11 ms·
Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
- hankchinaski 2y agoYou sell to CTO not developer, like you sell to CFO or to head of HR or head of Sales
- dannyw 2y agoI agree with the point, but isn’t Jetbrains a good example of selling to developers?
- smdyc1 2y agoIf there was a way to get a company licence, I'd have bought it for our dev team.
- toenail 2y agoIf your management doesn't get you the stuff you need to be productive your company is a failure. Move somewhere else.
- genocidicbunny 2y agoDepends on the tool. I've seen engineers ask for an IDA license to try to debug a pretty simple memory overrun crash. The manager rightfully told that engineer to go use Visual Studio first. Otoh, if management isn't willing to drop $50 on a one time purchase that increases your productivity, it's definitely a flag. Maybe not a red one, but at least mauve.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pflenker 2y agoMy own stance as a lead is that it costs more than 50€ just discussing the thing, so we might as well just buy it.
- Hammershaft 2y ago50€ can be literally less than 30 minutes of discussion over the item being bought.
- criddell 2y agoA discussion involves two people, so halve that. A then consider the opportunity cost. A relatively rare 50€ purchase likely isn’t worth any discussion.
- PeterisP 2y agoSure, but in the parent example it's more like a 2k-3k license, which makes sense only if you're going to use it regularly.
- School-Cotton 2y agoIDA costs thousands of dollars per seat
- mbork_pl 2y ago> Maybe not a red one, but at least mauve. You mean mauve, as in "the universally recognised colour for danger"? ;-)
- jimnotgym 2y agoNearly right. I don't think many sales and finance people have that kind of authority either. That's why you see everyone using the company tools or free tiers. You need to sell to peoples bosses. Save time, make projects more transparent, take away freedom, that sort of thing. This is probably why Excel is so ubiquitous. Also that Excel is the most powerful tool that Corporate IT will let you have. Try and get Corporate IT to let you have WSL on your machine if you work in sales or Finance. That is probably why web apps are so popular. Corporate IT have to know about it to block you. A marketing manager can probably put Basecamp on her credit card, but it would be a huge job to get anything self hosted last IT with their policy of 'we are in charge of the computers and we will decide how you run your business'.
- tw04 2y agoExcel is ubiquitous because literally anyone can use it. Unlike a database, there is a direct visual representation of what you’re building. It is included in all m365 licenses and has been relatively cheap for a perpetual license for years. As for allowing WSL for sales, have you ever actually worked with someone in sales? At 99% of companies, even the most technically literate sales person can just barely send an email attachment without help. What exactly do you think they’re going to do with WSL??
- flir 2y agoIn a lot of companies, web sits under marketing...
- jimnotgym 2y agoYes I have been on the senior management team of several companies and have worked with sales. Your lazy stereotype is as bad a suggesting programmers all sit in dark rooms with starwars T shirts and Body Odour issues. I have seen sales people create very complex excel models, and use low code tools to build their own pipelines because corporate IT were too pig ignorant to help them. I have seen them use screen recorders to beat the lack of API access. Ihave seen finance people use WSL, Cygwin, Python, Anaconda and more.
- wongarsu 2y agoHence the common strategy to onboard companies when the company is still small (when developers either have purchasing authority or sit in a room with somebody who has) and try to lock them in forever
- jessekv 2y agoI always liked the Sublime Text model. You pay once, and keep your licence no matter where you work. Same with my keyboard. I like to own my tools.
- watermelon0 2y agoJetbrains tools are the same; you can buy personal subscription, and use the tools no matter where you work. If you have a subscription for 12 consecutive months, you get perpetual fallback license for version of the tools that were available at the start of the period.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 2y agoKeep in mind you can't use personal license at work.
- sverhagen 2y agoYou can, if you paid for it yourself. As long as the employer doesn't "pay, reimburse, or in any way finance your personal license".
- boojing 2y agoYou can: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-I-use-my-personal-license-at-work-and-at-home https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- npteljes 2y agoTo elaborate, yes, Jetbrains allows for this, but the employer might not. At my company, personal licensed software are up for individual approval.
