The Secrets To Evolving from Self-Service to Sales with Twilio CMO Sara Varni

And so, you know, as we thought about these two sides of Twilio and what brings them together, we decided to land on a central metric, and that was how we influence developer signups in those accounts that Stevie is focused on the most. This might sound simple. You might say, "Man, Sarah, this is basic," but this is really critical. You want to make sure that everyone is waking up with this metric in mind, that you're reporting on in your QBRs, that you're reporting on it on your monthly cadence, because otherwise, you're not going to be able to look back on the year and measure progress. And we spend a lot of time focusing on what that right metric should be. The next piece that I want to talk through is really identifying the pivotal moments in your customer lifecycle. And, you know, I will say, in particular, when it comes to developer audience, you really want to make sure that you're helping and not selling. And this was something that I had to learn coming from Salesforce to Twilio. I couldn't just apply my enterprise playbook to the Twilio community. The average developer, they don't want a call from an SDR, they don't want, you know, a series of ebooks. They want useful information that really falls under the mantra of good stuff, no fluff. And we take a lot of time to analyze our customer lifecycle journey and make sure that we are getting engaged at a time people really want that help. So here is an analyzed opportunity journey for one of our customers. And we'll see that the initial engagement with that customer might be a developer signup, a couple developers signup within an account. You might see someone attend an event. You might see someone then, you know, download a white paper or download some content, go to our pricing page. And we are constantly analyzing this journey to make sure that we are inserting ourselves at a— in a time that is appropriate for that customer and how they want to be engaged with. And the overall goal here should be pretty obvious, but we want to shorten that fuse wherever possible between developer sign-up and enterprise project. And there are a couple different tactics that we've used to try and help developers either sell their project up the chain or give them the tools they need to get started more quickly. So here are a few of the, the short list of things that we have implemented and continued to double down on. Again, it's all with the mindset of you need to be helpful and not in sell mode, which is tough for some people. So let's walk through these. First, I think you need to earn the right to communicate with this audience. You need to make sure, like I said, you're not just applying the enterprise playbook and lifting and shifting it for a different self-serve audience. Second, you need to create nurtures that are based on product interest. While I don't think you want the standard kind of Ebook this, ebook that. I think to the extent you can identify what they raised their hand for when it comes to your— product and can serve them up very relevant info, connect them with people in the community that have similar use cases, the better off you're going to be. One thing that we found particularly helpful is, as we've moved from self-service to more enterprise customers, is also thinking about new implementations of our documentation. Instead of having stuff at the product level, what are the use cases we're seeing the most in our customer base? And we serve up use case versions of our documentation to, again, accelerate that process from initial signup and interest to actual material business. I think there is no better way to accelerate products than to connect developers or customers with like-minded people in your community. Some people hesitate from doing this. They fear that the existing customer might just reveal all of the negatives about your product. But in my— the actual— the exact opposite is true. People that are normally willing to spend their free time talking about your product are going to be huge evangelists and a great way to accelerate any conversations that you're having. I think to a lesser degree, but still important, is providing developers or people that have have raised their hand as expressing interest in a product, maybe at a personal level or a team level, is giving them the tools to sell business, to sell the project up the chain. So if that's an ROI calculator to show how one tool is better than the other, or if it's just a general business justification for why this solution can help advance other projects that you have within your organization, This just helps accelerate conversations that your sales team might be having. And then finally, while we don't want to run the standard process of a BDR calling down on every lead, I do encourage you to create alerts so your sales team is in the loop and they know when they should engage the most. Uh, the third piece I'd like to focus on, and I think this is more developer-centric and, and pretty Twilio-centric, but I do think there are broader applicabilities is that you need to focus on empowering and training those people that are showing early interest in your product to take it up the chain to the business and the people who might have the budget authority or power to actually sign the check for your product. And this is a screen that I always love to show. At Twilio, we have, we have gone down the path of starting a program called Enterprise Hackathons. And what we do there is that for customers that have started to play around with Twilio, we'll bring a set of our developer evangelists on-site to the account. They will come in with use cases. The team will hack for the day on those use cases, and at the end, the developer team and engineering teams will show off their finished products to the, the leaders of the business that are associated to these projects. And the picture that you see here actually comes from one of our enterprise accounts. And I think I bring it up because this account, you can see, this is their break room. These engineers are not even really allowed to change the channel on the TV. And so I think sometimes people, when it comes to a developer relations team and engaging with the enterprise account, I think sometimes the perception is that enterprise developers are only focused on just kind of the boring, mundane tasks, and they're not really focused on innovation. And I think when we've come on site to some of our enterprise customers, the exact opposite is true. And these populations of developers are very similar to what we see in our developer evangelism team and what we see in our startup ecosystem. They want to learn new tools. They want to pick up new skills. They're just not necessarily empowered to do so. And so we've tried to develop programs that really help unlock innovation within enterprise accounts. Um, 3 ways that we're doing this. And again, a lot of these programs we gear towards bringing both developers and line-of-business members into the room together. Um, we have our Engage and Superclass Roadshow, and what we'll do there is in the morning we'll have a hands-on training for developers to get skilled up on Twilio and to learn more about technology— more about our technology. And in the afternoon, we'll have more of a business session on the business value of Twilio and how you can get the most out of the platform. We also have what we call Foundry Workshops. So these are more design-based workshops where we bring in developers as well as the line of business to look at what their customer journey looks like today and what they want it to be in a future state. And this is a great opportunity to bring both the business and developers together, talk through their challenges, and figure out what the best path is forward in a really efficient way. And finally, we have the Enterprise Hackathon Program. I already talked about this a little bit, but again, this is kind of American Idol style. One-day-long hackathon where the development teams go away, use cases, and come out at the end of the day with proofs of concept. And again, this is an opportunity to shorten that fuse. Now what might have taken, you know, a year to prioritize in terms of getting these proofs of concept done are accelerated on-site at these customer accounts. The fourth piece of advice I want to share is play to your strengths. And when I say this here, again, this is pretty focused on developer relations in particular, but I do think there are applicabilities to, to self-service and growth teams. I think, first off, you want to be prescriptive. I think our experience when trying to bring our developer relations team together with our sales organization Developers, our developer evangelists, are super excited to help, but they don't always know the rules of engagement and how to, to get inserted into sales conversations. And then there's also a concern that they'll be pulled into every sales conversation if it goes well. It's really important to be prescriptive on what role each person is going to play in these customer engagements and set those ground rules from the get-go so people don't feel like they are taking on extracurricular work. That is going to eat into the day-to-day of what they need to do. I think also you need to not expect every developer evangelist to wake up overnight and say, "I just want to focus on enterprise, and I just want to focus on working with sales teams." This is not necessarily a path for everyone, and I think you need to recognize who's best aligned to that and who is not. And then finally, in our world, I definitely think of our developer evangelism team more of an— as an extension of solutions engineering. So helping people think through problems, helping show the power of Twilio versus, you know, getting involved in the mechanics of closing a deal. And I think that this is something that's more palatable for your average developer relations team. They're going to be much more inclined to be up for this challenge, feel like they're in a mode of helping versus selling. Just going to the general self-service funnel, I do think there is applicability in, as you're trying to think about how much of a growth marketing team can I apply to more the sales-assisted funnel model. And I think the same thing applies in terms of, you don't expect your average growth marketer to wake up overnight and say, you know, what I really wanna do is the sales-assisted, more B2B lead model. I think they're different skill sets. I think some people are looking to expand and to have a broader purview over all different types of marketing tactics. But there are some people that are really attached to more of the SEO motion, motion, and I think you just, you need to make sure that you're not, um, being a square peg in a round hole. Okay, some final thoughts on scale. Sometimes when I talk through these challenges, people will counter and say, well, Sarah, look, Twilio is a big company, you're able to throw all these resources at this. And I just want to encourage you that you don't need an army of people to employ some of these tactics. You know, it's easy for me to say now in the wake of COVID but I think many of the programs that we established in, you know, in a real-life context are completely transferable to a digital-first world. And, you know, there's things we've learned along the way and places that we've optimized, but I think that obviously thinking about these programs from a digital-first mindset will only help you scale. I also encourage you to find leverage points in your community. Just like I was talking about how it's important to connect customers with— or connect your prospects with other customers that are using your technology. I would also think about how you can deliver some of these programs through your community, provide them, you know, program-in-a-box capability so that they can go out and share with their network. And I think that that'll only, again, give you another lever and a way to scale anything that you're trying to drive. And finally, train the trainer. If you have an organization within your team that is growing faster than your marketing organization or who you're originally tasking to do this with, and they have applicable skills, train them and make them be, you know, the messenger for this program. At Twilio, for example, our developer— our sales organization, our solutions engineering team is growing at a much faster rate than our evangelism team. And so what we do is we train the solutions engineering team on how to run a lot of the programs that I mentioned in terms of Foundry or in terms of our developer hackathons so that we can only expand them further. So that— those are my core 5 tips on how to make a smooth transition from self-service to enterprise sales. And with that, I will open it up for Q&A.

