What started with the first commit (a saved version of a software program during the coding process) in 2007 has since become the world’s leading software development platform. More than 36 million developers worldwide visit GitHub’s massive community to collaborate, code, and create new software products and features.

However, extraordinary success frequently brings extraordinary challenges. While GitHub has extremely light-touch user activation to encourage developers to quickly join its community, this light touch user experience makes it challenging to follow up with users who might need GitHub’s enterprise products.

GitHub’s marketing team uses a marketing automation platform to run campaigns for top-funnel prospects, and a CRM as a system of record. Unfortunately, neither of these tools offered robust, customizable native integrations - software-level connections that let other apps flow data to or from them. This means that even though GitHub was capturing its leads as normal via its website and other channels, there was no way to directly flow those enriched leads for campaign follow-up, or to preserve marketing attribution. More importantly, existing leads weren’t getting enriched with any previous event or touchpoint data recorded, nor was there any way to automatically run regularly-scheduled enrichment “jobs” to ensure an ongoing, uninterrupted flow of lead data. This meant that potentially hot leads that had engaged with GitHub in the past weren’t being recorded as such, or picked up with any kind of regularity, potentially costing the company’s revenue team real opportunities.

 In order to solve this important marketing pain point, GitHub’s marketing team would have to make the decision between purchasing an external solution to its problem or requesting valuable development resources the company could be spending on making better products instead. That’s when they found the Tray Platform, offering the flexibility to integrate any combination of cloud-based apps, seamlessly flow data among them, and the power to create automated workflows that rapidly execute important business tasks.

The GitHub team used the Tray Platform’s deep integration abilities to connect the different elements of their marketing and sales tech stack. They built automated workflows that pulled in leads from multiple sources, including event-based leads, to enrich them, and then flow those enriched leads directly for follow-up and to its CRM for recording purposes. “Working with the Tray.io team is always great - they’re very hard-working and responsive. They provided tons of help getting us up and running.”

By integrating its previously siloed applications to unify, enrich, and flow lead data to and from its marketing platform and CRM, GitHub’s marketing team saves hours per week on what would have been time-consuming manual labor.

More importantly, the company has observed substantially higher engagement on its marketing campaigns, with a conversion rate increase from top-level inquiry prospects to marketing qualified leads (MQLs)...without having to commit valuable dev resources. “The Tray Platform helps us significantly improve conversion rates and helps our devs focus on building better products, rather than closing operational gaps. The weekly time savings are nice, but what’s even better is the business impact of increased engagement.”

Going forward, GitHub plans to continue using the Tray Platform to close operational gaps and optimize marketing processes across their team, without having to commit development resources. “Before, we sought out the Tray Platform to help us solve the problem at hand. Now, we solve our problems with the Tray Platform in mind.”