"Payload has transformed the way our clients manage content. It's an indispensable tool for any modern agency."
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How to "sell" payload CMS to a client
I've been looking at the
https://payloadcms.com/website and all of the marketing material on there seems very much aimed at developers.
Is there any marketing material that, as a freelancer or as a digital agency, I could use to "sell" potential clients on Payload CMS and its benefits to them?
I think a huge selling point is the ability to create a content editing experience that is catered to specific pages
In Wordpress, you have a visual editor, you have blocks, but often times there is still room for user error when editing / updating content
With Payload, if I have a Global that controls my front page, each section is explicitly built out
With sites like Squarespace etc, it's the same situation as Wordpress - a lot of capability to edit, and a lot of ways to mess things up
here's an example from a recent page build for a client
The page editing experience isn't a free-for-all
There are specific editing sections that match the page sections
The UI is basic, but easy to navigate and understand
Note: some of this is opinion, but I've used many CMS, including headless ones, and they all struggle with balance
I think some other good points are...
- It's lightweight and the setup is easy.
- It's open source and the dev team cares about the product
- It's cool & hip
- It's arguably more secure than Wordpress (often times devs will opt for 3rd party plugins because WP development is hard and a lot of people hate PHP)
That's all great from a content editor's and/or a developer's point of view. I'm looking for the business case... how would you market/pitch it to C-Suite/directors?
I sold it to a client wanting to migrate from a shop with Shopify and Directus to a marketplace, the key points where that it was fast, to develop and integrate thanks to the API and GraphQL, easy to update/migrate (nothing set in stone for them since they were still thinking about features, so mongo's perfect for that)
And what got them is that it can be extended very easily to integrate payment methods, tasks, and the ease of maintainability
Again, that's all very small-scale at the user/dev end.
What are the tangible business benefits that a non-technical CEO, CFO or CMO would care about?
For example, Sanity is pretty close to Payload from a developer experience & features perspective. Yet when I look at their website they don't talk about the technology first or how good the developer experience is. They make a solid business case aimed at business owners and executives.
The language is very different. (see screenshot)
If Payload is really wanting to get into the Enterprise market then it needs to provide marketing materials aimed at the people that control the money. That is not developers, content editors or even marketing managers in most cases.
Tell me as a business owner, not as a developer, why should I use Payload over the likes of WordPress, Umbraco, Kentico, etc.? ... here you're likey going to make a case for headless in general.
My next question would then be, "Ok, what benefits are you going to give my business that Strapi, Sanity, Prismic, Kontent.ai, etc. don't? What should make me want to use you over the competition?"
If your answer includes any of the following you're going to lose them:
- Typescript (or any reference to programming languages)
- Technical descriptions of hosting setup
- editor UI (generally these people don't care what the UI looks like or how easy it is to use)
- easy setup (again, they don't care. They have geeks for that)
- Any screenshots/videos of the product (again, they don't really care what it looks like in the editor)
My guess is that Payload is fairly new, a small team (most likely backlogged with dev work) and has been focusing on building, getting feedback and improving the product, before doing marketing.
If you create a write-up to sell to your clients, it'll be great if you share it here.
I think it aims at developers
Because business leaders should ask their developers for opinions
Not base it off of what they think they know
A business leader is not a developer, they don't have the same experience or knowledge of tech
If a business was going to judge a product based off how well it sells itself to CEOs
Then I wouldn't want to use that product (but I'm also not a CEO )
@jmikrut Likely has some thoughts here as well
This is a very tough topic imo because it was Payload's developer focused marketing that got me (The IT director at my company) to look at, tryout, and then ultimately pitch to my boss why this is the best choice for the company.
I think if I was a CEO "shopping for a new cms" (which seems like an odd job for a CEO) then any CMS would ultimately look the same and then it may just come down to pricing. However, I would think that most would just refer to the developers and teams that would be using the CMS to find the one that works best for them.
