This is the series where we talk to GTM trendsetters about the strategies and tactics they use to drive results.
We recently talked to Nino Medina, growth and demand gen leader at companies like Slack, Netlify, and now Anthropic about all things growth marketing as part of our recent event: Hacking growth holistically.
Here are three of the top takeaways from that conversation (check out the full recording above).
1. Authenticity and actionability add up for devs
As many commercial open-source software and developer tooling companies can tell you, dev audiences are a tough nut to crack.
From Slack to Netlify, part of Nino’s job has long been getting marketing-wary and sales-averse developers to buy into a company’s value prop.
His advice to fellow marketers? Be real and be practical.
“It's very easy to speak marketing speak in an Apple-esque way—to really refine the copy to tell a story,” Nino said. “But really what it comes down to is just being useful.”
For instance, say you’re planning a splashy new marketing campaign to accompany a feature launch.
It might create some buzz, but it won’t matter if your technical content—docs pages, YouTube videos, whatever the case may be—aren’t front and center to help users implement the feature.
Meeting developers where they are is also key. That means keeping your ear to the ground in dev-friendly watering holes like GitHub, X (Twitter), and Discord.
GitHub listeningCommon Room’s GitHub listening retrieves unstructured data from any public GitHub repo—including pull requests, stars, issues, and more—and uses waterfall enrichment to create a complete profile for every contact and account associated with the activity.
And while building goodwill with developers is crucial, you also can’t lose sight of the decision-makers above them.
“I'm thinking specifically about Netlify,” Nino said. “One of our core use cases was to build your marketing site with higher velocity and scale. And when I think about the buying committee [...] you have to consider the decision-maker. And so you obviously grok a different message for those folks. It'll be around productivity, about speed, about building personalized sites for your demand team so they can build effective ABM campaigns.”
It’s not rocket science. Marketing and sales teams are well-versed in persona-based engagement. But when it comes to turning dev interest into ARR, it’s even more important to get your multithreading ducks in a row.
Right person, right message, right time—no matter whether you’re going bottom-up or top-down.
2. Intent signals matter even more in the AI age
Interest in AI is white hot.
For demand gen marketers at AI-forward companies, that means the job may be less about building demand than properly harnessing it.
It’s something Nino understands all too well based on his work with Anthropic, a GenAI leader with heaps of market mindshare.
“One of the principle challenges is discerning who are the window shoppers versus who are the buyers,” Nino said.
In many ways, it’s similar to the challenges companies face with product-led sales.
Namely, how do you separate the product-qualified leads from the tire kickers who want to stay on the free-forever plan?
“How do we figure out the right signals that really indicate somebody who's ready to deploy versus someone who's just there for the conversation?” Nino said. “[H]ow do we think about potentially using tools like yours at Common Room to [...] model that in a way where we feel a high level of confidence and predictability in terms of generating pipeline?”
Signals play a crucial role in separating buyers from browsers. Figuring out the ideal combination of buyer behaviors and characteristics may look different from company to company, but the first step is always the same: getting your hands on the necessary data.
Agentic signal captureCommon Room’s agentic signal capture automatically fetches contact, account, and activity data from your first-, second-, and third-party data sources. Our machine learning algorithms process this data and turn it into structured outputs for team members to access, analyze, and action on.
From demand gen to sales development, customer-facing teams need easy access to intent signals.
3. Growth doesn’t happen in a silo
Nino is a big believer in what he calls a “growth operating system.”
In short, it’s less about implementing one-and-done growth hacks and more about establishing rituals that help teams find, fulfill, and fine-tune growth strategies.
“Early in my career, a lot of my obsession was around finding silver bullets,” Nino said. “As I progressed through my career and matured and met folks who were much more seasoned than I was, I think the pattern recognition there was a lot less of a focus on tactics and more on systems and an operating manual to uncover those tactics.”
From planning and road mapping sessions to business reviews and growth brainstorms, cross-functional collaboration is key.
The goal is to create and keep a regular cadence of communication and information-sharing with stakeholders from sales, engineering, and other departments.
It’s not about meeting for meetings sake, but finding the unique rhythm that will best help your organization achieve operational efficiency. It’s also helpful for securing buy-in for budget resourcing and getting different teams fired up about business initiatives.
“It’s really around discovering the best practices, rituals, and meetings that uncover these insights that ultimately will lead to the outcomes that you want from a quantitative sense,” Nino said.
It may sound simple on the surface, but it’s something you have to commit to, no matter how full team members’ calendars get. Or how much more you enjoy doing versus talking.
“For me personally, maybe one of my weaknesses even to this day is just cross-functional communication,” Nino said. “I'm sort of heads down and I love getting my hands dirty and doing the work. And oftentimes I forget how critical it is to communicate. And so the growth operating system, one of its functions is essentially to force the team to do that. And you'll be surprised at how effective it is.”
These are just some of the takeaways from our conversation with Nino Medina.
Watch the recording for the full story.
And stay tuned for the next edition of Go-to-market mavericks!
Run go-to-market intelligently with Common Room
Get started for free or get in touch to see how Common Room’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform helps you capture, enrich, and take action on every buying signal.
