“I should always be in sight” - Interview with Oleg Shelayev from ZeroTurnaround (part 1)

Hello! For your attention - the next release of the show "No Slides". This time, Oleg Shelaev , Developer Advocate of ZeroTurnaround , which makes different products for Java developers, became a guest. During the time that has passed since the interview, two important events occurred:

• Oleg got the title of Java Champion
• ZeroTurnaround Company bought the company Rogue Wave Software

So now is the time to release this interview. It turned out to be long, so, as in the previous case, I divided it into two parts. The first part is in front of you. What we talked about in it with Oleg:

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• who are ZeroTurnaround;
• how to become a Developer Advocate;
• about proper marketing;
• about sales managers and investors;
• about marketing and sales tools;
• about the tasks and problems of marketing.

It turned out a lot about marketing and technology in marketing. And also about what “right IT marketing” is.







Decryption as always - under the cut. Enjoy your viewing or reading.

Who are ZeroTurnaround

- Dear friends, good afternoon! This is “Without Slides”, I am Alexey Fedorov. And my guest today is Oleg Shelayev, ZeroTurnaround's Developer Advocate, who make different products for Java developers. First of all, it is JRebel and XRebel . I did not confuse on the part of what you are doing?



- Hello! Yes, ZeroTurnaround is a product company, we make products for Java developers that improve their life, productivity and make them more qualified specialists. Our main product is JRebel, which also has a special version for Android applications.



- What are they doing?



“They both connect to the JVM process (in the case of Android, to its process), and they can pull up changes in classes on the developer’s machine inside this process.” That is, the developer can change the code and see these changes without any pauses.



- That is, without restarting.



- Yes, without restarting the JVM process, without restarting the server, the new code will immediately work, which speeds up the development process. About 8-9 years ago JRebel appeared for Java, and a couple of years ago we released JRebel for Android. The second product line we have is XRebel and XRebel Hub. XRebel is such a tool for figuring out the performance of your application code, like a profiler, but it doesn’t quite do the things that the official profiler usually does. It shows the developer where the time for processing requests to the server goes, and shows where there may be potential problems with performance.



He does it quite intuitively, right there, on the development machine. This is a product for developers, and it can be used so that when you write code, be sure that you wrote it not just functionally correctly, but also that it will have more or less normal performance.



- How does it differ from YourKit or JProfiler and so on? What has OpenJDK and other tools?



- The functional difference is the same: XRebel is a profiler for web applications, it is focused on displaying easily digestible information for a programmer. That is, it embeds your widget right inside your web application and shows you the statistics from the server in one place that you cannot but look at.



In addition, typical profilers will collect a lot of information and show it to you in tables, which you must then somehow process. You need to be either an expert or just know where to look in order to understand that this is our bottleneck, here we will lose time in processing requests. XRebel shows an expanded tree for each request, where the code was stuck during the processing of the request, plus it inserts small pieces of information about events that, as we know, can cause a performance regression.



For example, communication with the database. It shows what requests you did, when and how much, if you use, for example, Hibernate or something else, shows where these questions came from, why they are made, the general view and, as a developer, you immediately see: yes, here here we have time gone here, here we launched the background threads and waited, here we made a request to Google and waited half an hour until the answer came from the Internet. And to improve performance, you must start with the biggest bottleneck. It makes no sense to optimize places that do not take much time, simply because the performance gain will be small.



- Or not at all.



- Or not at all. XRebel very clearly shows you where to look. Then, if you need to perform some low-level optimizations and profile the code, in order to understand why there was so much here and how to improve it, you can already connect the profiler and use it to optimize everything. And XRebel shows where time has flowed. As a programmer, you can use it to see what is actually happening in the application: do not click through dozens of interfaces in the code, but launch a separate quest and see what exactly happened when it was processed.



You wrote the code (for the web form / widget), it looked: it functionally works. On your machine, it will always work quickly, because you have no data, you have a local database, you have a powerful machine, and there is one user. And XRebel can show you that, yes, you have avoided, at a minimum, the worst mistakes that can lead to a loss of performance, and you can commit it calmly and continue to run some kind of stress tests.



“So, this is such a tool that allows us to detect any gross errors from the series“ I wrote an algorithm for O (n ² ), and then I made ten queries to the base instead of one ”?



