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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

Even with a non-self service system spinning up a demo should not take that long. I'd say those companies indeed had further political or other issues leading to your experience. For the product team alone a proper pipeline for building and deployment is worth it.

Than again it of course also depends on how the product works, how deep the integration and customization needed are etc.

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Dev side of the business myself, so just perception of the mechanics why self-service may be unattractive for the sales team:

From a sales perspective you would typically optimize for fewer false-negatives (people not buying even though the solution would be valuable for them) at the expense of more false-positives (you wasting time trying to convince people who have no value and therefore don't buy in the end). Self-demos lead to people self-selecting themselves out without sales being able to influence this (explain the lead maybe just misunderstood a feature in the self-demo etc).

Besides typical sales bonus structures reward converted leads which the sales person did convert, not avoided churn after self-signup which customer success gets credit for.

si siht emos dnik fo ekoj.

It was indeed always political, sales, and contractual hurdles (some their company's fault, some our company's fault) I believe if we could somehow interact solely and directly with a vendor's engineers, the whole process would take a few days to a week, max, for most vendors. But sadly that doesn't seem to be how enterprise B2B operates in my domain.

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