Comments on: What does an open source sales model look like?

By: Customer Loyalty: A Case Study

Customer Loyalty: A Case Study — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:55:26 +0000

[...] for on-site visits and work they don’t need, suggesting that at the end of the day the strongest business model is to provide valuable service for a fair [...]

By: abitrage

abitrage — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:20:05 +0000

Great post! I have tried to convince many open source companies to fire sales people and just sell standardized support contracts off their website. Download, print, sign, scan-email/fax and send money. EOT.

Your post convinced me that Percona is the right mysql support consultancy for our organization. As soon as we go into production with mysql – we will contact you for our mysql support needs.

Thanks!

By: George Michie

George Michie — Sat, 02 May 2009 12:44:35 +0000

Baron, great post! We followed a similar model, as you know. At some point you’ll want a sales/marketing person just to take that work off your plate. But marketing is different than sales. Getting the name out, speaking, Blogging, word-of-mouth is all you need to do. A non-salesy, salaried person to handle the logistics of contracts and scheduling projects will be well worth the investment at some point, but that’s not really a sales person.

By: Fernando Ipar

Fernando Ipar — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:35:48 +0000

Follow Stephan’s advice and avoid sales people. Besides, I think Percona’s needs would be better satisfied by promotion and not sales. I honestly can’t imagine what a Sales person could do in your company. Instead, assume you have to pay this extra salary, and besides the group blog and Performance Conference, organize other promotional activities with the current talented people you already have using this money.

I did this with my own company years ago and it worked great (I never hired a salesman/woman so I can’t compare). Go give talks at user associations (local LUGS, enterprise associations, etc, not all the people will be potential customers but the buzz will be great and what you want to do is establish yourselves as experts OUTSIDE of the circle of folks who already use MySQL).

At this level, money spent in sales is probably useless. Money spent on talks, blogs, and open source projects, will eventually come back (in a way that’s hard to measure, but I promise you it will come back :))

That’s my 2c.

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:53:58 +0000

Unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day, so I can’t really handle sales, consulting, and directing the consulting team very well. We spread the load the best we can to answer sales inquiries, but I’m not sure it will scale as the demand scales. We have designed most parts of the company to scale just like a distributed application, but some parts remain. All in due time!