Developer Buyer Journey Best Practices

Proprietary and Confidential ©2021 OpenView Advisors, LLC. All Rights Reserved 1
Developer Buyer Journey
Best Practices
Sam Richard - OpenView Growth Team

–DevOps Engineer
Why is a frictionless experience critical?
“If I don’t see how the product is going to work for me within 20
minutes, it’s probably not going to work for me.”

Challenges
• Developer-focused tools can greatly improve new user activation and
conversion by enabling a self-serve buying experience.
• The issue with self-serve can be that you only get a few moments to “wow”
your intended audience.
What OpenView did
• We spoke with 30+ back-end developers about their software buying
behaviors and product onboarding preferences in order to create best
practices for product teams and designers who build products for
developers.
Research background

A free offering is now table stakes
PLG
companies
All
companies
Free trial offering 74% 45%
Product analytics for decision making 67% 31%
Self-service buying experience 61% 28%
Bottoms-up sales 55% 31%
Product qualified leads 53% 29%
Referral programs 50% 31%
Dedicated growth FTEs 47% 27%
Freemium offering 38% 18%

Messaging
• Prospects come to each product with a "mental checklist" to complete before getting started
Direction
• Direction is every part of the journey that gets a buyer to the point where they find value in the product
• This includes the website, signup flow, documentation, and value discovery paths like guides and test data
Value
• This is the “aha” moment when a user perceives value in the software
• This moment of value could vary by persona
Human
touchpoints
• Human touchpoints are the deployment of sales and support resources to move buyers along their journey
What do developer audiences need to
shape the ideal buyer’s journey?

6
Proprietary and Confidential ©2021 OpenView Advisors, LLC. All Rights Reserved
Messaging
Building demand with prospects

Checklist item Description
Solves need Users weren’t willing to try a tool out unless it made their “top 3 list” based
“top 3 list” based on the website description.
Social proof 50% of prospects wanted to see what other companies used the tools we
tools we interviewed them about.
Integrations The developer stack is huge and interconnected. Prospects want to be sure
want to be sure your tool can fit in.
Pricing Buyers at smaller orgs wanted to see a pricing page.
Developers run through a mental checklist
before trying a product
This is why messaging is key

Prospect checklist: Solves need
“So I usually find three products that are in
that same realm. I’ll figure out what they do
better than everybody else and what they do
what the competitors do better than them.” –
Head of Security Ops
“The core question that I'm going to actually
care about... Does this make life easier for
me?” –DevOps Engineer
“I'm not a super technical SE... It (website)
goes a bit over my head.” –CISO
Snyk has a simple, interactive list of use cases available on their
website. The copy is simple and answers the basic questions of how
the tool works and why it is awesome.
Evidence Recommendation

Prospect checklist: Social proof
“Oftentimes, I'll go and look at who else uses
them. I know, it kind of sucks for small
companies, but the reality is if I know
someone smarter than me, or more people
than me have verified that this thing is safe.” –
DevOps Engineer
“If I don’t see other companies my size on
their website, I don’t think they’re going to be
able to work for mine.” –CISO
Algolia has customer logos on their website.
We understand that these conversations are challenging with larger
accounts. Ideally, if an account is trying to negotiate a contract,
rather than simply discounting, ask them for logo permission at the
same time.

Prospect checklist: Integrations
“How much does it plug other services I
currently use? Can I like, put this in Datadog,
or is this a whole other thing I need to
manage and look at?”
–DevOps Engineer
“The first thing I do whenever I look for any
software, mainly, but specifically in the
security space is I want to know what its APIs
are like or their integrations.”
–Site Reliability Engineer
“What CI/CDs does this plug into?” –CISO
Datadog has a rich integrations page
A simpler solution would be to add a tab or section to the website
with a list of existing integrations, or ones that are coming soon.

Prospect checklist: Pricing
“I don't see a pricing tab, which immediately
makes me nervous because... it seems like
one of those ‘If you have to ask, you can't
afford it...’”
–Site Reliability Engineer
“With tools like this we have to compare why
they’re better than hosting open source or
using a worse version from Datadog or
whatever. I like when they can show that and
compare pricing.”
–DevOps Engineer
Logz.io added a price range between their community offering and
their custom offering. This doubled their conversion rate, and most
signups expand to the Enterprise price points.

12
Direction
Once someone has signed up, how
can they discover value?

“The documentation seems straightforward, so I trusted it, but it didn’t tell
me steps to take after the first one.”
“Now that I’ve shipped data to the product, ingesting it is in a totally separate
part of the application and there’s no instructions on how to get there.”
Potential buyers ran
into many hurdles on
where to find things,
or where to go next.
Once in the application, participants often didn’t
know what actions to take
“I was expecting a self-serve module that allowed me to take action but ended
up at what feels like a dynamic API document. That was unexpected. I need
more explanation.”
Adding data to
product
“I’m so lost here. There's nothing here to tell me to set up the alerts I need.
I'm trying to poke at what this product can do beyond security, but it’s not
clear."
Engaging deeper
Documentation

Examples
Datadog Sumo Logic
Users land on a blank page, but the
empty screen provides guidance on
how to select an application and
what you’ll see when you’re done.
Users land on the “learn” page,
which has many CTAs—one being
a checklist for how to get started.
Logit.io
Empty screens with no results still
show users how to expand time
range or refine queries, which are
key parts of the Kibana feature.

