How to market to developers with finely-tuned BS radars
TL;DR: get people in the door with a few features, align yourself with the right development trends, and don’t ask stupid questions.
Read time: 4 minutes
The following is a conversation with Zach Short, a SaaS GTM leader & LinkedIn Ads Specialist. He's currently leading Digital Marketing & Integrated Campaigns at Gravitee, an API management scale-up. Zach describes himself as a leader who is always hands-on as a direct contributor.
How is GTM changing for technical audiences like developers?
What's changed is the online environment – people's access to info and what they expect from it.
Our customers don’t want to talk to sales until they've pretty much made up their minds.
They're doing their homework way earlier in the buying process and taking longer to do it.
Even 5 years ago we didn't have self-serve demos or interactive product tours.
And let's not forget, the pace of development is racing ahead faster than ever.
So yeah, a lot's changing. And the task is to adapt and stay sharp.
How do you approach your buyers?
Our buyers are developers. We used to target technical leaders (CIO, CTO) top-down, but we’ve had better success getting on the radars of developers in the trenches with the tools. So now it’s bottom’s up.
Developers are huge on privacy. Way more than most. And they already know how marketing tracks their online behavior and can dodge the tactics extremely well.
They’re the ultimate “I'll come to you when I'm ready” customers.
How do you communicate that "hey, there's a lot you can do with this thing, a lot of use cases to unlock"?
Our space is API management and it’s as vast as it gets. Tons of players, tons of solutions.
We pay religious attention to where technology is going and align our product to those trends.
So like seeing where your customers are heading and giving them the right tools to get there – faster, better, smarter.
Right, and for us it involves focusing on the types of APIs people work with. Asynchronous & synchronous APIs.
Asynchronous, where you send a request and wait for a change in service to get a response, offers efficiency in data exchange.
It's advantageous because it delivers the experience users want.
Our competitive landscape hardly caters to this type of API, which differentiates us.
How do you validate your story?
Our debut at a U.S. tradeshow was a real test.
We led with managing both synchronous and asynchronous APIs – doesn't sound like a “hook” to everyone. But for our crowd, it was.
Keeping it simple at first draws people in, even though our platform has much more under the hood.
In these discussions we pinpointed our niche in the API space.
This reminds me of April Dunford’s concept of acquisition versus retention features.
Developers do like the nitty-gritty details – and that’s why having comprehensive documentation is a big focus for us.
Creating an info ecosystem that delivers precise answers at just the right moment is part of the sell.
Our platform is big and capable of a lot. But we don’t just lob everything at prospects from the get-go. We zero in on the immediate fixes they need.
Once they’re in the door or deeper into the buying process, that’s when we open up the full scope of what our platform can do.
A key highlight for us is how quickly our customer success team get things up and running. Our team has been able to get customers into product around 3-4x faster than our competitors, which sets us apart.
Our own version of time to “hello world” in record time.
What about content formats?
Senior devs and engineers love stuff like whitepapers and tech docs.
They want something they can apply immediately.
But there's a big caveat: outdated info will kill your sales.
You've got to keep your docs as up-to-date as your code.
Developers will spot any slip-ups, trust me.
Do you see yourself as a journalist in your role?
For sure. It all starts with the customer and what they need. No point in a solution chasing a problem.
Take Gravitee’s story. A team of devs in France saw a gap in API management. They built something that focused on managing the whole lifecycle efficiently.
It caught on & grew into a whole company. It kept up with the market, meeting needs that older tools couldn’t. And just like our product, our story's been evolving with the times.
Working with developers, I’ve seen that they value a good question (but definitely don’t waste their time).
So there are stupid questions then?
Well, kinda. Steer clear of the obvious stuff. They'll give you more leeway with questions once you’ve earned their trust.
Do as much homework as you can if you’re going to be the marketer in the room.
And find lots of opportunities to just shut up and listen.
What are your objectives for the upcoming quarter?
Big one on the radar is our upcoming virtual conference, Edge – hoping to break last year's record of 2000+ attendees..
It's a ton of work across internal teams, partners & customers.
But it's a huge content generator for us & a valuable way for us to engage with our audience.
Last year, we had presenters like L'Oréal, Roche & Forester, which really set a high bar.