LaunchDarkly Marketing
How LaunchDarkly Optimized Marketing Spend to Increase Pipeline by 70% with CloseFactor
Introduction
LaunchDarkly is a Feature Management Platform that serves hundreds of billions of feature flags daily to help software teams build better software, faster. Launchdarkly serves application development teams in organizations of all sizes that are moving to agile development methodologies and increasingly faster product release cycles. As organizations all across the world transform themselves into faster-moving software delivery teams, LaunchDarkly is poised for tremendous growth. The LaunchDarkly marketing team used CloseFactor to develop sophisticated scoring for their massive TAM, so they could optimize their spending, pipeline growth, and bring the right types of MQLs to their sales teams.
LaunchDarkly – Poised for Rapid Growth
LaunchDarkly, one of the fastest-growing companies for developer tools, has the lofty mission to change how modern dev teams develop and ship products. The sheer speed of innovation today makes it a must-have developer platform for enterprises to release product changes quickly and reliably. To tap into the vast potential of enterprises that are moving to agile development tools and faster release cycles, LaunchDarkly’s marketing team knew they had to employ more sophistication than most traditional enterprise technology marketing teams.
Calibrating the Opportunity
LaunchDarkly marketing had a good problem – every company in the world that had any kind of software team could potentially be a customer. The challenge was to sift through the opportunity to find the lowest hanging fruit fast, so the sales team could harvest MQLs and turn them into qualified opportunities.
Identifying the right customers who were at the right stage in their technology journey, where LaunchDarkly could immediately become a critical component of their software development team’s success, was paramount. With a huge addressable market and a newly scaling sales team, LaunchDarkly needed a way to categorize and prioritize accounts by factors that were the highest indicators of buying propensity.
“Our off-the-shelf software tools had unreliable, high-level data points,” said Mike Smith, VP Revenue Marketing at LaunchDarkly. “We needed a way to capture the latest state of the market and the specific trends that are relevant to LaunchDarkly.” Mike, a seasoned veteran in the marketing demand generation space, had considerable experience using older tools that were often inaccurate and outdated and did not want his sales teams wasting their time with bad data.
Why LaunchDarkly Chose CloseFactor
Keith Messick, visionary CMO at LaunchDarkly wanted a sophisticated and pragmatic approach to getting to high value and high likelihood customers fast. He chose the CloseFactor team because they provided the extended data science and machine learning capabilities applied to externally available data about his vast addressable market, and helped him sift through to identify which characteristics of the data were important for LaunchDarkly. The uniqueness of LaunchDarkly’s market and timing made it impossible to use off-the-shelf data; Messick needed indicators that were specific to LaunchDarkly’s ideal customers at that stage of hypergrowth.
CloseFactor helped identify what some of these unique characteristics were and used them to deliver scoring and categorization of over 100,000 accounts worldwide.
The Results
Scoring the accounts and using it to optimize marketing spend led to a 70% quarter-over-quarter increase in marketing-generated opportunities and marketing-generated pipeline.
Encouraged by results, the LaunchDarkly marketing team ran additional campaigns. They used CloseFactor to generate high propensity personas for these campaigns and ended up creating a $600k qualified pipeline in just a few weeks.
“The biggest advantage of using CloseFactor was visibility into the exact data that is relevant to where we are as a company,” says Mike Smith. “Customization to a company in stages of hypergrowth is hard, but they pulled it off and were able to demonstrate very tangible results.”