I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.
If your website doesn't give me enough information to:
1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements.
2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.
Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do.
I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.
Oh I might add another huge thing: Have a way to justify/explain your pricing and how you came to that number. When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay. That's going to backfire on you because after you send me pricing, I'm going to ask you how you arrived at those numbers. Is it by vCPU? by vRAM? by number of instances? by number of API calls per month? by number of employees? by number of "seats"? If you don't have some objective way of determining the price you want to charge me, you're going to feel really stupid and embarrassed when I drill into the details.
>you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay
It should be based on the email address used. If, for example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and you get a discount.
My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.
You know it might be also priced on “this guy feels like a pain to work with after the way he asks questions, let’s put the price up”. There is no way to objectively explain that without having person offended - so I am going to put a price I think will cover me dealing with BS questions or attitude of the customer and if he walks it is still a good deal for me.
We might think that companies need every single sale - well no sometimes you want to fire a customer or not take one on.
>just making the price up based on what you think I can pay
It's called supply and demand, and it's the way things have been priced since the dawn of commerce. The only time the price is based on cost is when the market is competitive enough to drive that price down, and the cost acts as the floor. Even then, if you can get your costs below those of your competitors then it's your competitors cost that can act as the floor.
The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.
>When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay.
That is how 99% of sellers do business. The upper end of the price range is what the buyer can pay, the lower end is what their competitors are asking for. Some sellers are lucky to have few competitors, so they can waste more of the buyers' time trying to narrow down exactly how much they can or are willing to pay.
I'm confused by this, why would sales team know in detail the vRAM contribution to sales price, and how is it relevant to your purchase decision? I've never heard of enterprise/SAAS pricing to be based primarily using cost plus pricing.
I've always agreed with this take but now as a B2B founder doing sales, I think it can honestly be interpreted a lot more charitably.
I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things, like:
* How much will it cost us to support you based on what you're using our platform for?
* How expensive is this problem for you today?
* From there, how much money could we save you?
My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing together. It seems pretty reasonable.
Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for, instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own time.
I was just thinking about this today. Basically replacing my price list or prefacing it with something like : "We've designed the pricing and services to be affordable by bootstrapped startups with just one investing founder. Additionally prices are comparable to a FT SWE on a quarterly basis."
Because the truth is that the contracts are almost always different, so while price tables are good to get an idea, words are just better at conveying the ballpark, and they lack the illusion of price rigidness.
Agreed. As someone in a place to make purchasing decisions, if I can just sign up and try something without having to "jump on a call" and sit through a demo, I'm more likely to do so. I'm more willing to meet afterwards if I like what I see.
As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!
This sort of cuts both ways, I’m on the small business selling side.
Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time.
On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation.
By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.
At the beginning of this year i had some reflection on projects at two clients. While the businesses of both clients is vastly different, they were kinda using the same setup: One business critical system. The rest was mostly standard stuff and both companies are about the same size.
Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of the clients business. The approval of the project took about two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The project took more than a year, mostly because of communication chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed.
Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got cake.
My least favorite is when I relent and get on their call, and after 30 minutes of answering their questions, they say "OK, next step is we'll schedule another call with our product specialist, because i'm just a sales guy and i didn't really understand most of that."
Going to add the most important thing: It is perfectly fine to end calls early if it feels like it has phased itself out. Don't be afraid to do so! Everyone on the call is costing someone else a lot of income. This goes for internal or external calls.
Yes, seriously. When a sales call is scheduled 30 minutes but 5 minutes in we have a conclusion, you get a lot of good will points from me if you thank me for my time, ask me if there's any other questions I have, and then conclude the call. You can even make this explicit with a quip like, "I'll give everybody 20 minutes back!" then it's clear you are being courteous with our time.
I'm 100% agreement, right down to the CTO/CIO role. I just don't do business with them, period. I have a strict rule not to do business with people how cold call/cold email, hide info, and force pointless meetings. Once salesmen realize that I'm actually a very low maintenance customer who just knows what they want, they love me, I'm free commission to them because they never have to expend energy on me.
Also, this is very minor but phrases like "get on a call" or worse, references to jumping or hopping, really irritate me. What's wrong with that good old English verb "to have"? Or better yet, call is (believe it or not) a verb! Can I call you? Maybe. Can we hop on a quick call? Absolutely not.
I'm a freelancer and sometimes I have to recommend software or services for my clients.
When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions on me, but many lost tens of thousands.
API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.
I’ve had too many bad sales experiences to deal with that. The second someone tries to force me into a sales call for a non-customized or self-configurable service or product, I assume they’re just shamelessly setting me up to extract as much money from me as they possibly can. I just can’t assume good faith on the part of a company that only distributes product information through someone making a commission. It feels like they’re inviting me into a mouse trap.
We sell a devtool (FusionAuth, an authentication server).
We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card.
In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts.
Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.)
