Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me
matduggan.com
matduggan.com
The counter approach is: - Make complete information available as transparently as possible and don't gate it. - Be forthcoming about weaknesses. Don't force prospects and customers to find them. - Ensure that when a prospect or customer does want to talk to someone, they immediately reach someone who can handle the problem or answer the question (no need for escalations.) - Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that and be sure that all AI agents immediately disclose that they are AI. - Offer flexible e-mail list subscription options (monthly, quarterly, annually, only release notes, etc.) - If the product is not a fit, try to offer something useful anyway such as a suggestion of another product that might be a better match for their needs.
Value based pricing is one of the reasons why a lot of companies end up in these situations. Rather than setting a standard price, the company does a detailed investigation of the customer to try to find out how much value they will gain from using the product and then they set the price based on that determination. Although it maximizes revenue in theory, it is slow and invasive.
- people don’t read your documentation - if they find one edge-case that is not covered by your product they concentrate all their energy on it even though the competitor product doesn’t even work for the happy path (but ofc they won’t learn that until too late) - you will have a person on the free tier who is not able to the simplest programming take up all the time of your technical support if you let them
The rest (disclose usage of AI, offer multiple newsletters (imo unnecessary work), be upfront if it’s not a good fit) is very sensible and works in my experience.
The first three will break your product - but maybe I’m just cynical and was holding it wrong all this time
edit: I’m assuming you want to build some kind of investor fuelled unicorn - your approach probably will work for a single person slow but steady growth while you have other side income
ALSO: your UX needs to warn people about sharp edges and one-way doors, BEFORE your user commits to an action they might regret. These are not incompatible.
>your UX needs to warn people about sharp edges and one-way doors, BEFORE your user commits to an action they might regret. These are not incompatible.
Assuming trump doesn't nix it, the recent FTC ruling should fix this by itself. it should be as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe.
I just assume that if a product is gated behind "let's hope on a call!" it's still vaporware and there's a 50/50 chance that they'll pivot within a few months.
I cannot imagine making stuff up all the time as you go. Maybe if system is super small. But then even better to build up documentation to have it for later.
Sure if you just sell to hobby programmers and students it’s no problem. But if your customers should be real businesses - in my experience 90% of them require a lot of handholding, you literally have to read the docs for them and tell them in a call.
But thinking all your prospects will read the docs is a fallacy- maybe 5% of prospects fall into the category of OP, more commonly they won’t even know what their own requirements are, let alone how to map that to your product/docs
Having run into this many many times it's usually because that little edge case is where the hard problem lives in the problem domain and is the reason, whether the customers know it consciously or not, they bought it. Who pays for something that only handles the easy cases? The author even talks about it with the "one specific thing" line. I guarantee it's that one stubborn edge case.
It's likely you reached for a solution in the first place because you wanted something to turn a problem with a mix of difficulties into an easy one offloaded to a 3rd party.
I created and sold software (and services) for over a decade, and could never have lived with myself if I'd treated customers the way the original article describes.
I'm sure you knew all this better than me, but just want to elaborate for anyone who genuinely don't understands who falls for this.
Are there real humans / customers who ask, "yes, have an AI call me?"
If it could go faster than a slow-talking human who needs to re-verify information that someone else already verified? Yes, I'd opt for the AI.
From the perspective of designing a sales org to do this it is, roughly, a sales-engineer focused sales organization with the sales engineers on a minimal commission plan (i.e., a pooled 80% base/20% commission plan instead of something like an individual 70/30 plan.)
I never saw it in practice, but it would probably have something like a 2:1 ratio of sales engineers to account managers. On the plus side, sales engineers are less costly to employ than account managers. On the down side, this will almost certainly result in lower revenue.
> Value based pricing is one of the reasons why a lot of companies end up in these situations. Rather than setting a standard price, the company does a detailed investigation of the customer to try to find out how much value they will gain from using the product and then they set the price based on that determination. Although it maximizes revenue in theory, it is slow and invasive.
In my experience (working in tech sales for a few large manufacturers,) this is almost never a routine practice of the sales team. It is sometimes discussed in sales training, and very, very occasionally put into practice, but the Achilles heel is your last comment: it is slow and invasive. Sales people are a diverse group, but they are united by the belief that time kills all deals.
