No Calls
keygen.sh
keygen.sh
If your website doesn't give me enough information to:
1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements.
2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.
Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do.
I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.
I'm not in sales, but I've had a job once where I could see all the financials. And we would very often be charging one customer 10x what we charged another for exactly the same tier of service. Sometimes the huge corps would be paying more for a lower service tier than a small corp on a higher tier.
The examples contained CPU and ram but that's not what they say everything should be - just some objective measure.
Snowflake charge by time, storage and size of machine - though they never tell you what the machine actually is underneath. I don't know what their "large" is.
Maybe it's by concurrent users, maybe amount of hours of support, maybe API calls.
I think the key thing was "we'd charge you X because you'd use Y" rather than "we'd charge you X because you look like you might pay it"
More common now with SaaS seems to be employee count or some other poor proxy measurement for usage. I love actual usage based billing, but some of the proxies people pick are ridiculous. Like, if I have 5 seats or 500 employees, but 2 users spend 6 hours a day in the software and then 10 others maybe look at it once a quarter, paying the same for those is absurd and is not usage-based billing at all.
The cost of that PDF generation might as well round up to zero, but developing the tech cost multiple man-years of work. How do you price that “objectively” unless you’re given a breakdown of the company R&D expenses, operation costs and margins. That is not a reasonable request. Either you’re happy paying $X because it solves your problem and brings equivalent value to your business, or you’re not.
I do agree seat-based pricing is often ridiculous, but that’s a problem for the free market to solve. Alternatives usually pop up given enough demand.
No, I don't see, but it's clear from your personal attack that you do see and that you can help me, so thank you in advance. Please, help me to see.
Can you please point out to me where I'm being the "worst possible customer" ? Is it because I refuse to lie and/or make shit up to jam my extremely square peg into their round hole? (which I might add, would open me to legal liability down the road if I guessed wrong (lawsuit for underpaying license fees), or would mean I drastically overpay and even bankrupt the company if I guess way too high. What if I get one customer and use 500ms of a single vCPU all month, but I guessed 50 vCPU?).
If they want to know things that I don't even know in order to price them, what else should I do? I have a theoretical product that doesn't exist yet, with 0 users, 0 vCPUs, and 0 vRAM because it isn't deployed yet. I have no idea if I'll get 10 users in the first year or 10,000,000. How many vCPUs and vRAM should I tell them so they can price it? Keep in mind this will be deployed in an AWS lambda function so it scales literally on-demand, demand that we have no idea of yet because the product doesn't exist. We also have no idea how much CPU and RAM it will even need, because again it doesn't exist so it can't be profiled or measured. If you can't answer that, I won't accuse you of being "the worst possible customer" ;-)
Maybe a different approach. I have a PDF library that I want to sell you. I typically charge $10,000 per vCPU per month. You are thinking about building a product on top of my library and ask me for pricing (which I don't publish anywhere so you have absolutely no idea what to expect). You have no idea how many users (if any) you'll have, and you plan to deploy this as a lambda function that can scale from 0 to Infinity almost on-demand. I ask you how many vCPU per month you're going to use so I can quote you a price. What is your answer?
A PDF conversion may be required for the end-users, but it doesn’t make the entirety of the value of the product. It just doubles it, as well as the N features before that. But although each feature doubles the value of the product, the order of features doesn’t matter; A PDF export might have been added as the second feature, but the 10th feature still doubled it.
You ballpark how long it would take you to build something similar? You don’t need any breakdown for that, just a marginally competent engineer on staff.
> we can't do estimates.
Software developers as soon as estimating something would be beneficial for them.
> all you need is one of us on staff, to do estimates.
Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a free lunch - you can have simple and predictable but you will have some users that you pay for that aren't getting value. You can have usage-based billing, but then you run the risk that anyone who uses an antipattern for the product will suddenly cost you a ton (or consume all of their allocated quota and be dead in the water, which is differently bad).
The more flexibility you offer, the more complexity you're putting onto customers and sales teams to understand what's the best way for them to consume the software.
There's also a lot of market pressure to "follow the crowd" - even if you have an option that is (in your mind) more customer friendly/favorable, if you are structuring your pricing differently than the competition, there will be customers who are concerned that they're not getting "a good deal" or concerned that the structure will end up being less favorable to them over time (after all, why does everybody ELSE do it this other way?). Sales reps also prefer pricing strategies that are at least structurally consistent with other products on the market, because it makes their lives easier.
