There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell
you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get
serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their
budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and
competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a
salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his
airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the
Ritz Carlton. And with all this, the cost of making one
successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you're
sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than
$75,000, you're losing money.
The joke of it is, big companies protect themselves so well
against the risk of buying something expensive that they
actually drive up the cost of the expensive stuff, from $1000
to $75000, which mostly goes towards the cost of jumping all
the hurdles that they set up to insure that no purchase can
possibly go wrong.
The second paragraph is the key. Alex, these people aren’t trying to piss you off, they’re being driven by what BigCo wants from them. BigCo won’t let a manager try some software and declare that it meets their needs. BigCo demands that vendors respond to RFPs and RFQs, and if one vendor puts no-nonsense pricing on their web site, all of their competitors will undercut them by a penny or so and they won’t get any sales.
I could go on, but Joel has made the point: These annoying vendors have evolved to sell to those annoying customers. It isn’t the vendors that need to go extinct, it’s BigCo. BigCo buys cloud services in 2012 the way it bought time sharing in 1972, so the vendors are still using 1972 sales processes in 2012.