How to Engage Developers

Understanding what developers want from the technology buying process

For many of you that have been long time readers, you know me from my days selling software at Stack Overflow. Before that however, I spent a decade helping startups to understand how to market and sell and in the process created a community called the Enterprise Sales Forum.

I wrote the following essay for that community on the process of selling technical products to developers. So I am doing something a bit different from the normal newsletter and sharing this post in its entirety to hear your thoughts and gather to your feedback. It may be a lofty goal, but I do think there is an opportunity to improve how salespeople sell to developers and hope this is at least a good first step in improving the buying experience. Thanks for reading as always 😁

Corporate decks in the B2B enterprise software world can be legendary. By legendary, I mean not good, like the one at Siebel. It was not the longest deck, but a few slides triggered people.

I was a sales engineer at the time on the team selling to Wall Street banks. I was onboarding, so I would join account executives on sales calls. It was policy to present the corporate pitch, and at this one meeting, we got to the slide touting our 400 screens, 1700 views, and 4000 tables.

The senior bank MD stopped the sales rep mid-sentence and said,” Why the f*ck do I care about 400 screens? I don’t want 400 screens…