- Yes. Remember, on keynote, Aleksey Shipilev told about the “Shipilev name curve”?



- Yes. So we are in the green zone?



- We are in the green zone. We wrote some code that functionally works, we are ready to commit it, but, in principle, some manipulations can be done with it so that it works faster. XRebel helps you avoid the biggest mistakes and regressions.



- And if it is already a yellow or red zone, I take more complex tools.



- Of course. You take YourKit or plug in OpenJDK shny things, honest-profiler or whatever. If you need to avoid safepoint bias, then other tools are needed.



- We talked about the products. You are the Developer Advocate. What do you do? What is the Developer Advocate in the understanding of ZeroTurnaround and in your understanding?



- Developer Advocate is such a position in the company. My main job is working with the community of Java developers. I have two main tasks - to increase the visibility of the company and to create a company brand using my own example, showing that smart people work in ZeroTurnaround.



- So you are smart?



- By profession, I must look like I'm smart. I don't have to be the smartest, but I have to be technically literate and be able to communicate with people. The second big part of the work is to be a channel of communication between our developers, who live in their own, rather closed world of Java agents, low-level code and other things, and our clients, who are also developers.



That is, we are a company that produces products for developers. This is not a typical market. Some things that are applicable to the sale and advertising of, say, bread or fast food, simply will not work for programmers. If something does not work with us, if there are any problems, I must always be in sight so that you can contact us at any time through a simple and understandable channel of communication with a human face, and you have no doubts about how where and what to write if you want to learn something about our products.



If something bothers you, you write to me. I accept this feedback and pass it on to programmers or product managers, and somehow fix your problem. And if our developers have questions, for example, what features to do next, what frameworks to do ahead, should we concentrate on Spring, JavaEE, they can contact me, and I have access to the community and, therefore, some information.



- Do they use this channel?



- Yes. We collect information. Our team consists of three people: I, Anton Arkhipov and the head of our Developer Relations Team - Simon Maple. Periodically, we go to customers. Let Amazon, say, 2 thousand Java programmers - this is already a community, this is a lot of people, so that they have their local problems, their preferences.



- Amazon's parochial problems are fraught with problems for the whole world.



- They can get rid of the cloud, because Java slows down, they have their own specific problems there. We come to them, tell something that we know, ask about the problems that they have, what they are interested in, how they see the future of Java development and specifically their teams. Accordingly, within companies there are small communities. And there is a large Java community in which we are trying to play a role and move it forward, make it better.

How to become a Developer Advocate

- Look: you, Anton and Simon are all three technical people, all three in the past are developers, and you are developers in ZT, and Simon, as I understand it, was already a famous public person when he came to ZT, and the development in your the company was not engaged. How did you get from developers to, in fact, marketing (some of the functions you talked about - it’s marketing), and how did this transformation take place for you and the company?



- I was a developer in ZeroTurnaround for three years, before that I wrote one online casino, and before that I was in a company working in the public sector. It creates information systems, mainly within Estonia, but it is already entering the world market. This is a fairly large company, it used to be called Webmedia, now called Nortal. There I was just a programmer, I came from a university, trying to study in parallel, and was engaged in development.



How I got into marketing is a pretty interesting story, but a bit strange. In 2011, we were quite a small company.



- How many were you?



- I think 20 people.



- And now?



- Now we are almost 200, but that's all - the developers, sales, marketing, admins, services and operations that support our internal systems. We have about 80 Java developers, maybe 90. But all the teams are growing. Now we have grown to 200 people. We are still trying to position ourselves culturally as a startup, at least within the company, so that we are flexible enough with a normal development process. And we are doing the right things, not throwing problems in money. When we were 20, each person did what he could for the company. If you had to write a post or go to a conference, “stand in a booth” and chat with potential customers ...



- “To stand in a booth” is in the slang. Developer Advocate means “To participate with an exhibition booth”.



- Yes, on the stand. Stand in a booth. You can sit, but it is undesirable, so it is more difficult to communicate with people who come. In 2011, we had a small office in Prague, where our marketers were. There were development offices in Estonia, Tartu and Tallinn.



- Can I interrupt: why in Prague? You have in Prague, at JetBrains in Prague - what have you found in this Prague?