All that to say:
* email/async communication is great
* meet your customers where they are
* docs are great and clear messaging pays off
* devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions
When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different.
If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account.
So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do.
I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".
>2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.
My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22 metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark estimate for your boring enterprise software library licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.
I wanted to hire a personal trainer who just couldnt coordinate a call with me and I asked him to send me the details per mail. They said they dont do emails so didnt choose them as it was to scammy for me
I'm also a CTO frequently making product decisions, and I refer to it as "Boomer pricing." You want to get on a call with me to assess the size of my company and whether or not I have some bureaucratic, unconcerned entity with an indiscriminate pocketbook. Clear pricing up front, and ideally a pricing calculator, or I don't even consider it.
If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call. I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.
> I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.
Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e. likely to become a support burden.
When my team organizes calls or onsite mtgs with vendors, they always tell them to remove the first 10 slides because we are not interested in why security matters, how it changed over the last 20 years and how great the company is.
They repeat this a few times so that it is clear.
Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this is very important.
So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi
Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left the room.
I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying that the first 10 slides were removed :)
When evaluating and making purchasing decisions for my security department, I have the same dislike of this approach. And generally for me it is a red flag.
Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do not want to give the price because they don't know the price; they're still finding out how much they can charge.
To add to those two, I need a working demo (in sandbox of course) of the product without which there's no way for me to validate to what extent your product meets my requirements. It doesn't matter how many screenshots, product explainers, videos you might have put up. Nothing comes close to a sandbox. Trial period is also fine.
I’m a CTO as well and never get on these types of calls to get more details and pricing since they can be such a big waste of time. Someone else from our organization will get on the call instead and then give me the pricing details so we can make a decision.
lol, believe it or not this was an interview question one of my Director of Engineering used to use to sus out the experience of people. As I read the parent comment I was thinking the same thing.
Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.
That’s so true, I have seen a company that offer a chat over Slack, so basically did the entire qualification you mentioned over the chat and gave me some high level data I needed before a full demo call.
2 minutes, no sales fluff. That’s was a nice touch.
Not being upfront about prices is a major red flag, I associate it with someone selling pyramid schemes, or snake oil.
If I ask price and you insist on showing me a presentation to get me hooked and invested, I'm out. At that point you are bound to be talking to a salesman whose job it is to sell and you are experiencing a process that was designed and perfected to manipulate you into buying.
I don't want to buy from salesmen usually, directly from the manufacturer or provider is better, cut the middleman out. OTOH I have to be open to some imperfections, if we have to wait for someone or be inexperienced with sales process (introduction too long), that's fine.
On some industries it's possible for someone to do the work without saying price even. An electrician might be happy to do the work without talking about price, and then you have almost no recourse when it's a shitload.
> There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.
> I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness to play stupid games.
That's a significant over-simplification and ends up wrong in many cases. Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. Generally speaking, in the short term renting is almost always cheaper, but there's a break-even point at which buying (aka building) becomes cheaper. Owning the system also grants considerable ability to build it to be exactly what you need, instead of hacking around deficiencies and/or begging your account manager to get your feature approved and implemented.
There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have to use your best judgment and hope you get it right.
Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a major piece of our product or value proposition in which case you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you don't control.
No, they're protecting money on their company's table from being taken by random sellers. "Let's get on a call" game seldom leads to better deals for the buyer.
But part of doing what's right is considering opportunity cost.
If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it.
The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.
This only works if your sales strategy is all about inbound sales, i.e. content marketing (like this article)/ads.
But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.
It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.
But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.
Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.
We're primarily an enterprise b2b company, so definitely couldn't get away with the "no calls" culture. BUT the "why do calls happen" section is applicable to anyone really.
We need to hop on calls to close customers, but honestly we could probably cut 1/3 of those calls by following some of those suggestions.
i.e. better documentation, ready to go pricing proposals, pre-filled security questionnaires, etc.
"But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do."
And how a call will make it simpler? Or why a telephone call becomes part of the service provided for the additional (higher) price (instead of other alternatives)?
The more that people spend the more they want to talk to an actual human to make sure their product and psychological needs are taken care of, in terms of being comfortable with the sale mentally too.
Person buying the product has an idea of what they need. The information available within someone's head is naturally going to be much, much greater than any website.
Not to mention, that information can be accessed randomly and immediately. Searching if a product has feature Z is time consuming and you'll probably read about features A-Y. But asking a person can reveal the answer immediately.
It also only works if your product is quite good. I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution for the quality of products where the vast majority are neither very good or bad. An average company with average products will be more inclined to try aggressive sales and marketing tactics because they don't have a great product to help motivate sales.
I'd disagree - at the ends of the curve, there are a lot of products that are effectively identical, at which point it's a race to the bottom on price (often meaning a slow decline in features until things are "cost-optimised") unless they can bring another value-add to the table which is where salespeople come in. Some of the best companies with the best products have extensive sales teams because they don't race to the bottom on price - they outcompete on getting first to market of features that they only get to because they understand their customer pain points deeply and find out when the value add is.
