Breaking the Barrier: The Science of Selling to Developers
Tags: devrel, programming, selling, beginners
Published: 2023-05-25 11:37:32

---
title: Breaking the Barrier: The Science of Selling to Developers
published: true
description: Some reasons why selling to developers are hard and how to go about it.
tags: DevRel, programming, selling, beginners
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/740c53vetmgt5f4mz5f2.jpeg
# Use a ratio of 100:42 for best results.
# published_at: 2023-05-23 09:23 +0000
---

Yes, selling to developers is a barrier and so we keep telling one another, "Don't sell to developers". Have you ever asked yourself, "why is it hard to sell to us? Are we not human beings like every other person?".

In this article, I will show you why it is hard to sell developers but wait, this article is a part of [DevRel: How to sell to developers](https://github.com/codingnninja/DevRel-How-to-sell-to-developers); check it out to learn more.

## Why is it hard to sell to developers?

Selling to developers is very hard for four major reasons – openness, reliability, stubbornness and curiosity – all of which revolve around the practicality of software development. 

Developers are the best among the smart, they are very open and highly curious. At first, these reasons may seem odd but you will realize the truth in them soon.

Listen, salespeople tend to be tricky or deceiving in selling but the common ethic of most software developers is openness and it is that openness that makes it easy for us to share challenges, experiences and even our faults in public. You would agree with me on this if you’re a developer.

Or have you seen any community that shares things that should be secrets in public like software developers? Now, how is openness makes it hard to sell to developers? Psychologically speaking, if you’re open, you have a high tendency to dislike those who are not straightforward, isn’t it?

Also, developers are very smart people. Many of us have learned about human psychology and selling by reading widely and watching documentaries and movies. 

All of this experience plus our encounters with salespeople make us always assume salespeople want to trick us and no human being likes to be tricked. For that reason, we hate to give sellers our attention.

Developers are amazingly stubborn in pursuit, so we’re always strongly opinionated. Why do you think we have JavaScript libraries and frameworks that do the same thing basically? 

Why do you think we have DRY, WET and YAGNI? We tend to be stubborn in our thinking or belief and if you don’t have an emotionally and logically convincing product, you will struggle to sell to developers.

Our inherent curiosity makes it very hard to sell software to us and retain us. Many of us are okay with wasting our time and night to build or find out how one shining project works. In short, we like to learn and build our things. 

Are you even a software developer if you don’t have unfinished side projects? Who doesn’t? 

So you can’t easily sell software products to us by telling or tricking us to buy them. We will rather build our alternative if you make us angry or trick us. And if your product is not really convincingly useful, curiosity will take us to the next shining things.

That is the reality.

Why do you think developers are open? It is because if we’re not, any piece of software will expose us with ease. Software exposes marketing gimmicks easily because developers have to go through some experience while using them and developers are highly skeptical of software they have not used practically.

So developers rarely pay for software without experiencing it judging from experience. All this is why using marketing gimmicks without good experience rarely works in selling to developers. 

And it is the responsibility of DevRel to make sure your products work and achieve their purposes. They need to work to make sure your users feel the magic in your products the first time they use them. 

If they don't, DevRel needs to keep providing information to the stakeholders, abstract or create documentation and other forms of content to make the right audience feel the magic in your products. 

"The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. 

His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. 

He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. 

He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hoping the people will forget. 

The engineer simply cannot deny he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned." - Herbert Hoover, American engineer and politician

Talk to me about programming, content creation and DevRel on Twitter at [Ayobami Ogundiran](https://t.co/codingnninja).