Selling to the Enterprise Without Losing Your (Developer) Soul
Navigating the complexities of different audiences with different preferences
Developers hate marketing. They hate talking to SDRs or sales people who don’t understand the deep tech. They hate spin, and they hate fluff. They want deep, practical, authentic content. They love tinkering with the product itself in the privacy of their own assessment time. This is why product-led growth and self-service work so well when selling to developers. So it’s complicated when your company has to move “up market” to sell more to Enterprises and you need to triangulate around economic decision-makers and developers. Many companies start doing more of the things developers hate and lose the dev love in this transition. Some companies try to push growth too far and end up with desperate Enterprise Sales reps cheery-picking PLG leads and *gasp* calling developers. This is the conundrum one of the best developer marketers I know, Ceci Stallsmith, and I covered this week on her Calyx Substack Blog. You can read the blog here, or decide if it’s worth your time by reading these highlights:
🏢 How to get a company on board with “enterprise style” marketing efforts when the DNA of the company has been developer-oriented for many years.
🌱 Marketing growth levers, the surprising ones that work and the obvious ones that don’t work as well as everybody thinks they should
♟️ How many “marketing problems” are in fact cross-company, strategic problems
😬 An tough story about marketing Hipchat (which had the lead position) when Slack was on the rise
🤑 And, most interesting, how to pick a company to work for. One of my favorite quotes: “You can be a good executor at a crappy company and a good executor at a great company and have wildly different results.”
Ceci also just interviewed the VP of Marketing for OpenAI, Krithika Muthukumar. Krithika earned her golden ticket to the AI leader based on hands-on developer marketing work at Stripe and Retool. Great insights in her article here.
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.