- genocidicbunny 2y ago
- endymi0n 2y agoIf you have to fight for a 50$ book, you‘re probably just at the wrong place. That being said, some developers wanted to test Notion internally, so they got an informal account with a credit card. Turns out they built an important overview in it and send the link around, so everyone who wanted to take a look at it (half the company) implicitly created an account and our CFO got hit by a 10k bill next month. And that‘s how devs having no purchase authority stories usually start...
- rightbyte 2y agoThis is just an example of predatory pricing models and dark patterns. There is reason many SaaS companies usually have no prepaid or fixed cost roof pay options. They are scammers.
- VS1999 2y agoHow does anything think setting up a system where you can get billed for clicking a link is a good idea? Along with no sensible monthly limit on the credit card. The whole setup is beyond ridiculous, and it's hard to believe this is how "devs having no purchase authority stories usually start".
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 2y agoBilling by active users is quite common.
- maccard 2y agoI work in a small company and we use a few services that bill for active users, and sync with g suite. It reduces the overhead of admin for me significantly as it means I know we're only paying for people who use the service that month. > Along with no sensible monthly limit on the credit card. A £1000 limit doesn't stop you from generating a £10000 invoice. It just means you need to go higher with your tail between your legs to pay the bill.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bjornsing 2y agoHasn’t this begun to change though? I did a brief stint at Sinch (the Swedish Twilio) and “developer go-to-market” was an established term there. My impression is that developers have started using so many cloud services and APIs that the old school approach (“nobody in engineering buys anything!”) is starting to crumble.
- Rastonbury 2y agoAuthor been living under a rock?Engineering/dev first companies been popular since the 2000s. Developer salaries are often the most expensive thing, so everyone in the c-suite cares that their people are more efficient. Developer love is table stakes if you want to be put in front of someone who can purchase. If only sales were as easy as emailing the CEO or CTO and having them agree to a meeting
- Epa095 2y agoUnless you can put on azure/AWS/Google cloud. I can't buy a pencil without approval, but I can spend thousands in our cloud without asking anyone.
- barryrandall 2y agoTo be fair, that's only because nobody has figured out how to integrate "terraform apply" with SAP approval workflows.
- nevon 2y agoAnd there's the magic of the Amazon marketplace. Let's you buy non-AWS services while still ending up on the AWS bill and contributing to any potential spending commitment the company has.
- Aeolun 2y agoDoesn’t actually work because purchasing on marketplace is still restricted.
- rsync 2y agoDoes Amazon allow competing services to be sold on AWS marketplace ? Specifically, if rsync.net service (for instance) were targeted as a non-Amazon backup location, would Amazon allow us to sell our service on AWS marketplace ? This presumably competes with S3 and other storage options ...
- nevon 2y agoI've never been on the seller side, so I don't know exactly what policies there are around what products can be sold. But to give an example, Datadog is available on the AWS marketplace, which offers a competing product to CloudWatch. I do believe you have to deliver your service via AWS somehow, such as via an AMI or container image etc but the service itself doesn't have to be on AWS as far as I know.
- technofiend 2y ago
- forgotpasagain 2y agoCreate a developer tool that "makes easier" purchasing developer tools. edit: popped as joke idea, but thinking about it might make sense if both developers and developer tools have this pain rn.
- pompino 2y agoYour department head should have discretionary funds to cover $1000 easily. I understand this tweet is in jest, but cmon.
- fxtentacle 2y agoThere's plenty of consulting companies where developer = owner. Also, JetBrains, Ida, Visual Studio Pro, VMware Workstation, Docker Enterprise, Colab Pro, HuggingFace, ... There's lots of paid tools primarily targeting developers.
- throwaway83jf82 2y agoThe tweet says that companies will be more successful if they can find a way to market dev tools to non-devs (coo/cfo) in the organization that have the authority to approve larger purchases and can push these tools down the hierarchy
- delichon 2y agoHere's my puchasing power: "Boss, if we buy this developer tool it will save X hours of developer time." ... where X is large compared to the price of the tool. It works well enough that we use it often enough for Boss to be skeptical.
