I need feedback on my messaging / positioning from an engineering leader or someone experienced in selling to engineering leaders. What is the best forum to seek this advice? Thanks!
the forum is probably the wrong shape for this. engineering leaders who'd give you real positioning feedback aren't sitting in a place where people ask for positioning feedback, and the places where they do gather will punish anything that sounds like marketing, which is signal but not feedback. what's worked better for me: pick five engineering leaders you already have some connection to, fifteen minutes each, and don't show them the deck. describe the problem in plain language and stop talking, then see whether they finish the sentence for you. if they do, your positioning is right and you just need to write down what they said. if they redescribe it as a different problem, that's the actual finding. the other test that catches most of it: could this person repeat your line to their own team to justify the spend, without you in the room. technical buyers rarely buy alone and messaging that only survives with you narrating it dies in that second conversation. happy to give it a read from the selling-to-technical-buyers side if that's useful.
Thanks Jonatan! This is super helpful. Really appreciate it.
jonatan's advice is spot on. one thing I'd add from selling to engineering leaders specifically โ they don't respond to outcomes-first messaging the way other buyers do. they want to understand the mechanism before they care about the result. if your deck leads with ROI slides before the architecture slide, you've already lost them. flip the order and watch how differently the conversation goes.
that matches what i've seen, and i think the reason is accountability rather than taste. the roi number belongs to whoever signs the budget. what an engineering leader personally gets blamed for is the thing not working six months after it's in. so an roi slide answers a question they don't own, and the architecture slide answers the one they do. the other thing leading with mechanism does is expose you early. if there isn't much under the hood it shows in the first five minutes, which is probably why most decks put it at the back.
