🍐#129 How to sell if your user is not the buyer, employee advocacy trick, and a great newsletter on creating LinkedIn content

Hey,

My oh my had a great pear🍐 dessert. Fried cheese, caramelized pear, roasted walnuts, ice cream. It had to work. They got extra points for calling it de-ser (ser== cheese in polish)

This week on the agenda:

• How to sell if your user is not the buyer

• Fun little employee advocacy play from WIZ

• Newsletter on how to create LinkedIn technical content

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

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Developer marketing insights

1. Fun little employee advocacy play

Getting employees to post on LinkedIn is hard. If people don’t want to do it they just… don’t want to do it.

Over time I went from “let me try and convince you that it is worth it” to “if you want to, I can help”. Power of aligned (or misaligned) incentives rules here.

But this week I saw a fun little trick.

I mean why not:

• People have work anniversaries

• Info about it typically goes on Slack anyway

• Why not give people a little nudge in a form of a fun company badge

• So that they can look fun/cool on LinkedIn

This can work. Incentives are aligned.

Probably it won’t give you million qualified signups but it can get you some extra awareness. But since it is super “cheap” the ROI of the play is likely there.

2. Newsletter on how to create LinkedIn technical content

Some time ago Paolo’s content popped up in my feed:

And he’s been sending his newsletter “Tech Audience Accelerator” ~twice week. Focused on how to create LinkedIn content as an AI/ML startup founder (also, kudos for actually focused positioning ;) ).

Just tons of actionable insights in there. The posts fall into 3 buckets:

• prompts and templates → reusable patterns that work today to make writing easier

• stories from the trenches → what is working, what is not working

• essays/guides → thoughts on strategy and why things work the way they work

Imho this is an absolute must if you are creating on LinkedIn for the tech audience whether you are in AI/ML or not.

Just look at some of these posts:

3. How to sell if your user is not the buyer | Hacker News

There was a really good discussion on it on HN recently:

Here are some notes/tldr but this is a fun read.

Classic lead gen gating gets the hate (obviously)
Requiring info to download an ebook and chasing devs after they shown little interest turns users into detractors.

Don’t go around the gatekeeper
Emailing the whole org to bypass an IT owner gets your domain blocked.

Quote before demo (for dev-ish buyers)
Some buyers (especially senior devs evaluating) want a fast price estimate to move forward with shortlisting for deeper evaluation. Save the pitch for when it helps.

But many non-dev buyers like demos
At some point many (or most) Enterprise buyers do expect a call to contextualize price and options. Build a bit more trust in the company.

So you can segment by audience (dev/user, buyer)
Let developers tr. Let non-dev buyers talk.

Don’t gate your docs please
Gating API docs blocks evaluation and goodwill.

Have an entry plan with visible pricing
Fixed, small-team pricing seeds future enterprise accounts.

Be honest about the long tail
Serving many tiny accounts can cost more than it’s worth when compared to a big enterprise deal.

Respect devs inbox
Spray-and-pray sequences damage brand and relationships.

Remember who enjoys the attention
Some sales motions exist to flatter people spending other people’s money.

Design for the principal–agent gap
Your user isn’t the buyer; equip the user to sell internally.

A few more resources on dev tool sales:

• (Mine) How to sell to developers (tldr: you don’t, sell to their boss)

• Mastering Developer-led Outbound

• Developer marketing funnel

• Developer-led growth newsletter by reo.dev

• Dev tool sales playbook by correlated

• GTMBA newsletter

Need more developer marketing insights?

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2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 We've seen content be successful in the past. Do the existing playbooks still work? | Etel Friedmann Substack (Ex Head of Marketing at Prisma, Digital Ocean)

• 🟦 ”Everyone says Reddit is the new growth channel” | Lemlist Head of Growth LinkedIn post

• 🎧️ The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) | Lenny’s Podcast

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