- I dont know. But historically, we had marketers from Prague: Oliver White, who is now in Lightbend, someone else. We had a small team. Oliver is very cool, he can explain things well. Left us a couple of years ago at Lightbend. They were already in Prague then, and since we were a small team, it did not make sense to redirect them somewhere, they liked them, they worked, there was a designer in the office.



By the way, the typical stereotype is that developers are introverts, that not all of them love and know how to communicate with people, to tell something over and over again as marketing requires. In marketing, the most important thing is what? Repeat information over and over. Because then people hear this story, and then at some point they remember it as their own thought. And if you say the same thing many times, they begin to believe you. If you need to convince someone of something - say the same thing many times over several years. For example, that the JUG.ru Group organizes the best conferences in the post-Soviet space.



- Yes, and that without JRebel - nowhere at all.



- Exactly. If you have any data to confirm this, then it is even better. Once we went on a corporate vacation. We were few, we went to the island of Crete, and somehow I got into a group of marketers - by chance, Wi-Fi was in the lobby, and I tried to download something there. It was back in 2011. We had some kind of goal for the first half of the year in terms of income or volume of transactions, we fulfilled it, and the company took us to the island. So I met with our marketers, we talked for a week, they saw that I was not a closed person, and they called me to go to the JavaOne conference to help them work on the stand.



I went. Despite the fact that it was difficult, I really liked it, and marketers, too. Since we were few, they didn’t have much choice who would go to the next conference, and we participated in conferences as sponsors quite a lot - we had stands, we needed to put some people there, and I somehow wormed. Then we began to develop our corporate blog, RebelLabs. We wanted there to be technical content with interesting posts for developers. A marketer without a technical background and programming experience is hard enough to write such a post. Therefore, it was necessary for engineers to give their time and help. Since they had access to me, they came up to me, I started writing, for some time I did this, maybe one day a week.



Then we decided that we could bring this into a more conceptually holistic picture and realized that you can’t just go to the developer and say that you need a post on Korutin on Kotlin by Friday, because the developer has his deadlines, his tasks, and even if he is interested in doing this when the soul is lying to it, it is difficult to do it on schedule. And then I went to the marketing team. And then in the new team Developer Advocate. Accordingly, my work has changed a lot, I stopped programming so much, I started going more to conferences as a participant or with reports, rotate in the community and somehow “arrange” myself as a channel. So I became more or less famous, my name is now at the conference and at the interview.

What role does business recognition play in business?

- What is the role of RebelLabs in marketing a company? Is this a blog, tens of thousands of views per month and so on?



- This is a blog, we have been keeping it for about five years, we try to write there regularly some kind of sane technical content, and it serves as a platform for raising the visibility of the company. People read posts describing how to do something and why it is worth doing just that. We do community polls about what tools developers use, how they use them, why, and so on.



- Like PornHub practically. Have you seen the famous PornHub poll about how many minutes in which country are watching porn, what words are looking for and so on? You do the same thing, but for Java developers.



- They, probably, also make analytics on some data that they collect, and then post it in public access. We organize surveys on what frameworks are now on the rise; Are people interested in Kotlin; Docker - this is HYIP, or it’s accepted.



- "Docker - is it HYIP or just shit?"



- His every enterprise company has already introduced and uses with might and main. Or, say, is k8s the next step after Docker, or is it an add-on that needs operations?



- Where do you get people for these polls? These are blog followers, you have their emails, you use Twitter, Facebook - how does this happen?



- We use everything. We have a base of subscribers RebelLabs, we have an email-base of clients of our products, we have accounts in social networks. Twitter among developers seems to me the most recognized network. Our marketers say that Facebook also gives very good results, but I don’t use it very much, so it’s hard for me to judge. We try to advertise in all available media channels that we organize a survey, ask us to take 10 minutes and answer the questions, and then, the more answers we collect, the more clear the statistics will be. We are trying to put all this information in public access, it becomes part of the brand. For example, some developer from any country is looking for how to apply lambda in collections in Java 8. Somewhere on the first or second request to Google there will be our blog.



- Apparently, right after the Stack Overflow.



- Well, it depends on what kind of request it was. For example, “web frameworks” - here Google is very good at our content. And so, the person opens the post, reads it, finds something useful and sees that “ZeroTurnaround” is written above, and he has the impression that smart people work in ZT, and he already trusts us a little more. In order to sell something to someone (and we are a grocery company, and we earn money by selling our products to developers), we need to have some kind of trust so that they know that we are a company whose products they most likely they will help, and if they know that smart people work there, then the products must also be smart.



