going.

    • Connecting those two to help them actually solve the problem together.

  • Business Development / Partnerships: Integrations

    • Build out that integration with other partner developers.

  • Recruiting: Potential New Hires

    • In open-source projects a lot, you’ll find someone who loves your product and is super passionate about it -- might be a fantastic hire.

  • Sales: Potential Customers

    • Someone who walks up and we have a five-minute conversation with them at a conference booth, and they wind up being a customer.

DQL = Business Value

  • The definitive way to attribute value to the activities.

  • A valuable way to see which activities overall are more effective.

DQL = Community Value

  • Making introductions between community members and your coworkers

  • Making introductions between community members.

Do these connections truly matter?

  • Foundations of communities are built on relationships.

  • Empowerment is beneficial for both the community and the company.

  • Being able to formalize gives a way to show that you are valuable because of the connections,

    • You’ve assisted in this many people getting hired across the company.

    • You've been directly involved in getting this much guest content posted

    • You've been a huge part of these sales because we had a conversation with those people upfront.

  • Making those connections is the first step in getting a valuable person hired.

  • The more connections we’re able to make, the more we’re enabling those developers, the less likely they are to churn.

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