BC Startup Sales Podcast – The Why, Try, Buy Method For Open Source Sales with James Weitzman (Cockroach Labs)

This week, we hosted James Weitzman, Director of Commercial Sales at Cockroach Labs, and discussed a new concept he has been working on called “The Why, Try, Buy Method For Open Source Sales.” Building early sales motion in the open source community is hard enough and we have covered the foundations at a high level on our podcast before. However, when you try and build beyond that foundation how do you do it? James has spent a bit of time thinking through the issues and challenges that come up in open source and came on to our show to walk listeners through the details of revenue growth in this ecosystem.

James Weitzman is the Director of Commercial Sales at Cockroach Labs. Previously he was an Analyst at Bowery Capital, the Sales & Marketing Lead at Workframe and led Business Development efforts at ActionIQ. James is a Mentor at Acceleprise Ventures and also advises early stage startups. Outside of work, he is a Partner at Social Venture Partners – a philanthropic organization that strengthens nonprofits and invests in collaborative solutions to build powerful relationships and tackle important social challenges. James graduated from the University of Maryland and is a die-hard Terps fan.

In today’s episode, James and I walk through some of the high level on how he came upon The Why, Try, Buy Method for selling software and how he thinks about it in the context of company building. We talked a bit about when to use and when not to use this method. We then walked through each bucket starting with the why, then moving on to the try, and finally closing on the buy. We talked some technicals around whether to think about this as a discreet marketing activity versus a sales activity and the connection needed between sales and marketing for this to work. Finally, James and I close on companies he has seen do extremely well with The Why, Try, Buy Method. Give it a listen and we hope you enjoy.

If you liked “The Why, Try, Buy Method For Open Source Sales” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!