No Calls
(keygen.sh)1494 points by ezekg a day ago
1494 points by ezekg a day ago
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.
More like the people who appear rich subsidize the repairs of the people who appear poor. Probably usually fairly accurate but it's amusing to think about the edge cases where the truly rich don't feel the need to dress wealthy anymore and get their TV repaired for cheap.
Correct. Market value is not the cost of making X plus a margin. Many people get that wrong.
Marker value is what someone else is willing to pay.
If I remember correctly, Amtrak does something like this for pricing their train tickets. It is not the cost of going from A to B. It is priced so the more populated area travelers, North East Coast, pay higher to help reduce the cost for those in the middle of the USA. This helps make tickets more adorable for the more poor individuals.
> This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.
tbh I have no problem with this as long as the work was done well.
I've always wondered about this. My wife always tells me to close the garage when folks come to the house to give us bids on jobs so they don't see the cars. Not that a Tesla indicates wealth but I guess it indicates something? I tell her she's paranoid... maybe she's not.
>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.
No it's not called supply and demand, it's called price discrimination. The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives the market as a whole. Anything further is an anti-competitive attempt to vacuum up more of the buyer surplus.
> It's called supply and demand
Supply of the kinds of services under discussion here is rarely limited in any practical sense, so scarcity does not play.
> 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.
This ignores opportunity cost. Very few buyers have infinite cash, they do tend to have infinite ways they could spend money though and many of them will give a far better return than a couple of percent.
In reality if you're adjusting your pricing to try and extract the most you think you can get away with from the customer, you will lose a substantial number of buyers - and probably more so with buyers who have a technical mindset.
And also, the customer has the money and gets to make a choice. Sure, supply and demand is a real thing. But there is also a notion of friction blocking the sale. Everyone absolutely hates considering a new purchase that doesn't give you clarity on details and price.
So that CTO says I'm probably not going to bother with you if you don't have a clear price. I also practice this purchasing way. Everyone should. So sure, someone in sales will fight to the death to justify their strategy of obfuscation and charging what the market will bear, and to try to justify their presence in the sales process with some kind of commission and argument about how they caused pain for the buyers and got more money. Meanwhile, company B sold me a widget for whatever, I already paid them, there was no salesperson wasting time on either side.
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.
You don't have to change you process, so you can still explain it rationally.
Just leave off the "then I multiplied by 10" part.
Which I did by accident once ( not by 10, but it was still substantial )... but it turned out the customer was delighted because we were still 50% vs their existing vendor.
Enterprise pricing is a farce.
I very much agree with the poster above about vendors disqualifying themselves.. another red flag for me is the Two Suits and Skirt pre-sales Hydra Monster that big vendors love to send around, to scare you into letting them capture all the value that their purporting to provide you.
And yes, the above shows I've been both sides of the fence. I felt it was going to be good experience, and it was, but I have regrets too.
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'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.
Some products (especially infrastructure) still bill based on (outdated and often irrelevant) core counts and memory count. A few years ago I talked to a seller of a PDF library/toolkit who wanted to know my production and staging core count before they would quote me a price. Explaining to them that it runs in a serverless function on-demand was fun, especially because they would say things like, "well, what's your average?" I would often reply and say my average is defined by a function where you take the number of active users (which itself is highly elastic) and calculate for average runtime at 4 cores per user for approximately 50 ms per page (which page count is highly elastic too) and sum to get "average core use per month". Needless to say it was like pushing a rope.
More common now with SaaS seems to be employee count or some other poor proxy measurement for usage. I love actual usage based billing, but some of the proxies people pick are ridiculous. Like, if I have 5 seats or 500 employees, but 2 users spend 6 hours a day in the software and then 10 others maybe look at it once a quarter, paying the same for those is absurd and is not usage-based billing at all.
Isn't that exactly how a lot of things are priced? Ie. Snowflake. Pay for compute, pay for storage, etc.
>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.
This is how a lot of consumer businesses are pricing now.
Then they use the same consulting firm as their competitors to set prices.
For #2, someone once said there are two pricing models (was it Joel Spolsky? Don't recall..):
$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.
Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/
I think you mean this link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
That's like a restaurant, with no prices on the menu.
"If you have to ask..."
