From Ideas to Impact: Derek Weeks on Effective Community Marketing

Thank you, Harshit. It’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, I think the first thing is, and it’s a good question to start with because every business has to live by this, it’s you really have to understand the market and your customers. There are a lot I’ve worked for a number of different software startups over my career, and I observe a lot of software startups out there. And a lot of companies as startups have some new product. It’s some new innovation that they want to bring to market. And they are so focused on, Let me tell the market about this technology and how amazing it is. But they’re not not talking to the people that they’re actually selling to. They’re just talking about themselves and talking about the product. And they’re leaving it up to the mind of the customer to really interpret why is that product necessary? Why do I need that product in my life? And starting out in my career, early in my career as a product marketer, you always ask some simple questions. What does the technology do? Who is What does it fit for? Why would they care? How does it fit into their world, their lives, and make it better?

As a marketer, you really have to focus and hone in on that. And a lot of times people talk about product-market fit, and that is, does the technology fit the market? And that view of things often force fits the technology to the market. And I really think you have to think about customer fit. What are they doing currently? Why would they change from what they’re doing now? And how does your product help that? And communicating in a customer-first language, I think really helps the business connect more with the market. I think in marketing, in order to be successful, Once you have that, you have to continuously communicate with the market and use the marketing engine to amplify those messages out to the market. But I think it went when you’re building the content and information that attracts the market, there is a tendency for what I do and what my teams try to do, and that is to lean into being helpful first First, help these people, help the target audience be better at what they do, become better at their profession, become better at solving the problem that they’re after. And so, again, it’s really that customer-first, customer-centric point of view, being helpful, that I think plays into great marketing and makes demand gen easier, makes creating leads at the top of the funnel and managing those those appropriately.

But I think that’s certainly a key part of the formula that I’ve used over the years that I think differentiate my approach to leading marketing versus others that simply work for innovative companies that have a cool technology. They’re listening to a founder that probably created that technology as an engineer, and they’re just trying to amplify what the founder is talking about, which is more often often about the product than it is toward the customer. And I think marketing plays a key role in helping to translate between the founders and engineers and the market and what the market wants.

Okay.

Yeah, I think, so I’ve worked in a number of different companies, and you could say different industries, but most of my career, in fact, I would say 90% of it plus, has all been in IT operations, development, DevOps, something related to how IT teams develop or support the development of software. And in that, in terms of the approach to market, again, I’ll just go back to, it comes back to being helpful to the people that you’re trying to serve. Some of the unique things that I’ve done in my career are, I’ve always engaged more of the market and the communities that we serve as part of the the formula. So if I think back to the earliest days when I was at Hewlett-Backard, I was in their software business, their network and systems management business. We had products that we were taking to market on a global basis, competing against computer associates and IBM at the time. And we could go to market by focusing on the product, or I could go to market, focusing on the product that I was responsible for. But I chose not to limit my view to the product that I was focused, that I was responsible for.

I looked at that product. I looked at how it integrated with other products in our portfolio. And working in that business, I developed the business lines portfolio message out to market. I understood what the customers were trying to do and how our products had to fit alongside the other products that they were using. We weren’t going to be the only products that they were purchasing. And I have never worked in a business, in a B2B business, where our software was the only piece of software that someone was using. So when you know that the customer is using other pieces of technology, you have to fit yourself into their world. You don’t say, This is my thing. Hey, Harshit, you figure out how to fit my thing into your world. That creates mental friction between the market. So you have to figure out, how do you play into that larger technology world. That also meant that instead of just talking about my technology and the other surrounding technologies, we would bring partners into the picture. How do the partners help us in achieving this success in the market? As I grew further in my career and expanded these spectrums of view of the market, we also brought in community as part of the market.

What is the community doing overall? What do they want to know? What do they want to learn? Can we help them learn those things? And being a helpful member of the market like that, and not just someone that’s out there pitching or promoting as part of the market, really made a difference. And a couple of companies back, we started a community in the DevOps space, and we grew that from an idea of a couple of friends into a following of over 100,000 people that we were helping to educate and inform globally about DevOps and help them really progress in their careers. In that movement, in the broadest reach to the market, We were seen as a helpful vendor in the market first. People knew us from being helpful. They didn’t necessarily know our technology when we reached out or when they interacted with us first. It was more, Oh, here’s a vendor that’s doing some cool things, that’s being helpful, that’s helping to educate people. And then it became, I wonder what that vendor does. Now that they’ve actually helped me and connected me with others and supported me in my career, I’m actually curious what that business does.

