Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Don’t automatically sign me up for a newsletter about your company or product when I give you my contact information. Ideally, don’t request my contact information at all until I’m giving you money.

I agree with the first part -- always ask people for permission, probably by kicking them a sweetener (e.g. "1 month email course on X"). I have data that I cannot show you which is in you-could-run-your-company-on-just-this-trick violent disagreement with the second point here. If you don't like email, cool, but email is worth serious money in B2B software sales. (So are salespeople, by the way, even at pricepoints lower than you'd think would warrant a salesman. Think "4 figure LTV." + )

Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, every email-deleting-salesmanship-hating engineer in the world could drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow and neither buyers or sellers of enterprise software would notice until several months later when trying to figure out why the sales engineers stopped submitting expense reports.

+ Addendum: Joel Spolsky's famous Camels and Rubber Duckies article talks about there being basically two price points for sales now, but a combination of a better delivery mechanisms - SaaS - and better sales procedures/technologies opens up a bunch of very interesting options in the middle for something between BCC $30 "Every email from a customer is a wonderful opportunity to fix that from happening ever again" and steak-dinners-and-Powerpoint-decks enterprise sales for $75k+.

I have some amount of knowledge about this these days, since I help my clients implement it. If you're interested in hearing more, say so, I'll try to blog it (some day when I get out from a mountain of work and email).

I have some amount of knowledge about this these days, since I help my clients implement it. If you're interested in hearing more, say so, I'll try to blog it (some day when I get out from a mountain of work and email).

We're thinking of launching our 'enterprise product' in a SaaS format, so yes, I, for one, would very much be interested in free consulting^W^W a blog post about it.

> "1 month email course on X"

What's the advantage of being spammed for a month vs. having the entire month's course on an HTML page that I can peruse at my leisure and at my own pace? Or am I misunderstanding what an e-mail course is?

Yes, you are misunderstanding what an email course is. An email course is a daily or weekly reminder to you to keep using the product so that you'll be primed for the sales process. Given that your viewing of images will be tracked, it will also qualify your level of interest to the sales person that will be following up in person.

Ah, thank you. I've only had to make purchasing decisions twice or so, and it's always been for a pretty small and cheap product where I just tossed a credit card at them, and software/serial arrived in my inbox.

Often times, enterprise software buyers have a large team working for months (or years!) to evaluate, test, and negotiate the purchase. In those cases, it's good to take it slow and steady with the customer.

If you ask me for email, by definition sending you the email you asked for is not spam.

The advantages to the software purchaser:

1) You're a busy guy. If we critically hit you with a wall of text right now, you'll bookmark it and never get back to it. If you're honest with yourself, you know this, because you've got a backlog of things to read four miles long already. What's your RSS reader look like? Instapaper? I rest my case. So maybe giving you the highlights in a digestable format is a value add for you.

2) This is not a decision that is going to be made an instant -- there is an entire decisionmaking cycle, including research and shopping the solution you pick to your colleagues and experimenting and you get the general drift, which is likely going to take you real-life weeks. Your expertise on the problem area is currently "Not all that much" since you're only beginning the data gathering process. We can meet you where you are with the lesson for today, and when you're vastly more informed in two weeks (because learning this topic is, after all, your job) we'll send you more advanced information. Sure, we could drop everything we know on you right now, but you're not ready for it and reading it linearly will not make you ready for it.

3) Given that we're both businessmen here, we can both appreciate that we choose from mutually acceptable options, not all possible options. The software company has a lot of stuff available on the web pages for free, but if you want exactly the benefit this course is promising to you, then as a quid pro quo we would like your email address and permission to contact you. You, being a honest businessman just like us, are perfectly free to decline this offer, but if your counteroffer is "Give me all the goodies and I'll get back to you", our answer is "Not interested, thanks."

The advantages to the software company:

See above. No, really, the advantage is not "Score! We get to spam the heck out of Pavel!" We have copious data to prove that the statistical aggregate purchaser is overwhelmingly more likely to consume six emails in a month than he is to actually read a 20,000 word web page. We have surveyed buyers of enterprise software -- we know that many of them do not know what they want right now. We have had our sales reps talk to people, and we know that many of them expect to get handheld through this entire process. The email course gives the market exactly what it wants: information in a digestable, actionable format which will accomplish the goal of educating them and lead to measurable increases of qualified leads asking us to buy our software (or otherwise take the next step in the dance).

(I was using spam in a loose term)

Eh, I was going to address your reply point-by-point, but then I realized it was kind of dumb - all of my replies were just my opinions and preferences. To sum it up, though, if I'm really interested in a technology, I'd rather choose when I get to read about it - if I don't have the information in front of me, I'll read the information provided by your competitor, and if I have to choose fast, I'm probably going to go with the devil whose brochures I've read, instead of the one whose I haven't.

You sure seem to know a lot about how busy I am and where my priorities lie.

He knows a lot about how busy people feel and where the priorities of most people lie, as expressed by their actions, as measured, rather than their words.

He doesn't know a thing about you in particular and doesn't care, because he needs to get it right for most of his customers. Not every single one of his customers. If you don't accept these facts about email marketing, as annoying as the situation may be, you are an outlier.

> If you don't accept these facts about email marketing, as annoying as the situation may be, you are an outlier.

I probably am. That said, why not offer both options?

He knows a lot about how busy people feel and where the priorities of most people lie, as expressed by their actions, as measured, rather than their words.

So he's able to "measure" how many people don't buy from his company because they make it too difficult to evaluate their products? That sounds like a highly marketable skill in itself.

So who would you put up as an example of a company that's doing this well? I'd like to build a list but the enterprise market seems a little sophisticated for your typical list-building landing page.

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