Product teams do large scale market segmentation and price sensitivity studies -- that's where you get all of the packaging options. Sales teams? If they have a large existing customer, that customer will already have a standard discount level. That's the starting point for any given negotiation. For new customers or smaller customers, the sales team will try to sell at the 'standard' price, where by 'standard', I mean the prevailing discount level in their region. Variables that will ultimately cause the price paid to change: fiscal year-end/quarter-end, competition, bundling, "incentives" / customer "budget." I put those roughly in terms of how powerful a lever they are to move the price, on average.
Fiscal year-end/quarter-end. One challenge with trying to root out traditional sales/purchasing behavior is that customers are trained to reinforce the behavior. While it doesn't always work (a sales rep might be significantly under or over goal and might want a deal to slip into the next quarter/year,) if a customer can force a deal to get done around the end of the vendor's fiscal periods, they have significant leverage to negotiate a lower price if the vendor believes the deal might slip.
Competition - this one is pretty obvious, but adding a competitor to your purchase evaluation and letting the vendor you want to buy from know that you are seriously considering their competitor will likely result in a lower price. Bonus points for the purchasing team telling the vendor their engineers like the competitor's product better, but the purchasing team really wants to buy from you because they love you so much. Double bonus points for telling both vendors that.
Bundling -- if a manufacturer has multiple products, they often will voluntarily increase their discount level to induce the customer to buy a product 'suite'. The sales reps are often under immense pressure to sell the newer and flakier products on their price lists, and this is usually the only way it gets done. On the plus side, the customer gets more product for the same price. On the down side, the extra products included often aren't worth using, and come renewal time, the true total cost of ownership becomes apparent.
"Incentives" / "customer budget" - these are both, typically, BS in that the vendor doesn't usually have a magic "incentive" to offer a one-time discount. The sales rep just got (or thinks they can get) approval for a lower price. Similarly, while customers most certainly do have budgets, they often lie and say they can't buy x because it exceeds their budget, when their internal sales people (the purchasing team) just wants a lower price. I refer to the purchasing team as "internal sales people" because they often-times have a commission incentive just like the vendor sales rep: it isn't uncommon for them to have a personal, individual bonus tied to driving vendor contracts down in price. In some cases, it is a direct commission -- i.e., the purchasing agent (or sometimes budget owner) gets 10% of any monies saved.
I wish you the best of luck, but other than taking people completely out of the equation, I think it is really hard to eliminate this behavior in practice because 1) it is so thoroughly ingrained amongst both vendors and customers and 2) it works.
Unregulated competition is a race to the bottom, so the most unethical, invasive, borderline illegal, and manipulative tactics come out on top. Not the best product, but the best marketing. Not the most customer friendly, but the most customer-converting through coercion. Not pricing products and services what they're worth, but the most anyone will be wiling to pay for them.
- Beeing asked for demos when they could have tried your free tier/trial and you have decent doc (They always prefer that you waste your time then asking someone on thier side to review)
- Being used a price/feature comparison with your enterprise competitor just so they can get a better deal on their renewal (no stupid they never intended to change)
- Having to fill endless security questionnaire without being sure you can even sell to them (what you dont love filling 100+ questions at 11PM on a Friday???).
- Having to deal 3-6 months with procurement, often with one or two third party software resellers which only cares if he can make its margin (hello there CDW, no I wont lower my price 15% so you can make money)
- Receiving the money 60-90 days after the deal close while you struggle with cashflow and you had to provide the service (and receiving a call from my bank rep to see why my margin and CC is full).
I am sure I can think of more things. That is why I will absolutely charge an arm and leg to big businesses.
I think being up front about what you will and won't do really helps. They still ask for procurement forms and stuff but we can at least deny it and set an expectation.
https://help.timetastic.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003288769...
If you have something that needs to be a bit bespoke, or is an early-startup collaboration with a pilot customer as you refine and prove PMF... (and the customer is a real company, not just some other startups in your investors' portfolios)... and it impacts more than one very small team there... even if you already have the ear of their CEO... brace yourself for months of countless meetings with "stakeholders" of numerous departments.
Which, as a nimble early startup, impresses upon you why, in theory, you should have a massive innovation advantage over large, lumbering businesses, who can't seem to do anything.