And for some of those people, they look at what our business did and say, That’s interesting, but that’s not really my area of interest or specialty, which was fine because we still had a good brand impression with them. But some parts of the market said, Oh, actually, that’s pretty tied to the thing that I do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis at work. Maybe I want to learn more about that company. Maybe I want to engage with them more and understand what they do. But they came into that not because I was trying to promote to them like, Hey, I have this product. I have this product. Please pay attention to me. They came in into the fold of our realm because we were out there being helpful to people. So they already trusted us as someone that wasn’t purely out for themselves, but out to help others. And that eases and accelerates a sales cycle with a particular target. Now, it takes a long time to develop and grow these communities, but they pay off tremendously when you look at growing a business or sustaining growth in the market. Right now, as Chief Marketing Officer at katalon, part of the responsibility of my team is managing a product community that’s now, just this week, gone over 80,000 members within that community.

We help them. It’s a product community. We help them better understand our product. They have questions. They support others within the market. We have online forums. We go out and do meetups around the world. I either host them ourselves or participate in ones that other people are hosting. And we also put on global education and certification opportunities. So we have those online, but we partner with different groups around the world to educate hundreds or thousands of people. And we even have university partnerships as well, where we make our products available as part of coursework, that students in universities are learning new new skills as they go through their coursework. And so we work with the universities and the professors to get our product embedded in classwork.

We’re now at 80,000 members within the community. We’ve had over 100,000 enrollments within our courses, the online courses. We’ve certified thousands of people with our software within this community, and we provide a forum for them to interact with each other. So there’s lots of value into that, that we’ve built into that over the four years or so that we’ve been running this community. But let’s bring it back to marketing. Why is the community actually a worthwhile investment? And just by numbers, if you say, well, there’s lots of people participating in the community, the business wants to know, the executive team and the board wants to know, is the investment that we’re making in the community worthwhile? The thing that I know from looking at the data within an across our community is if there are companies that we’re working with that are very active in both our education curriculum as well as our online forums, the very active customer customers have twice the lifetime customer value as the non-active customers. So the more we actually engage and help the customers learn more about the technology, learn more about the integration, learn more about best practices, capture new skills, the more they’re doing business with us.

We’re just helping them do the job that they have to do on a daily basis better But because of that, we’re actually rewarded handsomely. If you think you go to any head of marketing or head of sales and say, How do you double the average revenue coming from every account that you work with? And community is a big part of that, certainly at katalon and has been at other places that I’ve led marketing.

Yeah. So it is not always an obvious path. And part of that is there’s a difference between how community-led marketing works and traditional marketing. And it’s not that you need to do one and not the other. You need to figure out how to do both appropriately. So in traditional marketing, as a marketer, I need to tell you about my company and the products that we have. Now, I can tell them, I can tell it to you in an informative way that helps you understand these products and these technologies. In a very broad community or a large community, if you want to attract more people to it, you don’t do that by talking about your product. You do it by helping the community. What did they want? How did they want to be a better marketing professional, a better software testing professional, a better farmer, a better civil engineer, whatever your community is, You have to start with that, that it’s really about them and their needs and how you can support growing them in that need or supporting that. And as such, building a relationship with them in the market. And by attracting that audience or helping that audience, you can learn a ton about the market.

Without pitching your products. But let me tell you, there are ways to integrate that community helpful motion and the product-led or company-led and demand traditional demand gen kinds of things. So let’s say we have a large community of interest around a particular technology segment or skill set. In a community-led approach, let’s start with learning more about this community. And one way to do that is to create a survey for the community. Now, if I create a survey at my company, that survey is going to mimic a lot of what my company wants to know about the market. And it will feel like a vendor survey. But to make it more impactful and to make people feel like maybe this is really helpful information. We’ve invited the community to help us build the survey. What questions do you want to know? So we bring in five, six people from the community and say, We’re going to survey 10,000 people, 50,000 people, 100,000 people, whatever it might be. What do you want to know about what they’re doing? What do you want to know about what your peers are doing? How do they work? Do they like their work?

