If you sell to organisations with multiple technical buyers or you are selling to people with job titles such as Head of Engineering, IT, DevOps, CIO, CTO, Cloud, Infrastructure, Architecture etc, then this content is for you.

This content aims to provide an actionable framework for technical teams or organisations who sell technical products and services e.g.: Developer Tools Companies, IT Services, SaaS Companies etc.

It’s well known that most technical people hate to write.

The 2 common reasons we hear are:

1/ There is not enough time to write.
2/ There is no framework on how to start writing or what topics to write about.

Step 1: Stakeholder analysis

You want to map out the stakeholders you need to convince in order to sell your product.

For example, the main stakeholders for a SaaS product could look something  like this:

The main buyer = Owner (Head of Engineering).

Sponsor = Could be the CFO, The CIO etc.

Team members: Engineering Lead, Engineering Team members etc.

Next, group the stakeholders into two broad categories: 

• Business group
• Technical group

The business group generally wants to see ROI, impact on customers etc, ensure you talk about that in your content.

The engineering group wants to ensure the platform works efficiently, is secure etc, ensure you talk about that in your content.

The business group usually consists of job titles such as the CIO, CFO, HR, Compliance, Program Management etc.

The technical group normally consists of job titles such as Head of Engineering, Head of Platform, Security, DevOps etc.

	Business group		Technical group
Business	Creates the business case and want to see ROI and impact on customers	Platform	Provisions cloud applications, optimises solutions
People	Maintains workforce and makes sure the right people are in place	Security	Concerns with security
Governance	Compliance and business outcomes	Operations	Concerned with Maintenance and reliability etc
Job titles	Includes; CFO, Business Managers, Finance, Budget Owners, HR etc CIO, Program and Project Manager, Business Analysts, Portfolio Managers		Engineers, Enterprise Architects, CTO, IT Managers. Solutions architectsHead of Engineering

Step 2:  Choose a stakeholder group

Once you have mapped out the various stakeholders at your target accounts and grouped them into Business and Technical categories.

The next stage is to select which groups you are going to write for.

Let’s say your organisation is a Developer Tools, IT Services or SaaS company with mostly engineers, the obvious thing to do is to write for the technical group.

Whilst it is expected for a technical company to write content aimed at technical people, it leaves the organisation unbalanced because all the writing effort is focused on the technical group.

Since buying decisions in large organisations are made by a group of stakeholders, it is important your team is able to write for technical and non-technical audiences.

This is where the business folks in your team can help or an agency that understands your space will be helpful.

Step 3 Mapping the Stakeholders to the Buyers Journey

Technical stakeholders

Let’s say one of the main target audiences for your product or service is responsible for security, you would want to list all the problems this persona has in one column (see below).

Next, you want to brainstorm content ideas that will provide answers to your persona’s problems and questions when they are in the awareness, interest and the consideration stage.

	Awareness	Interest	Consideration
Problem 1: Difficult to secure CI/CD pipelines.	X DevOps tools to secure your pipelines.	Comparing EKS, AKS, GKS security feature comparison.	Case study of how we deployed security tool X for client Y.
Problem 2: Worried about Kubernetes security.	Kubernetes security vulnerabilities	BGP vulnerabilities in CNI tools	Case study: Cloud Security works for client X.

Did i hear someone ask: what is the awareness, interest and consideration stages?

In the awareness stage: your prospects become aware of your brand whilst searching for a solution to their problem.

In the Interest stage: your prospect is examining the various ways to solve the problem and is looking deeply into the various solutions.

Consideration stages: your prospect has a shortlist of products in mind, shares it with other stakeholders, has a demo, requests case studies etc.

Now, lets consider the business stakeholder.

Persona 2: Business 

Once you come up with a couple of topic ideas, your table should look like the one below.

	Awareness	Interest	Consideration
Problem 1: Worried about compliance in the Cloud.	Making Cloud deployments complaint.	Compliance monitoring tools for Cloud-native apps	Case study of how we deployed compliance tool X for client Y.
Problem 2: Worried about security in the cloud.	Guide to Managed Cloud Service security.	Compliance monitoring tools for Cloud-native apps	Case study: work for a similar client X  to prospect Y.

The content above can be in the form of webinars, eBooks, blog posts, podcasts etc the format is entirely up to you.

Step 4 Integrate Keyword research

Once you have the content ideas you want to write about, the next step is to use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Tool, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Keyword Everywhere to check the volume of the keyword/s that your content is going to target.

You want high intent keywords with a decent volume of searches.

Next, integrate the keywords into your content.

Step 5: Put a content roadmap in place.

Now that you have a framework for writing content for both technical and business functions, you want to put in place a content roadmap which outlines who is going to produce which content by when.

Step 6: Content Promotion

The next step is to promote your content.

One strategy we frequently use is: we look at similar content on the web, make a note of where they were promoted and reach out to those channels to promote our content.

Understandably, as an engineering team, you may not have a marketer experienced in your space, but that’s ok –  that’s where we come in. Request an introductory call.