How does sales enablement change when your company is b2d (business to developer) vs traditional enterprise?

I love this question, <3 Developers! The fundamentals of sales enablement dont change, it's more the way you communicate the needs of your audience to your sales team that changes. If we unpack developers and what they want, then it makes it really easy to figure out how to approach sales enablement. 1) Developers will question to the end. They will question every word on every slide and understand it as a direction or intention. So make sure that any presentation or pitch you build for your ...Read More

Selling to developers can be difficult, often because they have a ton of say over the decision but not explicitly the budget, but marketing to developers is simpler than people think. Quickly and concretely explain what your product does and how it works/fits in with other stacks (as much as developers love to claim that they're immune to marketing/branding - just look at the stickers on their laptops. C'mon - that's brand loyalty/affinity on par with pre-teen pop music fans) then get them into ...Read More

I love this question. First, I would say to save your company's BDR/SDRs time and avoid trying to set up calls with developers. You'll avoid a lot of frustration on both ends. Gating content content from developers and forcing them to fill in forms might give you a short term bump in leads, but the quality will be low. Instead, think of the sales funnel as living side by side with the individual developer journey and look for ways to compliment the activities with the key decision makers and the ...Read More

When selling to developers your enablement activities are likely to take on a different focus so that the team understands how to engage in a discussion and build a community while keeping their sales pitches locked in a drawer.  It will also require in-depth technical enablement and understanding of technical use cases as well as how to answer questions without trying to sell them something.  The biggest shift might be the mindset, where the sales team needs to focus on what is the best answer ...Read More

Great question, something I think about a lot. I’m a huge proponent of specialization with technical products. I wouldn’t expect every member of our enterprise field organization (which is in the thousands) to be able to carry a highly technical conversation from end-to-end, nor would I want them to! But I am responsible for dev and ops-centric products, so it can't be ignored.What I try to do is zoom out of the customer lifecycle, pinpoint who on the team is having the conversation, and what th ...Read More

Your sales team needs a higher level of technical proficiency when you're a B2D company. It's important to hire sales reps that can form their own mental model of how your product works and integrates with the rest of a customers tech stack for them to be successful. They don't need to know how to code, but they do need to be able to develop a strong functional understanding of the product their selling.  Assuming you've hired sales reps that fit this criteria, enablement should focus on use cas ...Read More

Here are some tips on what you could do differently: Highlight technical value propositions more in your sales enablement collateral Invest time in technical training for your salesforce Ensure your salesforce has easy access to technical information, kudos if you can leverage an internal GPT for this! Think about how you can create self-service demos and sandbox experiences that your sales team also has visibility into Encourage your salesforce to share technical content and resources with cust ...Read More

B2d follows a whole different motion. A developer is not eager to talk to Sales (and they don't want to be sold to). Developers want to try out the product themselves, tinker with it, and only if they enjoy the experience (or get to the aha moment) will they evangelize the solution up the company's ranks. Developer motion strongly aligns with the product-led-growth (PLG) motion. The trial experience from onboarding to docs, inviting team members, and getting to the aha moments can play a pivotal ...Read More

For companies targeting developers, it's a good habit to build up a culture of developer empathy. Practical exmaples include: Provide them 101 sessions, enough for them to be dangerous and speak the lingo. What is an API? What is in a JSON payload? What is an SDK - and why does it matter if you support the customer's language or framework vs. your competitor doesn't? What is CI/CD or infrastructure-as-code, and if your product supports Terraform or GitHub Actions, why is that valuable to DevOps ...Read More

I'd say the mindset shift in B2D is that it's no longer "sales enablement", but just "enablement". And that should be a shared goal across your organization, whether it's the marketing team, sales team, product or support team who are dealing with your developer.  You are correct in saying that developers do not want to be sold to, but they'll still want good support if they need it. That comes in different forms and the good news is that your organization can divide and conquer across this.  Fi ...Read More

It depends a bit on how your sales team is organized today. But in any event, your product value pillars should always translate to both individual and company-wide gain, so your core message is always consistent, even if the language changes a bit to accomodate the audience. You might consider a mapping exercise that lets you chart that narrative. For example, "velocity" is one of our core product value pillars.  For the individual: Code portability, modularity, and packages helps each develope ...Read More

Great question. The main differences between these two audiences are their motivations - which impacts deliverability and construction of enablement materials. B2D (Business to Developer) Audience: Cares about technical details, documentation, APIs, directionality of data, etc. B2B (Enterprise) Audience: Cares about usability, implementation, time to value, outcomes. Keep this in mind when creating materials to enable sales for a B2D audience so you show things like: the flow of information (a g ...Read More

Sales enablement changes when your company is "business to developer" to point at a different stage in the funnel: the charismatic, knowledgeable developer who probably already has a solution.   When you are pitching to developers it helps to build a scientific, clearly logical and reasoned case for them to abandon their current solution and adopt yours based on a productivity or efficiency gain, or because you enable them to do something they simply couldn't do before.   Keep it simple, explain ...Read More

This is a classical problem for many developer-first companies. Without mentioning names, many have successfully figured out the working model with both strong developer engagement alongside a thriving enterprise revenue stream. Learning from these companies, they always focus on the developer success by doing things such as corporate hackathons, architect support, engineering blogs, etc. that helps to build advocacy for their products. It will be hugely beneficial if the sales enablement progra ...Read More

I think at the core of it the goal of the PMM team still remains the same: enabling sales by understanding the target audience deeply, speaking their language, and meeting the customer's specific needs. Sales enablement tactics in a B2D environment will likely differ by focusing on collateral which is heavily tech focused and tailored developer-centric messaging. Ensure that comprehensive technical documentation, API references, SDKs and quick, smooth onboarding tools and other developer resourc ...Read More