Similarly, it's very difficult to change pricing nad packaging later on - changing price is relatively simple, but changing units of billing or retiring an old offering can be an extremely difficult task.
(disclaimer: these are just my own opinions, everything is hard)
It is true you CAN do this, but very few do, for a few reasons:
One is, it's bad for margins - when you build a pricing model, you inevitably end up creating a system where some customers subsidize other customers. You assume each user or unit of usage is going to cost you X/unit and you charge X+Y. There is inevitably going to be a distribution of users and their usage patterns and costs, and the 90% percentile is probably going to be 5X, and the 10% is probably going to be .2X. There's not any malice there, it's just that different users have different usage scenarios and they use the product differently.
Another reason relates to the issues with usage-based billing. Even in that scenario, whatever usage dimension you measure on will have users that don't fit the profile and they still end up being subsidized (from a margins perspective) by customers that DO map to the profile. A really naive example - you're a database company, you want to be cheap for people to get started, you go with usage based billing and charge based on storage. For most customers, that works - assuming your product value is apparent and differentiated, I think most people would understand that "I have to pay more because I'm storing more data, and accessing that data can be more expensive, queries more complex, and the utiltiy that I get from the database scales as the quantity of storage increases". Great, usage based billing, let's do it.
But - then you have users who store very small amounts of data but with incredibly high query volumes. Your options are to either just eat the cost of those users (which might be fine for some amount of time) or now start to add additional dimensions on which you meter usage. So now you charge for storage AND cpu time AND maybe concurrent connections if that's a problem AND bandwidth. Congratulations, you have now created the perfect usage-based billing model, which perfectly assigns customer charges to handle the multitude of usage patterns that customers experience.
BUT, it's really complicated to explain to people, and it's really complex to predict costs. That has two implications, one of which is that your value proposition has to be increasingly compelling as complexity increases. To use the database example, at some point someone at a customer will say "honestly, wouldn't it be more predictable if we just spun up a couple of VMs and ran a database instance ourselves?". Complex usage-based pricing works if you've got incredible technology that would be difficult to impossible for a customer to deploy themselves, but if your value prop is convenience and/or abstraction, you're diminishing that value as you make the pricing model increasingly less convenient and less abstract.
The other factor is that someone has to build and manage the metering of all of these things. Even a single dimension like storage is complicated - how do I bill for additional storage? Do I look at the total storage at the end of the month and multiply by X? That hurts users who, say, run end of month batch jobs - but for you, users that use huge amounts of temporary space and then free them before the end of the month, that hits your bottom line (depending on your own architecture). So maybe you want to charge on a daily basis, but now every problem gets more complicated.
Then, if you extend that across multiple billing dimensions, it's just gotten harder and more complicated. Now it's rock and a hard place time - you can stick to one abstract usage measure that is easy to reason about, but you're inevitably going to have some users that underpay based on that usage measure and some that overpay. Or you can add more dimensions and make things more "fair", but everybody's lives are harder, both for the customer and for you and your team.
When you give customers automatic optimization, you get the worst of both worlds - you make less money on the bottom 10% (usage-wise) of users/customers because they end up falling into the usage based billing, and you make less money on the top 10% because there is capped upside for you as the provider. For customers, sure, it saves them money, but what you're really giving them is a price cap (not to exceed X).
I would say for the sales teams, it's also not great, because they have all of the challenges of explaining two different models. For enterprises, it's a mess because 1) they'll probably want to negotiate specific billing terms for their use cases (we don't want to pay X for bandwidth, we want to pay Y) and other structural terms, all of which your billing system needs to support.
At the end of the day, however you charge for anything is an abstraction layer on top of your costs. That's true if you charge per user, or per object, or per gig, or per connection, or whatever else. It's all unit-based pricing even if it's not usage-based procing. You have to decide how much work you want your engineers, customers, salespeople, etc. to do in order to build, explain, and understand how much someone will pay for software.
