
Good Programmers Don't Need No Marketing - alain94040
http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/07/09/good-programmers-dont-need-no-marketing/
======
pj
flagged for misleading title. I don't want to be lied to before I even click
the link. be honest, say, "Good programmers need marketing too." Do I really
want to take advice from someone who is marketing their blog with a lie? This
is why "good programmers" don't like marketing -- a lot of it is lies.

What good programmers need is honest marketing. What real programmers need is
to learn how they can remain honest, communicate effectively with their
customers, and still sell the product.

I've seen this so many times in so many organizations. The sales and marketing
team write up a bunch of lies and tell the potential customers anything they
need to hear to get the deal and then the programmers are put in a position to
have to do impossible things. The sales people don't even know what they are
selling.

If a lead asks a sales guy if product x can do function y, they say "Yes."
This answer is given without regard to whether or not product x actually _can_
do function y.

Where is the balance?

The programmers lose on the sales side, because they think the customer wants
the truth and sometimes the truth is, "I don't know." Or "No, product x
doesn't do function y, but if you buy product x, we'll implement function y
just for you." Unfortunately, that makes the customer think the product is
unfinished or hasn't been well thought out. The reality is that there are
myriad functions that product x doesn't do, but can do easily but no one else
has asked for it or needed it, so product x engineers focus on other things.

So that's what the programmers do, they focus on other things besides sales
and marketing, they focus on making their product do whatever their customers
ask them for, but every new potential customer wants the product to do some
little other thing so it's an endless cycle.

What programmers need is to know how to market effectively. How to sell
honestly. How to close deals.

They don't need to be lied to anymore than the customer does.

~~~
alain94040
_flagged for misleading title_ : I'm sorry that you missed the satirical
aspect of the title, but the expression "don't need no" should have been a
clear giveaway.

~~~
req2
In a world where jquery is about rock stars and rails is about porn stars,
nothing is a clear giveaway anymore.

------
edw519
In a very small business (start-up), it can even be dangerous to treat
development and marketing as 2 different things. I get scared by advice like,
"Devote x hours per day to marketing..."

Better would be to morph marketing and development into one by maintaining
intimate contact with your market as you develop your product. You end up
building what they want and have a head start on your sales cycle when you're
ready to release.

~~~
alain94040
_maintaining intimate contact with your market as you develop your product_ :
totally agree in principle. In practice, I know too many developers who let
their introverted side take over. Everytime they have the choice between
coding one more feature or interacting with live users, they choose to type...

How do you fix that?

~~~
edw519
"How do you fix that?"

Not by fighting the urge to type, but by feeding it.

You mention "coding one more feature". Where did that feature come from, you
or your users? If you consider "intimate contact with your market" as a box on
a flow chart that provides input into "features to code", any self-respecting
geek would understand how important it is as a critical step in the dev
process.

"Intimate contact with your market" is just as important for development as it
is for marketing. Don't allow yourself to play the introvert card when pieces
of the puzzle are still missing.

------
jimbokun
In other words, you need both a Jobs and a Woz.

Even in the rare case where one singular talent is both a brilliant sales man
and a brilliant technologist, he is probably better off focusing on one and
finding a partner to handle the other, just because there are only so many
hours in a day. At the same time, it is still a good idea for the sales person
to understand the product and for the product person to understand the
customer.

------
onreact-com
"And I don’t mean read the Web to learn about SEO." Like you want to do
marketing the old way, print ads or something? Without SEO there is no online
marketing, Without the Web your marketing will fail in 2009.

~~~
alain94040
Poorly consructed sentence. The emphasis should have been: "I don't mean
_read_ the web to learn about SEO". Reading is a passive activity. You can
read all day long, you will learn a lot, but you still won't have accomplished
any of the useful marketing activities of engaging with your users, key
influencers and so on.

Of course SEO is useful and the web is a must. But you must _write_ , not just
_read_.

~~~
onreact-com
You mean practice SEO. You can't "write SEO".

------
hajrice
I totally agree!

~~~
alain94040
I coach a few startups and the gap between having a good technical product and
having a successful company is huge. Engineers can design great things, but as
the saying goes: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it,
does it make a sound :-)

~~~
4chan4ever
Then again: if you build it, they will come.

~~~
il
I'm going just to quote Peep Show as a response to that: Jeremy: "If you build
it, they will come". That's my market research. Mark: Field of Dreams? A man
who builds a baseball field in his backyard for ghosts? That's your role
model?