I would definitely like to never have to talk to another "people person," and no-calls-but-we'll-give-you-the-info-you-need policy sounds great.
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!
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.
It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)
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."
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.
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.
That doesn’t seem like a logical inference to me.
A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house construction is more complex than space flight.
It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too variable to list in any meaningful way.
For a SaaS product with significant custom integration work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in the same way.
A small-scale contractor doesn't have a price list, but a real estate developer who builds an entire subdivision at a time definitely has a price list. There might be taxes and fees on top of that, but everyone expects that anyway. At least the base product should have a clear price tag.
If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more comfortable asking whether the custom integration work will cost $50k or $100k.
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.
Some people dont know when to end calls early and everyone else is too polite to tell them to end it. I had a manager who made it a point to suggest to end a call early. I try not to force calls to end early unless I know everyone on the call. I notice when its all devs its really easy to suggest ending early vs when non devs are on a call unless a dev manager does it.
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
At least you offer a pricing calculator.
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".
> 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".
That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things:
* prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced transparently and eat the market
* the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue ocean opportunity
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’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.
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.
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.
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
(sorry, somehow the end vanished)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
“Get on a call” is code for “we have commissioned sales people and in order to make that work we can’t let inbound leads from our website bypass them”
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.
>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.
> 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.
TLDR; please don't call him, he really doesn't like calls. Must be a gen z
your probably leaving money on the table then
i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo
you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself
I see it like this. If the seller can have salespeople waiting on a call, there can be better deals somewhere else. If the seller can have people cold-calling other companies, there most certainly is a better deal around that they don't want me to know about.
Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.
Who knows, maybe there is no better deal, maybe the cold-calling salesman is actually offering the very best deal there is on the market. Then again, maybe the Nigerian prince really needs help with their fortune, and I really just won a car for being the millionth visitor on that news site[0].
Point being, some stranger is calling me and asking for my money. I don't know enough about them to give them money just because they say it's going to be worth it.
--
[0] - https://xkcd.com/570/
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.
when your purchasing 100k+ products having a conversation makes a lot of sense
lots of opportunities to find easy win-win
finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working with them can lead to a good outcome
obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff
There's a bazillion things we could be thinking about buying.
Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial sales call to find out that information isn't optimal.
As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work. And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to qualify the vendor.
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.
Maybe that's true for some people. But there's a lot of frustration being shown here and elsewhere that proves there is a demographic of people who really don't want this.
Cars are similar I think. Sure maybe some people need help. But there's is huge demand for a one-click, no-negotiation car buying "experience" (or lack of experience rather).
My conspiracy theory is that this has more to do with Salespeople and established sales channels (dealers) not being able to understand this both because their job depends on it and because they are naturally people-persons. So it feels intuitive to them and they have trouble understanding/accepting that many other are not.
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.
Love this anecdote. Having a really capable sales team that actually listens to customers unique needs, and feeds that back into a better product can be such a huge asset. Your sales team is usually a huge repository of unique customer pain and problems (opportunities!)
People buy 100k cars online nowadays, why wouldn’t a great online presence also work?
A 100K car is a commodity product with very limited customization.
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.
You can go to the Porsche configurator website and design a personally customized globally unique $300K+ car, and it shows you not only the price but also what it'll look like. So there's obviously nothing _technical_ preventing them from letting people just order online, like with Tesla. Frustratingly, you have to still go into a dealer for them to click the submit order button, and they might add a markup for this privilege despite them adding negative value to the experience. It is just as frustrating as B2B sales. I'm sure some buyers want to speak to a human, but enthusiasts tend to know exactly what they want and they dread having to "build a relationship" and wonder if they got screwed because they didn't negotiate hard enough / aren't good-looking enough / etc.
As for B2B sales, if AWS can show their pricing online, which has to be among the most complex pricing in existence - then so can every other SaaS company.
> If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.
Yes, they will. I recall watching a whole kind of documentary of it somewhere on Youtube. Essentially, luxury brands will fully customize cars for customers and have calls/meetings with them to discuss how the car will be customized. It costs $$$$$ but they'll do it.
I think, too, that more important than income is the fact that these rich people should be driving their cars. It's a way to keep the brand positioned in that market.
So you agree that when companies want to truly give a customized experience to their customers, they would get on a call with them? I guess we are on the same page then.