What helps them? What slows them down? What is their biggest concern? What keeps them up at night? What technologies are they using in their tech stacks? Any of that. And when you develop that survey with people outside of your business in the community, they feel involved. You can promote this as, Here is our community survey, not our vendor survey. You can go out to this community and get a lot of people involved and engaged in that. You do the survey, You analyze the data and you produce the survey results. You can produce the survey results as a piece of content and information that helps educate the community. As part of that, that This is something that you can do for free and as a service to the community, where, again, you’re being helpful. Now, let’s say we publish that survey, but we want to tie that survey to our demand change in efforts. One way to do that is I could run a webinar about the survey results. As part of the webinar and the survey results, I could present in the webinar, but I could also actually make it better by inviting people from the community into the webinar to do a panel discussion on the results.

We built this survey, what did we find? That discussion would attract a larger audience into the fold that we have. And now, as people come to the webinar, they would have to go through our company’s registration, fill out a form, I need to be part of this webinar. I want to learn more. And maybe that’s That’s the first touch within a demand gen cycle. Now, and from that first touch, we’re going to have different offerings that we have to those people that may interest them more in what my company does. So we started with community, but we’re now touching on demand gen. The other thing that can happen with that survey is because we have the survey and we have the results, I might go to an industry conference and make a presentation on the survey results. I could stand on stage, have an audience, present some helpful data, present some insights. And because I’m presenting insights from across the industry, the interpretation of the audience is, here’s someone that’s a thought leader within this space. Who does that thought leader work for? Maybe I should visit that company’s booth at this show that I’m at.

They learn more about the products, and they’re scanned, they’re nurtured after the show, and that gets closer to the fold of demand generation. But it started with being helpful. It didn’t start with, Let me tell the community about my product. It’s, Let me tell the community about themselves. Now, when I’ve done this in the past, I’ve run surveys that we had 3,800 people, 5,500 people participate in those surveys. It creates great credible information about the survey. But as a marketing team in a business, how would you like a survey of the market that tells you what the priorities are? You see all of the data from this community. You can learn your market, you can learn your ideal customer profiles, you can learn what their priorities are. We surveyed the market in prior companies where I worked, where we asked the community community, Hey, what’s in your tech stack? And they said, Product A is in our tech stack, not our company. Product B is in our tech stack, not our company. Product C is the third priority, the highest priority that we had. So when we went to market, we were telling our salespeople, not, you should go out and find these people in this survey and sell them something.

It was, when you go into an account, if they don’t have product one and product two, you’re going to have a hard time selling our product, which is their third priority. So use that to better qualify the accounts that you’re going into. So it’s not just creating content. When you go out and serve these larger communities, you can gather an immense amount of data about the community and what their interests are and what their preferences are. Let’s say in other ways that we would do it, we built this community from zero to 100,000, one of my prior companies. As we did that, we started off, and there was a large group of people in the United States that participated in this community. But we would see people from Great Britain, from Spain, from Portugal, India, Australia. And as we grew it, we would start to see, Oh, last year in this community, we had about 200 people in Germany participating. This year in the community, we have 1,500 people in Germany participating. So the interest in this topic is growing in this specific market in Germany. As a business, we could then look at and say, if that market is growing, because we can see the community interest growing in this topic in that country, we would say, Do we have any partners there that we sell through?

Do we have any sales in that country? Is it time to have a sales rep in that country? Because there is a lot of interest growing in that particular space. So it could inform our go-to-market strategies as well by understanding where the interest of the market was.

Yeah. So this is no secret sauce. When it comes to KPIs, There’s a guy, David Spinks, who’s a peer of mine in community-led marketing and marketing leadership as well in the industry. And he says, business is operated by a golden rule, and that is you have to make more money than you spend. And so the core KPI for anything is how much revenue are we generating. If you run a community program or you run any demand gen program, it’s the same thing within marketing. I don’t have unlimited dollars to spend. I have to look across my team and say, what do I What do I spend on community? What do I spend on product marketing? What do I spend on demand gen? What do I spend on PR? And all of those things have to play into, did we increase the revenue for the business? Now, that is the core goal of any marketing. And if you’re not measuring that, you’ve started off in the wrong direction. Now, from that, we also look at not only how much revenue did we attain for the business, we look at what is the average sales cycle that we’re going through?

So how fast or what is the velocity of deals that are coming into the business? And are we shortening or expanding the sales cycle of where we are? That’s definitely important. Before I mentioned the average deal size within a customer. That’s also of critical importance and something that we’re now actively tying to our business in terms of how we measure our go-to-market success. With community, the more people are involved, we’re seeing larger deal sizes and twice the average deal size of our low participation accounts within the community. So how much revenue? How fast is the deal cycle? What are the deal sizes? And then we can go back to within the marketing funnel, so not just looking at It’s a specific indicator of business success, but how many leads are we generating top of funnel? How many connections are we making with the market? Are we increasing our market awareness over How many people are coming and visiting our site, visiting the content that we have? And how many of those can we effectively convert into high-quality leads as MQ Who else for the business or also account-qualified leads? How many different unique accounts are we engaged in?

