One of the great things about Open Source software, is its ability to significantly cut the length and expense of the sales process, by allowing prospects to “self-qualify” themselves for the product offering. Simply put, because an Open Source software product is freely available for download, potential users can get it, try it out, and decide for themselves whether it works for them. If it does, they can then decide to approach the vendor for additional services or technical support.

From the Open Source vendor’s perspective, this is a great place to be, because it’s getting a constant stream of leads which are (a) already educated about the product and (b) interested in pursuing a commercial relationship. This makes things much easier for the vendor’s sales people, because they typically need to do far less work in convincing the prospect of the suitability of the product and they can instead focus on meeting specific requirements and closing the deal. In summary, a shorter sales cycle for the vendor and clearer expectations/less disappointment for the customer.

Understand the Buying Process (and the Buyer)

The trick to this, of course, is to ensure that prospects have enough information to self-qualify. And this is not simply a matter of “provide a download link and they will do the rest”. For an Open Source vendor to fully exploit the informational advantages of Open Source, it needs to make sure that potential customers have all the information they need to satisfy their questions and concerns independently. And so, it is necessary to prepare and make available different types of marketing collateral for each stage of the buyer decision process.

There are two important aspects to consider here.

1. The stage of the buying process

The typical buying process consists of need identification, research, evaluation of alternatives, purchase and post-purchase evaluation. These stages are performed sequentially, and the prospect’s information requirements change from one stage to another.

For example, in the first and second phases, the prospect may have a wide range of options, but as the evaluation progresses, the field is whittled down to a few likely candidates. Correspondingly, the granularity of detail required also increases: for example, in the first two stages, the prospect may only be interested in (say) the platform and integration requirements, but once the main candidates are identified, the prospect will examine each in detail to understand the relative benefits of each. This is clearly seen in the following simple diagram.

2. The status of the buyer

The status of the buyer must also be considered. In small firms, the economic buyer (the one who actually pays for the product) and the decision maker (the one who takes a final purchase decision) might be one and the same. However, in larger organizations, the decision maker might be a developer, while the economic buyer might be a business manager or CFO. The information provided must be correctly targeted to the buyer’s status within the organization.

For example, consider the evaluation stage. At this point, a developer is keenly interested in the technical benefits of the product and so would gain maximum value from technical white papers, sample code, technical presentations, and other collateral that illustrate the technical capabilities of the product. However, a business manager at the same stage of the process would like to read case studies of similar deployments, white papers about collaboration features, data sheets listing service and support options, and so on.

Marketing Collateral Cheat Sheet

Here’s a quick cheat sheet, based on my experience, of what you could provide to different types of prospects to help them at each stage of the buying process:

A final question to consider: how do you actually make all this material available to prospects? The best way is through your Web site, as this offers several advantages:

• It’s the first place a prospect will visit for more information on your product/service offering.
• It’s publicly accessible, which means that sales people (yours and your partners’) can use the same collateral for direct sales.
• It’s central and 100% under your control, which ensures that updates occur in a single place and you don’t have to worry about salespeople or partners working off outdated material.

Conclusion

Open Source offers a number of advantages, and these are not restricted only to the software aspects of your product or service. By making available as much information as possible, you’re allowing potential customers to validate your offering against their needs, and giving them the tools to make an informed decision. This allows them to self-qualify or self-disqualify themselves, serving as an automatic filter and granting you the benefits of a shorter and more effective sales cycle.

LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany.

LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

• Is/was the recent economic crisis an opportunity for Open Source?
• More real-life case studies on how OSS is being used in mission-critical scenarios.
• A European or global perspective on Open Source in Public Administration.
• How to make use of Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine with Open Source apps?
• Technical tutorials for beginners, especially for building Web apps (e.g. PHP/Ruby/Java/etc. for beginners).
• High performance Web environments with Open Source tools
• Security in the Cloud
• What’s the status of some of the regional Linux distributions?

I can’t promise that your talk will be accepted if it covered one of the above topics. The review process is of course a joint effort of the whole Program Committee. Anyway, it’s definitely worth a try. Of course, any other topic I did not think of is also highly welcome.

Go here to submit your LinuxTag proposal.

2008 was an exciting and very successful year.

