Selling software that sells itself: An interview with Matt Asay

Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals.

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 08/16/07

Page 6 of 11

Or if they did go forward and it turned out after a year that it just wasn’t working for them, that we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars lost, that’s an experiment that some of these bigger companies can afford to take. Several million dollars is an experiment that becomes a material error in judgment and the problem for these companies is if they go with a proprietary solution, it’s not the proprietary vendor that’s evil and wanting to do bad. It’s just that the model itself does not contribute to making them want to serve the customer. The license fee, once that sales person has that check for the license fee, they’ve checked out. I mean that’s what they get paid on. And it’s better to have a model, I think, it’s better for customers to buy into a model that says you know what, you paid zero for the software--you find out on your own whether it’s going to work for you or not, and if you buy, you’re buying support, or you’re buying some extra value that we’re providing.

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Open source aligns customer interest with vendor interests, so that the customer is interested in being happy and getting the most out of the software. Well, in open source that is absolutely what the vendor’s interest is too, because if the customer is not happy nine months into their implementation guess what? They’re going to cancel their subscription. They're going to go elsewhere. And they should go elsewhere and should be able to go elsewhere. And so that means that the vendor, every day of that contract, has to be earning their fee. And for vendors that’s kind of uncomfortable. In the software world we don’t like the thought of having to really break our backs for the customer, but that’s what we should be doing. That’s what virtually every industry on the planet has to do. You have to serve the customer, and software has gotten a free ride for too long in my opinion.

So what does that mean for the sales organization if instead of dealing with incoming leads that might be qualified as far as budget, but might not know the software very well, the sales organization has to deal with customers who are all over the software and might have interesting or difficult questions about it? How does the software sales organization have to change to deal with the new open source sales cycle?

Very interesting question, and it’s not something that many people talk about much, including myself. One of the problems with open source is that suddenly your customers know a heck of a lot about your product and you can’t BS anymore. You have to train the sales people to just be very candid about what the product can and can’t do because the customer will find out really quickly if you’re lying. In fact, at Alfresco our model, and I don’t think we’re alone in this, is we don’t commission our solutions engineers, our sales engineers, at all. Because we want them to be the voice of reason with the customers so that even if the sales person gets out of line and starts talking up roadmap issues or where we’re going, we want the solutions engineer to say, "You know what? We can’t." We want them to be the absolute, honest voice. Our sales people are honest, but everybody wants to make the sale, so we need somebody there to kind of keep us from being too much like the old world.

But what it does mean, kind of coming back to your question, is again, it means you need to train sales people to be very candid and forthright with the customer. And I think, in our experience, and this may just be where we are right now in our products trajectory, I think it means you need to have more of these solutions engineers or sales engineers than you do of sales people. You need more people that are spending time talking with the customer, helping them configure the software to their needs within reason. We personally have policies that if a customer hasn’t chosen to buy or is not progressing toward a purchase after a set period of time, then we very politely say you know what, in order to keep our sales costs low and our prices low we have to focus on other things. Please contact us again when you’re ready if you think you’re getting near a purchase. But it means having that sort of a conversation as well and not spending months or years with a customer that isn’t progressing.

And it means that we commission our sales people on renewals as well. We want them to be thinking about the customer all year long, not just up to the point that they make the sale, but they have to be considering what they’re going to get out of the renewal as well. And it’s very easy, and I know a lot of subscription businesses pay a smaller percentage on renewals. For us, at least for now, we think it’s important to pay them full price on the renewals because we want those renewals to be just as important to the sales person as the initial sale was. And we aren’t yet of the belief that a renewal is just as easy or is easier than making the initial sale. At some point we may get to that point, but we really want to focus the sales people on thinking about the customer as a long term engagement, and not just as a one off.