Talk:Technology evangelist/Archives/2014
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redundant with "sales and marketing professionals"
i've never heard of this artificial and silly-sounding term before now. it appears to be nothing more than the self-promotion and self-glorification of people working in the marketing of new technologies. i'm not sure how this is notable to anyone other than a handful of IT people. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.67.196.45 (talk) 00:52, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
Developer Evangelist here, somewhat related role. The distinction between sales and marketing and evangelism is made because evangelists are often expected to have significantly more credibility than sales or marketing professionals. My background is in software engineering, I talk to other software engineers about technical products. Developers will not listen to a sales or marketing guy because they dont know anything about software and are seen as having untrusthworthy financial motives. They will listen to me though because i have built a lot of software products myself. I do not sell them the products...I have no quota, I have no sales numbers to hit. I cant and am not expected to be able to exactly measure the ROI of my time with developers in any other way than adoption of my tech ecosystem. Marketing and sales are often very much about the bottom line. I showed 10,000 ads, how much did i make per ad shown? Dont care.
This role is highly abstract, often very strategic it may be only indirectly tied to revenue. Many companies dont understand it. The ones who do, like Twilio, dominate their competition. Many software and technology companies require a strong developer ecosystem to work...no marketing and sales guys will get you that ecosystem no matter how many ads they show or sales calls they make. Sales and marketing people wouldnt be caught dead at a hackathon...no one would want to talk to them, developers hate being marketed to. MBAs are not helpful to evangelists in the field.
So the point of this is that evangelism is a dirty, face to face, footwork, event based profession which cant be automated or done by people without the prerequisite technical backgrounds. It may resemble marketing and sales but it is fundementally different. Bad evangelists, and there are many, are just corporate shills who have no credibility. More often than not, great evangelists are flamboyant, opinionated former engineers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.244.136.179 (talk) 04:36, 12 June 2014 (UTC)