I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.
Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.
I disagree, almost all products are intentionally bad and only continue to get worse. Ironically, it's due to the free market.
There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.
But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?
Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.
There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.
But I guess 100k cars are bought are bought more in person than 10k cars. For most people, the more money you spend, the more you'd like to talk to a real human being.
Mostly fair, but I disagree about the need for outbound for rapid growth, based on some recent experience. Good PMF and you'll be drowning in inbound. Still need a call and white glove for bigger deals though.
That’s what makes this approach interesting to share. By now everybody is familiar with the enterprise software sales process and it’s nice to see how other companies are doing it.
In most of these discussions, people on the sales side claim, "but our customers WANT this! Trust us!" and most of the people on the buying side scream, "We hate this. Please let us buy it without this song and dance."
It's a shocking disconnect to me.
(For what it's worth, I'm squarely on the fouder/engineering buying side and hate the call song and dance, and only engage in it as a last resort.)
Parting thought: SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship something INTO SPACE. I bet you can figure out a way to tell me your SaaS price, in ballpark terms, and what it depends upon...
The disconnect has such a simple explanation that it's brutal how long this conversation is: nobody wants to make stuff for cheap people, and people who hate calls are really cheap.
1) I agree that there are markets where "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." (However, I think those are extremely rare, and don't believe Enterprise software, even expensive enterprise software, is usually one of those markets.)
2) I agree that "cheap" people who are unwilling to buy expensive software are likely going to "hate calls."
3) I also believe it is true that, "If a potential buyer is willing to go through the time and effort to schedule a call, even before they know if the product will work, and even before they know what it costs, they are MUCH more likely to be able to afford it than someone unwilling to do that."
I don't think Tesla customers are "cheap". Not only is the price is right on the website, you can [buy it in a few clicks](https://www.tesla.com/models/design#overview). That's not because their target market is "cheap people who hate calls". (Also, have you ever spoken to a Tesla buyer who wishes they could have had a call with a car salesman first?)
I don't think people who buy multi-million dollar homes are "cheap". The starting (maximum) price is listed right there. I can't imagine that someone thinking, "I wonder how much are they asking for that 20 room mansion?" is a signal that they are "cheap."
I can see the value in not wasting a seller's time with cheap people who will be crappy customers. I think you could do it just as easily by clearly stating ballpark prices and/or the components of prices up front, rather than gating it solely based on whether someone is willing to schedule a call.
I love that SpaceX does that, because it proves once and for all that the sales tactic of "we need to know the details of your use case" is a lie. Some B2B software application is less complicated than launching things into space, so if SpaceX can provide pricing anyone can. They simply choose not to because they're hoping to waste your time and get you to succumb to the sunk cost fallacy.
It's worth noting that prior to SpaceX every single rocket was hand crafted, and often varied in key details based on the payload. Certain when it came to (people-intensive) integration tests and launch prep work. There's partly a legitimate reason ULA needed customer details before providing a quote.
But mostly it was so they could charge NRO more for their birds, by not having a price on their website.
> I bet you can figure out a way to tell me your SaaS price, in ballpark terms, and what it depends upon...
They can't if the price is arbitrary and subject to negotiation, like a car at a dealership. Not saying that happens everywhere or even most places, but it's one explanation.
This is true! And frankly, it's the most likely explanation.
Even then, I'd appreciate a "starting/maximum" price (which is what car dealerships and home listings do). "This is the price, unless you want to spend the time trying to negotiate it down..."
If the pricing is made up of a number of complicated usage components, it would be great to give both a ballpark for a given description of usage, and a brief explanation as to what goes into the price.
I think sellers either forget how much more information they have than the buyer, or know, and try to take advantage of it.
One of the best conference talks I ever saw was from a pool contractor explaining that it is indeed hard to answer the question, "How much does a pool cost?" because it can vary SO MUCH. But he found that explaining the components of pricing, along with examples and ballparks, was more than sufficient, and that his business took off as a result of publishing that information, rather than hiding it behind a sales call. (Looked it up - this is not the exact talk I saw, but it was this guy: https://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/uattr/marcus-sheridan-hubsp...)
I was once involved in a purchase for SonarQube for a bigger company (around 50-200 developers using it). It was just a horrible experience. My task was just to evaluate the software in a smaller team, get some evaluation licenses and write a report what our experience was.
It was a crazy ride, I got a sales person assigned, and this person kept asking me questions I couldn't answer. I kept telling them what my job was, and if my report would be positive they might be able to sell 50-200 developer licenses. But they kept pushing me to answer business questions I couldn't answer. It's not my job to know that stuff, and I wasn't allowed to share information about company internals to a third party.