For example, my company was looking for:
- a multitenant, site cms to replace our wordpress and wix sites
- a ticketing system to handle support inquiries
- an alerts platform that can send mass emails and texts to users
Instead of making multiple apps, I found payload and was able to quickly build an MVP of all of those features all in one place for our team AND on top of that have super refined access controls to the point that different team members have an entirely new dashboard based on the roles we assign them. Streamlines their work, streamlines my work, and allows me to add new features with no problem given the flexibility.
That's what I pitched to my boss and what caused her to give the ok for our teams to fully integrate payload as our company admin application (beyond just a cms at this point). Disclaimer, Payload uses all of the tools I work with every day so that's what made it easy for me.
These are all similar points to what @notchris mentioned.
I think the OP understands the selling points to devs, though is wondering what marketing communications are in place to suit their situation of selling to the client who is considering hiring their dev team (using Payload). What marketing materials exist to assist with that pitch?
Let's assume the business owner does their own research to suss out different headless CMS's and then turns around and says, "Sorry, I don't think Payload looks right for our content editor, they prefer Sanity, we're going to go with the other guys who will dev with Sanity."
Anyone want to make a general comparison chart for different headless CMS projects?
I made a blank template here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/125He-N5_f-rniCD-ywvoO8uebyk_ASW_Ng3cnLo5TNQ/edit?usp=sharingHappy to grant editor if this is something that would be useful
There's so many different fields of context to compare, you may need a dedicated spreadsheet for each topic or many fields. It's so complex.
I think the core question of this thread is "Why is there no marketing material to help dev houses sell to clients - from a marketing and business perspective."
I suppose we're used to having that marketing material in abundance, in this case, because it's so dev focused - it currently doesn't exist (to my knowledge).
I work both as a freelancer and as the Head of Engineering for a Digital Product Studio called Distinction in the UK.
As a freelancer I want materials that will help me sell Payload to my own clients. These tend to be Marketing Managers of SMEs or small business owners for the most part. In this case it usually comes down to cost, in terms of hosting costs, up-front development costs and ongoing development costs.
Unfortunately many in this category are spoilt by the ability to do almost anything they want on their existing websites because they're running WordPress, SquareSpace, WiX, etc.. So I need to be able to go to them with a value proposition that they can understand as a good reason to give up some of that control (i.e. plugins, WYSIWYG page-builders, etc.) to move to Payload.
Understand that in this case most of the time the client is going to have to pay for custom design and development work for the first time and that's scary for them.
As Head of Engineering at Distinction I want to give our Business Development Exec the tools & materials to talk about the benefits of headless generally, and Payload more specifically when they are talking to the key decision makers and trying to win new business.
These key decision makers are generally either "Head of marketing" or some variation on C-Suite. The businesses are generally much larger and a typical "brochure website" built by us might cost them between £50k and £100k. If they require integrations with CRMs, payment gateways, etc. then that can go higher.
They typically have a yearly budget for "marketing" and will want to know things like how the CMS we're recommending will save them and their teams time/money/frustration as well as how it will improve things like content governance, workflow, reusability, etc.
We also work with Startups to build them whatever platform they've envisioned. These ones are where I've been able to get Payload in the door since SaaS platforms have typically quite small scale content editing needs and Payload acts as a simple CMS for the app while they use something else like SquareSpace or WordPress for their main website.
These business are more interested in being fast to market and then iterating on their product/platform. How can Payload help with that? (in non-dev language)
The selling point to non technical users is the ease of development that it provides the technical users; but that still requires development obviously as you know. If I was in your shoes I would recommend they continue to use their current system or a proprietary software that is easy to get up and running but much more inflexible. The real question is of course why they decided to change their systems in the first place. Every system has tradeoffs. Payload is great but not a panacea. Their customer IS the technical person, and their hope (I believe) is to be so good that technical teams push it on their companies.
that said, I get your point on business case documentation. But payload is still new and the community still growing. its nowhere near the size of wordpress, strapi, or sanity. All that stuff comes with time.
@Kyr - @jmikrut was running a design & dev studio 'TRBL' and developed Payload to solve dev challenges he faced using other CMSs, such as Wordpress, and I assume for other client advantages, such as speed and a better user experience. It'll be good to get James' insight.
I'm going into freelancing, I'll also love to hear more about the value prop for businesses and content editors (not devs).
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