No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone.
Because it’s not usually engineers I’m taking to, it’s directors and managers.
If you’re a startup and I have enterprise pricing, I likely don’t prioritize you.
Because it’s not usually engineers I’m taking to, it’s directors and managers.
If you’re a startup and I have enterprise pricing, I likely don’t prioritize you.
I've lost count of the number of times this happened to me for moderate-to-large / organization-wide purchases.
Unless you somehow expect that a director never assigns a lackey at short notice, and always does this kind of research themselves, giving themselves oodles of time for a decision, because they enjoy the exhilirating experience of spending hours upon hours on the phone with salespeople.
There's probably a good chance of a non-trivial amount of survivorship bias going on before you even reach the tip of the iceberg that is the "I only end up talking to directors and managers" observation.
The people who look for quotes in organizations that are likely to want to be targeted by the company are themselves salespeople and business development employees, not developers, who know how "contact sales" and the sales pipeline in general work.
In other words, it is mutual self selection that benefits both parties. All others outside of that range need not apply.
As a developer, I've been tasked with doing this probably two dozen times in my career at various companies. It's not that rare. And yes, having to talk to a salesperson to get an idea of the cost gets that offering crossed off my list immediately.
Those companies have lost fairly large sales because of the practice.
I like how this response unapologetically lays bare a coarse reality of software.
Programmers only see steady paychecks; they don't appreciate where the money comes from.
That said, obviously we’re all in this together, and the paychecks come because we’re all doing the work.
It's absolutely valid that you can focus your attention towards the juicy targets, but there are likely more apples than expected that will hit the ground.
On the phone -> $0, as they're not going to call
Easy self-managed sign up -> $some, as this is what they're willing to do
Whether or not that makes sense is another matter.
there are so many layers for these companies before they can buy anthing above a certain threshold its insane.
data privacy/compliance questions alone make this insanely difficult
Then they sold to Enterprise, governments, and had to face compliance queries.