Learning to fly

Sales process benefiting from open source model

28 September, 2009

When I explain the benefits that a business can get from open sourcing a product, the contributions from the community in the technical aspect are well understood and accepted. But when I get to the point of sales leads and opportunities, the reactions are often skeptical. So far I could only come up with examples of other products and companies with just vague descriptions of the benefits in their sales process. Even when I tried to find more convincing figures I just could gather some more vague data.

Well, I finally have some real figures from our own product and company which I think are self-explanatory and I would like to share them as a snapshot of our current situation. My goal is that they could serve as a graphical example of how using an open source approach can help a start up increasing its sales and commercial opportunities. But first I need to explain a little background …

Our main market focus is through partners and resellers who can deliver eBox certified services locally, so for us a commercial opportunity is a system integrator or a managed service provider who contacts us interested in a partnership agreement.

It’s been less than three months since we launched our partnership program and the results so far are the following:

• We have received 50+ partner requests from 30 countries in every continent in the world, except Antarctica
• We have already signed up with close to 10 of them
• More importantly, over 80% of our partner requests have tested and deployed eBox in production environments, half of them at their customers’ premises, before contacting us, showing the value of allowing free download of your own product
• Surprisingly, one in every six is a member of our community, which shows that open source communities are not just “non-paying users”

Having this data would have been very useful for me some 5-6 years ago, when I had to do a lot of open source evangelizing. I hope they can be useful for someone else now.

Entry Filed under: Community, Sales. .