- newslepear
- Posts
- 🍐#84 Conference marketing with no budget, how to present your tool, and setting up PLS at GitHub
🍐#84 Conference marketing with no budget, how to present your tool, and setting up PLS at GitHub
Jakub Czakon
October 06, 2024
Hey,
How to sell a pear to enterprise prospects? Claim it can supearcharge 🍐their growth ;)
This week on the agenda:
Why how you present your tool makes all the difference
Product-led sales learnings from setting it up at GitHub
How to do conference marketing with no budget
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 4min
Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:
Influencer marketing for dev-focused companies
plug.dev helps you find developer creators to promote your product. And manages the entire process for you.
Basically:
You tell them your ICP, choose platforms and creator types.
They build the campaign, manage outreach, and shortlist creators.
They manage bookings, comms, invoices, and campaign launch.
Developer marketing insights
1. Why how you present your tool makes all the difference
This is a great post, from a founder of Wasp where he shares learnings from their naming history:
They started by calling themselves a language for web devs: that was scary, feels like a huge change of workflow
They tried to make it clear by showing what this language connects with their stack. That is less scary but still
They switch from saying language to framework and their numbers shot up.
Some devs would say “just words”. But words, especially product category or market framing, carry expectations, fears, pains, and hopes.
And so naming things with “language”, “framework”, “platform”, “tool”, “suite”, “solution”, “app”, “extension” etc makes a huge difference.
Think about the expectations that those words carry and choose wisely.
2. How to do conference marketing with no budget
Robin shared this story of his former colleague turned dev tool startup founder in our community and I loved it:
My takeaways:
If you don’t have $ to splash think how you can approach it differently. Anyhow, being incrementally better is worse than being dramatically different. What can you do that others just cannot?
Become a walking billboard. A simple t-shirt with a value prop and a QR code.
Create an awesome customized demo for booths from other vendors. Who wouldn’t want that? He reached out to all vendors asking and 8/25 replied, 4 ended up doing it. The (obvious) catch is that demos used his product in there. Nice!
Reach out to speakers and ask if, you guessed it, you can build an awesome customized demo for them to present during the talk. Confluent ended up agreeing to that!
3. Product-led sales learnings from setting it up at GitHub
Takeaways:
They let people self-serve to trial the enterprise product. And they saw no cannibalization, more self-serve trials AND more sales pipeline (qualified reachouts). They ended up going “Try free” primary and “Contact sales” secondary everywhere.
Product-led sales can and should work together with classic sales-led not against it. In PLS you get IC dev → try product → use it and hit sales signals → sales reaches out to upsell. Don’t treat dev signups as leads your sales team should reach out to right way. Wait for the right moment.
You may have PQLs (leads, individual people) that show signals for sales but ALSO PQAs (accounts, teams/orgs) that show signals for sales. Both work, just different signals.
When looking for signals to trigger sales outreach, start with what the sales team knows to be good triggers. Implement a simple ruled-based system. That builds credibility and buy-in from the sales team.
Later or in parallel build a machine learning system for finding those leads and triggers. When sending leads to sales add more context to the lead score. Show why it is a good lead.
For them, some good triggers were the time to add new seats (velocity), the size of the company, how many features were used, and hitting usage limits.
Need more developer marketing insights?
1. Work with me 🍐
"Thanks so much for your time and all the thoughtful feedback coming from the workshop.
I feel like we are in a much better place to start our website rebuild. "
If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.
2. Bonus links to check out
3. Join our Slack community
"Been here 20 min and already folks are sharing great advice."
1900+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.
Reply