In the end our team never completed that report, and I just put this sales person into all my block lists. Never heard from them again ;)
I was never really sure if they were scared we would abuse an evaluation license, but it was a reputable company (nothing shady at all, no US sanctions, nothing). Even if they had no idea about the market we were in, just reading the Wikipedia article about the company would've shown them, that this is someone they would probably like to be in business with.
Sonar cloud is free of cost for open source projects. Perhaps it would be better to use that as an evaluation tool? If you tried it, what did you find lacking about it?
Disclaimer: I am not employed by or affiliated with sonar qube.
We needed to test the integration into the company CI pipeline. One of the requirements was to fully run it in a private cloud environment, maybe even without internet access (this was required for some projects for security reasons).
PS: but that's not the point. We needed an evaluation license, but the sales person just kept bugging us with questions. Like how our environments were set up, what products we want to integrate it with, how our teams are build, how much team growth was planned, and so on.
A lot of internal things that you don't want to share, especially if you are not part of the purchasing department. They probably have some guidelines what they are willing to share and what not. Even when putting aside the security risks by sharing internal information, it could also hurt the purchasing departments negotiation strategies, if the sales person already knows more than they shared with them.
PPS: We didn't want to have SonarQube at all, we didn't like the reports at all, mostly false positives in our case to work through (but I can see that some teams could benefit from it). The requirement came from some check boxes to be ticked for an audit.
It depends on the evaluation needed. Maybe they wanted to verify that SonarQube would be able to handle their code structure, but they also had requirements that it has to work locally only and they couldn’t send proprietary code to a SaaS. You can’t evaluate that using SonarCloud, but a couple days with an evaluation license are exactly what you need.
I had a similar buying experience recently, where a SaaS had a cloud option and a local option, which varied slightly. The cloud option kind of told us what we needed to know, but a trial license of the local option let us actually verify that it would work with our use case.
Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what the enterprise license costs on the homepage.
Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.
I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)
- it usually obscures what the product actually does
Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
Worse than that, calls aren't usually tracked. They will forget they told you "oh we won't increase the price next year," but they'll damn well remember the green engineer you invited to sit the call who blurted out that the $75k/yr license fee was "within budget".
What if you sell a product where it's easy to determine the cost for one user signing up by themselves, so you figure out the required markup and publish that on your site. But large organizations wanting licenses for each user will want a discount, will want finer details about contracts, and often some kind of unique adaptations to the product for their use case. The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort, in which case you have requirements gathering and negotiations. Of course there will be differential pricing depending on what the buyer company wants (cost goes up) and if it's a whale of a deal that the seller really wants (cost goes down) So... schedule a call?
Have you ever done enterprise contracts? A lot of huge companies won’t touch smaller products because they can’t guarantee what they want. These are complex negotiations with a lot of a la cart options.
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?
How should a company figure out what to charge for something in the first place?
Especially a startup that doesn't have much market data to go on, and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of.
When this is the case, one option is to do price discovery.
And the way to do that is to remove prices from the website, take calls, learn about customers and their needs, and experiment.
> Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
A super valuable solution to your problem is pernicious because...checks notes...a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
the obscuring is just as bad as the differential pricing
9 times out of 10 even when you get on a call with them they just tell you the product does everything but their "consulting" or "support" will work to "configure" the product for you to do it. Meaning, it doesn't do that and they are going to sell you high priced consulting to ram their square peg into your round hole until you either beg them to stop or become stockholmed and invested enough that you are persuading your own stakeholders that it really does what it was supposed to.
Even just the pricing component would be lovely — I'm so tired of the "call us to discuss license cost" for anything larger than "absurdly tiny". You don't need to make it penny-accurate, even: I just need a sense of scale. If your product costs something wildly outside my budget, wouldn't you rather save your time to talk with people that can actually afford what you're selling?
(I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)
I've seen (and experienced as the seller) 2 main reasons:
1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from every enterprise client
2. we don't actually know our own economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest effort to quote it within a magnitude
A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal answers, more complex than just a formula...
> I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.
Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
> we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries
The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.
>Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission.
This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which you are informed that some important feature is out of the question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a bunch of people with nothing to show for it.
Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.
Nah, you definitely need calls. The idea that any product sells itself to the point that a venture backed startup needs is laughable. Lots of potential customers are clueless but excited and in order to book large contracts, you need someone to be a steward to work the contract through the byzantine maze of leadership and procurement.
Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in, and the idea that they say some magic words and then the customer suddenly wants to buy is childish. They identify and address needs and pain points.
I was in an email back and forth with someone that cold emailed us about a service. Sometimes, I say "what the hell" and take their pitch and see if it's actually worthwhile. But this guy, after I asked him some basic details about his service and what differentiates them, refused to answer my questions and insisted on getting on a call.
Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.
It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me.
After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about.
Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.
The title on the website says "licensing & distribution", the paragraph under that repeats it and the code example shows some software trying to authorize a serial key to see if it's valid or not.
