I've been part of the team that sets up this process at a few SaaS's, and I've done SaaS procurement for a while, so I clicked that button often (if I didn't know anyone at the company).
1. It gets added to a list of marketing website leads, which is owned by SDRs/BDRs who are there to filter and qualify leads. These are usually early-career people, with a base salary + quota for qualifying leads. The website is many times their least preferred channel of leads due to the quality, but they can't ignore it because sometimes good customers do come through there.
2. The SDR will either work over email or on a call; their goal is to identify if you're a real potential customer (vs shopping for prices, vs confused about what we sell), write up notes, and identify which customer segment you belong to (geography + business type + business size).
3. You will then speak to a salesperson (with varying titles "Account Executive", "Sales Director", "Regional VP of Enterprise Sales", or whatever inflated title makes sense for that sales organization). Their goal is to confirm they're speaking to the right person in your organization (or wasting their time), if your use case is meaningful enough for the "enterprise plan" (they can't sign too small deals), what your budget is, what your usage will be like, etc.
4. Pricing could be made up by guessing your price point, but it's rare. It is difficult to consistently make up pricing that works over time and doesn't have many lowball deals that harm the company's revenue long-term, and salespeople often don't understand the technical details well enough to make things up that make sense. Usually, there will be a pricing framework and an internal calculator (very often, a spreadsheet with formulae and VLOOKUPs) that will give them a range. They can then choose what number within that range to offer, based on who they think you are and how far off they are from their quarterly quota.
5. They can then negotiate the number, or the included features, or the payment terms (upfront payment, multi-year contract, exit clauses, etc.) which can be translated into discounts if they're favorable to the seller.
Oh man, I take it you've never operated this part of a scaled business before. Wouldn't you like to know the absolute crap that comes through those forms...and yes even from those who have the intent of "I want to pay more than the self service price tag".
Depends on who clicks the button. It could be a junior person doing some research for their team, in which case they are not the decision maker nor the one with the budget/writing the check.
If a VP clicks on the button, that's a different story.
With the classic setup where "request quote" is the only option, it's likely someone who wanted simple straightforward prices. But then they reached the saleswall and relented into entering their contact information based on a faint hope they might still yet get a simple number back. Then by the time your high touch middleman recovers from his coke bender and gets around to sending them a telegram or raising the semaphore flags, they've already long forgotten about you.
Or it's someone who's intrigued by the concept of the product and is curious how much it costs. All it literally can be interpreted as is "a [probable] human is curious how much this costs" — intent to purchase varies from positive to zero.
1. Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more.
2. Someone willing to pay more but not enough more.
3. Someone who's just trying to compare prices between vendors but isn't a serious buyer (especially when not an existing customer).
4. Various non-obvious spam (affiliate resellers, etc.).
5. Someone who's interested but can't get a sale to happen given their role: has no budget and their manager doesn't have budget, has no authority on technical decisions.
6. Someone who's only curious.
7. Etc. etc. etc.
The level of effort required to press that button is very low, so it isn't that great of a filter. Again, they take those calls because the lack of filtering doesn't mean it's never a quality lead.
It depends if it's a real 'request quote' option and not just something that gate-keeps the actual content on the site. I know in my job I've had to click through some of those sorts of things and enter my email just to get past the landing page of a company to get basic details of what their product includes.
“More than the self-service price tag” is not always a reasonable amount though. The reason I fill out those forms is to find out how much I’ll be swindled. It’s unsurprisng you get a lot of bad leads if you make that information invisible up front.
When people buy software they often speak to multiple vendors to compare prices. 90% of the time, they already know what they're going to use and they're only getting competitor quotes to show to their execs that they made the right decision. It isn't worth the time of the salespeople to entertain them, understand their usage, and give a quote if the customer already knows they want to use a competitor's product. Sometimes it is, sometimes not.
Curious: what do you do when it's not a good enterprise lead but you still don't want to burn them as a customer? Do you point them to the self service solution?
When I worked at companies with self-service plans, we'd direct them there and say that we can't provide provide them enterprise service for now, until their company grows or their budget grows. When we didn't have self-service, we were just polite and that's all we could do.
At my company, we sell deals between $25k and $1.2m/y. You obviously get very different salespeople taking those calls.