Except you made the mistake of needing the buy-in of a large, lumbering business who can't seem to do anything. Now most of their barriers to movement are also yours. :)
There's a worse angle I've seen on the same story: A different engineer, who was already running the good open source solution successfully with their team, heard the other engineer had an enterprise sales assault dumped on them, for some load of trash, and so tried to sound the alarm, but it was already out of the other engineer's hands, because upper subtrees of the org chart had already signed on with political capital (and in a couple cases, it's somehow become an express personal performance metric that they spend the company's money on this specific product). So all alternatives are blocked, everyone has to wait the next couple months for the sale to finalize, and then another month for IT to set up the SSO and databases, and forced to migrate from working solutions to garbage. Then eventually the contract doesn't get renewed, with appropriate face-saving for those who pushed it through, but half the people upon whom it was inflicted have already found jobs in better companies, a quarter got PIP'd or stalled careers for being sabotaged by the trash, and the remaining quarter will mostly be laid off next year.
Just say NO to enterprise sales.
The only thing worse than having to do enterprise sales to sell your own product, is being the employees forced to use the likely bad purchasing decisions of other enterprise sales.
But then you find an open source solution which is in general better and can do everything you want (simply tested already with just a docker compose up) but for deployment you get hit hard by compliance who just checks the SOC2 certifications and wants a in-depth due diligence of the code since everyone in the world can theoretically change it. Then your manager asks how it can be so good if it's for free and open source. And of course, last but not least, your overloaded team in general not happy to support just another unpredictable piece of software...
So it's the question to rather burn money and nerves with an awful SaaS offering and their endless and useless sales cycles and terrible and super expensive vendor-lock-ins or burn some money and nerves by utilising and running open source inhouse...
So typically I prefer to chose for the open source option and especially if the SaaS option isn't allowing me easy and fast self-onboarding, meaningful testing periods and a predictable and transparent pricing.
And then, if it get's widely adopted, I allocate some budget to support the authors and/or get some support plan (for more complex open source software) in place even though you most likely never need it...
"[...] I'll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it's maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo."
The poor, single recluse discovers one Tuesday afternoon that your company makes 100 million dollars a year with "CodeSquish", while not contributing anything back. He silently questions his life choices—or, shall we say, licensing choices—while feeding chickens on his Vermont farm.
Edit: from a quick search, there is a SaaS company called "CodeSquish". I haven't checked if it's also an open source project.
Sometimes nobody could just make this stufff up . . .
Most of OSS or even SaaS stuff is useful in F500 company but not more like convenience and not being able to put value on it. This also you can see in article even SaaS vendors have to make shit up to seem more valuable for big companies and use value based pricing by calling people and trying to push BS on them.
I also don’t see companies running much OSS systems as reselling them because then usually they rather build their crappy one like article mentions because they want to own whole IP.
Amazon pulling it of on Elastic was mostly because Elastic built a brand - they are not pulling this off on a random project. They might use some project to run their infra but attribution of value to a specific lib or project is super hard. Then also Amazon is making money because it is Amazon not because they use Linux kernel. It is hard to wrap head around anyway ;)
1) It may turn out that a lot of this is necessary in order to sell B2B and keep half of the software industry going. The business on the sell side might need to reach out multiple times, engage a sales engineer, help you align all the decision makers etc otherwise it simply wouldn’t get done. Buyers are so busy and selling to a big company is so complex that some of this is just a necessary evil for B2B commerce to continue.
2) Imagine if companies were actually better at buying. They spend $millions on enterprise bloatware when startups can literally produce something 10x better at a 10th of the cost. If they were easier to sell to then we could all have nice things without this madness.
I agree that the OPs experience is soul destroying, but clients could help themselves a little and end up with more money in their pockets and better tech.
SLAs and contractual assurances are very hard to deliver at 1% cost.
Enterprise products is just another class, and it has nothing to do with the product.
Nobody in the chain is interested in outcomes, they’re interested in completed process.
The value of something to the business is totally uninteresting to a purchasing person. They care about contractual arrangements, compliance with all sorts of poorly thought out ethics agreements, and making sure that all the process has been followed.
The result is far more money spent for far less outcome than if we’d just got a credit card and bought something. There’s a whole ecosystem of companies which are terrible at actually solving problems, but know exactly how to meet all the requirements of a large corporate purchasing department.