I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
Initially, I thought it was a solution for companies to manage their miscellaneous software licenses, but after some time I figured out it's a solution if you want to offer your own licensing. The gen-z ultra-wide fonts didn't help with readability either.
Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).
Recently I have been dropping the URL in ChatGPT and asking what the company actually builds, problems they solve, and how they make money. Especially for consulting firms, they really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating what they actually do.
Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.
I've been reading about landing pages for my project, and the standard formula is apparently to place that front-and-centre, with what your product actually does second. So often, though, it seems like they're so eager to tell you how brilliant the product is, they forget to tell you what it actually does.
And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical).
So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?".
Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats.
Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
On the other hand, I would hate to wade through email chains, type out large emails and wait for delayed async responses drawn out over days. I thrive when I can read the documentation, come prepared to a call and have my questions answered quickly in real time. There’s also something about quickly parsing the realtime information that brings out the best and most relevant questions in me.
May it happen that CloudFlare stops sending their call invitations to me. I have an account at them which has shared access to company domains, because sometimes I was needed to assist with them. CloudFlare reps repeatedly e-mail me to schedule a call, even after I replied to them and told that I am not a person directly responsible for our domains and asked to stop mailing me. Whoever was their rep at that time, answered that they will stop. Some time passed, and they started e-mailing again. Eventually I started putting their e-mails to spam folder.
A lot of companies don't actually sell a product that does anything useful, though. They sell an idea that sounds useful to management, and obscuring the truth earns more money.
A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-funded forum: scummy garbage makes money. Taking sales people out for steak and whiskey makes money. Lying makes money. (That last point is especially funny considering how startups lie, too, like having a landing page and no product but collecting emails like you do.)
The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now.
I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
Not the parent, but I love communication. I love being able to send a chat message to a teammember and get a response in an hour, or an email at 8pm and read the response next morning. What I hate is having to schedule calls for next Friday just to get a response to a basic question, or being dragged into pointless half an hour meeting just to say two sentences about what I'm doing today.
But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
Some of us are time-wasting averse. I am never going to recommend a product without a lot of answers, and it is never going to get green-lighted without my boss feeling confident of the answers. The faster I get the answers, the more likely we are to follow-up. When getting answers is like pulling teeth, other solutions get considered, including "develop something in-house".
> Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
They're not communication-averse. They're just not stupid.
The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available.
This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
I absolutely love communication, meeting people, etc. as far as it makes sense! Typically is much better written. Everything can be forwarded, is documented, no misunderstandings…
One thing I find with enterprise is your call sometimes isn't entirely about you selling them on your product. It's about learning about the enterprise, from them.
It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable. I find none of that comes out very clearly in emails that tend to be bullet point style focused but don't reveal the nature of the issue.
You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact needs and understand the product and so on, that's good, you're probably right.
But when it comes to something complex, something someone hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same direction, an email almost never covers it and often enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.
If you don't address / discover those things it is potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.
I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on the call and even asking about basic features, then one department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.
I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there, not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own processes and working it out internally.
In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is explaining or offering solutions.
Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work for some things.
Many organizations have a shadow org chart that you won't learn from the website but will get some sense of that structure in human interactions like calls.
A D&B report is not going to tell you everything you need to know about a company and the dynamics and problems it has with respect to the problem space that you and your company deal with.
I mean, you could somehow get access to an entire company's email history and it still won't tell you everything you need to know. Whether people like it not, sometimes direct, high-bandwidth human interaction is required to adequately understand an issue.
I agree with this. This is why I still do the occasional 'discovery call' with people directly involved in a project -- and is very clearly communicated as not being a sales call.
One of the most infuriating b2b calls I've ever been on was setup by our vendor to sound like this. After almost a year of using their product (on a month to month plan), they wanted to check-in and see what features we were using, what we liked, didn't like and show us the new stuff they'd released etc. And then in the last 10 minutes of an hour long call, they dropped a little "we just need to go over some administrative details" bomb where they started negotiations to get us on a year long contract. I will never accept another discovery call from this vendor again. It was such a huge piss off.
> It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable.
I'd like to trust you and your intentions specifically, but in the general case, this relationship is adversarial, so as the potential buyer, I definitely do not want you to "feel me out", and further disadvantage me in the coming negotiations. I'm fine letting you on the details of my organization, its issues and interdepartmental dynamics, but only at the point when I know enough about you and your product to feel safe you aren't just going to scam me.
On Sunday (first workday here), I needed a PoE injector that could take in 24V DC and step it up to PoE+ voltages (around 50V iirc), so I looked around, and found an industrial one that matched my requirements. On the manufacturere's website, there was only a GET QUOTE button, and when searching for the model number, I couldn't find a place where I could just buy the thing.
So I clicked on GET QUOTE and filled in my details, company, work email, etc.. I then got an automated email saying my request was received along with details of the request (just the one PoE+ Injector).
