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How does developer product marketing fundamentally change when you're targeting enterprise companies as buyers?

Vishal Naik
Google Product Marketing Lead | Formerly DocuSignJuly 14

In this area, developer marketing isn't that unlike core product marketing, in that the customer journey for Enterprise is more complex. For smaller companies, all phases of the funnel may be targeted at developers. For medium companies, your awareness and marketing may go to decision makers vs your adoption marketing towards developers. For larger companies, things get a bit more complex: You may have decision makers who think about technology (IT, Product, etc), decision makers that think about the future (Business Owners, Innovation teams), Developers that do the work (junior level Devs) and Developers that set direction and give guidance (senior level Devs). You’ll also have companies that choose to build in house vs companies that choose to leverage a partner. So your PMM work will have to matrix across the funnel by persona. 

1352 Views
Justine Davis
Postman Head of MarketingNovember 17

Be very clear who your buyer is. When going after the enterprise, developers are not your buyer. They are one very influential piece of the puzzle though. Developers will be your end users but ultimately the buyer is likely at the VP level. 

To build your champions, first build a product they will love and see value out of right off the bat. Give them technical use cases, sandboxes, demos, AMAs with your product teams and/or dev teams, and GREAT documentation to win them over. Do not talk to them about business benefits, they aren't likely to care.

That is the message for the buyer. Developers will listen more to getting them out of tedious tasks that they straight up don't want to do on repeat. 

2052 Views
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Amanda Groves
Enable VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, AppsemblerMarch 26

The biggest things to keep in mind when selling to enterprise are the concepts of:

  • Multithreading

  • ABM

  • Personalization

  • peer influence

With these three things in mind, for developer segments the fundamentals don't necessarily change - it just becomes more important to index on the things devs care about:

  • multithreading: info sec, cto, engineering lead

  • abm: lead with value and outcomes (efficiency metrics, reducing dev load so they can ship faster with less review cycles)

  • personalization: use intent technologies to serve just in time messaging

  • peer influence: this audience will research so ensure your third-party review sites are polished/positive and you're active in adjacent developer communities.

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