These are just my (Sebastiaan Janssen) notes, I didn't go into detail, but I hope you'll get something out of them.
How do you build trust?
Show that you have experience. You can give support, etc.
Have some trusted partners in place to deal with vacations and so on.
Should you sell “the product” Umbraco? It might be good to tell the customer what open source is.
Customers might want open source because there’s no vendor lock-in. License costs are also a factor for customers.
Judge whether or not the customer wants to actually work with a free/open source product.
The tool is great, no need to tell the customer what it is, just make sure to sell how great it works for what they want to use it with.
Integration with Word.
Instead of selling a plug-in based system, tell them you can make it do anything you want.
Other products have plugins that take a long time to tweak and make them do what the customer wants it to do, most work is very custom anyway so you’re better off building your own (if possible: based on existing code).
Selling is just a conversation with the user to show you can match their expectations.
The “brand” is not well known, is it a problem? With Sharepoint, companies sort of know what they’re getting.
Customer references can be valueable. Show examples of other sites, to show what Umbraco can do.
Umbraco doesn’t sell their product very well at the moment, for the client, it’s hard to find much from the current website.
Open sourcing sales material?
For set –price projects: “this is what you can get for the money you have available”.
Helps with testimonials from your clients.
Quote in days so you can change the price later on.
Share the source code with your client, but keep the rights so you can use it again.
Offer hosting and support so that you have a long relationship with your customer. You could give the first year of hosting for “free”, even though they’ve paid for it in development cost.
Use direct debit, hard to cancel.
€100 per month sounds much better than €1200 a year. Wrap hosting up with support hours.
What are the objections customers give you?
- Core and external packages are not upgradable
- Deployment can be a problem because you need full trust
- Lack of training availability
You can be rejected by a client because you are too cheap.