Comment by mihaaly 6 months ago
"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)?
Depends at what level the company is at, especially if they're non-technical. I've found that non-tech VPs and executives definitely want a call, they'd never approve an email-only deal.
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.
HN is just such an anomaly that taking people's individual preferences here to heart is a bad strategy.
We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.
The most important deals that make up the vast majority of our revenue took lots of meetings, pilots, review meetings, etc, because those deals are in the 6/7 figure range.
> We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.
That's awesome. And, I think that's what a lot of people here are talking about: options.
If your customers largely wants sales calls and sales engineers, that's great. But don't ignore the (smaller) population that does prefer no-calls.
Power law. Only a few deals constitute the majority of the revenue of most B2B enterprise companies, whose customers will not approve a deal by email only, with no (and often an extended) face to face process. This article is talking about B2B, not consumer behavior. And anyway, cars are unique in that their sales are enshrined in law to be done through an intermediary rather than directly by the manufacturer.
> whose customers will not approve a deal by email only
That's kind of begging the question. Part of the point of the thread here is that it seems B2B is leaving some money on the table by refusing to do deals with less interaction. For example, this CTO's comment [1].
A good comparison I think is AWS and other cloud offerings. Of course, past a certain spend, you will start getting calls and have the opportunity to negotiate better rates, SLA's, etc. But, you can just go and spend 5-6 figures per month without any human interaction.
Another good example I think is 5 figure (or maybe even 6 figure) equipment purchases. You can definitely go ham buying most professional equipment without having to talk to someone over the phone. Think servers, GPU's, storage, cameras, etc.
It'd be great if more services offered this.
> And how a call will make it simpler?
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.
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.