Author: Henrik Ingo, 2015. Please share and reuse this presentation using the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Selling Open Source 101

Henrik Ingo, MongoDB

Oscon 2015

@h_ingo

Sales funnel

The open source sales funnel: Awareness, Adoption, Lead, Qualified Lead, Customer

Awareness

Adoption

Lead

They are aware of your product,
and you are aware of them!

Qualified Lead (BANT)

BudgetAuthority
NeedTimeline

Customer

2 Ecosystems

Single vendorMulti vendor
(MongoDB, MySQL)(Linux, Hadoop, OpenStack)
AdoptionAdoption
Convince to payConvince to pay
Convince to pay YOU

Multi-vendor ecosystems

Other business models

Growing your business

The open source sales funnel: Awareness, Adoption, Lead, Qualified Lead, Customer

Your Open Source Business Model

Improve conversion ratio

Lead Qualification Heuristics

What can we achieve?

Increase adoption

Metrics!

Why are metrics important?

Graph of sales bounded by adoption not growing fast enough

How do you measure this?

The open source sales funnel: Awareness, Adoption, Lead, Qualified Lead, Customer

How do you measure...?

Example

451 Group: NoSQL Linkedin Skills Index - June 2014

Conclusion

Adoption is your most important metric,
and it is the most difficult one to measure!

Compare with Traditional Proprietary Software Sales Process

Traditional (proprietary) sales funnel

The traditional software sales funnel: Awareness, Lead, Qualified Lead, Adoption, Customer

Proprietary

vs

Open Source

Sales effort to convince someone to use pay
Sales cycle long, expensive short, efficient
Price is a function of migration cost
(lock in)
value

Side note

Conclusion

In Open Source...

This must be offset by

Thanks

To my boss Joe Morrisey from both MySQL & MongoDB
for inspiring me to think these thoughts
and for encouraging me to write them down.

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