I’ve worked at several tech startups over the years, focusing on marketing operations and working closely with sales, customer success, and finance teams. My goal has always been to connect the dots between departments and create effective and insightful lead funnels. 

As Senior Manager of Revenue Operations at Redpanda, I get to impact how we build and improve our lead funnel directly. Understanding our funnel allows us to understand better what draws users to Redpanda and how we can keep making their experiences with Redpanda better. 

What is Revenue Operations (RevOps)?

From a company perspective, the goal of RevOps is to maximize revenue potential by streamlining and aligning sales, marketing, and post-sales through systems, processes, and data. However, in my opinion, RevOps is more than that and should focus even more on an optimized customer journey by making recommendations to all teams involved. 

RevOps is a unique field because it touches many different departments within a company. You’re essentially looking at the whole lead funnel and aligning different teams’ initiatives to give users the best experiences possible as they learn about and decide to use your product. 

I love this kind of work because no day is quite the same. I work on anything related to the lead funnel. This can mean implementing tools for different Redpanda teams, evaluating funnel performance through reporting and analytics, helping our Demand Generation team with campaign builds, or consulting with the Sales team on how we handle leads. 

The great thing about RevOps at a startup is that many of the typical tools and procedures you’d inherit at another company aren’t set up yet. This actually makes tackling some of the challenges we face easier because I’m able to decide what systems and processes we need to set up to have an effective lead funnel. Being able to pick and work with the right tools from the beginning is rewarding, and even more so as you gradually fine-tune your tooling and gather insights to better interact with potential users. 

How to build a lead funnel

In a way, building a good lead generation funnel is all about storytelling. I like to think of our lead funnel as an opportunity for us to tell a story to our users. That story should guide them through the different obstacles or challenges they might face and make it simple for them to find a solution. 

Yet, the story needs to go beyond simply offering a solution. For example, at Redpanda we do so by making the initial journey into Redpanda easy and seamless so they can immediately benefit from the platform. Providing helpful features like Redpanda Console allow us to do this. We knew our users wanted better UI options for working with Apache Kafka®, so we built one. 

Doing RevOps well involves taking a bird’s eye view of your company's entire lead funnel and building a story that users can easily move through, resulting in their satisfaction with the product. 

Building a lead funnel for engineer and developer audiences

The challenges I’m most interested in solving at Redpanda center on getting better insights into our users and program performance. Understanding prospective users is a goal of many RevOps teams, but marketing to developers and engineers can be challenging in unique ways. 

Engineers and devs are well-versed in how marketing technologies function — after all, they may know the engineers who built some of them. What your average consumer might view as acceptable in terms of gathering user information (e.g., providing your email address in exchange for a digital download), devs are wary of. 

Suppose you’re going to ask an engineer or developer to give you their email address in exchange for an ebook. In that case, you must ensure that the ebook is providing truly valuable information to developers. This sets a high bar that ultimately benefits everyone involved in the lead funnel: We aim to create the most informative and helpful content we can, and our users get better experiences and assets from us. 

If you plan to do RevOps for a software company specifically aimed at developers, you will need to be especially mindful of how you market to your potential users, even more so than RevOps professionals in other industries. Engineers and developers tend to have a low tolerance for promotional content and marketing emails. Where other industries might view it as standard practice to send an email blast each time a new product is released, those who market to engineers know that this strategy would quickly get you sent to the Spam folder.

What we’ve learned about marketing to developers is that we can provide the most value to potential users by offering learning development and educational tools. For example, Redpanda University has been a great way to generate user interest in our product because it teaches subscribers not just how to do data streaming in Redpanda, but also about the fundamentals of data streaming in a more general sense.

We’re hiring - Check out our Careers page!

I love the people I work with here. Everyone on the team is incredibly smart and driven, but also very appreciative. 

I think the key to being happy and successful in your career is to work for a company whose product you can stand behind. Everyone at Redpanda is so driven because we all know that we have a fantastic product (check out our latest performance benchmark to see why we’re so excited!). We genuinely believe we’re making a difference and so we give our all every day to make Redpanda more successful. 

If you’re also excited about the ways Redpdanda is changing the streaming data landscape and you want to join the team, check out the positions we’re hiring for on the Careers page!