- sverhagen 2y agoAnd skeptical they should be. Overestimating benefits, whether it's for a tool or something like a re- architecture, is right up there with underestimating effort, probably highly related... Doesn't mean there aren't worthwhile tools, because there are, but they're few and fast between.
- maayank 2y ago“Developer time is not a KPI and we pay you the same whether you work 160, 180 or 200 hours a month”
- olivierduval 2y agoHow much time before you boss says: "OK, during the last 3 months you told me that all these tool would save you in total 1 dev/year... so I will reduce your team by 1 dev but keep the work and deadlines" ? ;-)
- al_borland 2y agoI had this happen. I was on a team that was overloaded by work generated by another team, that had the tools and capabilities to automate the work, but chose not to, because they didn’t have to deal with it. Spending time on their work meant other important tasks went undone, or were half assed. I pulled some data and did some math, and found that we could dedicate 3 people full-time just to working on their junk. My goal with this was to light a fire under them, get that stuff automated, and free up those hours so those people could do more interesting and worthwhile work. It did light a fire, the stuff did get automated, and the week after victory was declared, 3 people were laid off. I was very upset and yelled at my boss a lot. It sent a very clear message to everyone on the team that automation is the enemy and when they see something they can/should be improved, they’d be smart to keep their mouth shut. That’s exactly what happened. Improvement efforts ground to a halt, as no one would talk about issues or use new tools that were developed.
- animuchan 2y agoSo true. Getting a Copilot subscription for $10/mo was an uphill battle. My daily supply of coffee alone costs the company more that that.
- flakeoil 2y agoWow, they must use expensive coffee beans.
- tempay 2y agoNot really. 3 cups a day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month = 60 cups of coffee. If we say 15g of beans per cup means you'll use 2 one pound bags in a month which could easily be $20-$40.
- al_borland 2y agoWhen I was in an office of about 200 people, the facilities manager told me the coffee machine cost him $60k/year. That doesn’t include the coffee people brewed outside of using that machine. That works out to about $25/person/month. That assumes everyone drinks coffee from that machine, which they did not. I also heard that number at least 10 years ago, so I’m sure that price has only gone up.
- samus 2y agoYou guys get coffee? /s
- nerdponx 2y agoStill trying to get our team Copilot subscription for 2 months now.
- atq2119 2y agoMaybe I'm a dinosaur, but I wouldn't just approve an individual Copilot subscription either. The problem isn't the money, it's the copyright and whether trade secrets are being leaked. Those things can surely be solved, but it's far from trivial.
- bitwize 2y agoIt's pretty much like all enterprise software: you sell to the people with the purchasing authority. Meaning sales are often closed on the golf course.
- t43562 2y ago...and get terrible solutions which the people on the golf course don't care about since they don't use them - or if they do they only use the reporting part of the feature set - so that's got to be great but the rest can be shit.
- badgersnake 2y agoE.g. Atlassian
- grugagag 2y agoAnd kickbacks for the purchaser…
- elric 2y agoI only had this issue the one time while I was an employee: I wanted a Thinkpad, but management insisted I got a shitty Dell. In the end, they got me a Thinkpad. Other than that, whenever I've asked for a book or some tool, I simply got it, even expensive split keyboards. Now that I'm self employed, I just buy what I need. Which isn't much, really. Very few "developer tools" are useful enough to spend money on, let alone try to integrate them in my workflow. That last part has become much more important to me over the years.
- chillfox 2y agoIf you have to ask, then you don’t have authority.
- samus 2y agoIf you get what you ask for without fuss, then it's not an issue. It becomes an issue if you have to slog your way through corporate bureaucracy^H^Hzy to get basic things.
- maccard 2y agoAnd asking isn't a problem - it stops three different teams signing up for slack, campfire, teams.
- moooo99 2y agoIt depends on how strictly the request is scrutinized. I can spend exactly 0€ myself. But when I request a new machine, the order is placed immediately. On the other hand I requested three months access to frontend masters which was promptly denied citing I should use our Udemy subscription.
