> 1. "Call us" pricing works because for big enterprise deals (4-7+ figures), there's often some serious negotiation involved and if you just show a sticker price up front, you risk a) scaring the buyer because the price is too high, b) losing the buyer because your competitor will just negotiate a better price than your listed price or b) leave yourself no room to negotiate if you really put your best price on the website.

I'd disagree and say this can go either way. As an enterprise buyer I know both MY budget and that all numbers are negotiable - to some extent. If you show me that this product costs $100k and my budget is $80k, I'll still talk to you. But if you list $100k and all I've got is $25k for the budget, yes, I'm going elsewhere.

Now you might argue "We can make something work" I'm concerned. You'll do 80% off deal? Clearly you don't think your product is worth what you list so... now I don't think so either. And the "But We've got a tier for that" then list it.

My time is way valuable to me. I do not want to go through 3 screening calls, a shit ton of hoops, and a 2 week wait... just to find out that your product is way too expensive for my budget. Especially when getting into those sales calls where the reps wanna play coy and say "Well whats your budget" or "Well it really depends, we want to get into a POC bla bla bla to understand your useless before providing a pricing". Ain't no one got time for that shit. Give me the MSRP up front (with the understanding that a deal may be reachable if it's a little much) or I'm walking.

Keep in mind that when I'm pricing your product I'm probably pricing 3 to 5 others. There is literally not enough hours left in my life to give each and every vendor a 5 hours of time in order to get a price.

Fortunately the world is shifting. You know who's pricing is available on their website? Salesforce. Okta. OneLogin. Ping. Slack. Github. Gitlab. AWS. Google. Microsoft (for some). Elastic. Tailscale. Adobe. Databricks. Datadog. Cloudflare. Zoom. ... The list goes on. In other words there are a lot of companies out there with their prices available on their website right this second. Sure, almost everyone of them has a "Enterprise call us for pricing" option and that's fine, as long as you've got something for me to start with.

If you're a software vendor and don't have some prices to start with, you're at a major disadvantage. Because your competitors often do. And price is not the only thing buyers are looking for. If it was, Okta would have no business. You can look at their prices and OneLogin and Ping's (and Azure AD and Google). The entire IAM/SSO space has their prices right out front and Okta is... the most expensive. Yet somehow they all still are selling.