- That is part of the tactics - to show that you are smart, and thereby increase the credibility of you and your products.



- Well, the usual visibility, visibility. The next time they see the name ZeroTurnaround, they will know that we are the people who once helped them in some way.



- If, with an increase in the level of trust, I understand how this brings in money, how does Visibility bring in money (can be translated as “fame” or “visibility” - note by the author), it is still not very clear to me, although I’m working on associated with marketing, already five years.



- I, frankly, this is also not very clear. But specifically, I have everything very simple. My mission is visibility and a good attitude towards us in the Java community. If people don’t know about us at all (if I don’t work very well), they will think that some strange personalities work in ZeroTurnaround, and it’s better not to have anything to do with them. And this is exactly how RebelLabs helps us.



The same reports take quite a lot of time (preparation, gathering information, creating a beautiful PDF), we use the same data as input for product managers. When they need to learn something, they come to us and say: "Oh, by the way, for XRebel you need to understand how people solve the problem with performance." And we ask the question: “How do you feel about the performance and why?” And we are answered: “In my project, the amount of money received depends on the performance. And how do we do it? No way, because we do not know how. ”



And here you can tell how to do a performance: start from this green part of the Shipilev curve, and we have a product that could help you. This is an example of product content: in RebelLabs we can write about our products and form them. A significant part of our work is to educate people, to explain to them that they have a problem. For example, if Java cannot restart classes and instantly pull them into a running process, there are solutions that can fix this. If a person is used to working the way he has been working for ten years, it is very difficult for him to recognize that, in fact, you can get rid of it. We need to teach him.



- About the RebelLabs blog: can you name the percentage of content that is not at all related to your products and simply shows that you are smart, cool, gives interesting statistics and the percentage of content that is associated with products?



- I think 80% of the content is not related products. These are posts that interested me, we all thought, and decided that they would also be interesting for some large group of developers - for example, juniors. Or already deeper posts that have nothing to do with our products.



- In fact, this is a product placement, where, say, every fifth post affects your products.



- Roughly speaking, this is true, but not quite. Just sometimes we have something interesting to tell about our products. This does not include press releases that, for example, we have released a new version of JRebel, these are passing posts, they need to be written. There should be, say, a changelog or a post about why we did this or that thing. For example, when we wrote JRebel, we needed to organize a large matrix of tests: our product should work on all JVM with a dozen application-servers on five versions plus twenty frameworks on each, because all of these combinations can break everything. We write these tests. And in the blog, we want to write about how cool we did it, that we learned such and such lessons and use TestContainers to organize it all.



- You speak very amusingly, it is clear that the translation from English into Russian is constantly going on in your head. You once said instead of “doing things” - “doing things.” And now, too. Do you speak a lot of English and little Russian?



- Yes, in Russian I speak very rarely. Russian is my mother tongue, but I use it more or less informally, with friends or at home. I would train a dog to recognize teams in Russian, but in a professional setting I rarely use Russian, so sometimes it is hard for me to find words. And English is the working language of the company, and my daily communication takes place not even in Estonian, but in English, although we are in the Estonian office.



- This has never been reproached on my part, it is simply wildly interesting to watch.

About proper marketing

- So, we talked about the company, products, about your role and about the blog. And now I want to talk a little about the subject area. Let me explain why. Very often with IT people we talk about virtual machines, products and so on, but we speak very little about marketing. This is an important thing. We already know a lot about the processes in the company, Scrum, Agile. About how to write code well with and without lambdas, what a fashionable language is Go and so on. And about marketing very little. Things that interest me madly are metrics, tools, and maybe pricing.



I was taught in my childhood that marketing should be built on data. I know that you are collecting or trying to collect some data. What data is obtained to collect, and what - no? From the point of view of data metrics, what else would you like to collect, but do not understand how?



- This is a good question. I will start with the general - what we collect and what we would like to collect. We collect data about the channels of use. At some stages of using the product, there is an option for the product to make requests to our servers and tell what it is doing now. It starts with a website. I'll tell you on the example of JRebel: first, a person comes to RebelLabs, because they google something, then he looks - aha, products, goes to the JRebel page, reads it, downloads it.



