3 ways to find tech buyers & generate leads on Reddit

If you're selling to technical teams– such as R&D or security departments, you already know they're hard to reach through traditional channels. They’re doing everything to block your ads, filter out your cold emails, and have very little desire to jump on a call to tell you about their biggest challenges. 

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However, these same buyers will be active elsewhere online, mostly in communities of people who are like them – where they’ll be asking peers for recommendations, venting about vendors, and researching their next purchase. Reddit is one of the major community channels where your buyers are likely active: for example, the r/sysadmin subreddit alone has 1.2 million members. r/devops has 450,000.

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However, this does not mean you can go in “guns blazing” and immediately start selling. Reddit operates by different rules than LinkedIn or Twitter, and most sales teams get it wrong. Let’s look at how you can get it right.

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Why Reddit is Challenging for Tech Sellers

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Because there are so many technical users on Reddit, and the discussions are almost entirely public, it’s natural for ambitious sales folks to try and generate leads from these discussions.

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However, turning Reddit activity into lead generation pipeline is far from straightforward:

• Reddit users tend to be pseudonymous. Your prospect isn't "Sarah McLuhan, Director of Platform Engineering at Acme Corp." She's "cloudops_skeptic" or "k8s_nightmares_2024." There's no job title in the bio, no company page to check, no easy path from profile to email address.
• Selling is strongly discouraged. Reddit communities have a deep-seated hostility toward anything that smells like marketing. Self-promotion is banned in most technical subreddits, and users will downvote obvious sales pitches into oblivion. The communities police themselves aggressively.

You need to find a way around these challenges to gain value from Reddit as a sales channel. Here’s 3 ways you can do that:

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1. Using Reddit for Market Research

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The simplest way to use Reddit is as a listening channel. Spend time in subreddits where your buyers congregate. Read the threads where they discuss tools in your category. Pay attention to the language they use, the problems they mention, and the features they care about.

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This won't generate leads directly, but it will make you better at selling to leads you find elsewhere. When you understand what’s top of mind for people dealing with observability or DevSecOps, your cold emails and discovery calls improve. The investment here is modest, and it won’t directly generate leads - but it will almost certainly make you better at selling to your ICP.

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Tips to keep up with relevant discussions:

• Use the search tool to find discussions about your company, your competitors, or the category you sell in. Run this search periodically (daily, weekly, or monthly might make sense - depends on the volume of discussion that’s out there).
• Join subreddits where these discussions are happening to get the overall ‘vibe’ and what people care about.
• See which hot takes are popular, which comments get downvoted, and what the users seem to care about.

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2. Generating Inbound Leads by Joining the Discussion

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A higher-effort option is taking an active part of the discussion. If you manage to become a recognized contributor in communities where your buyers hang out - answering questions, sharing useful knowledge, and building credibility over time - you can gain a valuable inroad that leads to inbound opportunities. People remember the helpful person who solved their Kubernetes networking problem six months ago when they're ready to evaluate vendors.

But there's a significant catch: this requires authentic expertise and consistent time investment. It's not something an SDR can fake, and it doesn't scale across a team. 

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Community participation is often better suited for developer relations or solutions engineering than for sales proper. A DevRel person who can speak to buyers at eye level will build trust faster than a rep who's clearly there to sell.

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Just spamming your company blog is not going to work. For one, it’s likely to get you banned. The rule of thumb you’ll often find Reddit’s guidelines is that:

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"For every 1 self-promotional submission you make, 9 other submissions should not be self-promotional."

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In practice you can probably get away with a bit more. But the bottom line is that simply trying to promote your company is not going to build your credibility. You need to actually be helpful in ways that go beyond “Oh, you have a security problem? I happen to have the best security solution.”

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3. Direct Outreach to Relevant Prospects

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This is the ‘holy grail’ for SDR, BDR, and sales teams: finding those Reddit users who are showing clear buying intent and reaching out to them individually. Reddit is full of high-value signals: "Evaluating WAF solutions, looking at X and Y, what do you recommend?" or "We're unhappy with our current CI/CD platform, thinking about switching”, etc.

These signals are gold. Someone asking for recommendations is deep in their buyer journey and open to input. The problem is everything that comes afterwards.

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The anonymity problem. That user posting about WAF solutions is "sec_eng_32" with no identifying information in their profile. Finding out who they actually are requires digging through their post history for clues, cross-referencing usernames across GitHub and Twitter, searching for mentions of their company. It's detective work that can take 20-30 minutes per prospect, and it fails more often than it succeeds.

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The qualification problem. Even if you identify someone, you don't know if they're in your target geography, at a company in your size range, or hold the right title. You could spend an hour tracking down someone who turns out to be a student or works at a three-person startup.

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The scale problem. Buying signals appear across dozens of subreddits at unpredictable times. Monitoring a dozen communities for relevant threads means either dedicating significant daily time or missing most of the opportunities.

To truly see the value of direct outreach, you need automation that helps you find, qualify, and identify prospects. This is where Onfire comes in.

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How Onfire Automates Reddit Prospecting

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Onfire takes the manual work out of finding and qualifying Reddit prospects. The platform monitors over 25,000 technical communities - including Reddit, Discord, and Slack communities - and automatically surfaces buying signals from users who match your ICP.

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Here’s how it works:

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1. Define your ICP

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You specify the criteria that matter: company size, geography, job titles, technologies used, and whatever else qualifies a prospect for your sales motion. This becomes the filter that Onfire applies to every signal it finds.

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2. Onfire Finds and De-anonymizes Prospects

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When someone posts about evaluating solutions in your category, Onfire captures that signal. And instead of leaving you with a username, the platform attempts to de-anonymize the user, matching their Reddit activity to a real identity using cross-platform pattern matching and AI-powered identity resolution.

For users who can be identified, Onfire enriches the record with contact information with email and phone - so you have more options beyond sliding into their DMs.

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3. Qualified Leads in Your CRM

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Prospects who match your ICP criteria get pushed directly into Salesforce, along with the full context of what they were discussing. Your reps don’t  just see a name and title, but what the prospect is looking for, which competitors they mentioned, and why now might be the right time to reach out.

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The result is a stream of qualified leads from Reddit without the manual monitoring and detective work.

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Where Does This Fit in Your Prospecting Mix?

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Reddit isn't a replacement for LinkedIn or intent data or any other channel you're currently using. It's an additional signal source that captures activity in the "dark funnel" where most competitors aren't looking.

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Much of the B2B buyer journey now happens in places that traditional tracking cannot see: Reddit threads, Slack communities, private groups, and review sites. By the time a prospect shows up on your website through normal channels, much of their decision-making has already happened.

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Reddit signals let you enter that conversation earlier. A prospect asking for recommendations hasn't committed to a shortlist yet – they're still gathering options and forming opinions. Reaching them at this stage, with the context of what they actually asked about, changes the dynamic entirely.

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Start generating qualified pipeline from Reddit with Onfire

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