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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
12 Data Technology Founders
Marketing Best Practices
Serve Sellers With the Same Intention You Serve Buyers
Abby Ross built her marketing approach around a simple reframe: sellers are customers too. “Sellers are your customers. And for channel marketing, its sellers and partners organizations are your customers,” she said. That framing changed how she prioritized her time and what she produced. Rather than treating sales alignment as a courtesy, she made it structural. “I believe in working hand in hand with sellers at all times, understanding their priorities, understanding their challenges, understanding what’s working and what’s not.” The payoff went beyond better internal relationships. When she built those connections, sellers started pulling her into the room with actual buyers. “When I establish those strong relationships with sellers, they also invite me to join customer calls, which is insanely helpful to really hear from the customer about the problems they have and need solving.” Hearing customers directly made everything downstream, from messaging to campaigns to content, sharper and more grounded in real problems.
Track Pipeline Contribution Instead of Lead Volume
Lead counts are one of the most persistent vanity metrics in B2B marketing, and Jayashree calls it out directly: “Measuring marketing by just NQs and leads. Again, it’s really common. Every day you would see marketers talk about how they brought in 500 leads. At the end of the day, if that doesn’t pan into meetings, it doesn’t pan into your pipeline and your opportunities. You can get all the leads you want.” The real frame she uses is the buyer journey as a sequence of touches, where any single program is one input among many: “It’s not leads, right? It is building your awareness. It is the multiple touches. It’s one of those touches in the user journey.” A marketing team optimizing for lead volume will hit its numbers and miss its actual job.
Choose a North Star Metric That Measures Customer Value
Michel built internal alignment at Airbyte around a single metric: volume of data moved. The logic was deliberate. “We have a [north star] metric. It’s volume of data that we’re moving basically. The reason we picked that [north star] metric is because it’s not a validity metric. It is synonymous with the value we provide to our customers and with our community.” A metric tied directly to customer value keeps the team focused on outcomes that actually matter rather than numbers that look good in a board deck. When that metric moves, everything else follows: “If we get the volume really high, then yes, revenue is here. Yes, the community is growing, and yes, we’re building a valuable product.” Pick the one number that only goes up when your customers are genuinely getting value, and let everything else be secondary.
Make Your Brand Impossible to Ignore in a Commoditized Market
Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy, built a deliberately bold brand in a category where enterprise B2B companies all looked and sounded identical. His reasoning was straightforward: before anything else, you have to get people to look. As Dan put it, “You need to differentiate. You need to be real. So the big, bold messaging works incredibly well for us.” The results showed up at events. At a Gartner conference, the provocative creative did exactly what it was designed to do: “I would say at least a third of the traffic that came to our booth and, we were definitely one of the busiest booths at the event, was from, what does this mean? the obsolescence of integration. Tell me more.” Bold positioning generated the conversation. The conversation created the opening.
Align Your Marketing Tone to What Your Buyers Actually Respect
Ian and his co-founders came from technical backgrounds and built their marketing philosophy around a direct observation about their audience. Technical buyers respond to candor and substance, so Tonic oriented everything around those qualities: “What we’ve come to believe is that being generally honest and direct and also producing really high quality content is the best way to reach our audience.” The reasoning was straightforward: “The people that benefit from Tonic are technical folks, and so I think they appreciate candor, they appreciate substance. So that’s what we try to focus on.” Polish and production value are not what earns trust with buyers who can see through surface-level messaging. Your marketing tone has to match what your specific audience respects, and with technical buyers, that means substance over style every time.
Anchor Your Messaging Around a Genuinely Different Product Approach
In a data market Roy described as full of “a lot of marketing, a lot of buzzwords,” he drew a clear line between companies that blend in and those that break through. His view was direct: “to rise above it, you really need to deliver a unique approach. You can’t be just another player in a specific category that caters to the same audience with the same type of solution.” The differentiation starts with the product, and the messaging job is to make that difference visible everywhere. Roy described the execution as “taking a completely different product approach and making sure that we hone on this messaging in every channel and avenue possible.” When your product genuinely does something different, consistent messaging across every channel turns that difference into a competitive position.
Treat Community Contributions as a Growth Asset Worth Investing In
Many companies behind open source projects fall into a resentment trap. Suresh named it plainly: “A lot of times there is a resentment that as a company behind an open source project, you’re giving so much to the community and you think that the community is not appreciating how much work you are putting into it. But at the same time, if you work it the right way, there is a tremendous amount of contribution that comes from the community.” The mechanics of doing it right came down to how seriously the team engaged with contributor work. “If you do the community the right way, and encourage them and [review the pull requests] that they’re sending to you, you can actually increase the number of contributors and increase your product velocity. Within four years we have 400 plus contributors.” Communities that feel ignored stop contributing. Communities that feel heard compound.
Leverage Community Proof to Reinforce Your Market Messaging
Competing against larger, better-resourced players creates a specific messaging problem: buyers have reasons to be skeptical, and a small team cannot outspend its way to credibility. Vinoth framed this directly as a competitive reality: “How do we rise above like this and how do we kind of fight FUD in a lot of different cases? As a small team, that has been a pretty interesting challenge.” The answer he found was to let community adoption do the work that a marketing budget could not. “The open source community really helps us because it helps [to point to] large data lakes that are being powered by our technology, which helps us actually cement our messaging and the value proposition that we bring.” Real-world proof of adoption at scale is a more credible counter to market skepticism than any campaign a small team can run.
Generate Category Awareness Through Compounding Customer Stories
When Alation needed to generate awareness in a market that didn’t yet know it had a problem, the team leaned on one repeatable marketing motion: customer stories told consistently at events over time. Satyen described the approach as “a lot of evangelical stories that started compounding and ultimately got to a place where people started recognizing the category.” There was no big campaign, no single breakout moment. The cadence was simpler than that: “here’s a story and here’s another one. And it was a really slow roll to build momentum.” Customer proof, repeated consistently across the right venues, compounds in ways that a single campaign cannot. The most durable marketing motion is often the least glamorous one.
Compete on Customer Outcomes Instead of Brand Spending
In a crowded market, Sean described the competitive environment as full of noise and pointed to substance as the thing that cuts through it. “For us what matters and why we win is it’s a lot less about the hype or the promise of what you could do with data,” he said, explicitly setting aside brand-based spending as a primary lever. Instead, the focus landed on direct product exposure. “Get the product in the hands of customers and we win.” When buyers experience real outcomes, the product earns the deal. The companies that win long term are the ones that let results speak louder than promises.
Take Creative Risks in Marketing to Stand Out in Crowded Markets
In a crowded competitive space, Rina operated from a clear conviction about what it takes to get noticed. “I think it’s important to be bold and take risks with marketing. Otherwise you’re just blending in.” That philosophy extended to accepting rejection as part of the calculus: “You sometimes need to risk having a door shut at your face to potentially land something big and suppress competition.” Safe marketing produces safe results, and in a saturated category, safe results mean invisibility. The willingness to do something that might not work is what separates companies that break through from those that don’t.
Prioritize Customers and Product Before Investing in Brand
Barr Moses held off on building a website for roughly two years after starting the company. “It took us a long time to get our first website. I think it was maybe a couple of years into the company’s existence. We already had the product, we had customers, we had the full thing where we didn’t have a website.” She was direct about why: “It was really because we were focusing on building a product, making customers happy, and getting customers. And that was our sole focus. I really believe in being extreme in our focus.” Brand presence came later because, in her view, “in the early days, that was way more important than building a website.” For early-stage founders debating where to put marketing energy, her sequencing is clear: get customers first, then build the brand around what you learn from them.