We needed this for a fairly tight deadline, so we ended up getting an industrial PoE+ switch, which also gave us some added flexibility, and had 2 units on my desk by Tuesday.
Fast forward to today (Thursday), I get a call from a local distributor who had _no idea_ which product I requested a quote for, and just asked about what my needs are. I of course told them it's no longer relevant, and they decided to send me an email with some wildly irrelevant brochures for ruggedized tablets.
All this is to say, if the manufacturer just put up a price or link to buy online, I would have likely ordered 1-3 units on the spot, either directly or via a distributor. But they decided to complicate the process, and lost the sale to someone who was willing to just sell the products instead of trying to get me on a call.
I also had a look at the distributor's website, and they seem to offer various vague "compute platforms" and "industry-specific solutions", I typed in the model number into the search box, and got no results, and when I typed in the manufacturer, it just brought me to a page saying they are a "Platform Partner", with another contact button.
Been on the other side, running Technology in 3 listed companies.
People came telling me they could do anything, but everything was too shallow.
I turned it around. I would say “we have 40 mins. I will run through a list of our current pain points or challenges. If you feel you can add value to any of those, pick your best 3 and shoot an email and specific material next week”
The change was dramatic. Many sales people actually thanked later saying it was much more productive for them too.
This makes a good point. Many salespeople want the process to be more effective as well. Their time is money, just like ours. Good communication principles absolutely apply
Most people you talk to on that level either don’t know what the pain points are or don’t want to tell you out of fear that you exploit that knowledge.
Most colleagues in the same role in the same industry are good friends or friends of friends.
We have lunch or dinner now and then and meet at sector events. We share a lot of what are our challenges, what works, what doesn’t, who is good and who is not and how much we are paying our suppliers
If a sales person took the info across the street, chances are a) they already known about it or b) the person across the street will ring me to let me know.
Again, I don’t meet the sales rank and file, in many cases the Senior Partner across the table also knows me well (past clients, suppliers or colleagues).
Readit News
If your website doesn't give me enough information to:
1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements.
2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.
Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do.
I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.
It should be based on the email address used. If, for example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and you get a discount.
My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.
We might think that companies need every single sale - well no sometimes you want to fire a customer or not take one on.
It's called supply and demand, and it's the way things have been priced since the dawn of commerce. The only time the price is based on cost is when the market is competitive enough to drive that price down, and the cost acts as the floor. Even then, if you can get your costs below those of your competitors then it's your competitors cost that can act as the floor.
The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.
That is how 99% of sellers do business. The upper end of the price range is what the buyer can pay, the lower end is what their competitors are asking for. Some sellers are lucky to have few competitors, so they can waste more of the buyers' time trying to narrow down exactly how much they can or are willing to pay.
I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things, like:
* How much will it cost us to support you based on what you're using our platform for?
* How expensive is this problem for you today?
* From there, how much money could we save you?
My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing together. It seems pretty reasonable.
Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for, instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own time.
Because the truth is that the contracts are almost always different, so while price tables are good to get an idea, words are just better at conveying the ballpark, and they lack the illusion of price rigidness.
Break the solution selling sales cycle.
Non-technical sales people selling software need a better standard to deliver on the promises of their software.
We want partners, not vendors. This can be communicated long before reaching out.
$0 - $999 - direct sale/download, pricing on website
$50,000+ - full sales team, no pricing on website
And essentially not much in between... this has perhaps changed a bit with SaaS, but this is still semi true.
As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!
Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time.
On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation.
By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.
Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of the clients business. The approval of the project took about two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The project took more than a year, mostly because of communication chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed.
Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got cake.
When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions on me, but many lost tens of thousands.
API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.
We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card.
In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts.
Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.)
All that to say:
* email/async communication is great
* meet your customers where they are
* docs are great and clear messaging pays off
* devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions
When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different.
If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account.
So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do.
I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".
My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22 metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark estimate for your boring enterprise software library licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.
If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call. I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.
Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e. likely to become a support burden.
They repeat this a few times so that it is clear.
Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this is very important.
So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi
Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left the room.
I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying that the first 10 slides were removed :)
Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do not want to give the price because they don't know the price; they're still finding out how much they can charge.
Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.
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If I ask price and you insist on showing me a presentation to get me hooked and invested, I'm out. At that point you are bound to be talking to a salesman whose job it is to sell and you are experiencing a process that was designed and perfected to manipulate you into buying.
I don't want to buy from salesmen usually, directly from the manufacturer or provider is better, cut the middleman out. OTOH I have to be open to some imperfections, if we have to wait for someone or be inexperienced with sales process (introduction too long), that's fine.
On some industries it's possible for someone to do the work without saying price even. An electrician might be happy to do the work without talking about price, and then you have almost no recourse when it's a shitload.
> I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness to play stupid games.
There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have to use your best judgment and hope you get it right.
Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a major piece of our product or value proposition in which case you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you don't control.
i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo
you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself
If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it.
The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.