My general advice is to pick the simplest pricing model that protects your margins and prevents abuse. For infrastructure-y products, things like storage, compute, network, are all reasonable meters. For SaaS products for business users, per-user pricing is well-understood, and there are things you can do if you really want to apply a usage-based element there (bill based on MAU, or have a MAU component separate from seats purchased). But there's really only two scenarios - you pick a small number of meters and understand that some customers will subsidize other customers, or you meter across a bunch of dimensions that align to your costs and create a lot of complexity for your customers. Blending the two gives you worse margins and the complexity of both options combined.
I don't think it's an especially hard model to understand though. It's commonly called pay-as-you-go in consumer mobile plans and sold as the cheapest option to customers that may not even speak the language the fine print is written in. Those consumers still understand the service they're getting.
Telecom is actually a good example of how granular billing can get, but still produces an incredible profit margin even with simple pricing strategies.
Consumer telecom is a great example of a very constrained problem space. There’s two levers, call time and data. And the population of people who are consuming that are limited to the size of the family.
By contrast, enterprise telecom is incredibly complicated, with variable pricing by region, by time, type of inbound number, and then the software that sits atop that telecom is an additional license.
Telecom is also largely a commodity - one provider is the same as the other. SaaS providers are fundamentally trying to not be commodities, and so the comparison is weak at best.
They're also not truly fungible, though that's mostly for the higher end of the consumer market. Think about TMobile's "uncarrier" marketing, or Verizon's network coverage marketing.
Did you know that in New Zealand, some business/server telecoms offer different plans based on how much of your traffic goes overseas? It's connected to the rest of the world with, like, five really long and expensive underwater cables, but it's also a not-quite-tiny market itself and if you can serve customers in NZ from a server in NZ, you can avoid expensive routing. (Your customers will also appreciate having a ping time lower than 300ms, even if they don't know what ping time is)
Meanwhile, ISPs in Europe don't charge you extra based on how much traffic you send to New Zealand, because you could max out your 1Gbps flat rate with NZ-bound traffic and it would still be a tiny percentage of all their traffic anyway.
Another fun trap I've seen on the enterprise side is that pinging different towers can have different charges. Highest I've seen was $15 per ping.
What would be other metrics that you could bill consumers for that they could do anything about?
> You aren't required to have a complicated pricing structure even for incredibly complicated services. Doing so is a deliberate product choice with consequences.
You're making my point - the simpler you make it, and the more abstractions you put, the more decoupled each billed object is from the underlying costs. The implications of that are that you have to be careful about making sure that the economics work out, and that means either you have some customers subsidize others or you are very confident that customers can't use your product in such a way that it turns your numbers upside down. At the same time, that abstraction that you choose will not map to how every customer wants to buy.
To go back to several posts ago, "per user" pricing is a per-unit abstraction that lots of customers like and understand. Sure, customers recognize that some users will use more than others, but it's a deliberate product choice that you abstract the more complicated dimensions from the users.
It sounded like YOU, as a buyer, want a DIFFERENT abstraction, which is "usage" - and again, that's reasonable, but as a product team have to make exactly the same calculus, which is "what metric do we use instead as a proxy?", with the understanding that there are lots of SaaS products where usage patterns are highly variable and it is difficult to come up with single units that cover your bases without making the per-unit price higher than it might otherwise be.
It's not hard to imagine yet another buyer who says (assuming the product metric chosen was "storage consumed"), "wait, I like usage billing, but your per-GB cost is really high for us, because we store a lot of data, but we don't access most of it - why can't you just charge me for data accessed?". You either say no or add more billing dimensions.
> They're also not truly fungible, though that's mostly for the higher end of the consumer market. Think about TMobile's "uncarrier" marketing, or Verizon's network coverage marketing.
It's interesting, because that ALSO proves the point, because the only differentiation you are citing are things other than what customers are being metered for. There's availability differences, but that's orthogonal to the billing metric. If I have connectivity, my minute on tmobile is the same as my minute on verizon is the same as my minute on mint, and the differentiation is everything OTHER THAN the billed minute.
To wrap up - I don't disagree with you that there are benefits to usage-based billing. The point that I am making is that for essentially any SaaS product that has any depth, it can be difficult to pick a single metric at an attractive price point that a) covers your margins across the spectrum of usage behaviors, and b) maps to the metric that the vast majority of your users want. If you try to make everybody happy, you either lose the simplicity or you hurt your underlying margins while simultaneously making everybody's lives harder.
