Generating 1,500+ leads wasn’t luck, it was strategy. CircleCI’s partnership with LeadDev transformed traditional event sponsorships into powerful, experience-driven opportunities that connected deeply with the developer community. By combining gold-level sponsorships, micro-workshops, networking dinners, and digital campaigns, they engaged key engineering personas and positioned themselves as thought leaders. 

CircleCI focused on meaningful engagement rather than lead volume

CircleCI had the objective of generating high-quality leads within their ICP: Engineering Managers and Directors at companies with 1,000+ employees. CircleCI leveraged LeadDev to connect with top engineering leaders.

LeadDev has a unique proposition in terms of bringing together a certain persona that we arguably couldn’t find elsewhere and a good reputation for great content and a broader community that obviously attracted that wider persona to come together to spend two days, geeking out about all the cool things that we do in this industry. 

“That was the primary reason, for coming along and dipping our toe in the LeadDev waters, and then it has grown from there.

– Tim Bush, global head of events, CircleCI

With LeadDev, CircleCI could access the full Decision Making Unit (DMU)

LeadDev complemented CircleCI’s broader event strategy by enabling engagement with multiple personas: engineering managers, platform engineering teams, and senior leaders.

Bush added: “We don’t just care about a single persona. Through various activities, we’re trying to influence three core personas in our marketing programs: developers, middle managers [and] platform engineering teams, and senior leaders. When we plan our event schedule for the year, we need to make sure we’re touching all of those key personas in a way that’s gonna help us achieve our goals.”

CircleCI partnered with LeadDev to deliver a bespoke, multi-layered event program

Thought leadership

CircleCI leveraged its industry credibility to shape its own narrative.

• Expert Clinics and video content sponsorship
• Micro-workshops

High quality lead generation

Strategic experiences that convert interest into actionable leads

• Gold Sponsorships in London, NYC and Berlin to collect booth scans at their large booth
• Networking Dinners and 1:1 meetings via a concierge service to build relationships
• Digital demos nurture leads and identify hand raisers, panel discussions build broader topic-based audiences, and digital workshops extend in-person event content to nurture leads, reach those who missed it, and leverage proven success.

This strategy aimed to engage multiple personas across the engineering hierarchy, from developers to senior leaders.