It’s depressing.
Every company on Earth is exploring this tech and if we don't give them strong signals when they fuck it up we are just dooming our future selves to this garbage.
Better to not tell them and just boycott them.
Those companies who don’t push the boundaries on how bad they can treat their (potential) customers deserve to be rewarded.
Where do you work that this is an effective strategy?
In my experience telling a vendor something is broken wastes my time and has no effect on the vendor. I don't know whether sales don't care or sales can't make dev changes. The only exception is when I can contact the devs and I know the devs have a history of fixing problems.
You are wasting my time, not yours, because you automated your spam workflow. The only strategical response is to flag your emails as spam ans to block your emails in the future.
Everything else is a losing game strategy because there are more spam emails per day than available time already.
What they have. Ticket. Feedback.
If they see tickets with certain feedback scores, some rep's score will go down and some manager's score will go down and if enough people do this (it literally takes a 1-2 digit amount of people in most cases), someone will raise an eyebrow and ask some questions and read the <99 responses that came in about this topic.
Since so few people actually respond to feedback, anyone who does has a massively outsized impact on the numbers that get reported inside the company, and the messages that get passed around inside the company.
I should clarify that when I say "Feedback" it does not mean yelling at a support rep, it means responding with a low score or a frowny face or whatever metric in their system that indicates quantitative disapproval.
Just do something instead of nothing. Mark as spam. Post a negative thing. Email them. Post on social media. Just do something instead of nothing. Show your disapproval out loud to everyone instead of silently accepting it and moving on. Please.
2) Why should the victim be expected to waste their time.
If I posted a small complaint about every broken interaction, it would be a firehose. Imagine complaining about every website popover or pothole...
Also, being a victim is by definition a waste of time because you didn't ask to be a victim. You can be a victim and quietly take it, letting it perpetuate and condemning both your future self and those you care about, or you can be a victim and fight back, refuse to take it, and defend your future self and those you care about.
This behavior is that of a bully and abuser. Bullies and abusers will only listen to a slap in the face, not to quiet submission.
Bullies want you to fight back because now you're playing their game according to their rules which they know how to win and you implicitly authorise them to hurt you and often you have handed them a moral highground excuse they can spit back at you later. Bullies don't "listen" to a slap in the face, instead they escalate further: good luck!
Fighting is high risk. I do believe in fighting when necessary and here is a fantastic article that perhaps supports your view: https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/escalation-theor...
To win against a bully often requires changing the game so that you can win by other rules.
However not everyone has the ability/practice to handle conflict - a friend talking back with a female bully recently had a panic attack which was a horrific side effect for them.
Anything else is wasting your time.
"Saw on LinkedIn that you spoke Spanish. I've heard that the way "¡Qué chévere!" brings such energy and brightness to a conversation is uniquely charming. Have you had a chance to practice it recently?"
"Develop a compliance automation tool that adapitates to changing regulations, reducing overhead costs while ensuring secure and efficient investment programs."
No human would ever see my "limited working proficiency" of Spanish on LinkedIn and say something like the first line! And the second? "Adapitates" is not a real word, it's a hallucination. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1d8gc6x/did_chatgp...
Sales isn't the problem, and most people are tolerant of some level of sales. I've gotten unpersonalized cold outreach from a data replication company that actually made me interested in the product, because it was short, to the point, and (as far as spam emails can be), authentic.
Just regurgitate things . . .
Or maybe it's an ancient dictionary. I was kind of surprised at the sizes of ]dictionaries I could find while trying to test out a personal project.
One can even go as far as entering something with even more of a watermark. An example: Adding more spaces in the role, like "DB Engineer" with two spaces instead of one. Using the Alt + (Numpad 255) unicode instead of a regular space is a bonus here.
Doesn't always work, but anecdotally I've noticed it will more often than not in differentiating automated garbage.
Like, yes, you'd lose money offering 4-hour-SLA support to customers paying the entry-level price. But you could make that decision, and have part of your business model be subsidizing those customers. It depends on everything else in your model; how you acquire customers, what their lifetime value is, &c.
And in my experience, SSO doesn't need to be expensive. SAML and Kerberos should be expensive, sure. But OIDC with standard seevices such as Google, GitHub, Okta or Keycloak should absolutely be part of the base package.