Super junior salespeople promoted from SDRs train on the $25k-$40k; most salespeople handle midmarket deals up to maybe $200k; and the very best salespeople get the enterprise leads.
Sometimes you'll have commercial/digital reps that handle high volume, low revenue customers. The company may also have a self-service/credit card swipe product option, or a free tier, or a support-only option.
Enterprise customers can ask for different payment terms (bank transfer instead of credit card, 30/60/90 day payment goals), legal and security review, different termination periods, amendments to the standard contract, sometimes different currency. So it starts a discussion of their requirements. Some companies won't even tell you their requirements before signed NDAs were exchanged. Others require you to create an account at their finance system (SAP, Cisco, Oracle Financials and such).
Then depending how formal the customer is the reply can be a text email with a quote, a formal quote that looks almost like an invoice (PDF), or even a 10 page draft document for further discussion.
This might sound like a lot of extra work, something that can't easily be automated, but those companies are used to long sales processes. The product manager needs to liaison with their legal department, then with their accounting department.
"Request for quote" and "contact sales" are essentially the same.
Oh, I didn't answer the "How do you come up with the pricing" part.
Pricing is usually the same only scaled higher. We have an Excel spreadsheet that's an extension of the public pricing page. Then we look if something is complicating the contract (but we might only insist on minimum contract length, not higher price) or making it easier (they need less features which actually cost us less money and we can give discounts).
That's for an established SaaS. I assume any new SaaS only few months old will just make prices up on-the-fly (we did!).
It's not the price. It's the stupid insistence on putting "SSO" -- which even a single dev should be doing, preferably using OIDC so nobody does any work! -- behind that button.
As a customer that process makes sense if I had those extra requirements, but why do so many SaaS lock SSO (Google/Microsoft) behind their Enterprise offerings?
I get that it's for differentiation between plans, but as a customer it feels weird to walk into this pricing black hole just for SSO. Maybe you have some experience with that?
Most SaaS companies will tell you that they would rather not lock this important security feature behind enterprise. But the reality is that it is one of the few things enterprise will pay for and gate on and as such it’s become very effective as a differentiator. The edict to gate everything behind SSO is powerful in large enterprises and as such they will absolutely pay to be able to do that, making it a very easy internal sales tactic. The market has spoken, for better or worse.
Because SSO outside of the OAuth2 happy flow [0] can be a pain in the ass to develop for and support.
Some customers use Okta; great! But some of those customers have Okta configured in ways that don't work with your auth service. Some customers use Okta as a downstream to their _actual_ IdP, which could be Keycloak (a million different ways to configure that) or, god forbid, some custom thing they wrote. You've gotta support that.
Some customers (the ones that will pay the REALLY big bucks) use Active Directory Federated Services and SAML-based auth. SAML is XML/SOAP. Gigantic pain. Gotta support it.
Some customers want LDAP/LDAP-S based auth. Gotta support that.
Given all this, it makes much more financial sense to lock that behind customers who are willing to pay the big dollars for enterprise-y features AND support instead of dealing with infinitely long support tickets.
[0] There is no such thing as a happy OAuth2 flow.
In my experience SSO is high-touch. Sure there are self-service portals and control panes but big company IT departments are ticket processing machines, and it becomes a game of broken telephone to make changes. When something doesn't work, what do you do?
Offering SSO as part of an enterprise SKU offering implies there is a high-touch relationship out of the gate, and that there is a higher chance of success and adoption, including getting SSO set up right.
Furthermore many large behemoth corporations have strange SSO configurations and it's not unusual to require bespoke configuration let alone debugging time.
> why do so many SaaS lock SSO (Google/Microsoft) behind their Enterprise offerings?
"Price discrimination" is a pricing strategy where very similar products are sold at different prices in different market segments.
Imagine you've invented an amazing silver bullet that makes software developers 30% more productive.
For the likes of Google who pay developers $200k/year, getting 30% more productivity would be a great deal even if you were charging them $10k per user per year, because that productivity boost is worth $60k.
For unpaid students, casual users, open source projects and cash-strapped micro-businesses - a 30% improvement in $0 is still $0 so they can't afford much. Maybe $50/user/year, and they'll still complain like hell about it. But it'll help your tool spread and build word-of-mouth.
So how do you price your product - $50 or $10,000?