What people really want, when they say “usage-based billing”, is outcome-based billing. They want to get charged money whenever they hit the button in your software that makes them money (or, for a cost-center, saves them money.)
Think of e.g. tax prep companies. (For the average Joe employee), they don’t charge you money up-front; instead, they take a part of the net-positive return they fully expect to find you. They make you happy, then take a slice of your happiness at the exact point that they’re making you happy. Outcome-based billing.
That is how 99% of sellers do business. The upper end of the price range is what the buyer can pay, the lower end is what their competitors are asking for. Some sellers are lucky to have few competitors, so they can waste more of the buyers' time trying to narrow down exactly how much they can or are willing to pay.
Then they use the same consulting firm as their competitors to set prices.
Many prices end up being a little higher than costs, but that’s because competition drives prices down close to the floor, not because businesses set out to do that.
Why do grocery stores have coupons? It’s not because they’re charitable. It’s because coupons are a way to charge higher prices to people more willing to pay. Trying to figure out your customer’s willingness to pay and matching that with your price is nothing new or unusual. The tactics just change when the purchase is big enough to have dedicated salespeople.
It should be based on the email address used. If, for example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and you get a discount.
My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.
I'm not sure how everything 'costs less'?
You could say that wealthy people can substitute money for time. So they need to spend less eg working hours for each good consumed.
It's all about opportunity costs.
If the interest on your mortgage pays less than you can get in eg the stock market, you are better off not paying your mortgage. (Ignoring fees and taxes for a moment.)
Yes, a rich person and a poor person could try to buy the same items and the rich person might be able to buy them cheaper. But: first, when you have more money you generally want to buy nicer stuff, and the bang-for-buck generally goes down. Nicer shoes might cost twice as much, but they are perhaps twenty percent better. (And that's worth it for well-off people!)
Second, you can save a lot of money if you are willing to invest some time. From DIY or just generally shopping around. But: rich people's time is more expensive, even if just by opportunity costs.
From the Wikipedia article:
> In June 2024, the National Bureau of Economic Research from USA published a working paper expanding on the ONS findings, showing that cheapflation, a term the authors coined, is a global phenomenon:[21] "prices of cheaper goods increased at a faster rate than those of more expensive varieties of the same product",[22] thus placing a higher financial burden on poor people.
Funny enough, this observation is perfectly compatible with the notion that everyone, including poorer people, got richer over time as the economy grew, and so the cheapest and nastiest goods were removed from the market. The cheapest most basic TV you can buy today is miles better than what you could buy in the 1970s for example.
This isn't necessarily a fact of human nature, this is just an extension of Greed.
There is an inflection point, where the price of a good is minimized whereas it's quality and lifespan is maximized. Such an inflection point is somewhat high - meaning it cannot be reached by poor people.
Sometimes people cannot be satisfied, and they will go well past the inflection point. Such behavior is, of course, completely optional and almost always self-destructive.
Sure, a Birkin might be pretty, but really any decently made leather bag will run circles around what you can find at Target. The Birkin isn't bought for quality.
You say that as if it's universally true of all goods.
Btw, finance is one way to transform cap-ex into op-ex. That's why we have mortgages and you can rent things.
> Sure, a Birkin might be pretty, but really any decently made leather bag will run circles around what you can find at Target. The Birkin isn't bought for quality.
That's why you don't buy a leather bag when you are poor and have your wits about you. Leather is expensive. Not just absolutely, but also per use of your bag.
A couple of key examples:
Food deserts often mean that groceries are more expensive in poorer areas as opposed to neighboring rich ones. Additionally, bulk food is cheaper but requires having enough funds to buy more than your immediate needs.
It is generally cheaper to own your own home than to rent and low income people are going to pay higher interest on the same home loan.
It is always cheaper for rich people to borrow money than poor people and poor people are often forced into debt in situations where rich people can dip into savings. Having to pay interest on your rainy day debt is way more expensive than getting paid interest on your rainy day savings.
That last one is huge, and tends to compound across all kinds of other areas, increasing the effective price that poor people pay for almost everything.
In the most general sense, it is often feasible to spend more money up front to save money down the road. The amount of interest poor people have to pay to do this reduces or even totally wipes out any savings.
This is all pretty well documented and studied. It's part of the unfortunate feedback cycle at the bottom of the economic bracket that makes climbing back out harder the poorer you get.
