Top 4 challenges while selling developer tools

[00:00.14] 

Hi, I'm Piyush, Co-founder at .Reo.Dev. Most developer tool founders or sales and marketing leaders will tell you that it's really difficult selling a developer tool. So what's really so hard about it? What's difficult about selling a developer tool? We think there are four main factors that make it a bit challenging. The first one is intent. So every developer tool, by nature, is a problem solver. So if an engineering team is not facing the problem that your product solves, the chances of selling the tool are really slim. Because engineering teams across the world are always pressed for time, and engineering bandwidth is at a premium. So they're always focused on solving the top two or three problems that present the company at this point. And if your product does not align with these problems, then they're not really going to give any bandwidth or attention to your product. So intent is king in this sector. The second big problem is intent is not very easy to get. If your product was a cloud-hosted SaaS product, every click on your free product is tracked. So just by looking at your free product usage and engagement, you can figure out who's most likely to buy.

[01:18.26] 

But in case of a developer tool, the evaluation can happen on so many different platforms. Like the developer could discover your product on a Stack Overflow thread or a technical blog, or they just might go to GitHub and check out your code repository. If they're convinced, they might do a Docker pull or they might install your product on their local machine. And all of this is happening off your platform. And therefore, it's very hard to know who is evaluating your product, who's really in your pipeline. There have been instances where a developer tool company did not know Tesla is using their product. So that can be really tricky. The third challenge often is that developers have a build versus buy mindset, and And every sales team or marketing team has to overcome this mindset. You have to convince the engineering team why buying is a better option than building. And this is non-trivial. This is why a company like Datadog has 1,500 salespeople who are out there getting in front of buyers and selling. So it's very important for you to know which team is interested in your product and then go talk to the right people in that team and try to sell.

[02:26.06] 

And the last challenge that we feel is about timing. So developer tools generally are quite complicated and nuanced, and they go through a long evaluation cycle. So if you get in too early in that cycle, you will have a long sales cycle, and that can get very frustrating. But also if you get in too late, then maybe the developer team has put together something of their own, or they've used your source code and customized it so much that now your premium features don't make sense, or maybe they've just moved away to a different competitor and they did not even know about your product well enough. So getting in at the right moment is very, very important, and that can make your sales funnels move very slow or very fast. So these are some of the challenges when it comes to selling developer tools, and how effective your go-to-market motion is really depends on how effectively you've thought about and solved these challenges.

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