Last month, I presented how Intalio’s adoption of an Open Source business model essentially leads to an inversion of the traditional enterprise software sales process. Today, I’m glad to share this sales process with you.

The idea is pretty simple: generate leads through word-of-mouth and active blogging (happy customers are the best salespersons you can get), consider everybody as a customer (including software vendors and system integrators), sell something affordable initially (training is the key to the whole process), then offer more advanced services to the customers who can most likely pay for it.

Shown on the sales process are expected conversion rates from one stage of the process to another. For example, we expect 1.5% of end users installing our product to sign for a training class within four months, and 25% of those to sign for a support contract no longer than six months after they attended the training class initially.

Also, we make sure that every step in the sales process pays for itself, so that we increase our gross margins and reduce any pre-sales investments to the bare minimum. Sales for our training classes are done through our website, and customers pay by credit card before they receive training. Similarly, sales for support contracts are done over the phone, and we never travel to meet a customer before a support contract has been signed. Following these very simple rules helps us ensure that we develop a profitable and scalable sales process.

We implemented this invested sales process less than six months ago, so it’s too early to tell whether things will pan out as we expected or not, and we certainly will have to make some adjustements along the way. Nevertheless, we started the year with 12 customers, and we now have 70, listed there for the ones we’re allowed to talk about. In other words, we’re off to a good start!