This quote reminds me of an eye-opening speech I attended way back about the things you learn about when you run a business.

One of the lessons was that hiring the wrong salesperson can put you out of business. When you're hiring the first time, you think they're going to maximize their commissions. In reality, a lot of people are satisfied getting half the income they could by only taking the easy money. They might have to work five or ten times as hard to make the second half of sales, so they let those customers know they're disinterested and they go elsewhere.

The tougher half of sales are maybe 90% of the potential customers, or maybe more than that. You lose 90% of your customer base initially, then people talk to others about their experience, you've lost half of the rest, and suddenly you're no longer a viable business.

I'm curious about how they know.

I'm actually in that exact process, and have absolutely no idea if half of the providers I'm looking at have a decent product.

There's no free tier so I can't just create random accounts and see for myself. To your point, I'm also not the last decision point, but will be the poor soul explaining why we should choose X or Y to get someone up the chain to approve the money.

Your point probably stands for companies that will blindly buy the overpriced market leader anyway, and do whatever it takes to make it work whatever the proposition. But that's not even half of the market I think, very few companies actually require the top of the line service, by definition.

That seems exceedingly unlikely. When I'm shopping for a new vendor I have no idea who I'll use until I talk to a few to see how the offerings vary and which ones fit my budget.

The ridiculous part is how much time is wasted getting to the price. Then it turns out it is above my budget, so it's all wasted time on both sides. I don't expect a final price on first contact because I know enterprise contacts have variables, but give me a ballpark figure in the first 30 seconds to see if it's worth continuing to talk for three weeks or just end it there.

Just recently had a vendor (named similar to this site but "One" instead of "News"!) who gave me an approximate quote on day 1. Sounded perfect, fit my budget. So we continue talking about the details for many weeks. Only after a lot of time they reveal that quote is just for the core service we need, but there's also several other mandatory fees so the actual quote was like 3x higher. Far above my budget. Many weeks wasted. Maddening.