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So very much this. I went through 4 30 minutes meetings with a vendor for a client of mine before I had enough with them and told them either give me a price or I'm forever done with them. 4 meetings just to get a price! Then they threw a price at us and we understood why they needed so many meetings. We ended up building the software we needed in house for 25% of what it would have cost to license theirs. And that includes creating an IT department that had not existed at that company before.

Over a month wasted on pointless meetings just because they were afraid to share their price.

I’d love to hear more about this. Can you blog about it?

> 4 meetings just to get a price!

This is often a sign the vendor doesn't know how to price their product. It sounds to me like they didn't have any index of where the lines really were - one line is price where the customer building it themselves ins the option. The other is the price too low we can't do the deal line. They were probably afraid to talk price because they were afraid to put the first number on the table.

> We ended up building the software we needed in house for 25% of what it would have cost to license theirs.

Not surprising. I've been in way too many of these kinds of meetings, both buying and selling. Now when I buy, I flat-out tell the sales rep:

"We make software. One of your competitors is us building what you have. Give us a price that makes that option unattractive."

Do you put your A team on internal software? Are the support, documentation, and maintenance stories the same as they are for revenue software? Etc.

Not that this can’t be done and done well, but just like running your own datacenter the idea looks much more attractive at the beginning than it does a year or three in.

Had a previous prospect with a large, well known software company that paid several times more per engineer than our own and somehow in the end they thought they could build and maintain the software for less than what we were charging (we didn’t even break into 7 figures annually at all). In the end they formed a team internally that was several times larger than ours when technically we met their stated capacity needs and for the foreseeable future. Last I heard 4 years later they were still building and operational using the same thing as what the vendor (my company) offered. Some companies really would rather pay many times more and take the hit financially because a culture of NIH is so prevalent and deep across the company that it’s considered a risk if the vendor can’t be pressured to be acquired.

I don't want to minimise your experience, and clearly the vendor was not a good fit for you.

But the software didn't cost 25% because that's not how software works. Basically you now have a choice, A) the project is done, so you can fire that new IT department. B) the project is not done, so they can keep working (meaning your 25% will keep growing) C) the project is done, but you keep the team for future development, so you give them other projects to do in the meantime.

And you just hope that you keep the team interested enough to stay around, so that in 5 years time when you have to make it work with TLS 1.4,or Windows 12,or the new Dropbox API, or whatever that there's still someone around to do it.

My point is that writing software is never done because it exists in a world that changes. And keeping programmers on salary to do that is expensive.

That said, yes, it can clearly still end up being cheaper than some Enterprise offerings I've seen.

“please, please, please put videos, feature lists, and screenshots of your product on your website! These people do not want to go through a big process to buy your product (this is the whole reason they do not involve the purchasing department!). Hence, make it easy to understand what your product really is and easy to buy it.”

Obfuscation of the actual product seems to work well for big ticket purchases. I have been in quite a few sales meetings where I tried to figure out what the f……ng product actually does but couldn’t get a straight answer. Same for pricing. But somehow the IT big shots loved the presentations and bought it. There seems be a layer of mutual bullshitting going between sales guy and VPs on the regular engineer doesn’t seem to be able to understand.

I'm ok with it either way as it usually acts as a good filter. If you don't have screenshots or prices listed I know the product is hideous AND expensive.

The best vendor product in my industry has an easily accessible website with PDF & YouTube videos on how to use all features. All documentation is easy to peruse, it's used by several college textbooks, and their company is small enough to where I can call up the lead devs and get a bug patch or just chat when needed. It is also much cheaper than the majority of the competition. I was an expert in using the product before I ever used it. They also have trial licenses for all feature add-ons and will extend them if you had a busy month and didn't get the chance to use it. I once arranged for a trial license, tested out the feature, and built a full process around it as a "this is a workable solution to one of our problems for management". They even left me a nice and simple quote. Two years later we got involved with a project that absolutely needed that add-on and I just forwarded management an email showing that I tested it worked on our systems as advertised and even had the quote ready so we knew roughly how much it would cost (the quote had expired, but we knew it would be close).

> please, please, please put videos, feature lists, and screenshots of your product on your website! >These people do not want to go through a big process to buy your product

Yet some companies like to get potential suppliers in to check them out, despite all the literature & online website info. Thats when the real phishing begins, getting info thats not publicly available. Subtle questioning and things like that.

> Dealing With The "You're Not Big Enough" Objection

I know FTSE listed companies that would not trade with SME's because they were too small, even when it meant the product or service blatantly benefited the FTSE company.

"Too small" means you're not big enough to sue if something goes wrong.

Thats assuming if something went wrong and also assumes something/someone could be sued. Have you seen various software EULA's?

They want you to call sales is because they don't want to sell for $500 but if possible for $1500 and have to have a way to get info if they can do that.

That is why a lot of SaaS stuff does not have price on their page or at least "enterprise" option is always call only.

Can't have the sales guy invent functionality out of thin air without a call.

Oh uh, yeah... XYZ - it totally does that and definitely doesn't function like a prototype.

>>Can't have the sales guy invent functionality out of thin air without a call.

Exactly! Find out what the customer needs it to do, and then tell them your solution does exactly that, even if it doesn't.

If you list all your features online ahead of time, its a lot harder to lie to the customer.