- That is, there is a referral in the browser, which said that we came with JRebel, there are some tags.



- There is a separate set of metrics for the site, traffic and other things. Then, when the product itself starts working, it can also send some data: now they downloaded me, now I installed as a plug-in in the IDE, now I was tied to some project that sits in Workspace, and now the first reload of classes occurred, first reload.



- You can ask: some people work with live production, with some systems that can be associated with security, with money, with something similar. And you send some user data to your servers. How do you solve this? Does a person put a tick on something, or do you carefully select the data that you send? I understand that this is a subtle question, but if in general?



- We do not send "home" any confidential data. The metrics I have just mentioned are just pinging that “I am now at such and that stage of the process. They started me, they installed me. ” He does not say where he was launched or something else. Simply, there is a unique identifier so that we can trace that such and such steps have been taken for the installation. JRebel, as, practically, and all products now, sends some data home. In my opinion, they are now optional, that is, if you have completely confidential information, then you can simply say during installation: “Please do not send anything“ home ”.



- Yes, now it is fashionable to do so.



- If you have a big company that develops financial software, you have processes that are there. You can’t put anything at all on your car from the bay-flounder. In some companies, you simply do not have access to the Internet from your car. When you need something to look at Stack Overflow, you “switch the lever”, a picture from another machine is displayed on your monitor, and you can google it.



- Well, or you open a personal laptop on the side.



- The metrics we collect are fairly harmless. Our products send home metrics about what technologies are used, this is done selectively. Just statistics. For example, we take a slice, and we see that the Spring plug-in has initialized in us, and we know that the user probably uses Spring or some version of Java, and so on. This helps not to keep track of our customers, but to understand exactly what they use in order to further improve the development. These metrics are not so easy to invent and do, although it would seem that this process is fairly obvious: you need a customer journey through your system to see that, say, the plugin is installed, and the project is not configurable.



What should be done? It is necessary to somehow facilitate the configuration or change the appearance of the menu or make some hints and tell the user that he didn’t do something here. Or they configure, but there is no class reloading. Maybe they have something incorrectly configured or something else. That is, we know where to dig and where to improve. As a result, everyone gets better from collecting these data.

Sales and Investors

- How this data is used by developers is understandable. You see that there, obviously, the button was not pressed, and nothing works. How does it use marketing?



- Let's start with the story. When we started, JRebel was sold simply as an archive from the site. The client could come and say: “Here is my credit card, I want one JRebel”, downloaded the zip-file in which the jar-file was sitting, and installed it.We naively thought that JRebel is such a good product (and it’s really good, everyone was happy, they said they don’t represent life without JRebel, it’s so cool) that it will sell itself. We do not need sales, we do not need a team and some processes. At one point, this opinion changed, and we started to recruit the sales team.



- You can ask a strange question: is this opinion connected with the arrival of investors? Investors usually invest money and want this money back to the company. I understand you had rounds. You now have a large sales team. Does it feel the hand of the investor?



- Rather, it is your own understanding of how to develop a product. We have a board of directors, investors, we have our own interests, and at some point it became clear that it was impossible to simply grow the company, to develop its interest, so that we could hire more people and make our product better. -marketing, which implies that we ourselves are and want, but you need to create a sales department. Our investors (this is open information) - Bain Capital (they are also from Hazelcast), we have been working with them for quite some time. The company initially made a profit, and we lived for some time with this money, but when it was decided that we needed to develop the company at a much faster pace, there was a round.

Marketing and sales tools

- At that moment was the sales department?



- It then began, was in plans. Bain Capital gave us expertise, helped. Our sales office is located in Boston, where they are. They introduced us to useful people. They are a very big company, 20 years on the market. They are serious, they have a large portfolio, and in general they are great, they helped us a lot.



Then we started to do the sales department. Initially, it was largely based on the idea that our products are so good that the people themselves want them. Using cold dialing, we collected lists of Java programmers around the world and added them to LinkedHashMap. We now have Salesforce for sales, like every other big company, and Marketo for marketing needs. In Salesforce - information about customers, to whom and when we called, who bought, when there were deals, when to call the next time the license expired, when to write a letter and so on. In Marketo, information about potential clients, about leads from Lead Generation practices.