With "price discrimination" you can do both. Offer a cheap tier for home users and micro-businesses, and an enterprise tier with features Google desperately wants, at a much higher price.
By having prospective customers call for pricing, your sales folk can research each customer and figures out whether they're the kind of place that pays their developers $200k/year or more like $30k/year - allowing them to figure out how much the product is worth to that particular customer.
I don't have experience with SSO. It's a typical feature SaaS tries to charge extra for (https://www.enterpriseready.io/#features). Maybe they don't have an add-on feature in their billing app.
I tell you why: SSO means I'm going through a qualified purchasing route, which means getting finance/procurement and then subsequently IT involvement. SSO implies I'm using the product company wide, versus a group of 2~10 people in the marketing group. As others have mentioned, there is a very justifiable reason to have a relationship between sales and procurement/IT.
Unpopular opinion - you may like to call it an SSO tax, but I think it's perfectly reasonable from both sides. The reality is - if you're a 10 person startup and the "SSO tax" is annoying, then simply don't do the SSO version...you have 10 people in your company, you can get them all to use a password manager with MFA. If you're worried about security then fine, don't you think it's worth paying a little more?
If people's issue with the "SSO tax" is that the SaaS software provider is making incremental money for very little effort/investment, then I would love to explain how the economics of most SaaS tenancy models work with regards to infrastructure spend...
I always tell YC startups not to do this when they're launching on HN. Well, except when I forget, and then it usually goes bad.
It's in the launch HN instructions we give YC founders, which are here if anyone wants to see them: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html. All the advice is valid for HN generally, though the logistical aspects are specific to YC.
Edit: I even keep a list of examples to scare people:
I think there's a big difference between a HN startup not being upfront about their simple pricing, hiding it behind the "Start for Free!" anti-pattern, and an established B2B SaaS with a "Request a Quote" flow. One is deceptive, the other is a necessary barrier in doing certain kinds of business
I work for an Enterprise SaaS company who has a "Contact Us" pricing and fully agree with the sentiment. This is how it was explained to me:
* Since we sell mainly to Enterprise they all have procurement people who get measured on how much money they save - with some getting crazy bonuses if they can "save" 50%. So we needed to keep the price inflated by 50% until it gets to them so they can "twist our arm" down to the real price to show their value.
* And if a procurement person can get that 50% off our competitor such that the deal with them makes them look better they'll pick them instead.
* And when we used to put that 2X the real price price on our website some people wouldn't know to twist our arm for the discount and instead just thought we were too expensive. It was also abused by our competitors who were all "Contact Us" to make out they were cheaper than us without giving us the chance to compete.
So instead we do this stupid dance that I hate where we can't even tell the real price to the people in the early meetings (keeping that for procurement at the end of the process) - and we have to do all this fishing to find out who else they are looking at and what their price is that we have to beat before giving them our price. The entire purpose of our Sales Execs is to do this dance to decide whether to give a price and which price they tell to various people at the various stages as far as I can tell - though they actually are pretty good at it...
I came from Amazon where the price was public as were the mechanisms to lower it through various types of commitment so I found the whole thing ridiculous. I have since learned that everybody does it this way and this seems to be the reason. I argued "maybe if we are the one who doesn't in our space then we'll get more business for being the easiest one to deal with?" but I was assured that was not the case and it would just mean procurement people would want 50% off our best price instead...
I'm a dev, so don't know the exact details. We make a niche B2B application that is essential for the daily operation of businesses in our niche, with several hundreds of businesses as our customers.
Our pricing is in general based on a "fixed" monthly per-module price plus max-simultaneous-users price, and then a usage based per-transaction price element in addition.
The "fixed" cost can be somewhat different, typically it's a bit lower for smaller customers which also takes into account smaller customers typically have fewer custom integration needs (ie less custom maintenance/support).
The transaction pricing has a volume discount "ladder" with many steps. So smaller customers pays a lot more per transaction than larger customers. The transaction-based "price ladder" is otherwise quite fixed between customers.
This transaction-based element allows us to have reasonable overall prices for small as well as large, as it scales with our customers' activity. If they have a good month they pay more but also have more income.
This model is used for all our customers, from single-employee shops to the largest ones we have (many hundreds of simultaneous users). Our CEO has been clear he doesn't want to be cheapest, but deliver a superior product that justifies the price.