But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.
It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.
But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.
Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.
We need to hop on calls to close customers, but honestly we could probably cut 1/3 of those calls by following some of those suggestions.
i.e. better documentation, ready to go pricing proposals, pre-filled security questionnaires, etc.
And how a call will make it simpler? Or why a telephone call becomes part of the service provided for the additional (higher) price (instead of other alternatives)?
Person buying the product has an idea of what they need. The information available within someone's head is naturally going to be much, much greater than any website.
Not to mention, that information can be accessed randomly and immediately. Searching if a product has feature Z is time consuming and you'll probably read about features A-Y. But asking a person can reveal the answer immediately.
I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.
Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.
There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.
But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?
Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.
There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.
Sturgeons law applies more to enterprise software and products than any other space
"ninety percent of everything is crap" is just insufficient in describing how bad the solutions in this space are.
If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.
A large SaaS customer is the opposite.
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Parting thought: SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship something INTO SPACE. I bet you can figure out a way to tell me your SaaS price, in ballpark terms, and what it depends upon...
1) I agree that there are markets where "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." (However, I think those are extremely rare, and don't believe Enterprise software, even expensive enterprise software, is usually one of those markets.)
2) I agree that "cheap" people who are unwilling to buy expensive software are likely going to "hate calls."
3) I also believe it is true that, "If a potential buyer is willing to go through the time and effort to schedule a call, even before they know if the product will work, and even before they know what it costs, they are MUCH more likely to be able to afford it than someone unwilling to do that."
But that doesn't mean that potential buyers who "hate calls" and prefer to know what something costs before-hand are "cheap." Many very expensive products list the price (or at least the maximum price, right on the website): [Luxury cars](https://www.mbusa.com/en/vehicles/build/g-class/suv), [Mansions](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1900-Spindrift-Dr-La-Joll...)...
I don't think Tesla customers are "cheap". Not only is the price is right on the website, you can [buy it in a few clicks](https://www.tesla.com/models/design#overview). That's not because their target market is "cheap people who hate calls". (Also, have you ever spoken to a Tesla buyer who wishes they could have had a call with a car salesman first?)
I don't think people who buy multi-million dollar homes are "cheap". The starting (maximum) price is listed right there. I can't imagine that someone thinking, "I wonder how much are they asking for that 20 room mansion?" is a signal that they are "cheap."
I can see the value in not wasting a seller's time with cheap people who will be crappy customers. I think you could do it just as easily by clearly stating ballpark prices and/or the components of prices up front, rather than gating it solely based on whether someone is willing to schedule a call.
It is, to put it politely, horseshit.
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But mostly it was so they could charge NRO more for their birds, by not having a price on their website.
https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/
https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf
To save a click, that PDF at this moment says clearly:
STANDARD PAYMENT PLAN [for Falcon 9] (through 2024) $69.75 M Up to 5.5 mT TO GTO
If they can put a specific base price on their website, so can any SaaS.
They can't if the price is arbitrary and subject to negotiation, like a car at a dealership. Not saying that happens everywhere or even most places, but it's one explanation.
If the pricing is made up of a number of complicated usage components, it would be great to give both a ballpark for a given description of usage, and a brief explanation as to what goes into the price.
I think sellers either forget how much more information they have than the buyer, or know, and try to take advantage of it.
One of the best conference talks I ever saw was from a pool contractor explaining that it is indeed hard to answer the question, "How much does a pool cost?" because it can vary SO MUCH. But he found that explaining the components of pricing, along with examples and ballparks, was more than sufficient, and that his business took off as a result of publishing that information, rather than hiding it behind a sales call. (Looked it up - this is not the exact talk I saw, but it was this guy: https://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/uattr/marcus-sheridan-hubsp...)
It was a crazy ride, I got a sales person assigned, and this person kept asking me questions I couldn't answer. I kept telling them what my job was, and if my report would be positive they might be able to sell 50-200 developer licenses. But they kept pushing me to answer business questions I couldn't answer. It's not my job to know that stuff, and I wasn't allowed to share information about company internals to a third party.
In the end our team never completed that report, and I just put this sales person into all my block lists. Never heard from them again ;)
I was never really sure if they were scared we would abuse an evaluation license, but it was a reputable company (nothing shady at all, no US sanctions, nothing). Even if they had no idea about the market we were in, just reading the Wikipedia article about the company would've shown them, that this is someone they would probably like to be in business with.
Disclaimer: I am not employed by or affiliated with sonar qube.
PS: but that's not the point. We needed an evaluation license, but the sales person just kept bugging us with questions. Like how our environments were set up, what products we want to integrate it with, how our teams are build, how much team growth was planned, and so on.
A lot of internal things that you don't want to share, especially if you are not part of the purchasing department. They probably have some guidelines what they are willing to share and what not. Even when putting aside the security risks by sharing internal information, it could also hurt the purchasing departments negotiation strategies, if the sales person already knows more than they shared with them.
