Marketing Insights

And virtual events also provide an amazing opportunity for marketers, but the rules aren’t the same as they are for on-site sponsorships. Maximizing your investment takes intentional work - but, if done correctly, can bring huge benefits. So how do you create the best chance of success? 

1. Don't just focus on the day

Traditional event sponsorships tend to be very on-the-day heavy, but attendees engage differently with virtual events. The weeks leading up to the event are equally as important in getting your message out there – priming people to interact with you on the day. 

Creating and releasing engaging content that piques people’s interest will drive more traffic to your teams on the day. And post-event? Don’t jump straight to hard sales, use more relevant content to connect with your leads and help sell your product.

2. Think about longevity

Virtual events are all about the content: attendees will come back to revisit what they’ve learned time and time again. So how can you make sure to remain at the front of their thinking any time they look back?

Smaller upgrades such as video sponsorships keep your company’s brand attached to content pieces that will be used for years to come. And why not try to add to the conversation? Content upgrades give you an opportunity to demonstrate the value of your brand through related articles on hot topics.

3. Create an engaging social strategy

Sponsoring an event allows you to promote your company through a brand trusted by the engineering community. If you’re only posting your usual content on social media, you’re missing out on great brand alignment.

Ask event organizers for branded graphics that you can promote on your own channels – tying your brand to that of the event in the minds of your customer. 

4. Give people a reason to connect

Most virtual events give you the opportunity to offer 1:1 meeting requests with sales or marketing reps. But you’ll need to go the extra mile to make these work for you. At physical events, impromptu meetings happen naturally at your stand, but online you’re asking someone to take time out of their busy day. So how can you get them to invest in the conversation?

Define what you can offer them. Are you solving a problem for them? Offering insight? Showing industry best practice? The more specific your offer, the more likely you’ll be to get take-up.

Example of a great offer: Book a 30-minute meeting to explore the tools to better understand inefficiencies in your system

Example of a not-so-great offer: Book a 1:1 meeting to chat about our product

5. Get your engineers involved

And remember, an event sponsorship doesn’t just live in the marketing department! Some of the best traffic and referrals you’ll receive will come from ad hoc conversations on the day – so make sure your engineers get stuck in! 

Get your engineering departments involved in the Slack channel, and any events with live participation – they’ll bring you leads, and get to learn from the discussions taking place! 

So whether you’re sponsoring an event, producing relevant content, or just curious about what Engineering Managers do, we’ve put together this super easy guide on engineering management to get you up to speed with the core aspects of their day job.

Who are they and what do they do?

The who:

Engineering Managers are responsible for the output, productivity and personal progression of their teams. Their main focus centres around the advancement, development and support of their engineers to help software developers flourish within their roles.

Unless an Engineering Manager has previously undertaken a leadership role, this will likely be the first time within their career that they will have stepped into a people management position.

The what:

• Creating high performing teams.
• Boosting the confidence of their team members to deliver projects autonomously.
• Helping their team members to become the best version of themselves.
• Facilitating meetings.
• Developing and expanding their team.

What they don’t do:

Engineering Managers rarely get involved with coding due to a large number of meetings in their calendar. Their role is very reactive, meaning their days are often disrupted and can be pulled out of context at short notice. Thus they become blockers in the process if they are responsible for technical work as their schedules do not easily lend themselves to focus time and can often lead to bottlenecks in projects.

How is their time divided?

Weekly:

A lot of their time is spent in meetings, whether that’s with their direct reports in 1:1s or with the leadership team to discuss the broader strategy and to ensure that the team is moving in the right direction. You’ll also find Engineering Managers conducting code reviews, providing technical direction, facilitating daily sprints and holding retrospectives to flag any issues that are arising on a weekly basis.

Average weekly break down

Quarterly:

Within this wider timeframe, they look closely at hiring new members into their team, conducting performance reviews with their engineers and running team health checks. Other important tasks include setting OKRs for the team, agreeing personal goals with their direct reports and horizon scanning with senior managers to incorporate future projects into their team’s roadmaps.

Annually:

On an annual basis Engineering Managers update career paths for their teams to align with any structural business changes, plan the tech strategy for the next financial year and conduct annual reviews for their team members.

How do they define success and failure?

Success:

This can look like a multitude of things, but often this means happy, high performing teams and having a high retention rate of their talented engineers.

As Engineering Managers are also heavily focussed on the personal progression of their team members, having confident and autonomous team members is a big win for them, as well as high levels of motivation, achieving what they set out to do and being able to communicate the value of their team’s work to the wider business.

Failure:

Whilst this varies from team to team, common key indicators of failure tend to include having a lack of communication with team members, disgruntled direct reports that are unhappy and are lacking psychological safety at work. As well as a lack of transparency, not delivering on targets and having team members relying heavily on them… (notice the people trend?).