In the 10 years I've been here we've gone from #5 of a group of vendors to a dominating position. I think our pricing model has been one of the factors that has facilitated this.
I think this is a common misconception around sales. The prices aren't upfront because there's too many variables. Price is determined by more than just number of employees. There's also individual SKUs for each employee, usage tiers, etc. Once there's more than one variable it's probably too complex and you need a quote.
It's not extortion. A good salesperson is looking for a good customer that actually needs the product. They want to make sure that the product is a good fit for the customer. Selling to a business that doesn't need the product is not only a waste of time, but it actually costs the business, as the customer will quickly cancel and all the work the account executive put in to learning the business ends up in a net loss
This could occasionally be true, but in my experience it’s much more common that this is a signal that either the vendor’s internal processes are stuck in the early 2000s, or they are indeed going to run an arbitrary negotiation process to drive up prices.
I had one large, famous call center vendor who were running on a monolithic Java backend in their own data center, with a six-week implementation time for a completely vanilla configuration, and for which the simplest change required a professional services engagement. There is no technical reason the entire thing couldn’t have been done with self-service signup and configuration, and indeed that’s how their smaller, younger competitors do it.
Indeed, this is the correct answer for 85% or more of SaaS businesses. As a CTO who makes buying decisions, the worst thing you can do if you want my business is bury the pricing behind one of these. I know the game, I despise the game, and I don't have time or willingness to "do the enterprise dance" unless I am already a happy customer. Even then, I've migrated to competing services to avoid that, so consider that when designing your "sales pipeline"
All pricing is 'enterprise', there are no special small-company or single-person offers. A salesperson will receive your information, research your company and try to figure out the size and whether you are a decision-maker or assigned to look at competing services or just looking around. Then they will send you an email to set up a meeting.
The pricing will be basically the same rate for everyone, with discounts based on actual scale, but there will be a minimum commitment which will be calculated to be substantially less than your likely bill -- this is to encourage you to actually start using the service, rather than sitting on it for another year while you wonder if the conversion will be worth the trouble.
(It is. Clients love us after they actually start using us. One of our big sales drivers is employees of clients going to work at other companies and noting how much worse things are without us.)
Then the client will have due diligence and security questionaires and want to negotiate some fine details of the contract. Will they require special setup services? More or less training than usual? Sometimes this will require a one-time fee.
Readit News
1. It gets added to a list of marketing website leads, which is owned by SDRs/BDRs who are there to filter and qualify leads. These are usually early-career people, with a base salary + quota for qualifying leads. The website is many times their least preferred channel of leads due to the quality, but they can't ignore it because sometimes good customers do come through there.
2. The SDR will either work over email or on a call; their goal is to identify if you're a real potential customer (vs shopping for prices, vs confused about what we sell), write up notes, and identify which customer segment you belong to (geography + business type + business size).
3. You will then speak to a salesperson (with varying titles "Account Executive", "Sales Director", "Regional VP of Enterprise Sales", or whatever inflated title makes sense for that sales organization). Their goal is to confirm they're speaking to the right person in your organization (or wasting their time), if your use case is meaningful enough for the "enterprise plan" (they can't sign too small deals), what your budget is, what your usage will be like, etc.
4. Pricing could be made up by guessing your price point, but it's rare. It is difficult to consistently make up pricing that works over time and doesn't have many lowball deals that harm the company's revenue long-term, and salespeople often don't understand the technical details well enough to make things up that make sense. Usually, there will be a pricing framework and an internal calculator (very often, a spreadsheet with formulae and VLOOKUPs) that will give them a range. They can then choose what number within that range to offer, based on who they think you are and how far off they are from their quarterly quota.
5. They can then negotiate the number, or the included features, or the payment terms (upfront payment, multi-year contract, exit clauses, etc.) which can be translated into discounts if they're favorable to the seller.
If a VP clicks on the button, that's a different story.
Enterprise pays more due to volume , but generally pay less on a per user or whatever the unit that constitutes the seas is
No, you can get idiots who are trying to sell you crap, random confused job seekers (who may or may not also be spammers), etc.
1. Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more. 2. Someone willing to pay more but not enough more. 3. Someone who's just trying to compare prices between vendors but isn't a serious buyer (especially when not an existing customer). 4. Various non-obvious spam (affiliate resellers, etc.). 5. Someone who's interested but can't get a sale to happen given their role: has no budget and their manager doesn't have budget, has no authority on technical decisions. 6. Someone who's only curious. 7. Etc. etc. etc.
The level of effort required to press that button is very low, so it isn't that great of a filter. Again, they take those calls because the lack of filtering doesn't mean it's never a quality lead.
“I am a jerk trying to annoy you”
“I am a bot scraping your web site”
“The people setting up the website are incompetent and a blank entry was just added to the database”
“I am a dishonest salesperson with a harebrained scheme to pad my metrics”
I do think we just found the poster who has not worked in sales, though. Please, be sure to count your blessings!
... what?
At my company, we sell deals between $25k and $1.2m/y. You obviously get very different salespeople taking those calls.
Super junior salespeople promoted from SDRs train on the $25k-$40k; most salespeople handle midmarket deals up to maybe $200k; and the very best salespeople get the enterprise leads.
Dead Comment
Then depending how formal the customer is the reply can be a text email with a quote, a formal quote that looks almost like an invoice (PDF), or even a 10 page draft document for further discussion.
This might sound like a lot of extra work, something that can't easily be automated, but those companies are used to long sales processes. The product manager needs to liaison with their legal department, then with their accounting department. "Request for quote" and "contact sales" are essentially the same.
Pricing is usually the same only scaled higher. We have an Excel spreadsheet that's an extension of the public pricing page. Then we look if something is complicating the contract (but we might only insist on minimum contract length, not higher price) or making it easier (they need less features which actually cost us less money and we can give discounts).
That's for an established SaaS. I assume any new SaaS only few months old will just make prices up on-the-fly (we did!).
I get that it's for differentiation between plans, but as a customer it feels weird to walk into this pricing black hole just for SSO. Maybe you have some experience with that?
Some customers use Okta; great! But some of those customers have Okta configured in ways that don't work with your auth service. Some customers use Okta as a downstream to their _actual_ IdP, which could be Keycloak (a million different ways to configure that) or, god forbid, some custom thing they wrote. You've gotta support that.
Some customers (the ones that will pay the REALLY big bucks) use Active Directory Federated Services and SAML-based auth. SAML is XML/SOAP. Gigantic pain. Gotta support it.
Some customers want LDAP/LDAP-S based auth. Gotta support that.
Given all this, it makes much more financial sense to lock that behind customers who are willing to pay the big dollars for enterprise-y features AND support instead of dealing with infinitely long support tickets.
[0] There is no such thing as a happy OAuth2 flow.
Offering SSO as part of an enterprise SKU offering implies there is a high-touch relationship out of the gate, and that there is a higher chance of success and adoption, including getting SSO set up right.
Furthermore many large behemoth corporations have strange SSO configurations and it's not unusual to require bespoke configuration let alone debugging time.
"Price discrimination" is a pricing strategy where very similar products are sold at different prices in different market segments.
Imagine you've invented an amazing silver bullet that makes software developers 30% more productive.
For the likes of Google who pay developers $200k/year, getting 30% more productivity would be a great deal even if you were charging them $10k per user per year, because that productivity boost is worth $60k.
For unpaid students, casual users, open source projects and cash-strapped micro-businesses - a 30% improvement in $0 is still $0 so they can't afford much. Maybe $50/user/year, and they'll still complain like hell about it. But it'll help your tool spread and build word-of-mouth.
So how do you price your product - $50 or $10,000?
With "price discrimination" you can do both. Offer a cheap tier for home users and micro-businesses, and an enterprise tier with features Google desperately wants, at a much higher price.
By having prospective customers call for pricing, your sales folk can research each customer and figures out whether they're the kind of place that pays their developers $200k/year or more like $30k/year - allowing them to figure out how much the product is worth to that particular customer.
Unpopular opinion - you may like to call it an SSO tax, but I think it's perfectly reasonable from both sides. The reality is - if you're a 10 person startup and the "SSO tax" is annoying, then simply don't do the SSO version...you have 10 people in your company, you can get them all to use a password manager with MFA. If you're worried about security then fine, don't you think it's worth paying a little more?
