One of Steve’s recent posts reminded me of a question I’ve been kicking around for the past few days: not too many companies seem to have evangelist roles; why is that?
Sun, of course, has made that an official role, and Microsoft does as well, esp. in a psuedo-official way with passionate their bloggers and fans/”fans” (e.g., Joel Spolsky).
But, for the most part, it doesn’t seem like enterprise software companies have evangelists…at least in the extremely vocal and visible ways that Sun and MSFT do. Is it that (a.) most of those companies don’t need evangelists because their other marketing efforts are “just fine,” (b.) most of those companies either don’t think they need evangelists, or don’t even realize it, or, (c.) I’m just not looking harding enough to find them?
Maybe they don’t have them because they don’t need them. Maybe they’re useful (I don’t know), but it could also be that it’s a “Dot-commy” type of position… sounds good and is really flashy, but doesn’t really do much. Indeed, everytime I’ve seen an evangelism campaign–people doing tours, but not selling anything–up close it never produced anything tangible except a lot of expense.
Zane votes for option (a.). Anyone else?
These companies are not doing anything new or exciting enough to require evangilism. MSFT and SUN need to grab the developer mindshares and evangilize Java or .NET to convince said developers that this is truly better than COBOL. But is the same type of marketing really required for a company like SAP? I don’t think so. BMC is trying to move the sales pitch to the C-Level. I don’t think that sending in the evangilistas is gonna win over the CEO of Fidelity for example. So put me down as an a. or a b.
:-P
Those are good points, Chris. It gets to the ages old debate of “software can always be exciting” vs. “most software is not exciting.”
Along that line of thinking, perhaps evangelists are needed when you’re doing a “mass-audience” pitch vs. a direct sales pitch. Like you’re saying, Sun and MSFT are pitching to 1,000′s (if not more) of developers, while other enterprise software companies are pitching to just 100′s (if not 10′s) of buyers.
Yeah thats probably true.
When I worked for Micrografx we had a bunch of evangalistas. And thats exactly how they were used. We sent them to user groups and trade shows and so forth where generally they pitched to large audiences.
When I think of evangelisms “non-effect,” though, I specifically think of developers. Good developers, at least, wouldn’t be effected by evangalism. I guess, though, the point isn’t to get quality people for your company so much as to get hordes of mediocre programmers excited about your product. Indeed, the more mediocre the better because then you can sell certification training and tools to ‘em.
Which goes to the mass audience pitch. I’d say the point is that the ‘product’ in evangilism really isn’t the product, it’s just the thing that get’s the mediocre addicted to your company.