Thank you so much, Sarah, and thank you everyone for tuning in. We do have a handful of questions with a handful of minutes left to go. So to kick it off, did you scale your sales and marketing team all at the same time with a significant cash injection, or did you do it organically?

Uh, the— so when I came on to Twilio, the marketing team was actually at a at a healthy size. And there was a lot of investment that in the first 8 years in terms of brand and website and making sure that the self-service part of the business was coming in and working. On the sales front, we did, we did grow that team faster than I, than I would say on the marketing side. And that took, you know, justification up to our board, justification amongst our e-team. To make that shift in strategy.

Very nice, very nice. Great question too. How have things changed in this model that you're doing during our current situation in COVID?

Yeah, we've had to evaluate some of our programs that we deliver in real life and assess whether or not we can just lift and shift them to the virtual world or if they need to have tweaks. We've definitely found that shorter, more to-the-point content is going to be more effective in terms of getting people to tune in. I know everyone has Zoomed at this point. And so I think it's best practice outside COVID or in the midst of it. But we really tried to streamline our content and make sure that it's hard-hitting, gets to the point, and what they need.

Fair. That seems to be resonating across the board today and over the last few weeks, that the conciseness is what's key now. And you said this fever and everyone's online all the time and just trying to get to the point. What was the hardest thing about making your transition, and is there anything that you would tell yourself 3 years ago?

Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the hardest parts of this transition is making sure you don't lose sight of who the company, what it is. And so I think we're always trying to make sure that we have— we're striking the right balance between talking to people from the line of business, but also making sure that we are not talking to developers in a way that's authentic to them. And so we're always kind of trying to check in with ourselves to make sure that we're, we're striking that right balance.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Well, this has been great and I appreciate your time and I appreciate all of you who joined us. I hope you guys are all signed up for more sessions throughout the day, because I know we still have quite a few hours to go. Sarah, thank you to you and your team, and thank you for joining us. We, we hope to bring you back soon, and I hope to see everyone later. Thanks very much.

Have a good one, guys.

Thank you.