Personally, I'll just build the open core version from source and add all the "enterprise" features like SSO, S3 and Prometheus metrics myself.
By all means: build your own SSO on the open core of products that charge for SSO. I promise: the companies don't really care that you're doing this. You're profoundly segmenting yourself out by doing that.
Oh there absolutely is. The customers that use OIDC use a relatively light stack and are generally okay with relatively simple setups. They're usually startups and are also the ones that can feasibly add SSO into your app themselves.
The customers that need SAML are older, larger companies often with a custom mix of multiple hybrid AD and AzureAD directories for each department that need special handling with custom properties and realtime sync. You'll be spending at least a few engineer-months on support for them.
I've been on both sides previously, I've seen it all.
If I have 100 cheap customers I need to scale it for 100. If I have 3 I can get by with putting staff "on call". (Pay the existing staff a bonus for out of hours etc.)
You can't pay $20 a month for something, and expect a high SLA . That's not reasonable (and certainly not sustainable. ) a business that offered that would be on my "don't touch, will be out of business soon" category.
It's certainly possible to have a "free tier" - there are hood reasons for that. But the free tier had better not be costing you money. If they do, you don't have a business you have a hobby.
There is a big difference between just winging something (and then hearing people complain on HN about how they have to work crazy hours and be on call) and doing things the right way, in a long-term sustainable business, with good work practices that also respect the employees.
Also, if you're running a solo-founder business, you can't "pay the existing staff a bonus for out of hours etc". You simply can't be on call for 24h/day, which means you need to hire an additional person -> see my comment above about the costs.
Certainly not. Having looked at SSO recently in my SaaS, both implementation and maintenance costs were very significant.
The usual answer is "just outsource it to [whatever external service]", which apart from implementation and maintenance costs also introduces complex external technical and business dependencies.
Sorry — I know this is not the main topic of this discussion.
Surely any company doing that would be spending profits on less profitable customers which is not economically sensible. See the box on page 2 of https://regulationbodyofknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/201...
Cross-subsidisation can occur due to regulations or a company trying to monopolise a market.
Pricing a product depends on how much you can charge and variable costs, not so much on how much it cost to develop - which as you point out leads to price discrimination - where it looks like one group is subsidising the other but maybe not in reality.
I would like to see a model of the marginal costs and ideal decisions.
Deciding to build features for higher paying clients only makes profits if those features are paid for by those clients. Other clients might get those features but it isn't "subsidisation" - however I'm not sure what a better word is! It isn't free-riding or consumer surplus.
Ultimately the job of the airline is to get me from A to B. They do just that for First Class and sub-economy. But for more money you can have snacks etc.
Airlines offer add-ons that cost them real money (checked bags) and things that don't (seat selection.) They allow the customer to decide which features they want and which they don't.
Not all seats generate the same profit, but all seats generate some profit above marginal cost. (Usually some number of seats needs to be filled before the flight makes a profit, but that's a different equation.)
With software there's naturally some segmentation, and so the smart company tries to capture that value. Equally some segments want different (expensive) things like Support (and can afford it) so that needs to be on the table to win that customer in the first place.
A segmented offering is inevitable, at which point you then have to decide who does the segmenting. The client? Or do you have a salesperson to help them?
There's no right answer, but usually it depends on the product price. If I'm buying an airline seat I can figure it out [1]. If I'm buying an airplane probably not.
[1] I'm old enough to have lived in a time when there were specialists necessary to buy an airline seat.
In any product there's a thousand different features where offering a price break for not using that particular feature would be silly.
If anything, just considering the customer side of things, give a disincentive for not using something like SSO to reduce careless password use.
Do the direct approach with no bullsh*t, instant demo, meaningful trial period, easy onboarding, etc and lose those customers that expect the usual sales ride.
Source: I do the direct approach.
In the case described where a technical person is shielding the final decision makers, it's more of a gamble and will often fail.
At the same time you can make a career out of being persuasive enough in person to close deals that could not be done any other way.
These are not always mutually exclusive.
The only product I really want to punch in credit card info and GO is commodity software (e.g. AWS EC2 or a domain registration service.