- maccard 2y agoYou can have authority while still having someone be accountable to the org. We had a situation where we were paying for three different presentation tools and two whiteboarding tools for a team of 30 people because two people had minor preferences. I have to request a limited card for recurring spends, which comes with a "why" box. It makes people think about what they're buying just a tiny bit more. But I've never had a single purchase denied (other than the time I accidentally paid for a personal holiday on my work card because Google pay's default payment card on device and online are linked)
- holoduke 2y agoA good thing in my opinion. 95% of the tools are worthless. In a lot of cases a personal preference of a dev. Not a shared one. And sometimes sold by a sales representative to a dev. Important to have a guarden.
- bartvk 2y agoImportant for what reason?
- jimnotgym 2y agoPerhaps because interoperability of a team is more important that one dev?
- digestivetires 2y agoI would wager that some tools are like gloves or shoes, very important to have a good individual fit, to get best of performance.
- Simon_ORourke 2y agoCorrect - and this can be extended into any ML/AI team within a company too. The folks wanting to build something advanced or innovative will never have the authority themselves to get the tooling they need. Writing from experience here, my team wanted to get a application (or even a trial of a particular application) that would help with LLM hosting and model building, and it had to go up to SVP level to get sign-off.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoSelling dev-tools to devs is like selling toys to kids - you target the parents (or the paying CxOs in the company). One should learn from the likes of Slack, Postman, etc. -- make it the de-facto tools for the devs/users and make them happy, then they go and ask their parents/approvers to buy them.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoThat's how you make parents feel good about themselves, that they did something useful, while their kids are unhappy with shit pseudo-toys they got. That's how amateurs and people who mistake priorities in edutainment do things. Pros know that you always target the kids - not just for toys, but for many other categories of wares too. Kids may have no spending authority, but they're much better at marketing to their parents than you can possibly hope for. Like, there's a reason you see Paw Patrol merch on every other kid everywhere - they release a highly addictive animated show for kids, and kids do the rest. The reason this doesn't work with devs is because unlike parents of kids, people with spending authority usually don't care, as devs are a cost centre and a number on a chart, not people generating value.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago> Like, there's a reason you see Paw Patrol merch on every other kid everywhere - they release a highly addictive animated show for kids, and kids do the rest. > The reason this doesn't work with devs is because unlike parents of kids, people with spending authority usually don't care, as devs are a cost centre and a number on a chart, not people generating value. Perhaps the reason why this doesn't work with devs is that typical devs are much worse marketers than typical kids. :-)
- dilyevsky 2y agoThat’s right you have to impress both the devs and the “parents” and they usually appreciate wildly different things. That’s why devtool space is hard
- kmac_ 2y agoIt depends on the company. One company I worked for had a policy of "Just buy what you need that makes your work easier: books, licenses, and even hardware. Management time spent on decisions is too expensive, so we default to instant approval." Did developers go on a buying spree? No, the same amount of stuff was bought as before the policy. And it did make life easier.
- redditor98654 2y agoNetflix?
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoDon’t hire idiots and assholes and this policy becomes pretty self policing.
- repeekad 2y agoThis is the reason bureaucracy exists, the more people at a company the higher probably one of those idiots or assholes slipped through the cracks, at large companies you just have to assume they got in
- sys_64738 2y agoThis rarely works as it requires a strong personality to set the standard. That's a lot of trust in developers otherwise.
- Unfrozen0688 2y ago[dead]
- olivierduval 2y agoActually, it's just considering books, licences and hardware as disposables like pen and papers... and it can usually be true for some "small" local software (like an IDE, provided that either you trust the devs with admin rights or that corp IT can allow software installation). You can give either a "small" bugdet for everybody (and you wont be a software the same year that you buy a new laptop) or managed by the team/department But it doesn't work when you need corp IT for corp IT integration
- technosavie 2y agoIn europe, my work, which has 600 circa devs, cannot use any other browser than Chrome. Have to get multi levels of sign offs to even login in Gmail. When I raised this issue, they simply buried me in paperwork + got almost no support from co-workers.