What are their key challenges?

Common key challenges for Engineering Managers include managing the velocity and scope of the work that falls within their remit, finding the projects that they can contribute to above the noise and striking the right balance between advancing products and supporting their team.

Additionally, sustaining a level of technical understanding without getting too involved in the process is tricky; becoming too involved can often feel like micro-management and stepping too far away from the tech stack can leave managers feeling out of the loop.

On top of these, you’ll also find them grappling with prioritising the most important work, reducing bugs, balancing features with technical debt, hiring diverse candidates and understanding when a technical investment becomes inefficient.

What are their career aspirations?

Most Engineering Managers look to progress to becoming the Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering or Director of Engineering, with some focussing on the big end goal of being the Chief Technology Officer.

Whilst this is often the most common line of progression for Engineering Managers, for some, the idea of managing managers and being less focussed on day to day tasks is less appealing and thus less of a personal desire.

What do they love most about their jobs?

This one is pretty simple, it’s people! Engineering Managers work very closely with their teams and love to see their people grow and achieve their goals.

 

Why listening matters

Listening to customers and understanding their problems are the first steps to knowing how to help them. We can create great marketing experiences and develop smart strategies, but none of it will have an impact if we aren’t listening to the folks we are trying to help. We need to understand their pain before we can alleviate it.

At Karat, we embody this by asking our customers questions. It is important to be humble (as marketers, most of us aren’t engineers), and acknowledge that we don’t always know where the pain points are. Even if we think we understand the problem, we need to check in with the customer: they will tell us everything we need to know.

How to reach customers

Karat’s customers have been involved in the development of our solutions for years, allowing us to build up a pool of trusted advisers. We also partner with our colleagues in sales and customer success to connect us with new people who are willing to share their experiences. Having a collaborative culture allows us to share valuable information like this across different teams.

Live events, when they can happen, are another great way to get talking to customers. We approach these as opportunities to listen to others as much as to promote ourselves, so we resist the urge to give elevator pitches. A real conversation is more valuable.

We reach out to a broad range of people and continue asking over time. Our customers’ pain points evolve based on their careers, technology, and the economy, so we keep asking!

Questions to ask

The goal is to encourage customers to share their stories. We might ask: What blocks are you trying to remove in your work? What are most of your team meetings about? Where do you feel stuck? You told me about X problem. How have you tried to fix that in the past?

For those less comfortable sharing personal experiences, we might steer the conversation towards safer topics like team goals and revenue. The important thing is to listen closely to identify their biggest problems (we call this honing our instinct for pain). Once we understand our customers’ obstacles, we can help to clear the way.

What next?

When we hear that enough folks are experiencing the same problems, we can map their needs to our primary positioning statement. This outlines: We do what for whom for why. For example, at Karat we interview software engineers for talent and engineering leaders so that they can hire the right people and build great products.

We believe a good statement should be clear and solve several of our audience’s problems. So, by freeing up engineers’ time, we make hiring possible and improve morale and burnout. By making hiring easier, we are also solving issues of access and diversity.

We also share feedback with our product development teams who can then make improvements to our solutions. Regular meetings help to maintain this culture of sharing and keep internal relationships strong.

As marketers, we believe our role is to grow the business, not just to promote it. By listening to our customers, understanding their pain, and building strong partnerships with sales and product teams, we can continuously improve the ways that Karat serves its community.

Whether you are a small company trying to increase your brand awareness, or an established brand looking to stand out from the competition, how can you make sure that your message is heard among the noise, by the right people?

The key is to market to the broadest range of folks within your target organizations, so that you can secure buy-in across the board, from VPs to entry-level engineers. Here’s why you should be casting a wide net.

More advocates, more chances

It’s simple: the more advocates you have in an organization, the more likely you are to secure customers. Decisions around new solutions are rarely made by one person; the average number involved in B2B purchases is 6.8 and still rising. It has never been more important to get your brand in front of multiple leaders and users, even those that you might not consider important: you never know who might influence a decision.

Make your message land

In any organization, only a handful of the team may be facing the specific problem that your product can solve. These are the people you want to reach, but targeting them is easier said than done, with job titles and levels of seniority doing little to signal who really needs your help. By promoting across different teams, and at all stages of the career ladder, you can be sure that the right folks receive your message.

All rungs of the ladder

Getting buy-in from VPs is essential (as they’ll have the most influence and will likely sign off on budgets) but don’t neglect the lower rungs of the ladder. Engineers are often the folks using your service, and teams are regularly asked for recommendations for new vendors. If you already have several team members using your product, you can gain an advantage when their manager decides to scale out. Collectively, they may have the casting vote.