I officially started my own business in February: InitMarketing, the open source marketing company. Ever since then, the InitMarketing customer base keeps growing. As of today, there are 15 paying customers including open source software vendors and associations, ranging from content management systems, e-shops to Linux distributions, from mega corporations to small start-ups. Some of them are in the FOSS business for several years, others recently started or even open sourced their formerly proprietary product. InitMarketing helped them with marketing strategy definition, community building, public relations, blog coaching, event management, creating product brochures, writing case studies and white papers and much more.

Revenues for 2008 clearly exceeded my expectations. We have been contracted for project-specific work as well as on a retainer basis. A good part of that money went to InitMarketing’s team members who have done an excellent job helping out with their special expertise on customer projects.

I am particularly proud of InitMarketing.tv, because it is first of all a lot of fun to record the video interviews about Open Source marketing. Second, the videos provide real value to those who watch them much in the spirit of Open Source communites where expertise is being shared happily. Furthermore, video recording and editing has turned into a passion and I very much enjoy extending my prosumer skills.

The goals for InitMarketing in 2009 are to double our revenues, but given the world-wide economic downturn, I am clueless if we can make it. Honestly, I wish that those claims about Open Source software doing better during a recession turn out to be true. So far, I don’t have any reasons to not believe that this self-fullilling prophecy will fullfill itself.

There are positive signs: none of our customers face any economic problems yet. Some of them even performed better than projected during the second half of 2008 … but – you know – only the paranoid survive.

Given the overall economic climate and the general bad financial situation of the U.S., I don’t want to be overly optimistic. Nevertheless, the advantages of open source software over proprietary software in times of tight budgets are obvious. The only real problem are completely cut-down budgets…

Anyway, I wish you all a 2009 that can only become better than expected, right?

It’s been quiet for a month on my Weblog due to still increasing demand for the services offered by InitMarketing. The more I am happy to be able to present some of the work we are doing for our clients.

In June, we started to work with YMC on what we labeled “marketing phase 1″. This project set out to build a completely new corporate design and identity. We re-defined the positioning and branding of YMC, re-launched their corporate website regarding visual appearance and content, created marketing collaterals and more.

About YMC

YMC is located in Switzerland. Their software is what we categorized as “Open Source Web 2.0 Content Management” and it is named Volano. Volano is based on eZ Publish and – you might have already guessed it – provides some cool Web 2.0 functionality on top of it. Volano itself is available under an Open Source license to YMC’s customers.

YMC provides support and services for Volano and currently focuses on the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). One major customer of YMC is Swiss Televsion SF where they use Volano for the website related to the daily news broadcast SF Tagesschau. A highly interesting implementation done by YMC is 029, a Web 2.0 portal where social travel booking takes place: A group of people can find the best package for joint holidays.

Corporate Design

Most of all, I am happy about the results achieved in creating a new corporate design for YMC. We started with the logo and then moved on to designing the website.

New YMC Website.

I especially do like the rings and the illustration used in the banner. The rings symbolize communities that sometimes overlap. The pieces of the rings sum up the individuals who are members of the community.

The illustration is great because it is a creative piece of art that is in sync with the banner’s claim that YMC combines spontaneity and quality in it’s Web 2.0 content management solution. Most importantly, the illustration highly differentiates YMC from other software companies, who tend to use stock photos of architectural buildings or even worse, of two business men shaking their hands.

The new corporate design also works well regarding booth designs, as this picture shows, taken at OpenExpo a few days ago:

YMC booth at OpenExpo 2008 (Credit: Andreas Heer).

The corporate design work also included the design of business cards, presentation slides, case studies, etc. and we are about to deliver the style guide to YMC.

Marketing Collaterals

We at InitMarketing assisted YMC in re-structuring and re-writing the content of www.ymc.ch to have it in sync with the more focused brand identity of YMC. We are currently in the proccess of coaching YMC when it comes to identifying and writing about thought leader topics on YMC’s corporate Weblog. Furthermore, we helped YMC in writing two case studies and delivered a case study template to them.

All this marketing work forms the basis for the public relations activities we just started for YMC.

The relaunch of the Swiss TV news site SF Tagesschau is based on eZ publish. Now, a 11 pages case study has been published, written by me and my colleague Marcus Rölz. The document explains the most important features and also provides some screenshots.

Yet, the case study is only available in German.