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.
Assume the price is too high for you if you have to talk to sales and go some where else, simple as that?
Were you born to annoy people?
I don’t call and it’s not for the reason you suggest, but because I won’t talk to an automaton once then endure multiple calls and emails trying to sell me their offering. I’ve been down that road enough times and sales people usually go to spam.
For your information, the hidden price is often times in line with the market. They hide it so they can do market segmentation without changing the product and to gather information about potential customers.
So thank you for your most useful recommendation which changes nothing for me. I follow it for reasons other than your ill-informed assumptions.
I agree with you on three things:
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.
This is exactly what mediocre salespeople tell their bosses to keep their jobs.
It is, to put it politely, horseshit.
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.
> SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship something INTO SPACE.
Not just that, they also plain tell you how much it costs to buy an entire rocket launch for yourself.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I could use what this guy is selling.
Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because:
- 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
> it implies differential pricing
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?
> 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.
Then someone at a large organization can multiply this number by the expected number of licenses they'll need, and get a ballpark estimate for the (upper bound of the) costs of the service, which is a critical input in determining whether it's even worthwhile to consider talking to the vendor. Having that information, the organization can then schedule a call to negotiate whatever extra adaptations and discounts they need, or realize signing up is unlikely to have positive ROI and skip it, which also saves the seller from wasting their time on a deal that won't come through.
Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
> Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
That or they have "customers" who are knowingly or unknowingly incentivized to have the vendor succeed.
People in marketing, often even those in higher levels, know Google analytics. They have demonstrated experience with it. They want to keep using it. They want their employees to keep using it. Google Analytics plus or whatever it is called iirc does not have a pricing page publicly available.
Why does Google not have pricing available publicly? Why do customers put up with Google? Is there any other reason?
PS for those curious, I think this is one of the limitations we hit with Google Analytics free
> Custom dimensions: 20 custom dimensions
> The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort
It's not worth the effort.
It's killing your ability to scale your sales process. Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product development, as now you have a bunch of one off deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you want for various tiers of user count.
If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you scale are critical.
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?
you are right. an enterprise products can never be ready for any enterprise customer. they need custom solutions to work with what they already invested millions in. each customer is different there. most enterprise products are ever expanding 'app platforms' or frameworks ultimately, in order to be able to adapt to new customer environments and needs quickly and efficiently. if they arent, most environments will spit them out quickly and harshly. bad for business on either side.
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.
> and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of.
How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with.
--
[0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.
When you don't how valuable it's going to be, you at least know how expensive is it to make.
For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top.
If you can't figure that out either, well...
If client pays for a link that’s part of a chain, and doesn’t want the chain broken, and still has profit, it means client can pay more, that link is worth more.
> 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.
I can't scratch my head hard enough.
> a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
That's just an euphemism for "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the value their product creates for you".
A real head scratcher. Perhaps has something to do with there being no point of buying if all (or even most) of the value flows back to the seller? Unless you're a nail wholesaler and are happy with 0.1% margins because you sell by truckloads anyway.
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 could see that — having worked for a large network vendor in the past, there are some things that just don't lend themselves to any kind of pricing without some kind of scoping discussion. :)
Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more companies think they have that problem than actually have that problem.
> 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.
GP's company is (at least in their eyes) not interested in selling per se - quoting:
>> 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.
I don't know what the name for that other thing is, but it's indeed distinct from "selling" that salespeople do, which boils down to begging, cajoling, tricking or coercing you to buy their shit, no matter how useless or downright harmful to you is, because that's what commissions combined with competition incentivize. Not surprisingly, the bottom-feeder telemarketing sweatshops are where this model is present in its purest form - extreme competition, frequent bonuses for top performers, and quick firing for not being a top performer.
If I have a choice, I never want to "buy" whatever someone's "selling" - I only want to do the whatever is the "buying" equivalent for the not-selling thing I don't have the name for.
It's not a B2B-specific phenomenon either. The B2C equivalent of those salespeople are car salesmen (which have meme status at this point), telemarketers, and those people doing the Amway model, trying to sell some Tupperware knockoffs[0] or barely working vacuum cleaners or whatnot at 3-10x inflated prices, making you feel like you had a good time instead of having just been scammed.
--
[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.
>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.
> 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.
