Brady Gentile

Background: Worked as a Community Manager and Product Marketer for an open source database software company DataStax; we sold a proprietary version of the open source database Apache Cassandra, targeting the developer and administrator personas. Developers are experts at searching for information; they're most likely to make buying moves after doing their own research and product comparisons. By the time a developer is actively engaged with sales, you can almost guarantee that they've made up their mind about what they want. One way to enable your sales team in selling to developers, while getting developers into earlier stages of your funnel, is to position your sales team during enablement sessions as educators and central sources of knowledge. By no means do they have to be—or should they be—experts on the nitty gritty of a technical and developer focused product, but they should be armed with proprietary and educational information to pass along. The more useful and hard-to-find this information is, the more your sales team will be viewed as a valuable source of information, rather than a nuisance. Also, make sure they don't bullshit (easier said than done); sometimes the product just isn't the right tool for the job. Knowing when you're barking up the wrong tree, and conceding, is super important.

This is less about automation, and more towards organization, but you can setup a list on Twitter and only include your competitors in that aggregated list. Good luck!