As Stearns’ team became more established, they began exploring new marketing channels and looking for partners to generate leads. Inbound lead flow was healthy, but CircleCI aimed to expand its top-of-funnel lead generation activities for high-trajectory growth. With a niche consumer in the DevOps world, CircleCI needed a partner that could go beyond generic IT managers to find DevOps managers.
Given the industry’s state of bleeding-edge technology, they encounter many early adopters but finding companies in new markets that were behind the adoption curve posed a significant challenge.