I wish marketers realized that as a developer, and a senior one at that, I have no say in what software my company pays for. I have a daily flood of messages from salespeople on email, linkedin, even text and calls asking me to "try out <hot SaaS product> for your team", and I get frustrated trying to explain that no, that's now how things work at corporations beyond a certain size. A simple software license or subscription that will make me significantly more productive in my daily works takes several rounds of approval from different departments maybe lasting months, and is more often than not denied. And this is for something that costs $10. I am not going to get them to switch to your CRM.
I assume you're working in a big company? In small company as a dev I have almost all the decision power regarding which software to choose, at the end I just need to justify the cost to management.
This sounds like exactly the kind of force-multiplying work a senior developer should be doing, though.
I totally agree that it's ridiculous and sucks to do, but that also sounds like incredibly high ROI on your time.
Spending a month filling out paperwork to save every dev in the company 15 minutes a day or whatever would be a massive win. Like an "I deserve a promotion" level win.
I get what you mean, though. I've fought to bring products in a couple of times, and it's one of my least favorite tasks. It's endless meetings, and nobody on the other teams is super helpful because they're not going to get a bonus if this works out.
Edit: Another thought; spending your time making procurement easier might also be a worthwhile endeavor, if you could get the buy-in from someone that procurement will listen to.
True. I wrote that from the perspective of a sales process trying not to waste time.
As far as risking being annoying, it's an unfortunate reality that you come out way ahead in sales if you talk to a lot of people, even if you make a fraction of them hate you along the way. That's even true when selling to programmers. But it does have externalities as all the sales teams collectively evolve their tactics to keep cutting through.
Yeah, "it costs nothing to reach out" when there's a low percentage of recipients who will be interested is exactly how we we got to the current equilibrium of "developers just ignore marketing emails". Individually, it might seem like there's no cost, but collectively they've all made their job a lot harder by making it not worth developers' time to try to sift through the noise and try to find signal.
When they do "realize" that, B2B companies end up building products that are evaluated by procurement managers but not end users. Lots of examples in the industry.
So I'd really rather most didn't come to that realization. And, well, we as developers do have some influence.
Add to this: transparent pricing. Most developers I know are highly allergic to "Call for a quote!"
For enterprise pricing, this can be unavoidable, but a ballpark is nice. Or say you can offer steep discounts in the right situation, and have me call to discuss.
nobody would be allergic to calling for a quote if calling got you a quote. problem is, it puts you in a pipeline/funnel and you still don't have a quote.
Transparent pricing and a free/evaluation tier that is feature complete but scale limited, rather than feature-gated. With that combination I can put together a really tiny "this can do X for us and would cost us Y at our current scale, potentially negotiable" demonstration, which will make the CTO sit up and listen. Without transparent pricing I'm just not going to bother (because it's the first question I'll be asked) and if you gate off enterprise features I can't demonstrate enterprise use cases.
If more software companies put effort in documentation, web environments in the browser were is it possible to try the tools, provide many and good examples they would instantly push themselves way ahead of the competition.
The software that I've seen advertised and then introduced myself to corporate environments is software that I can play with at home first. I'm not going to go through hassle of the purchasing department if I don't have extremely high confidence it'll be solve real problems and be worth the effort.
I have multiple cases where there's software I know works, but I don't know if it works for my situation. Not being able to test it means that we're going with the default "safe" option, which is almost always someone else.
This is an example of where you can't simply ask the users what works (or what they want). People don't know. People lie. People will tell you what they would like to work.
The truth lies in results, not simply asking "how can I make you buy my product or service?" You will need to try many things. You will need to measure their effectiveness with a fairly standard funnel (eg [1]).
If you ask people, they will tell you that advertising doesn't work on them and they simply skip all ads. This just isn't true. Not that I'm defending attention theft but even if you have a good product that solves a problem potential users actually care about, you need to make those potential users aware of it somehow and you will need a metrics-based approach to finding it.
Technical people in particularly tend to take a dim view of sales and marketing. The reality is that these fields tend to be very results-focused (eg you sold something or you didn't vs "we shipped something nobody used but we learned a lot") and way more methodical than most product planning.
curl is a single product. Databricks is a brand with a product portfolio; they need brand- not product marketing. Their site is actually clear for a company of their size. Compare them with sap.com.
One of the biggest things that attacts me to a particular product (besides a lot of the good answers here already) is if it's open source and self hostable or not. Maybe not a marketing strategy per-se but it's something for marketers to be loud about.
More, and more companies are open sourcing their core product, and those are usually the ones I'll recommend my employer use.
Besides that having a nice UI that's easy to use and prominently displayed in the marketing material, or available via a demo goes a long way, too.
One thing I like is having a one line pitch, in clear terms, that explains what your product does on the front page. Second is easy accessibility to documentation so I can validate whether the product will meet our needs.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to evaluate some new software which required me to wade through pages of marketing speak and buzzwords before I could even find a explanation of what the product does.
Marketing works on me when trusted and intelligent individuals passionately suggest tooling and confidently answer my questions.