PPS: We didn't want to have SonarQube at all, we didn't like the reports at all, mostly false positives in our case to work through (but I can see that some teams could benefit from it). The requirement came from some check boxes to be ticked for an audit.
I had a similar buying experience recently, where a SaaS had a cloud option and a local option, which varied slightly. The cloud option kind of told us what we needed to know, but a trial license of the local option let us actually verify that it would work with our use case.
Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.
I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
I wish I could use what this guy is selling.
- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)
- it usually obscures what the product actually does
Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
Worse than that, calls aren't usually tracked. They will forget they told you "oh we won't increase the price next year," but they'll damn well remember the green engineer you invited to sit the call who blurted out that the $75k/yr license fee was "within budget".
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?
A super valuable solution to your problem is pernicious because...checks notes...a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
I can't scratch my head hard enough.
9 times out of 10 even when you get on a call with them they just tell you the product does everything but their "consulting" or "support" will work to "configure" the product for you to do it. Meaning, it doesn't do that and they are going to sell you high priced consulting to ram their square peg into your round hole until you either beg them to stop or become stockholmed and invested enough that you are persuading your own stakeholders that it really does what it was supposed to.
(I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)
1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from every enterprise client 2. we don't actually know our own economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest effort to quote it within a magnitude
A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal answers, more complex than just a formula...
Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.
Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.
This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which you are informed that some important feature is out of the question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a bunch of people with nothing to show for it.
Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.
Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in, and the idea that they say some magic words and then the customer suddenly wants to buy is childish. They identify and address needs and pain points.
Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.
> I do not understand why that's difficult
It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me.
After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about.
Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.
I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.
And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical).
So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?".
Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats.
Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8
The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now.
I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available.
This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
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It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable. I find none of that comes out very clearly in emails that tend to be bullet point style focused but don't reveal the nature of the issue.
I don't like calls either, but they are useful.
For me, I can find out way more quantifiable information by just doing 15 minutes of OSINT, or even simpler pull up your D&B report.
I do not trust my emotions.
But when it comes to something complex, something someone hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same direction, an email almost never covers it and often enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.
If you don't address / discover those things it is potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.
I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on the call and even asking about basic features, then one department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.
I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there, not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own processes and working it out internally.
In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is explaining or offering solutions.
Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work for some things.
I mean, you could somehow get access to an entire company's email history and it still won't tell you everything you need to know. Whether people like it not, sometimes direct, high-bandwidth human interaction is required to adequately understand an issue.
I'd like to trust you and your intentions specifically, but in the general case, this relationship is adversarial, so as the potential buyer, I definitely do not want you to "feel me out", and further disadvantage me in the coming negotiations. I'm fine letting you on the details of my organization, its issues and interdepartmental dynamics, but only at the point when I know enough about you and your product to feel safe you aren't just going to scam me.
On Sunday (first workday here), I needed a PoE injector that could take in 24V DC and step it up to PoE+ voltages (around 50V iirc), so I looked around, and found an industrial one that matched my requirements. On the manufacturere's website, there was only a GET QUOTE button, and when searching for the model number, I couldn't find a place where I could just buy the thing.
So I clicked on GET QUOTE and filled in my details, company, work email, etc.. I then got an automated email saying my request was received along with details of the request (just the one PoE+ Injector).
We needed this for a fairly tight deadline, so we ended up getting an industrial PoE+ switch, which also gave us some added flexibility, and had 2 units on my desk by Tuesday.
Fast forward to today (Thursday), I get a call from a local distributor who had _no idea_ which product I requested a quote for, and just asked about what my needs are. I of course told them it's no longer relevant, and they decided to send me an email with some wildly irrelevant brochures for ruggedized tablets.
All this is to say, if the manufacturer just put up a price or link to buy online, I would have likely ordered 1-3 units on the spot, either directly or via a distributor. But they decided to complicate the process, and lost the sale to someone who was willing to just sell the products instead of trying to get me on a call.
I also had a look at the distributor's website, and they seem to offer various vague "compute platforms" and "industry-specific solutions", I typed in the model number into the search box, and got no results, and when I typed in the manufacturer, it just brought me to a page saying they are a "Platform Partner", with another contact button.
People came telling me they could do anything, but everything was too shallow.
I turned it around. I would say “we have 40 mins. I will run through a list of our current pain points or challenges. If you feel you can add value to any of those, pick your best 3 and shoot an email and specific material next week”
The change was dramatic. Many sales people actually thanked later saying it was much more productive for them too.
We have lunch or dinner now and then and meet at sector events. We share a lot of what are our challenges, what works, what doesn’t, who is good and who is not and how much we are paying our suppliers
If a sales person took the info across the street, chances are a) they already known about it or b) the person across the street will ring me to let me know.
Again, I don’t meet the sales rank and file, in many cases the Senior Partner across the table also knows me well (past clients, suppliers or colleagues).