- _the_inflator 2y agoThe conclusion is correct however the premises are not correct. 1000 devs buying individually on average tools for 100 USD/month doesn’t make sense in any organization. Controllers will have their say and architecture or CTO should have their say, too. Tool usage corresponds with IT strategy. Procurement tends to count in large numbers. That’s why a business unit usually decides. It is up to the devs to raise the Business Case. IT departments are usually considered Loss Centers. That’s why there is another road block, but not against productivity per se.
- t43562 2y ago....hence the great value of open source because a lot of those managers don't give a thought to what you put in your requirements.txt or package.json.
- pflenker 2y agoI have never even heard of a company where a single person on the level of an engineer was able to spend 100k without getting approval. Just ask for example sales persons on engineer level how easy it is to get 50€ for something they think will have a huge impact on closing a deal. They have the exact same problems.
- al_borland 2y agoAccording to our corporate portal, I have $100k of signing authority. Meanwhile, I can’t get approval for spend about $2k on flight and hotel to go to a conference that would be valuable for me. I’m going to end up paying out of pocket. I have co-workers who are afraid to order a new mouse when their current one is broken.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoHa. I used to work in a sales-oriented subsidiary of an engineering company. In the early days, I could take people out for a $100 lunch, no problem, but I couldn’t buy a $30 card for my computer. In the parent corporation, on the other hand, they could fairly easily get a $5,000 test rig, with no issue, but needed to fill out forms in triplicate to take you out to a fast food greasy spoon. Towards the end of my tenure, you basically couldn’t do anything, at either place, without said forms. But many successful dev tool companies have made their money by marketing to bosses, as opposed to devs. That goes for many fields; not just tech.
- fbdrgvv 2y ago[dead]
- heelix 2y agoSo much this. At one of the big tech companies, we needed a hard drive for something. It was going to be easier to buy a $5K drive array and shuck the drives than expense $200 on a single HDD. Trying to buy stuff 'outside your lane' was crazy. Just got done with an experience where the company I'm at said - you have a corp card - use it - with the EVPs signing off on whatever for that event. Very much not the norm, but it was eye opening that they knew sometimes the red tape needed to be cut. I'm totally expecting to fight with accounting on a simple taxi receipt because it did not say where the pickup/destination was for a $20 fare the next time I do a 'normal' expense.
- jongjong 2y ago"Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority" Wow, I said almost this exact sentence to my co-founder just a few days ago to explain to him why my no-code serverless platform which allowed me to build our entire startup, bug-free, in record time cannot be anything more than a side project or tool for my own usage and cannot be monetized. It doesn't matter than I can build something 10x as fast and avoid 99% of bugs. Those with decision ability are brainwashed to think that the way to reduce bugs is TypeScript and the way to build software fast is React.
- srvaroa 2y agoA business model based on engineers as the decision makers is perfectly possible. But it is confined to tools where an engineer can make a local optimisation without direct impact beyond that scope. IDEs are the best example. Engs in a company can be allowed to make whatever personal IDE decision that makes each one of them more productive, and the global impact of aggregating those individual decisions will be ok. Jetbrains is a testament to this. But this is not the same for every tool. The thread author focuses on examples that fall in this second category like Redis, Terraform, AWS, etc. Unlike with IDEs, sprawl resulting from individual decisions in databases, infra management or cloud infra becomes a problem. For both! The company has to maintain a heterogeneous stack. The seller can’t make a meaningful enterprise deal just because some team chose Redis. This means that you will want to do some standardisation. At that point the impact of the choice and the size of the license become big enough that, in the same way as eng leads will want a say, finance will too, for good reason. And needless to say, the moment finance is in the picture you will have to justify the choice in a language that is challenging for most engineers.
- Aeolun 2y agoNot entirely correct, I have purchase authority for several million dollars a month in AWS costs. A new mouse however…
- bjt12345 2y agoI purchase my own software licences and claim it on tax. Because it's a false economy. I've won awards at work, became indispensable on certain projects, and have been given pay rises, choose the work I want to do, through finding the affordable right tools for the job and purchasing them. My Jetbrains licenses are a classic example of this. I couldn't imagine refractoring code without it. If the cost cutting stopped, I'd have more competition in the workplace.
- itsArtur 2y agoim curious - what are some other examples?
- JonChesterfield 2y agoObsidian is a contender.