I think wires sometimes get crossed in pricing/sales models, where an enterprise product gets priced like commodity software ... but that's usually a sign the company is immature. There shouldn't be a sales team for software that costs 2-3 figures. Software costing 5-6+ figures absolutely requires people in the sales/onboarding process, because a big part of what I'm paying for is support.
I think the problem is that we rarely want to know “can you meet this use case”, but rather “how well can you meet this use case”, and that’s hard to assess without putting your hands on the software.
If your sales department is staffed by people who got hired on Monday, and are on the phone by Friday, then frankly they're not worth much.
I've seen the opposite though where sales folk know more about the software than support folk. They're equipped to help you with choices, but also understand limits and high-cost areas. Yes you absolutely can get Custom Reports, but we absolutely charge for that. And the data you're looking for is on this built-in report....
Dealing with a good salesperson, who knows their stuff, and understands that truth and trust are important, is an amazing thing.
I don't really do these sale pitches often, but it's a similar mentality for a different reason. I simply want anything communicated in writing in case they try to say yes to put a foot in the door, but the small details say no.
I'm not a doctor, and even if I was, I'll never be able to help them purely over the phone if they are "lying bleeding somewhere" and I'm not around. If my house is burning down and I'm away, what am I going to do about it remotely that a phone call will solve? I'm not a firefighter and I can't splash water over RF. If something happens at my kid's school, I'm not there, and even if I was, I probably wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
That being said, if someone really, really thinks that I can somehow help them over the phone in an emergency, despite my number not being 9-1-1, certain family and friend's numbers I allow to punch through DND and reach me.
I might like to be informed of emergencies, but I'm not a first responder. If you are bleeding phone 911, not me.
To be fair, my mom sends my wife a message to tell me to "check my phone" if she needs me :)
Each person finds their own level of intrusion they want from their device. I've picked mine. You pick yours.
i try to tell people about the "two calls in a minute lets it go thru" feature because as of yet the autodialers don't know about it or have it implemented.
I do the same as commenter up-thread, my voicemail inbox is empty. Sometimes I let a call ring out and then listen to the message immediately, I just don't want to have to deal with it synchronously. Then if it's 'I have a number of opportunities that seem like a great fit for you' I can just delete it and move on with my day, not have to try to say no-bye politely before hanging up, for example.
Someone with a full inbox is more likely someone who does the opposite - they'll never listen to their messages because they want to talk to someone, you'd have to call them back anyway so no harm it's full. (Or they'd call you from the missed call, not because they heard your message.)
people with professional and PhD with full mailboxes do this, with jitter of up to hours.
the last full voicemail i hit i was called back nearly immediately, and they said "what, i just delete all my voicemails, if i call it says no new no saved"
There's a reason i'm harping on specific elements so much, because i don't think voicemail is magic, i guess.
do these people have voicemail boxes like this (nsfw language, a bit. idk. it's art.): https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/NSFW_voicemail_...
If I'm being frank, that extra minute for me to respond probably won't change their fate if they are indeed bleeding out somewhere.
This pretty much chimes with my experiences getting anything that costs more than my boss can readily expense. Purchase agreements in large companies are pure hell.
I've been going through a purchase order process for a bunch of patch cables and adapters so cheap I could even expense them without a receipt. It's taking months. They're being delivered by air freight. My heart and soul are aching.
However if you're on a call with two EMs, a couple engineers, a security engineer, and a product manager, you're on the right call.
A single engineer very likely wants a PLG (product led growth) experience, sign up, read some docs, make a few API calls, and then punch in a credit card when they're ready. But you don't sell a $500k deal (usually) without some phone calls and a deck.
I have no desire to be in your fucking sales funnel.
In-person sales work at least in part because salesbros are trained to handle and overcome objections. They do it in many ways, and most of those ways take advantage of the fact that people by and large tend to want to act agreeable and kind to each other kind of by default. If you opt for the in-person meeting, the salesbro knows they have the opportunity to guilt or nudge or suggest you into buying additional services, or a longer service agreement, or a higher SLA, or whatever.
So, OP isn't the customer because they're announcing they're not interested in the dance. Many (not all!) IT vendors prefer the dance because it makes more money.
