Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlieok | Hacker News Reader

Signing up online is more efficient than picking up the phone. This alone seems like enough to guarantee that it is only a matter of time before everybody in the industry offers online self-service, excepting those who do not need or want new customers.

View on HN

You'd think. But you can get much greater differences in pricing if you find out who you're talking to before you give them a price. That's really hard to do with online self-signup.

The payroll companies that I have dealt with have always been efficient and competitive in their pricing and level of service. And this is a mature industry with competition and multiple providers. The amount of disruption possible is probably nominal.

That's a fantastic reason to be leery of vendors want to do business that way. If I can see their offering described on materials posted in public, I can be much more confident I'm being treated fairly by them.

What the hell difference does it make who they're talking to? What matters is what they can provide and under what terms.

Not really. Pricing gets complicated for enterprise sales so it can't be as simple as just signing up online. Furthermore, if it's a trial they are signing up for then they have to be put into the sales funnel (meaning they have to sift through a bunch of tirekickers to find the real buyers). Finally you'd have to worry about fraud, trial abuse and all of the other related pains of free and open signups.

There's a reason that basically every business in the industry does it this way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com