- jt2190 2y ago> … claim it on tax. How does a U.S. employee (exempt, W2 form) do this?
- spicyusername 2y agoAnd how do you get above the standard deduction... Jetbrains is like $200 / year. Only $27,500 more to go!
- netman21 2y agoIf you qualify for itemized deductions, which you do if you have a mortgage, you can claim things you need for professional development, etc. Subscriptions are a good catch-all. The IRS meant magazine subscriptions, but...
- lolinder 2y agoOnly a few categories of people get to claim professional development expenses as a tax deduction [0], mostly self-employed. > If you qualify for itemized deductions, which you do if you have a mortgage If you have a sufficiently large and expensive mortgage and/or are filing as an individual. Our interest almost got us over the standard deduction in the first year, but every year since then the standard deduction threshold just gets further and further away. [0] https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc513 https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc513
- nabla9 2y agoTypically there is a price limit. Below the limit, there is an assigned budget for the dev team. You can buy online and the price is visible. Above that sum you must do sales negotiation and the price is not public in the sellers site. If buying the tools for the whole team costs a few grand, you can buy it online. If the sum is higher the price is negotiated and costs the company at least five figures.
- lloydatkinson 2y agoI don't even bother trying to get money back. I buy, for example, GitKraken at any new job I start at.
- cheema33 2y agoAt my company, I can buy pretty much anything I want. I do buy hardware often. But software dev tools? I am trying hard to think of one and coming up empty. Save for GitHub/Copilot, ChatGPT and Anthropic subscriptions. Those things are the only software dev tools I have found worth paying for.
- vertis 2y agoYeah, there are definitely exceptions to this. I had a company credit card for quite a while at a previous company. It did result in a bunch of other devs coming to me to get small things purchased (this was an appropriate use). The number of tiny things that were then not subject to silly red tape just provides supporting data for the original tweet though. There are also examples like Slack where it becomes a ground up movement that eventually results in the company purchasing the requested tool. (Context: I was the lead engineer on the company emerging technology team, buying 3D printers, VR headsets, and hackathon supplies and many many things of this nature + travel related expenses)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- constantcrying 2y agoIn my experience it's not about purchasing authority. Otherwise free software should be available without issue. But in large companies IT won't let you install things on your own devices. The problem isn't money, you can get money at most companies fairly easily. The problem is that you actually need to be allowed to use it, which is far harder and far more costly than the cost of the product.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoThere are tools out there that devs pay for themselves. That's an answer to the paperwork insanity. If the tool is useful enough relative to the price, go with direct to (developer-)consumer. I know instances of that working for jetbrains, sublime, beyondcompare, matlab and obsidian. I can see web browsers and off site backup fitting that model.
- cushychicken 2y agoMonthly reminder that engineering is a cost center, not a profit center.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoExcept for those weird "software companies" that don't seem to do anything real yet have absolutely all the money.
- vinay_ys 2y agoI've been a decision maker on $100M+ of engineering hardware/software/services spend per quarter and here's my perspective on this problem: 1. If you are making developer tools, make sure current/existing developers find it super useful and are strong advocates for your tool. 2. Make sure you don't tick any of the 'veto' boxes – there are a few – opaque contracts, lockins, data security/privacy challenges, sso/auth integration challenges etc. 3. Make sure your pricing makes sense – if it scales linearly with some variable it is likely not going to make sense in some finance spreadsheet. A simple per developer per month fee makes a ton of sense. A site-wide floating seat license makes even more sense. For some, a lumpsum fee for site wide unlimited license makes even more sense. On the last option, you can still charge for your consumables – cloud compute/storage charges you incur – just pass it on as-is. Even better if you can deploy to customer's cloud account directly (that solves for all data privacy/security issues as well). 4. Provide sufficient cost controls – put an upper limit on billing, put an upper limit on usage. don't let anyone turn on any knob that can result in expensive usage charges etc. Also provide sufficient usage reporting facilities. 5. If you do a good job, you can sign multiyear contracts with committed spend. Make sure your service is reliable and you do a quarterly check-in with your large account customers to understand if they are happy or have specific unmet needs. 6. Remember, you can provide and charge for whiteglove professional services (dedicated butts in seat engineers, support etc). This is highly lucrative and also sometimes critical to win and keep certain types of customers. Sometimes your product is controversial inside the customer's company and there maybe detractors who will make your product fail. By having professional services do the initial integration/implementation job you can ensure your product reaches its intended users without much meddling from the IT gatekeepers. 7. Don't bother trying to sell something that a customer strongly believes they can build in-house (even if they are wrong). Even if you win initially, you will lose eventually.