I say this as a former presales engineer for EMC (before it was EMC/DELL), serving large enterprise named accounts in the Houston area. If my boss saw me in the office, he'd kick me out and tell me I should be out taking clients out to lunch or to Astros games or whatever. I spent probably $2-3k/week on entertainment, and it was basically imaginary money to EMC, because if me and my salesbro blew $20-30k hooking a client, we were going to be doing it on a $2-3 million Symmetrix deal with 70-80% margin.
So yeah. OP isn't a customer because they don't want to play, and (most, not all!) companies can extract more revenue out of customers who DO play.
Not every business wants every customer. Some businesses know they can do very well if they keep their costs-per-customer low and their revenue-per-customer high, even if they have to have fewer customers to do it.
Some of those "contact us" companies are in that situation. I think that most of them aren't, but wish they were.
So they forego customers that just want to pay $N amount of money to try&use their software/service in favor of customers that want touchy-feely phone support at every step?
In particular I find that Chinese companies are hungry for all business, more willing to provide up-front information, and more willing to send a direct quote no-questions-asked rather than scheduling a meeting with a sales rep. I'm not surprised when I see them win.
You are not the customer because you are not who is being targeted by the website. You don't have the ability to pay X thousand a year as an individual or even as a corporate spender, there are specific people in companies that buy software, and those are who these websites target. It is nothing personal, it's just that you are not the customer, no more than if you go to a ski resort and want to surf instead, asking why you can't surf at the ski resort.
Ever since I started taking this advice instead of going through a sales process (I really only need this inflicted on me a single time in my life), I have been a lot happier. We also stick the counter at around $50k saved per year for applications that are essentially fancy crud forms.
The best part is it bypasses all the complicance requirements, since if it’s written in your company it can’t possibly be bad.
Let me get this straight: author clicks around on B2B SaaS with un-focused sales models (both the heavy account rep / sales engineer sales-driven process, and the free trial product-driven process) because they want One Small Feature that's too big to build themselves (but still small enough for someone else to build and open-source, sustainably), knowing that expressing interest to purchase will result in an Enterprise Sales Cycle yet being pissed off that it resulted in an Enterprise Sales Cycle?
Methinks the author doth protest too much to cover up their own misaligned expectations. If you want One Small Feature then it's either covered by the product-led pricing (i.e. credit card based, no Enterprise Sales Cycle) or it's not. And if it's not, if you have to click a "Contact Us" button, which, being an industry veteran, you know will launch an Enterprise Sales Cycle, then maybe what you're asking for isn't really One Small Feature, because you're going to pay Enterprise Pricing for your One Small Feature, and so maybe this isn't the vendor to get it from.
The Enterprise Sales Cycle exists because the number of people who can put Enterprise Pricing (~$25+k/year) on a corporate credit card, without any internal checks, is close to zero. The Enterprise Sales Cycle exists precisely to align the many stakeholders whose alignment is necessary to sign larger deals. If you have a corporate card, are looking for a solution that you can buy independently, then you are not in the vendor's market and you're doing everybody a huge disservice by trying to force a deal anyway. Go find a vendor that actually targets your market segment.
If anyone is reading from RingCentral: you are seriously pushing your customers away with these shitty calls. Just stop harassing your own customers.
Please check out thanks.dev to possibly get your company to start paying OSS Devs that they rely on.
(No affiliation)
Love, Oracle
There are lots of ways to make a lot of money selling a service. The best way IMO is to build a service that is easy to integrate and customize, delights your customers, and has a simple pricing model. There should be no surprises in any of these traits. Customers will be loyal because you’ve made their lives easier - you didn’t just “solve their problem”, you solved their problem in a way that doesn’t require them to change anything else about their business to adapt to you.
The other way involves minimum viable products, basic features only available at top tier pricing, only have a single way to integrate and no meaningful customization. You make your product a black box that your customers can only escape with Herculean effort and lots of begging on many time consuming phone calls.
It seems like startup culture somehow funnels everyone into the second category.
This model works especially well when your early (pre-series-B go-to-market) is not big companies (say, 1000+ employees).
i wonder if there’s a world coming where the oss and the company become the same person.
It is true that CodeSquish probably works better than the paid product, but it only solves 20% of the problems that the paid product does. You are in the lucky group of 5-10% of all people that the paid product targets whose requirements are fully covered with that 20%.
For the remaining 90%, it's either the paid product, or another free/open source product which may or may not exist.
