1. Design your product or service. This is the single most important step for business success. You should be clear enough about what you offer to be able to explain it in couple of sentences.
2. Select the target market. Then either manually or by buying from some marketing firm acquire a list of companies and their contact persons. Import this to OpenPSA Contacts.
3. Create a campaign from your contacts in OpenPSA and approach them either by phone, email and regular mail. Usually a combination of these works. If your offering is a relevant one expect about 3-8% response rate.
4. Start sales projects in OpenPSA Sales for the companies that show interest and start arranging meetings. Handle all contacts and documents related to the process in OpenPSA and monitor how your sales are doing by checking out the pipeline report.
5. Once you get contracts add the delivery tasks to OpenPSA Projects together with the pricing information. Track the projects by scheduling them to the Calendar and then reporting hours, expenses and mileages into OpenPSA. You can also store the project documentation in OpenPSA Documents.
6. Invoice your work based on the information in OpenPSA Reports. You can also design your custom invoice templates there. Track the payments either manually or using some financial software package.
7. Make support or maintenance contracts with the clients and handle their questions and problems using OpenPSA Support. Keep track of response times and customer satisfaction by setting SLAs and monitoring the Support reports.
8. Profit!

This has originally been written as an insert for a PHP Magazine article. Powered by a Dominican El Credito cigar and some Velkopopovicky Kozel in Pullman Bar.