And how many people from those accounts are we engaged in? So all of those things matter. There Are there more leading indicators that in terms of awareness and leads within the funnel or marketing qualified leads or account qualified leads, those are leading indicators that we measure continuously every day, every week. But at the end of the day, it’s all about revenue. How much revenue, size of the revenue, speed of the revenue. Those are the KPIs that we look at.

One, I feel like We’re just fully integrated between sales and marketing. We have a tremendously strong relationship between our marketing and sales teams. I feel like we are more one team than we are two separate organizations within the business. I’m constantly meeting and communicating with our sales leader, our head of sales, as well as our regional VPs around the world. We have regular one-on-one check-ins. We’re on Slack communicating all the time if there are challenges, we run sales enablement within my team, so we understand and help the sales teams with how do you go to market? What do you have to know about the products? What do you have to know about the customers? How do you do account planning? Do you need help or guidance on developing strategic account plans? We look at whether that training and enablement is working. We have regular pipeline reviews with the sales teams where we look at the pipeline that we’re generating, the quality of the pipeline, the velocity of the pipeline, that we’re working with. So at least once a week, there is a meeting on this, if not multiple times a week, where we’re talking about how do we progress this forward?

We’re also looking and getting feedback from sales constantly. I was on a call yesterday with one of our strategic account managers, and we were talking about a specific campaign that marketing is running. And he said, I don’t really feel like this campaign is targeted toward the best thing that we do. And it’s creating some confusion in the market when we’re engaging with customers. And that tells us, don’t just build a campaign and try and get it out there. And just because It’s attracting a lot of attention because he’s telling me it’s attracting that particular campaign is attracting the wrong attention. So then I can look at that campaign and say, Yeah, there’s lots of leads that are coming in top of funnel, but they’re not converting. And he’s telling me it’s confusing the market. So we pause that campaign, and we go back, and we either stop it or we have to refine it so it doesn’t confuse the market. But you have these continuous feedback mechanisms systems. We play a role of being the voice to the market for the organization and amplifying that through demand gen programs, but also the voice to the sales organization on, here’s Here’s the product, here’s the company, here’s how we promote and position ourselves, and do that in a way that we listen to the market enough to know what converts well and what stories work well and how to best resonate the value of what we do with the customer.

And then we also play a voice from or listen to the voices of the market about what are they hearing, what are they experiencing? What are they doing? And is that really resonating? So we don’t believe that we always know best. You have to keep an open ear to what’s happening through your sales organization, your partner organizations, et cetera. I had dinner with a customer a couple of months ago, and I was asking him, What should we be saying that we’re not saying? And he said, he listed off three things. And I won’t go into explicitly what those three things are, but I will tell you those three things are very visible parts of our web pages overall at the company. Because if the market is saying it, The customers are going to say it much better than I am. I’ll make up what I think they’re thinking about, but when you hear it directly from them, it makes that more cohesive. But I think it’s that being just as engaged in the success of the organization as sales teams are, where they’re really looking at us as partners in the mix versus another group that they work with in the organization.

We just closed out our fiscal year, and we were waiting for one big deal to come in that put us over the top, and we were We were way over planned for this quarter, but that deal certainly helped. When we got that in there and we crossed the threshold, the head of sales reached out to me directly on Slack and was like, We did it. It wasn’t like I did it, my sales team did it. It was the immediate, We did it together. We’re that team. I think that makes marketing a lot easier when you’re all on the same team, when you win When you win, you win together. When you lose, you’re challenged together. I think that’s part of just the camaraderie and teamwork that helped between sales and marketing.

Yeah. Well, here is a ton of tools. I’m not a fan of all of them, so I won’t mention those, but we’re actively working on replacing those. But I’ll say there are a couple of different tools that I’ll hit on, and we probably We just created our view of the Martech stack, and there’s probably 30 different tools that we have in our Martech stack. It is not a light stack at all. Probably my favorite one is HubSpot as This is where we live and breathe. It’s our website, it’s our email, it’s our campaigns, it’s our data about the market and the customers. That is incredibly important, not just from what it enables us to do, but the visibility that it gives us to the marketing efforts that we’re running, the metrics around that, so that if we create a new web page or a landing a marketing page or an email campaign or a nurture cycle, nurture drip campaign, we can see the performance of all of those activities within one spot. And the other thing is it allows certain Certainly on creative and pages where we’re building content or pieces of content, we can work very quickly to make changes and modify those things in a HubSpot without needing to go to a development team in in order to do that.

