Thinking about the sales side of your APIs is an important part of elevating them and treating them more as a product, helping actually connect your road map with real-world tangible value for both producer and consumer.
APIs excel at doing one thing and doing it well. They become much more difficult to sell if you try to make them be everything to everyone. While crafting a sales strategy for your API products, it helps to be as precise as you can about how you will be making your products available. The shape, size, and positioning of your API solutions will vary widely depending who you are targeting, and will dictate a great deal about your approach to selling.
- Individuals - Consider whether your APIs will be targeting individual developers, speaking to what they are looking to accomplish both in their role and as part of their personal interests outside of work.
- SMB - To right-size your sales strategy, ask whether your API products are focused on the needs of small to midsize businesses and startups. Augment your sales team with the right experience for your API sales and marketing.
- Enterprise - Your enterprise API consumers will have an entirely different set of needs, requiring you to do your homework on the mix of infrastructure and developer talent across teams.
- SaaS - The software-as-a-service market has been evolving and maturing over the last decade, introducing a significant but often specialized opportunity for delivering APIs.
- Integrations - APIs aren’t always for desktop, web, mobile, or device applications. There is a significant opportunity for delivering and iterating upon the system-to-system integrations that businesses need to operate.
- Connectors - The API-first transformation has produced many platform, application, and pipeline connectivity opportunities. Looking into them will reveal opportunities for API experiences that you can inject into solutions consumers already use.
- Bottom-Up - Your sales strategy may need to speak g to the needs of consumers at the lower levels of an organization, spreading across the enterprise organically.
- Top-Down - Your sales strategy may need to consider the realities of selling in a top-down fashion, reaching business and technology leadership. A top- down approach requires a different set of product packaging that speaks to the needs of decision-makers. Being deliberate and concise in your API product sales strategy will help strengthen your position. It will impact all aspects of your API lifecycle and governance. There is a Venn diagram of considerations as you stitch together and evolve your sales strategy in this new era of self-service and reliable API products. The areas you invest in will shape how you sell and what the needs and expectations of your consumers will be—so make sure to plan accordingly. Like other aspects of enterprise operations, sales is undergoing a shift, using historical practices that are still relevant, but also modernizing the sales toolbox with new constructs and practices. It is up to you to set the tone for your sales strategy by defining which of these areas matter the most to your objectives and which offer you the greatest opportunity for using API-first transformation to change how business is done today and tomorrow. null