developers are easy to sell to
TRANSCRIPT
Developers are Easy to Sell To
Austin Gunter
Virtual DevRel Meetup, Sept 1, 2016
Sales?
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Define sales in the context of DevRel Set developers up for success Build holistic, ecological sales relationships
* Between your users, your company, and your software Understand how Developer Evangelists can close the sale
successfully
Focus today
Developer community at datawire.io Prev, Developer community at WP
Engine Author, The Liberal Arts Techie
Who is this Austin guy?
@austingunter
Open Source Microservices SDK Build a Microservice in minutes
Datawire
“Microservices should be easy to build.”
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Sales is NOT A financial transaction where you
disappear after money is exchanged Manipulation or coercion
Redefine Sales
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Sales Is service Is long-term relationship Starts with massive empathy
Redefine Sales
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Intros Content Start with, what problems do they
have + what resources can I help with?
Developer Success
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Holistic sales relationships
Add value early and often Offer more than you receive (make it
easy for people to open your emails) Build credibility and trust by saying
“no, we aren’t necessarily a good fit”
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Closing a sale
Start a convo with an opinionated perspective
Have empathy when you pitch Know that developers are going to do
their homework
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The Developer Sales Pitch
1. Say something opinionated about the tech 2. Engage the developer’s natural skepticism, desire to prove you wrong
3. Tell them where they can get ahold of the software 4. Walk away 5. Let the developer go try and break the software 6. Assuming the software is solid, they’ll come back to you knowing that it worked and you have built credibility
7. They will then buy
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Why this works (It’s good sales)
It comes from a deep place of empathy with the developer Respects their intellect and their independence The entire sale rests on the quality of the software
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Slides: speakerdeck.com/austingunter/devrel-sales [email protected] / datawire.io/features Amazon: The Liberal Arts Techie @austingunter
Thank you!
How long have you been doing Dev Relations Did you come to Dev Relations from marketing or engineering
Do you have a really great POV that gets people to talk to you - it’s intelligent and outrageous, but not motherhood and apple pie “datawire: you should be able to do microservices in 60 seconds” “WP Engine - WordPress should be secure and scalable
Building Communities - Network effect - Getting WOM growing on its own
Build Trust and credibility