If people's issue with the "SSO tax" is that the SaaS software provider is making incremental money for very little effort/investment, then I would love to explain how the economics of most SaaS tenancy models work with regards to infrastructure spend...
It's in the launch HN instructions we give YC founders, which are here if anyone wants to see them: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html. All the advice is valid for HN generally, though the logistical aspects are specific to YC.
Edit: I even keep a list of examples to scare people:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40237070 (May 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40170609 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39787870 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39513573 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31840885 (June 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31659066 (June 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31655259 (June 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630736 (March 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29554111 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552753 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551538 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551412 (Dec 2021)
* Since we sell mainly to Enterprise they all have procurement people who get measured on how much money they save - with some getting crazy bonuses if they can "save" 50%. So we needed to keep the price inflated by 50% until it gets to them so they can "twist our arm" down to the real price to show their value.
* And if a procurement person can get that 50% off our competitor such that the deal with them makes them look better they'll pick them instead.
* And when we used to put that 2X the real price price on our website some people wouldn't know to twist our arm for the discount and instead just thought we were too expensive. It was also abused by our competitors who were all "Contact Us" to make out they were cheaper than us without giving us the chance to compete.
So instead we do this stupid dance that I hate where we can't even tell the real price to the people in the early meetings (keeping that for procurement at the end of the process) - and we have to do all this fishing to find out who else they are looking at and what their price is that we have to beat before giving them our price. The entire purpose of our Sales Execs is to do this dance to decide whether to give a price and which price they tell to various people at the various stages as far as I can tell - though they actually are pretty good at it...
I came from Amazon where the price was public as were the mechanisms to lower it through various types of commitment so I found the whole thing ridiculous. I have since learned that everybody does it this way and this seems to be the reason. I argued "maybe if we are the one who doesn't in our space then we'll get more business for being the easiest one to deal with?" but I was assured that was not the case and it would just mean procurement people would want 50% off our best price instead...
Our pricing is in general based on a "fixed" monthly per-module price plus max-simultaneous-users price, and then a usage based per-transaction price element in addition.
The "fixed" cost can be somewhat different, typically it's a bit lower for smaller customers which also takes into account smaller customers typically have fewer custom integration needs (ie less custom maintenance/support).
The transaction pricing has a volume discount "ladder" with many steps. So smaller customers pays a lot more per transaction than larger customers. The transaction-based "price ladder" is otherwise quite fixed between customers.
This transaction-based element allows us to have reasonable overall prices for small as well as large, as it scales with our customers' activity. If they have a good month they pay more but also have more income.
This model is used for all our customers, from single-employee shops to the largest ones we have (many hundreds of simultaneous users). Our CEO has been clear he doesn't want to be cheapest, but deliver a superior product that justifies the price.
In the 10 years I've been here we've gone from #5 of a group of vendors to a dominating position. I think our pricing model has been one of the factors that has facilitated this.
Year 1 - Form posts into slack. Someone calls you and reads the price off a pdf.
Year 2 or 3 - form posts into CRM. Someone calls you and reads the price off a pdf.
Year 4+ - form posts into CRM. Someone calls you and maybe enters some details into a Google sheet.
Think very hard before using something not upfront about pricing.
It's not extortion. A good salesperson is looking for a good customer that actually needs the product. They want to make sure that the product is a good fit for the customer. Selling to a business that doesn't need the product is not only a waste of time, but it actually costs the business, as the customer will quickly cancel and all the work the account executive put in to learning the business ends up in a net loss
I had one large, famous call center vendor who were running on a monolithic Java backend in their own data center, with a six-week implementation time for a completely vanilla configuration, and for which the simplest change required a professional services engagement. There is no technical reason the entire thing couldn’t have been done with self-service signup and configuration, and indeed that’s how their smaller, younger competitors do it.
The pricing will be basically the same rate for everyone, with discounts based on actual scale, but there will be a minimum commitment which will be calculated to be substantially less than your likely bill -- this is to encourage you to actually start using the service, rather than sitting on it for another year while you wonder if the conversion will be worth the trouble.
(It is. Clients love us after they actually start using us. One of our big sales drivers is employees of clients going to work at other companies and noting how much worse things are without us.)
Then the client will have due diligence and security questionaires and want to negotiate some fine details of the contract. Will they require special setup services? More or less training than usual? Sometimes this will require a one-time fee.