For me, I don't see a need to spend a lot of money on clothes because I work at home without video. But I will spend on luxury vacations and dinners, and I will certainly spend money on services that can help save me time at home/work.
Whereas the "high income" people -- typically doctors and lawyers -- are spending lots of money on nice suits and cars and homes, but have little to show for it in terms of actual wealth.
Having said that, I don't mind the rich who aren't pretentious getting a discount. I'd call it a "pretention tax". What's further ironic is that the former tend to appreciate paying a little extra if it ensures that a job is well-done, whereas the latter tend to skimp on paying extra, and often get the poor-quality results you'd expect.
And yes, there's exceptions to both categories, too -- indeed, it's not as if it's hard to live within your means as a doctor or a lawyer, if you don't mind looking a little "lower class" as a result (and if your clientele are the working class, this may even be a bonus!). But it's nonetheless a fascinating dynamic to keep in mind!
tbh I have no problem with this as long as the work was done well.
Marker value is what someone else is willing to pay.
amtrak uwu
And then now that we have Elon Musk following the Howard Hughes self destructive cycle (greatest video game player AND ceo of 5 companies who posts all day on social media), there's a very possible negative takeaway - especially in tech it's hard to know. I live in a ridiculous world, I actually see 'got mine before elon was a doofus' bumper stickers. We should all try to judge each other on actual behavior and choices. I'm an asshole completely separate from buying a tesla a decade ago, people.
I'm not quite understanding the point you're trying to make about the bumper stickers though. I think Elon's actual behavior and choices are what causing people to have these bumper stickers.
We might think that companies need every single sale - well no sometimes you want to fire a customer or not take one on.
Just leave off the "then I multiplied by 10" part.
Which I did by accident once ( not by 10, but it was still substantial )... but it turned out the customer was delighted because we were still 50% vs their existing vendor.
Enterprise pricing is a farce.
I very much agree with the poster above about vendors disqualifying themselves.. another red flag for me is the Two Suits and Skirt pre-sales Hydra Monster that big vendors love to send around, to scare you into letting them capture all the value that their purporting to provide you.
And yes, the above shows I've been both sides of the fence. I felt it was going to be good experience, and it was, but I have regrets too.
It's called supply and demand, and it's the way things have been priced since the dawn of commerce. The only time the price is based on cost is when the market is competitive enough to drive that price down, and the cost acts as the floor. Even then, if you can get your costs below those of your competitors then it's your competitors cost that can act as the floor.
The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.
I disagree, but genuinely asking why you think that. Why is it ok if it's on the market level but not on the individual level? Price discrimination is all around us all the time, often "hidden" because people get uncomfortable with it, but I don't see it as a bad thing (and it's often very net positive socially).
Supply of the kinds of services under discussion here is rarely limited in any practical sense, so scarcity does not play.
> The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.
This ignores opportunity cost. Very few buyers have infinite cash, they do tend to have infinite ways they could spend money though and many of them will give a far better return than a couple of percent.
In reality if you're adjusting your pricing to try and extract the most you think you can get away with from the customer, you will lose a substantial number of buyers - and probably more so with buyers who have a technical mindset.
So that CTO says I'm probably not going to bother with you if you don't have a clear price. I also practice this purchasing way. Everyone should. So sure, someone in sales will fight to the death to justify their strategy of obfuscation and charging what the market will bear, and to try to justify their presence in the sales process with some kind of commission and argument about how they caused pain for the buyers and got more money. Meanwhile, company B sold me a widget for whatever, I already paid them, there was no salesperson wasting time on either side.
If jumping the hoops guaranteed the best price, then I would agree with you, but I would vehemently disagree that it does.
I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things, like:
* How much will it cost us to support you based on what you're using our platform for?
* How expensive is this problem for you today?
* From there, how much money could we save you?
My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing together. It seems pretty reasonable.
Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for, instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own time.
Break the solution selling sales cycle.
Non-technical sales people selling software need a better standard to deliver on the promises of their software.
We want partners, not vendors. This can be communicated long before reaching out.
Because the truth is that the contracts are almost always different, so while price tables are good to get an idea, words are just better at conveying the ballpark, and they lack the illusion of price rigidness.
$0 - $999 - direct sale/download, pricing on website
$50,000+ - full sales team, no pricing on website
And essentially not much in between... this has perhaps changed a bit with SaaS, but this is still semi true.
