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Comment by jarym | Hacker News Reader

I have experience selling to companies and I’ve found that even when they realise they need and want to pay for a piece of software they have absolutely no clue how to figure out what it’s worth.

Consequently they engage in endless hardball negotiation and invite other suppliers to provide quotes (even when your offering uniquely meets all requirements).

In the end the challenge is to get customers comfortable that they’re paying a fair price for what they’re getting. That however is much easier to say than to do.

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If you haven’t already, stop talking about what it took to create it and start talking about how much value they’re going to get out of it.

Figure out how much time / money it will save them. How much that is all worth. Tel them your software is less money than that.

I have the luxury of knowing I have the best product, but even if you don’t, you can’t give in to the hardball shit. Play hard to get instead. Dare them to go buy the cheap thing and let them feel like you know they’re making a mistake and you’ll see them in a few months when that doesn’t work out. It pays to be cocky in those situations. It starts to make them feel like you must know something they don’t.

It’s the only way. (I sell one of the most expensive software products there is, with loads of cheaper competitors)

This is a great point.

No one wants to be ripped off. Software basically can't be objectively priced. You might be selling £50k per seat software that competes with £50, or free. It sucks to be making that decision.

>Software basically can't be objectively priced. //

Can anything be objectively priced, how?

I can buy apples at a somewhat objective price by comparing the price provided by other sellers in nearby stores. Also the price will be mostly affected by supply vs demand.

OTOH, softwares prices can be affected by too many parameters.

Then again, IT industry is a child when compared to say, mechanical or Civil industries.

Your first method just overprices/wrong-prices the whole market. I'd argue that supply-demand doesn't give fair pricing (which presumably is what's meant [in part] by objective), if you can make something very cheaply does that mean you objectively deserve to be very rich simply because you've got a corner on that market?

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