Bob Stolzberg: Being a Technical Evangelist

Evangelist / Marketing / Sales All Drive Business

What are many business people missing about technology that could help move their objectives forward?
  • Understanding how people are using technology to get value and benefit their lives
  • Apple: Personal technology devices that blow the world away

How can you start to understand the value they can derive from it?
  • feedback with user community.
  • Use the products yourself
  • Relate to your users. Empathy.
Your career has been mostly technical, how do you think about relating to different stakeholder groups:
  • Marketing
  • Sales
    • This is the show me state. Seeing is believing so just show them
    • This is how it works and the value you’ll get from it.
    • Simply show them the solution and answer questions that help them apply the solution to themselves.
    • How do we know what they need to see?
      • Just like buying a luxury vehicle…
      • Show what’s important to you.
      • Adapt to the personality and perception of the customer
      • Most important thing is sales process experience and emotional impact 
      • You have to be an expert on using the product to sell it.
  • Operations: delivery, logistics, supply chain etc.
  • Dev teams
Evangelism vs. Marketing vs. Sales:
The term evangelist is relatively new, we see it mostly in technical fields. How do you compare it to marketing and sales?
  • Define term evangelism: passionate advocacy and cheerleader.
  • Exemplify the corporate value.
Compared to sales:
  • Sales is critical to business. What they do is macro focused; it’s big picture. What he does is very micro: specific apps, infrastructure, use cases. k
  • With corporate marketing / sales it’s more 
How do sales people work with you as an evangelist?
  • Doesn’t carry a number.
  • Is an agnostic fact teller.
  • Shows up to highlight the technology as a solution.
  • Help clients understand the decisions they have to make.
Career
  • Started in operations
  • Started own companies
  • Sold them all to get to focus on enterprise
  • Moved into consulting organization. travel. exciting and difficult projects
  • Thought he wanted to be in sales
  • Sales leadership told him he’d never be in sales there.
  • Stayed focused on progress and doing what’s exciting.
  • Take risks to get perspective.
Favorite business book? The Power of Habit. Charles Dohig
Best contact: Bob Stolzberg, Evangelist
Bob@ctl.io
Special Offer: $3,000 in CTL cloud service credit. Code: BOBROCKS

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