The Business of Open Source12 Helmi 2024

OSFS Special Episode: Peter Zaitsev Talks Sales

As part of the preparation for Open Source Founders Summit, I’m interviewing both our speakers and our attendees for a special podcast that’s hyper focused on one thing. In this episode I spoke with Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona, about sales. We talked about the specifics of sales as a bootstrapped company — which means sales are exceptionally critical from the beginning, and how sales changed as the company moved from a consulting model to a support model on the open source software that Percona creates.

Also, this episode was recorded on site at OpenUK’s State of Open Con!

Here’s the concrete takeaways from this episode:

Even before starting the company, Peter had built up a personal brand as a MySql expert — this is what made it possible for him to get consulting gigs pretty much immediately
Peter’s personal brand wasn’t just around MySql in general, but was very specifically focused on MySql performance optimization
How a growing team meant that the sales process had to get much more disciplined — and deal sizes had to get bigger so that it’s worth the sales team’s time
How to align sales incentives with your business goals — how it’s important to adjust sales quotas and incentives so that sales people don’t oversell, which can hurt your reputation long-term, and don’t sell long-term agreements at too much of a discount.
Why it’s important to separate out your revenue that comes from new customers and your revenue that comes from customer renewals, and how to do so in the organization

If you want more opportunities to go in-depth on sales for open source companies — and to discuss sales and other aspects of business development with other founders, join us May 27th and 28th in Paris at Open Source Founders Summit.

Kokeile Premiumia

Nauti 14 päivää ilmaiseksi

Tilaa Premium

Jaksot(269)

Applying the lessons from Docker with Solomon Hykes

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have the first episode I recorded on-site at KubeCon Salt Lake City (and the only full-length episode), with Solomon Hykes, CEO and co-founder of Dagger, an...

20 Marras 202439min

ATO Special Episode with Nithya Ruff

In this special episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nithya Ruff, director of Amazon’s Open Source Program Office (often referred to as an OSPO). We started out talking a little about ...

13 Marras 202415min

ATO special episode with Peter Farkas

In this special episode recorded at All Things Open, I talk with Peter Farkas, CEO and co-founder of FerretDB. We talked about about MongoDB and the license change fiasco and why Peter wanted to build...

12 Marras 202416min

Selling Peace of Mind with Bhaskar from YottaDB

This week’s full-length episode is with Bhaskar, founder of YottaDB. This episode was recorded on-site at All Things Open last week, and we covered a wide range of topics. Including:How the open sourc...

6 Marras 202429min

ATO Special Episode with Tatiana Krupenya of DBeaver

This special episode of The Business of Open Source with Tatiana Krupenya, CEO of DBeaver, was recorded on site at All Things Open 2024. It’s a short conversation, so we addressed one main question: W...

5 Marras 202413min

Behind the Scenes of the Open Source AI Definition with Stefano Maffulli

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, about the definition of open source and… the definition of open source AI. We...

30 Loka 202432min

Price Anchors of Zero Dollars with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick , the co-CEO of Grist Labs and CTO of Grist Labs. We talked about managing growth of users versus growth of...

23 Loka 202442min

Getting people to use the features you already have with Eric Holscher

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs. We had a really far-ranging conversation that included talking about why documentation is often so ba...

16 Loka 202445min

Kaikki yhdessä sovelluksessa

Kuuntele kaikki suosikkipodcastisi ja -äänikirjasi yhdessä paikassa.

Sinulle valikoitua sisältöä

Podme-sovelluksessa kokoat suosikkisi helposti omaan kirjastoosi. Saat meiltä myös kuuntelusuosituksia!

Jatka kuuntelua koska tahansa

Voit jatkaa siitä mihin jäit, myös offline-tilassa.

Premium

9,99 €/kk

Kaikki premium-podcastit
Ei mainoksia
Ei sitoutumista, peruuta koska tahansa

Aloita 14 päivän kokeilu

Premium

13,99 €/kk

Kaikki premium-podcastit
Ei mainoksia
Ei sitoutumista, peruuta koska tahansa
Yksi lisäkäyttäjä

Kokeile 14 päivää maksutta

Suosittua kategoriassa Liike-elämä ja talous

Tarinat ja äänet, joita rakastat kuunnella

Kuuntele kaikki suosikkipodcastisi ja -äänikirjasi

Lue lisää