15
Value
Get users to realize some value quickly
so they’re committed enough to
manage the heavy lift for the rest of the
setup

What is the “aha” moment?
• This should be the minimum threshold when a customer has seen value
and should be extremely predictive of retention and conversion
• Examples: Scheduling your first meeting with Calendly, team of 3+ users
each using Slack on 2 distinct days in the first week
How long does it take for a new user to activate?
• What are the steps required from a user perspective?
• It should ideally happen within 1–2 days of signing up (worst case, within a
week)
How will we know whether
a new user has seen value?

Participants often don’t see enough value in
onboarding to add their own data
During 1:1 interviews, we asked assessors why they would or would not take the heavy-lift action, and what
value they perceived they would see from that action.
“I would stop at this point (before shipping data
with Lambda) because that’s going to cost me
money and I still don’t know how this tool differs
from what I’m using.”
- 80% of the participants did not care about security of loading data or protecting information
- Their only hesitation was level of effort vs. perceived payoff
Feedback
- Some participants shipped data, as they felt it would be useful in the assessment (outside pressure)
- Other participants did not ship logs and then wandered around the product with empty screens
Engaging deeper
Discovery
We know that certain heavy-lift features in the product and deeper usage makes it stickier, increasing
conversion rates.
Problem
Case
“Right now, it feels like maturity is missing from the
product. Maybe because it’s not heavily populated
with my data, but it looks a little less professional
than the tool I use. It has promises, but it feels a little
raw.”

Benchmarks and examples
Pendo
When users go to use a certain feature,
there is a clear CTA, and the empty screen
explains why you should use that feature
(i.e., why funnels help product people) and
a picture of that feature in action.
Splunk
Splunk shows users what a full
dashboard would look like and walks
them through the different features that
they can take advantage of if they create
a visualization, like sending them via
email.
Additional opportunity
Other developer-focused products have
challenges in expressing their value beyond
features. This is an opportunity for you to
stand out among other tools that potential
buyers are evaluating.

19
Human touchpoints
When and where to layer in support
and sales

Users prefer self-serve documentation over
human interaction
43%
100%
14%
43%
0%
57%
14%
0%
29%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
Chat with Support Self-Serve
Documentation
Sales Demos
I would use this resource
I wouldn't use this resource
I may use this resource
under the right conditions
Do you utilize sales demos or support resources, and how? (% of times cited)
During the interviews, participants were asked how they preferred to interact with sales
and support resources.

Interviewees recall outreach, but still prefer
digital interaction in purchasing
Do you recall outreach from the team
during the duration of your trial?
60%
40%
Yes
No
If you were to purchase this product, what would be your
preferred payment method?
0%
80%
20%
Over the phone
Adding a credit card
I'd like to get an invoice
“The sales representative reached out professionally and promptly. They sent only a couple
emails and were not overly pushy—which is a very good thing. Had I been interested in a
further evaluation or conversation, the outreach would have been exactly what I wished for.”

Engagement and support:
Benchmarks and examples
Datadog
Welcome email gives users
multiple ways to digitally
interact with support
team (email, Slack,
webinars).
Datadog
Users can upgrade from right within the
application, with simple-to-understand
pricing and the ability to add a credit card
or talk to sales right from the application.

23
Takeaways

• Prospects come to each product with a mental checklist to complete before getting started
Messaging
Direction
• Direction is every part of the journey that gets a buyer to the point where they find value in the
product
• This includes the website, signup flow, documentation, and value discovery paths like guides
and test data
• This is the “aha” moment for a user of the product, where they perceive value in the software
• This moment of value could vary by persona
Human
touchpoints
• Human touchpoints are the deployment of sales and support resources to move buyers along their
journey
Value
What do developer audiences need to
shape the ideal buyer’s journey?
This is a key, but often ignored step
Most developers appreciate this,
but don’t feel they need it
Businesses must focus efforts here

About the author
Director, Growth
sam@ov.vc
Sam Richard focuses on the customer’s journey to
value in freemium and free trail software offerings
with a special interest in open-source, developer-
focused, and security tools.
In her work at OpenView, Sam conducts teardowns
of free offerings for prospects and portfolio
companies, interviewing dozens of developers about
their tool and purchasing preferences.
If you have questions or comments about the piece,
please reach out via email or on LinkedIn!
Sam Richard

26
Thank you!
Sam Richard — sam@ov.vc

Developer Buyer Journey Best Practices

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