The other thing, and we’re just bringing it into play at katalon, is Path Factory to help us with account-based marketing, where we can see not only a view of what different people are coming into our business and interested in what we’re doing? And landing as lead within our funnel that we’re then following, but how many different people from various accounts are interacting interacting with our company from an account perspective? What content are they interested in and consuming, and what is the target buying organization that we’re engaged in? That helps us tremendously from a marketing point of view, as well as our colleagues in the sales organization, understand better how to build their account plans and interactions with that. The other thing that we use here often, it’s a combination of two things around data. One is meta-based for reporting. So we have a ton of dashboards that tell us exactly what’s happening in different parts of our business. A lot of that goes toward analyzing the pipeline and the flow of deals through that pipeline and various things. But every once in a while, I have to pull the information out of a database and put it in Microsoft Excel to better analyze and interpret the data for the patterns and to see the motion of the market.

So of the tools that I think are my favorites that I certainly spend the most time in, those would be it.

Are you ready? Sure. Let’s go. Yeah.

Linkedin, for sure. That’s I’m in it every day, multiple times a day.

Oh, gosh. That is a good question. The most bizarre? I I don’t think I have a most bizarre thing that I saw at work. Nothing’s coming to mind. We did some pretty, I think, cool things within community marketing, and just that we weren’t talking about ourselves and went out to market. We sent gift boxes to a whole bunch of people within the market for being helpful, that were cool and branded. Nothing to do with our company, but they were big hit in getting attention out there. But I don’t know. Maybe if it works, it’s not bizarre. It’s just cool.

Oh, It wasn’t weird necessarily, but there was a guy on my team that was really pushing me to do this crazy idea where we were going to give away personalized Lego mini figures to people. So the little Lego characters, and we put the name of the people on the shirt of the Lego character. And after multiple tries of this guy trying to convince me that that was a good idea, I was in the car coming back from an industry conference talking to him on the phone. He’s like, We got to do this. We got to do this. And that particular idea once it gelled, not only was it about the Lego minifigure, it was about why the market cared, how to use it as a different account strategy and tactic, and how to generate more business within events that we were going to. And once we made the connection between that piece of content, if you will, and how we would run the business differently, that made a world of difference. And we ended up running that campaign for four years. So it was a big one, but it was just in the car coming back from a conference.

It was a distinct conversation, I remember.

What habit holds me back the most? I think probably with most people, not just myself, it’s that you don’t listen to your gut on the priority of the thing that you should be working on. It is always easier to work on the fun thing versus the thing that you must do. And this is part of leadership, is you sometimes don’t get to do the fun thing all the time, so you just have to ruthlessly prioritize, what am I doing today that’s going to move the business forward? And while I like doing that other thing, or it’s fun, or that would be cool to get engaged in, you just have to end up ruthlessly prioritizing your time. And that means sometimes you don’t always get to work on the fun stuff, but you work on the most important impactful stuff that moves the needle. And at the end of the day, that’s more fun than anything.

Oh, gosh. I’ll tell you, it was, I don’t think it was yesterday, two days ago, and I use ChatGPT a lot actively in my business. I was in Excel, and I had this mass amount of data with a lot of different rows and columns that I was trying to figure out a particular problem. And I’m quite good at Excel, but I am by no means an expert. And if it comes to a really complex formula, I could not craft it or I’d have to go on Google to try and figure it out. So I took a screenshot of the columns that I was concerned about within this spreadsheet And I fed that into ChatGPT, and I said, Here is this thing in column A, B, and C, and this other thing in column B, and I need to compare that to things in columns P, Q, and R within this and then make some decision on that. How do I actually craft the formula that does that within this spreadsheet? And I explained it in sufficient detail in ChatGPT that it just said, Here’s the formula, stick this in this column, stick this other formula in this column, and it will give you that answer.

And that was just like, That’s brilliant. I love ChatGPT, and I’ve been a very active deep for a year and a half now, and I’m still blown away every couple of days with like, I wonder if it could do this, and then it just exceeds expectations on what it does.

Yeah. Thanks, Harshit. I really appreciate the invitation. It was a pleasure talking with you.