Don’t lose your way in

Things move fast in the tech industry, including people. There is nothing more frustrating than building a great rapport with somebody only for them to move to another company. By nurturing plenty of relationships, you can make sure you don’t lose your way in. And you can ask them all about their experiences in the company, helping you to understand your customers’ needs more clearly.

De-risk your sales cycle

Most importantly, marketing to multiple stakeholders reduces risk. Targeting just one or two key relationships places too much on individual loyalty (which in our fast-paced industry can change overnight). By building a large group of champions throughout an organization, at different stages of their career, you can secure your connection to the company, and make sure that you always have folks promoting your brand from within.

 

The IC career trajectory is less established than the path for engineering managers, with tech companies approaching titles differently. The same role can come with a wide variety of titles depending on the organization, making it hard to identify patterns around job scope, skills, and experience.

To find out what IC leaders have in common, LeadDev spoke to a group of staff, principal, and distinguished engineers and asked them to describe their roles and responsibilities. Here’s what we learned.

The typical IC leadership career ladder

Fellow

Distinguished

Principal

Staff

 

Staff engineers

Staff engineer is the first wrung on the IC leadership ladder, a level above senior engineer. As well as technical strength, core leadership skills such as critical thinking, judgment, listening, empathy, and communication are essential at this level of seniority.

These folks lead deep, complex, or high-risk technical projects, and steer all the communication channels around them. They support the organization by providing context and technical direction, defining technical specifications, and documenting processes. The percentage of their time spent coding differs from one person to the next, but averages around 20%.

They also play an important coaching and mentoring role by sharing best practices with other engineers and creating new opportunities for their growth. And they give technical performance reviews, aiming to improve the technical capacity of the entire engineering organization.

Staff engineers tend to work directly with permanent teams as well as pairing with other temporary project teams. The reporting line varies from one company to another, but they have a certain level of autonomy: usually, they report to a manager but control their own day-to-day activities.

Principal engineers

The rank above a staff engineer is principal engineer. It’s harder to pin down the day-to-day execution of this role because each person’s journey depends on their own expertise, and how they can apply it to help the business achieve its goals. Generally, principal engineers exist to guide the technical direction of the company.

Principals have a deep, strategic understanding of company priorities, and make technical decisions to solve business problems. To do this, they draw on their wealth of technical experience, an understanding of different risks, and an ability to navigate different perspectives and priorities.

These folks are the connective tissue between the on-the-ground work completed by engineers, and senior executives. They're extremely autonomous in their day-to-day work, but should be able to collaborate (and be completely aligned) with management in order to make good business decisions. Though they aren't on the management track, they lead with influence, advising and asserting their ideas without official authority. 

Distinguished engineers

Very few people make it to the level of distinguished engineer. This role recognizes these individuals for their outstanding technical achievements and is just one step away from the title of fellow. More commonly, this role exists within larger companies and these folks help to shape the organization's direction, carve out strategic roadmaps, and meet business goals. 

These leaders have the time, space, and flexibility to build out their own areas of expertise to strengthen the company. This includes working closely with other stakeholders and executive teams, keeping aligned with management and avoiding frustration on both sides. This folds in with distinguished engineers having a strong history of growing and influencing others, highlighting a need for exceptional interpersonal skills.

Final thoughts

Getting to grips with senior IC roles is hard. There’s little alignment in the industry, with organizations approaching titles differently based on their business needs (which can change as they grow and need different things from a role).

But the leaders we interviewed all shared some common ground: they lead and advise on the big, technical decisions that impact a company’s future; they work to empower engineering squads; they build relationships with stakeholders and bridge gaps with senior management; and they find ways to lead with influence, rather than authority.

But this is often easier said than done. Which members of the engineering team are involved in purchasing decisions? Which other departments have a say? What are folks looking for from potential vendors? And how does this differ across different types of companies, from nimble startups to slow enterprises?

To find out how tech teams really purchase solutions, LeadDev asked a group of engineering leaders what their company’s purchasing journey looks like. Here’s what we learned.

1. Engineers start thinking about external solutions once they identify a need or opportunity to run at a quicker and cheaper rate. Teams will spend the most on tools that they believe to be business-critical.
   
2. When marketing to small companies and startups, it’s easier to introduce tools to the engineers on the ground, who will generally be open to products that make their lives easier. Engineers don’t need permission from managers to sign up for free trials, but will submit vendors for approval if they find them valuable. Often, these folks will go for tools that they’ve used before or have had recommended to them, so word-of-mouth is an important channel.
   
3. In larger (but still agile) companies, decisions to buy business-critical tools are escalated and centralized. Some companies may even decide to build these tools and systems themselves, if they have the resources, to make sure they’re perfectly tailored to their needs. When it comes to purchasing everyday productivity tools used by individual functions, engineering teams do have more influence and access to budget.
   