Obviously there are exceptions to this, but in general, commercial products are bloated for a reason. People really need 20% of the functionality as the saying goes, but everybody needs a different 20%.
How would you pay such a person?
Start by asking those who have contributed before, and any that use the software (if there's a forum, mailing list, Reddit sub etc). If it's on GitHub look at any forks.
I've built this exact open source platform, for "nearly everything you'll ever need" for full-stack web apps (from profiles, to access, control, notifications, payments, credits, even videoconferencing and livestreaming). You can build your own Facebook or Twitter pretty quickly.
Here it is: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
But I haven't really marketed it, at all. Almost no one on HN has heard of it. Only if someone takes the time to poke around will they be impressed, start to use it, etc.
Even more than that, I started a new GitHub project recently as I plan to release v2.0 after many years. So all the stars on the original project are not even on the new one. (The old one is still on my github.)
And here is the documentation: https://qbix.com/platform/guide
So this is the extreme opposite ... I haven't started trying to market it or sell it to the world or even attract developers to it. But it's there if someone bothers to look.
This too is already rapidly becoming utopia-land.
Very easy to deactivate an address when I decide I don't want to hear from them anymore.
Someone who wishes procurement reduced to online documentation and credit cards is going to hate their job if it requires engaging with high touch sales processes.
Maybe they need a purchase team partner - the analog of the salesperson in a salesperson-sales engineer team.
A more happy flow exists, author signs up for trial, he can't find or is unsure if feature exists during trial or reading docs, he asks sales/sales engineer where it is, salespeople show him or speak to PM to get him a timeline, later the feature he needs goes into beta and sales reconnects and demos, starts trial using beta. Sales helps draft the internal proposal/implementation plan to convince his boss and the hundreds of others needed for the sale. They buy when it goes GA.
Yet at the same time, when faced with a complaint about excessive unnecessary sales processes, the solution is to add more people.
Plus, when salespeople ask how I’m using their product, I need to prepare because, most of the time, I don’t remember how I was using it. That project isn’t the center of my world.
That said, I still accept calls from people I know in the field. I recently had two calls with Glauber Costa, the founder of Turso, and in the process of scheduling another one with the Pydantic Logfire folks. But none of them are sales reps, and they’re usually fun to talk to, so I’m happy to do it.
• “Obviously, I don’t care about this anymore.”
• “But what if they’ve finally added the feature I wanted?”
This gives me an idea... how about reaching out to developers and ask them what their experience was, which features they'd like the most, and/or subscribe to when they will be launched, to be the first to try them and give feedback? Even this guy would go for that.
I've sat on a lot of sales calls and I get these feels. But when it comes to selling to people who are NOT the author, managers, execs, decision making architecture astronauts ... that long list of features and functionality really do seem to sell the product. Not that they'll use them...
I had this happen for a service we already had implemented at my company. I created a new account just to make sure it was working because we had a few say the site or login was being blocked by our security software. Even after I deleted the new account I was getting emails from them.
They called me after the 30 days and I even told them I didn't use it. Yet they still insist on emailing me every 3 weeks about some security policy junk.
Won’t work for every product, but I’m pushing through with my prototype and that (i.e. release notes) is something to consider.
I know thats their job but goddamn, this kind of competitive spying is scummy af lol
...and I realized it was the recruiter, probably not interested in my friend so much as recruiting off the reference list.
it's everywhere.
The choice is to be deferential and poor, or bold and reach.
So far I am poor.
The senior technical person from the customer would ask me a couple hard questions and I would be pretty honest in my responses. Afterwards our Sales Success Customer Account Manager would be unhappy with me, but at least I wouldn't have to go to another one of those meetings for a while.
The deal would go ahead anyway because our management had convinced their management to make the purchase even though what we were offering didn't really meet their needs. They would only need to pay us if we actually delivered so they weren't taking a lot of risk, other than wasting their time, and we got to make a multi-million dollar "booking."
In the end I would either get along with their senior technical person pretty well because we could be honest with each other, or else they would despise me for being unable to deliver what my sales people had promised (Hi Sven!).
What. The. Actual. $&%#?
Companies, don't do this. After I've attempted unsubscription, I flag every single email from you as spam.
"I'm a European citizen. Please erase me from your list as per the GDPR"