To me, it's refusing to show up with a knife to a gun fight. The company needs a thing. The "things person" stands no chance in direct confrontation with a "people's person" and they know it, so they to avoid calls (direct or otherwise) to level the playing field. A "people's person" could fare much better against the seller's "people's persons", but then a "people's person" is in much worse position to understand the thing the company needs in the first place.
For buying things, a win-win outcome can occur only when people on both both buyer and seller side are "things persons".
It's basically a Prisoner's dilemma, with "people's person" and "things person" in place of "defect" and "cooperate".
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.
> Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in
Except as we can see in this thread, it's not objective fact. They chase many customers away with such tactics and are blissfully unaware.
> 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.
That's called exploitation, not stewardship.
It is what it is, but let's not pretend that the relationship here is anything but adversarial. The incentives are such that dishonesty and malice brings in more sales, so honest salespeople get quickly outcompeted by their dishonest co-workers, and companies with honest business models get outcompeted by those with dishonest ones. Buyers are in no position to change this, but that doesn't mean they have to pretend it's fine, or play along.
The irony of HN discovering how capitalism works when they're on the receiving end of it.
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.
> ... post that stuff online.
> 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.
Ironically, I also actually can't figure out what this company does from its website.
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.
Right, I thought it was extremely clear. The code sample on the homepage really makes it click right away for developers and confirm that it's what they need. While developers might not be the decision person, I bet they get a ton of leads from developers who find this company and then ask their management for it.
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.
> Especially for consulting firms, they really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating what they actually do.
I mean, isn't that what Zombocom was created for? I always assumed it existed to parody those firms.
You can do anything at Zombocom[tm].
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.
sure, features vs benefits
reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and still no idea what the product is or how it's differentiated.
> sure, features vs benefits
Yeah, I don't understand why the standard advice is what it is. Are most adults that stupidly naive to not realize that benefits are just lies? No company is actually able to predict how and how much their product can benefit their customers. Only customers themselves can predict that, and to do it, they need to know the actual things the product does, i.e. the features, which also happen to be the only objective things the company can say.
And yes, in many cases, the buyer may not know enough to correctly evaluate the features - but such buyer should be aware that, in such situation, they're even less able to tell if the benefits listed are realistic, or just blatant lies. Buying by benefits is stupid - the smart thing is to find someone who understands the features and ask them for advice.
Burt. This bloke won't haggle!
You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
> you seem to be communication-averse
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.
This might be the very reason they prefer to call you, to force you into rushed decisions. Because otherwise I can't imagine the reason for spending scheduling time and minutes (hours) of chitchat just to answer a couple of very basic and totally repeatable 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 doubted for a second, as I wrote that. Yes, written communication can lead to misunderstanding, but more often in chat. Mails are a little better in that regard in my experience. Because they are saved and seen by many people, is easier to analyze what has been said, context, etc.
But in general I would say, both can generate misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle down.
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.
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.
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.
> The economy is built on grifting, at this point
I agreed until here. Obviously, lying isn't the only way to make money. I make furniture and fix windows in old houses for a living. Am I grifting?
When you stretch into hyperbole, you lose the ability to convince people in the middle.
> 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.
How dare companies do market research with potential buyers to know what to build before they start building it! If only we could setup massive factories that pump out hot garbage that nobody wants and build roads to nowhere like the soviets did.
"...like you do" Is this a typo or a personal attack to the parent?
VC is an absolute cancer. All of these grifters claim to love free markets, but the entire ecosystem is just propping up companies operating at a loss until all their competitors fold. At least these useless buzzword B2B companies actually have some gormless entity willing to pay them enough to keep the lights on without another 500 million dollar check from Daddy Andreessen lol
Let me explain it to them, then: it's not simply that "scummy garbage makes money". It's that scummy but shiny garbage is given away for free, which makes the company look great to potential buyers - typically large corporations or the public (via IPO) - which allows the company to be sold for stupid amounts of money before the buyer realizes they bought a garbage factory, and this is what makes investors money.
People who got the free shiny scummy garbage? They don't matter, their only role is to grow a counter on financial reports, and to serve as a backup plan - because when the potential buyers realize too soon what they were about to buy, the people holding the previously free garbage can be squeezed for some money to hopefully make the investors whole.
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.