What SaaS company discloses their Enterprise prices?
I've seen too many governments and even medium sized companies paying absurd amounts to some shitty locked in cloud platform with lots of better alternatives, because someone got kickbacks, gifts, vacations or a seat on some board, and everyone should be more enraged.
The EU has tried to battle this with various public procurement processes but it's a big clown show of course so i don't know what the solution is.
In many cases I'd even pay a premium to avoid talking to one of those people.
Devs' reaction to all this is honestly the same as when a non-technical exec tells a dev why they "can't just get it done in a day, it shouldn't be that hard right?" People have their own competencies and are usually blind to others'.
I don't talk to sales.
I own the business and I buy stuff all the time, just not from places that say "call for pricing".
I've got too many other things going on to waste time listening to some lame pitch from a guy who was probably selling shoes last week.
If they don't want to sell me stuff because I'm "not their target market", that's fine with me.
I'll buy it elsewhere.
I'm not sure what crazoid B-school theory says that you should make it harder for customers to buy your stuff, but I'm pretty sure that's a really bad theory.
You're continuing to justify the role of salesmen, which is an essentially parasitic role that results in higher prices for everyone.
If my company should get big enough that I have to hire someone to order stuff, I don't want that person wasting time on the phone with salesmen either. Every minute he spends on the phone listening to a sales pitch is a minute he's not actually doing the job I'm paying him for.
"Target market"... pfft.
What was your first clue? The fact that I consider salesmen to be parasites?
>If you don't like the game, don't play it, but don't think you're somehow above the game.
Oh, I am totally above the game, because I will not talk to you or your fellow salesmen. I will not call you. Ever. If you cold-call me, I'll hang up and block your number. If you show up in person, you'll be asked to leave and informed that any future visits will be considered trespass and result in a call to the towing company to have your car removed and a call to the police to have you removed.
I thought that was made clear.
Is this what you call "negotiation"? Because you suck at it, dude. srsly.
You are in the business of conning people into paying a higher price for goods and services for which they would otherwise have paid less. Every penny of your commission is ripped right out of the customer's pocket, for zero value added.
I want products at my doorstep in exchange for $. I don't want a goddamn coffee chat.
How the hell do I know they're not giving me higher prices due to racial profiling or some other unethical reason?
That would allow, at least, some sort of website or chrome plugin to exist that fetches and displays previously-submitted pricing information as an overlay next to any idiotic "call for pricing" statements.
That is the way I would run a country if I was its president.
Maybe there are ways to address the abuse without forcing upfront pricing?
The true costs are not front facing because it may not be clear which part of your product is going to be bearing most of the weight of the enterprise customers use-case until you know exactly what they are buying. Your costs may change a lot based on the nature and scale of what they are buying.
For example, you may be rate limited on a background service they use and the customer usecase will likely pish you over your limit. the next product tier from the background service vendor that's required to fulfill the enterprise company's use-case may cost way more and offer way more capacity than that company is going to use by itself. So you have to make a bet on how much cost to assign to that customer, and how much to assign to other/future customers given you buy that new tier and use it to change what you offer to other customers to try to make use of it. It may lower your cost overall if it supports a feature you can upsell relatively easily. Or it may be a service hardly used at all andyou really can't justify going up to that next tier unless this one enterprise customer pays for nearly all of the added cost