Sales people that use words incorrectly and don’t have a deep understanding of the product or the problem being solved cause me to distrust the product and brand indefinitely. I’m looking at you Databricks, Datadog, and Snowflake.
First, be upfront about pricing and make it simple.
Second, have good documentation and make it easily accessible.
Third, either in your interactive demo or in your video, make it extremely obvious what problem you’re trying to solve. You don’t need to be clever about it.
Fourth, if you use more than two buzzwords, I am just going to laugh and leave your site or delete your email and forever think you’re a grifter.
Marketing works on everyone, but many people have been trained to hate certain things due to repeated bad experiences. Things with arcane pricing, tons of NIH terms and/or buzzwords, poor documentation, and hype driven not solution driven marketing is all at the top of that “repeated bad experiences” list.
The replies to the tweet that say some variation of ‘no marketing strategies work on me’ crack me up. If you think you’re too clever, it suggests to me that you could stand to be more introspective.
"Marketing never works on me" – guy who is carrying a dozen Apple products on their person at any given time, whose grocery cart always has Coca Cola, Oreos, Doritos, Fruit Loops, Kraft mac and cheese, who uses Colgate toothpaste and Tide detergent, buys Pampers diapers, has State Farm insurance...
Why do you assume that it's necessarily false or that it's some kind of brag about intelligence?
There's not necessarily shame in reacting positively to marketing and a lot of marketing directed at developers is truly dire. Your product isnt getting any more sales because you hired somebody who printed some t shirts.
Anecdotally I'd say the most effective marketing done by software companies is done at bosses who are not very tech savvy. Microsoft is especially good at playing upon their emotions.
100%. If you've ever found yourself buying something (a rather likely event, in most lifetimes) the goods most likely didn't just magically end up in your cart (virtual or real) and you made the purchase. Somehow you ended up looking at that product in particular, and made the decision to buy it. You may not think about all the steps that occurred along the way as marketing, but they are. Whether that be how the results showed up on the search engine or the shelves in a store, to the names and descriptions that let you know what it is and what you'll get out of it, and so on.
Marketing is a massive discipline, it isn't just the cringy ads we see all the time. As with many things in life, you don't tend to notice those who are doing it well, just those who are doing it poorly.
No marketing strategies kind of does work on me. The standard psychological manipulation tactics have been so badly worn by now there's a lot to be said for just offering a meaningful product and not acting like manipulative scum. May seem too simple, but sadly it's an easy way to stand out positively from most of the competition.
I've never had good experience with salesperson. Almost every time I ask them "can your product do X?" I get answers like "yes" or "no but our engineers can make it happen", which is baseless promise. Last time I signed up with a vendor was when their engineer told me "No, we can't do that. And here's why that may not be what you want".
A free tier/trial that opens with an end to end "hello world" of your product that's easy to modify with my own data/system to test out the happy path.
Many products with a lot of config options open up with a totally blank slate. Just to see what it might feel like you have to go away from their system to go google for examples which may or may not be current best practice.
Direct Response Copywriting works very well. So well that I even quit developing and started doing it full time. Launched a product and then another. Moved out of software development and into health. Like most successful marketers, I started by reading the great Gary Halbert Letter.
Not turning purchasing / procurement into an obstacle course.
A company burns a lot of goodwill by not being direct (which makes me even more suspicious of their offering): if what you have to offer is so great, then SHOW IT.
1. Prominence of documentation. I will infer from the absence of a prominent documentation link that the product is not meant to appeal to the kind of people who read documentation, and is thus awful (but probably comes with nice kickbacks for shotcallers).
2. Prominence of pricing. If the product does not have public, easily findable pricing, I will assume that the company is going to try to fleece me. Either now, or when I'm invested enough that I can't afford to switch. Hard pass.
3. I want the marketing to tell me what the product actually does, not what they think it will do for my company. I.e. tell me the stupid thing does object storage with an S3-compatible API, don't give me this "It accelerates your synergies and decelerates your incompatibilities" drivel. I'm perfectly capable of deciding whether an S3-compatible object store is going to be useful or not. Don't make me try to guess what it does, because I won't.
4. Do not ask for my phone number. Seriously, don't do it. I would rather give you a credit card number and pay for my trial than give you the means to cold call me for the next 3 months.
5. Do not cold call me. I will ask what product you're selling, hang up, add the product to my "do not buy" list, then spamlist your entire domain and block your number. If I'm interested, I'll reach out to you.
6. I like to see at least some open source code in a well-maintained repo, to give me some confidence that the closed source portions are well-maintained as well. It doesn't have to be something fancy or secret; just putting the HTTP calls that anyone could reverse engineer into a client library on Github that has unit tests and coverage and releases and what not is fine by me. I prefer entirely open source projects, but I know that's not realistic for many businesses.
7. If your business is a SaaS, I want a real status page. Not this red/yellow/green current status non-sense, but a graph of the SLI's over at least the past year with the SLA marked as a line on the graph, and annotations for the outages. That tells me that providing reliable service to customers is important to you. The red/yellow/green one tells me "reliability" is important to you, where "reliability" means "not having to pay out SLA penalties".