- I thought you had it in CRM. Usually there you can make a funnel, starting with the lead.



- For almost all marketing needs, we have Marketo. All emails that we write are open - you can poke at any link, this information will go through the servers of Marketo, they will notice that such and such person stuck at such and such a link, and in this statistics they will show us everything. Accordingly, when we collect contact information, when they download reports or simply leave their information, when they download a JRebel trial or XRebel, they fill out a form that I, Oleg Shelayev, downloaded from such and such a company and want to try this product, this information comes in Marketo and is released into circulation. If I did not try it in two weeks or tried it, but did not say anything, an email will come to me.



- Question: who understands this trigger? Does this make marketo? What a person downloaded and did not buy. Or does Salesforce do it?



- I think this is Marketo.



- I understand correctly: I bought a license for your product for 365 days, I have about two weeks left, and Marketo will tell you to send me a letter, because my license is running out and I haven’t renewed it yet. So?



- Yes, so this system worked. Now we have a little shifted focus on a large enterprise, we began to call less and try to find developer contacts, began to concentrate more on existing accounts, to help them use the full potential of our products. If the company bought 200 licenses, and only 100 of them use, then next year they will not buy these 200 licenses. Most likely, they initially bought so much, because they have developers who would be interested in this, but they didn’t manage to use our product, or something distracted them.



We have a small Customer Success team, they specifically work with sales and with customers and try to help them do all this. Accordingly, if this is a big account, then when the license ends, our sales contact the company's managers, because in large companies the developer does not wave his bank card and does not say: “Two XRebel to this gentleman!” Most likely, there is an account manager or team leadership, some department that certifies what tools you can use. There is someone who deals with the budget, and we will contact him.



— Oracle , . , , . , , — .



- In a big company it will be like this: if you need something, for example, you cannot live without XRebel, you will better program and carry out tasks with it, you come to the team leader or to your immediate boss and say what you want. He agrees, but he will not immediately buy it for you, there is some process of his own, a person with a budget, you have to try this product first, roll it out to the whole team - it’s a little strange to give to one person who asked for it a lot, because if this is a good tool, it would be great to make the whole team happy. If this is not a very good tool, it may not be very necessary. And we are now focused on these enterprise sales, on large accounts.

Marketing is to blame

— - ZeroTurnaround , : , — .



- Both call and write. I admit, I am a little sorry that at some time people were not very happy. The products are good, but the aggressive sales force policy makes people angry. It was very sad to hear that. Marketing is blamed for everything. When someone is guilty, marketing is to blame, despite the fact that it was the direct work of sales. We, as a channel of communication between the company and our customers, tried again to get through to these people, write, understand what happened, how it happened, apologize. Someone we sent baskets of flowers and wine. For example, we called a person several times a week, and when he said: “Please, I know your CEO, I see Evgeny Kabanov twice a year, we are good friends. If I need JRebel, I know where to get it, ”we still continued to call him - the tick in Salesforce wasn’tno need to call anymore.



And so we tried to apologize in this way. Just because humanly it is right. At some point, it all began to erode. Either people have become more patient, or their attention with Twitter has become so dispersed that the call does not bother them anymore. In general, we knew that such a problem exists. This is part of the strategy. When your sales are built on the fact that you are individually in contact with hundreds of Java developers, you will definitely have 2% who will say that you are already fed up, stop calling them, will write about it on Twitter or Reddit in public. On the other hand, 98% will work, because for them it is normal, it does not bother them much. Those 2% of cases we have heard about are very sad, but this is rather an exception to the rule.



— , : , . RebelLabs, trial, , , , , ; , . , . CJM (Customer Journey Map) , , - , . ?



- This is really a problem, not for the company, but more for Developer Advocacy. Everything is good for the company - they buy products from it, she is happy. The problem is measuring how productive I am. The sales department is very simple - they have numbers: for the quarter they need to sell so much. You got this number at the end - you did a good job, you didn’t receive it - not so well done.



- But then it’s pretty hard to understand how to put these KPIs. Otherwise, we get involved in a game where our salespeople fulfilled the last plan, we paid them too many premiums, let us make a plan for them by 20% more next year. A difficult game begins.



- This is a game of a slightly different order, when you have a problem in that you have fulfilled the plan, but you are a little toad strangling money to pay. This, on the one hand, is a good problem: you fulfilled the plan.



