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One of the most common myths in Developer Tool sales is that you should just focus on the Buyers who hold the budget.

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Actually developers play a very significant role in the purchase decision. The best Developer facing GTM teams leverage a combination of Developer focused and Buyer focused strategies to drive the purchase decision.

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One of the factors to consider is the type of deal, whether it is a Buyer Championed Deal or a Developer Championed Deal and adapting to it.

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In this episode Piyush Agarwal, Co-founder of Reo.Dev shares which playbook works best for each deal type.

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[00:00.14]

Hi, I'm Piyush, Co-founder at Reo.Dev. Let's decode the purchase journey of a developer tool product. One of the biggest challenges in the sales process for a developer tool is that there are multiple personas involved. There is the developer who's the user, and then there's the buyer who's the eventual budget holder. And even if the buyer is your champion, there will eventually be an evaluation by a developer or multiple developers, and their recommendation holds significant sway in the decision-making process. So as a sales or marketing team of a dev tool company, you cannot ignore the developers. And in fact, you can leverage this relationship to make your GTM motion way more effective. The first step in doing this is to map your developers across a developer evaluation journey. Now, a typical evaluation journey could look like discover, evaluate, build a POC, deploy the product, and then eventually scale. This can be customized to your product and your industry. Once you have a developer evaluation journey and you know which companies were in this journey, you can leverage this to make the same. Once you have the developer evaluation journey, you can map this to the buyer involvement, what stage is the buyer getting involved.

[01:14.06]

If the buyer is involved at a very early stage. This is probably a buyer-champion deal, and all you need to do is give the developer a very good experience. Make sure they have a seamless onboarding, questions are answered on priority, they have all the material needed to properly evaluate your product, and then hope that they make a positive recommendation at the end. On the other hand, which is more common, is typically it's a developer-champion deal where the developer is facing a problem, they go out and discover a product to solve that problem, start using it, and eventually, they hit a roadblock or a feature gig, which makes them go to the buyer to get a budget. In this scenario, again, you can use the developer relationship to do one of three things: get a warm introduction to the buyer, which is the best case scenario, or you can empower the developer to make an economic case and secure the funds. And in the third scenario, if none of these happen, you can still use this data to reach out to the buyer at the right time and with the right information and the right sales pitch and try to close more effectively.