4. Large public sector companies tend to have lengthy tender application processes. They need to be careful and transparent around how they’re spending public money, so be patient and thorough when you’re applying!
   
5. When selling to traditional enterprises, things can take significantly longer. Most decisions are made top-down by those in charge of the budget, and anyone else on the team needs to jump through many hoops to secure budget for new tools. To save on costs, employees are encouraged to share product licenses, and managers will always check if there’s a similar tool licensed elsewhere in the company before approving a new contract.
   
6. The larger a company, the more stakeholders that are involved. In bigger orgs, there are often additional departments to contend with including Security, Legal, and Compliance. The biggest blocker tends to be Security, as these folks need to perform rigorous checks and due diligence, which can take months. These steps do often end in rejection, so make sure you complete their processes correctly.
   
7. For all companies, the most important thing vendors can do is be clear about what the product does. Folks don’t just want to hear it from your sales team, they want to know how other customers are using your solution. Sharing case studies is a great way to provide evidence that your product serves its purpose and that it’s functional for the way they want to use it.
   
8. It’s also important to be clear about the terms of your partnership. Engineering teams want to know exactly who (i.e. you or them) will be responsible for fixing or maintaining different areas of your solution once they’re working with it, so be sure to provide clear, defined terms.
   
9. Finally, try to reach out to the folks responsible for making the decisions. If you can, avoid having separate conversations with different layers of the ladder, as engineering teams can feel this wastes their time (and yours!) and is less personal.

It’s not always easy marketing to tech companies, as their decision-making processes will vary depending on their size and needs. But by understanding the type of organization you’re approaching and getting to grips with your audience, you can start tailoring your approach to make sure your message lands.

But how can you make sure the leads you’re generating are genuinely engaged? How can you prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to growing your contacts list? Here are our top tips for running a webinar that will successfully bring in opportunities for your sales team.

1. Make sure your format is interactive and engaging

The more engaged folks are with your webinar, the more engaged they will be with your brand. Have your speakers interact with each other and give attendees the chance to participate or ask questions. Don’t forget to add captions to make the session accessible and engaging to those who are hard of hearing or if English isn’t their first language.

2. Assemble a credible panel

Hosting a well-known speaker is a great way to lend credibility to your brand. You could also ask an existing customer to join to act as an ambassador on your behalf (software engineers listen to their peers!). Someone from your team could join as a thought leader and expert, but avoid focusing on pushing your product. Always select an experienced facilitator to keep the discussion flowing. And remember, all panels should be diverse, giving a platform to a range of voices.

3. Go with a trusted media partner

Producing a high-quality, well-attended webinar with content that speaks to the audience you are trying to reach is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Outsourcing this work to a trusted media partner will save you time and energy, but most importantly it will help you to extend your reach. Make sure the provider is well-respected in the space and has a good following from your target community so that they can bring in more quality leads.

4. Curate your content for your target audience

The webinar content should be relevant to your company and speak to your target audience. Working with a content partner that understands and has close relationships with your audience will help you to position your content in an engaging way. Too many webinars focus on ‘what our product does’. Instead, focus on ‘what issues we can help to solve’ and offer valuable content around that theme. Tell a story, weaving in the challenges that your audience may be facing.

5. Promoting your webinar

Creating a buzz in the lead-up to the webinar is key to generating a good number of engaged leads. Make sure you know what audience you’re trying to reach and that you and your event partner are marketing through a variety of channels. Releasing a blog piece or article on a similar topic is a great way to build anticipation and engagement before the event.

6. Identify your potential engaged leads

As folks register for your webinar, separate out those who would genuinely benefit from your product from those who have likely just signed up to enjoy the session. Ranking your leads will show you where to focus your efforts in your follow-up. Job titles are a great indicator but you could also add other qualifying questions to the signup process, for example, ‘what influence do you have when your company purchases new tech?’ or ‘how often do you change X provider?’

7. Don't put all your focus on the live viewers

Not everyone who signs up will watch the session live, and that’s okay! Make sure the webinar recording is available on demand for those who are busy or in different time zones to catch up in their own time. You can also use these recordings down the line to demonstrate your value to future prospects, helping you to generate more engaged leads down the line.

8. Stay in touch

To keep people engaged, communicate a clear call to action when the webinar ends. For example, encourage folks to opt in by offering a complimentary ebook or article to those that do (they will likely be quality leads). Always send follow-up emails to everyone who registered with the recording, a summary of the learnings, and links to relevant content. You could also reach out personally to those you’ve flagged as engaged leads; suggesting a coffee might just turn into a sale.

Reflections

Webinars are a great way to get in front of new folks and establish your company as a trusted source in the space. By identifying your target audience and designing each step of the experience with them in mind, you can start engaging more leads and bring in more genuine opportunities.