- Look, if I fulfilled the plan, tell you what will happen next year? My plan will increase. We had to sell so much, and now - even more.



- Yes, but you understand that you have a complicated sale process. This is not an emotional purchase, how to take chewing gum at the checkout, and you know that you sold two containers of chewing gum, next year you will make the shelf more, and you will have to sell three containers of chewing gum. You have a forecast, sales teams that work with accounts, with an increase in accounts, finding new teams, working with individual developers and trying to find a new business, they all have forecasts.



- Is new business a new corporate client?



- Yes, or new developers, or to find one developer who has not yet used our product, give him a try to start using. Even if he does not buy now, later it can grow into a whole team. And you always have some predictions: this month we will have five transactions, there are metrics about how much this money will bring, some probabilities and so on. At the sales department, the metrics machine is very well honed.



- Better than you?



- In marketing, it is a little incomprehensible, because in our country marketing plays more likely a supporting role for sales. Marketing about what? About love and stories.

About tasks and problems of marketing

- Storytelling.



- Yes, this is storytelling, so that the client goes this way from a stranger to a fan of your products. This is the essence of the global marketing task. Plus, sales managers go there for messaging, branding, how to say what to say, who our competitors are, how we position ourselves in relation to them, what to say, where we are better and so on. These are marketing tasks. These things themselves say sales. People meet at the conference and ask: "Who are you?" "And we write JRebel." “And how is it better than HotSwap?” And here salesz know what to answer: marketing told them that only the body of the method can be changed in HotSwap, and this is an insignificant amount of changes, and when it does not work for all other changes, it is even worse than when it works. And JRebel can do everything, and thus gains from HotSwap or some other competitors. This is what marketing does.Marketing metrics are more vague, because KPIs are difficult to set, they do not have a very clear effect on money and on the bottom line.



- Then I would have talked, of course. It seems that you and I have already discussed

Norton and Kaplan and work with the Balanced Scorecard. It seems to me that this is most likely due to a lack of understanding of the whole process. Marketing is better in this regard; it is more about business and business functions. The problem with the measurements. But they, in principle, can be customized.



- It is possible, and it is done, but it is not so obvious and not so simple as with clear numbers. For example, you are a programmer, you have a test suite, and you know that when the code coverage is 90% and when everything is green, we are fine and we are great.



- And you can safely go home, and the chances that they call you at night on weekends are very small.



- They are equal to 10%, which are not covered with dough. And marketing is a little more complicated. If you have a message or are trying to understand what works best, what words you describe the product, what documents to show to potential customers, when they want to buy your product, but they have doubts whether it will work with WebSphere, there is already a method trial and error. When you build charts and models and try to concentrate your efforts on something, you can do it in one way or another, for example, there is a framework and strategy, goals, tactics. But does it work?



- We are now returning to the fact that marketing should be based on hypotheses, operationalization, testing and feedback - this whole cycle. This is very few people understand. Do you have this type of metric: how many times have JRebel distributions downloaded from your site?



- Yes, such a metric is quite simple, sometimes it is deceptive, but we believe that, for example, (I'll take the numbers from the ceiling now) 50% of the downloaded JRebel are installed, 80% of the installed JRebel are configurable. We get a typical funnel. Naturally, when someone just takes a trial, they don’t buy at once, but they turn to the sales department, we communicate with them, show a demo to their entire company, team, and there the funnel starts again.



- And if I put JRebel, use it, my distribution has a unique id, can I somehow trace that I bought it? It is the one that I downloaded - from there the key came to the server. Link purchase and installation.



- Probably not. Of course, this can be done when you have some big platforms or something that goes to the whole team. And when you have an individual developer, he puts something, he tries, and he almost never buys it himself, it always takes a detour. We can somehow relate this, but this too will be, rather, retrospectively. We will not be able to follow through all the way how the person tried, went to the manager - this is at the stage when he has not yet become our client. But backdating, when the transaction is closed and the key is purchased, we can already say it. I do not know for sure if we are doing this.



- Everyone with whom I spoke, they say that you can’t track the connection, but this can only be determined after the transaction.



- Yes, you can. But, if you think about how metrics work, you can see that this does not always help. We would like the metrics and some data that they collect to tell us what to do next, what to do more, where to concentrate our efforts.