- RyanHamilton 2y agoThank you. I know enough to appreciate that list was built on some hard lessons.
- mlrtime 2y ago#7 Is usually not so black and white. This is most difficult when the buying product is already in-house and you are looking to replace it or add new functionality. The problem I have with #7 is the ROI on build vs buy. And, at what point do you determine this? First, buying a product with very high integration cost is still "building". So I need developer time for integration, time that they could spend on something else or the product itself. Hopefully this would come out during a POC integration, but then we still need developer time to execute.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- realsharkymark 2y agoAs a VP of Sales selling dev tools, I noticed: 1. As mentioned already, if devs aren't already using it, it's an uphill battle to sell. 2. Having your product as OSS helps since it reduces barrier to entry - devs and being using your product without having to contact sales. 3. Large enterprises, e.g., Fortune 500/Global 2000, spend money to reduce risk, cost and improve productivity (and other reasons) - as long as devs will use the tool. Startups, smaller companies would complain about spending even a dollar (probably because so many tools are OSS) 4. Target the centralized dev intra leadership and team would buy and support other dev tools. A junior sales mistake is giving free sales resources (e.g., demos, trial support) to a distributed team or devs trying your product - they probably will never buy since they didn't have authority, and all you did was provide free OSS support to get them running. Coaching sellers to avoid this is key - steer these types to docs and community. 5. Sell the value of support. Sales will only help if speaking with a qualified opportunity with authority and budget - otherwise good luck in the docs and community. In large enterprises, that is not a strategy. 6. And to the sea of sellers who think they can cram down large contracts - get the initial pilot or purchase successful - help demonstrate metrics of its value - .e.g. productivity etc. and put it in an easy-to-consume way for real decision makers to understand. Then you are more likely to take down larger investments. And yes - even before that initial deal, explain a license model and examples of how this scales to be affordable and not linear. You look like the JV squad if you do otherwise and will not know why they stopped returning your calls. You get one chance to make a viable economic impression if deployed site-wide. Unless you work at massive software companies where you can cram down large purchases due to enterprise agreement quirks and holding customers hostage to agree to software they may or may not use. e.g., company heavily uses one product so vendor stuffs other products in the renewal.
- Lornedon 2y agoI've been trying to get Excalidraw+ for my team since October. It's 8€/month/user.
- from-nibly 2y agoNo, engineers are full of hubris, and arent rewarded fro bringing value to the company. They are rewarded for "solving problems" as in figuring out puzzles. Buying software isnt a puzzle to solve its just busy work. They look at a saas product and think "i could build that" and they might be right. But the current engineering culture doesnt look at that situation and go "why the frick would you want to?!?!"
- ckdarby 2y agoThis is why the AWS marketplace is an incredibly powerful tool. In most engineering departments they control their existing P&L which will include opex AWS spend. Spending within an existing vendor doesn't need budgetary approval as long as the opex doesn't exceed the budget. It allows flexibility to find savings within the opex budget to spend elsewhere on better tooling.
- fragmede 2y agothe other problem is devs are cheap asses
- kovacs_x 2y agoyes and no. yes, authority is usually with CFO or line managers, how/when and for how much things are APPROVED depending on the company and its policies and NO as it's developers that come and (authoritatively) say "We need you purchase this and that, because ..." and are the ones that evaluate tools and make such requests. Also there's big difference whether we're talking some sw for $100 one time payment or SaaS service for 100K/month, imo. And then there's of course freelancers and well-off devs that buy things for themselves that make their decisions on their own. tl;dr; if you think that devs dont have authority, maybe its you or your sales skills/strategy/methods that fail you more? ;)