"If you have to ask..."
I would definitely like to never have to talk to another "people person," and no-calls-but-we'll-give-you-the-info-you-need policy sounds great.
My tastes are a lot more plebeian.
Unfortunately, I have to eat in one, every now and then, but I always walk away disappointed.
Given that I am the original russian translator of this article, shame on me for not remembering exactly which article it was.
When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions on me, but many lost tens of thousands.
API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.
i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo
you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself
If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it.
The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.
lots of opportunities to find easy win-win
finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working with them can lead to a good outcome
obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff
Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial sales call to find out that information isn't optimal.
As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work. And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to qualify the vendor.
Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.
Point being, some stranger is calling me and asking for my money. I don't know enough about them to give them money just because they say it's going to be worth it.
--
[0] - https://xkcd.com/570/
My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22 metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark estimate for your boring enterprise software library licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.
As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!
Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time.
On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation.
By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.
A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house construction is more complex than space flight.
It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too variable to list in any meaningful way.
For a SaaS product with significant custom integration work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in the same way.
If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more comfortable asking whether the custom integration work will cost $50k or $100k.
Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.
Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of the clients business. The approval of the project took about two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The project took more than a year, mostly because of communication chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed.
Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got cake.
They repeat this a few times so that it is clear.
Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this is very important.
So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi
Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left the room.
I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying that the first 10 slides were removed :)
Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do not want to give the price because they don't know the price; they're still finding out how much they can charge.
We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card.
In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts.
Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.)
All that to say:
* email/async communication is great
* meet your customers where they are
* docs are great and clear messaging pays off
* devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions
When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different.
If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account.
So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do.
I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".
That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things:
* prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced transparently and eat the market
* the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue ocean opportunity
If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call. I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.
Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e. likely to become a support burden.
> I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness to play stupid games.
There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have to use your best judgment and hope you get it right.
Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a major piece of our product or value proposition in which case you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you don't control.
I would say this is not a valid analogy. If you buy real estate you have an asset. However, if you build something that is not your core product you have a liability and not an asset. You're not going to get more money because you have a bunch of tech you built that you could have bought.
If I ask price and you insist on showing me a presentation to get me hooked and invested, I'm out. At that point you are bound to be talking to a salesman whose job it is to sell and you are experiencing a process that was designed and perfected to manipulate you into buying.
I don't want to buy from salesmen usually, directly from the manufacturer or provider is better, cut the middleman out. OTOH I have to be open to some imperfections, if we have to wait for someone or be inexperienced with sales process (introduction too long), that's fine.
On some industries it's possible for someone to do the work without saying price even. An electrician might be happy to do the work without talking about price, and then you have almost no recourse when it's a shitload.
But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.
It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.
But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.
Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.
Sturgeons law applies more to enterprise software and products than any other space
"ninety percent of everything is crap" is just insufficient in describing how bad the solutions in this space are.
I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.
Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.
There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.
But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?
Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.
There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.
And how a call will make it simpler? Or why a telephone call becomes part of the service provided for the additional (higher) price (instead of other alternatives)?
People usually want a call because they don't know something, not 'just because.'
Cars are similar I think. Sure maybe some people need help. But there's is huge demand for a one-click, no-negotiation car buying "experience" (or lack of experience rather).
My conspiracy theory is that this has more to do with Salespeople and established sales channels (dealers) not being able to understand this both because their job depends on it and because they are naturally people-persons. So it feels intuitive to them and they have trouble understanding/accepting that many other are not.
That's kind of begging the question. Part of the point of the thread here is that it seems B2B is leaving some money on the table by refusing to do deals with less interaction. For example, this CTO's comment [1].
A good comparison I think is AWS and other cloud offerings. Of course, past a certain spend, you will start getting calls and have the opportunity to negotiate better rates, SLA's, etc. But, you can just go and spend 5-6 figures per month without any human interaction.
Another good example I think is 5 figure (or maybe even 6 figure) equipment purchases. You can definitely go ham buying most professional equipment without having to talk to someone over the phone. Think servers, GPU's, storage, cameras, etc.
It'd be great if more services offered this.
We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.
The most important deals that make up the vast majority of our revenue took lots of meetings, pilots, review meetings, etc, because those deals are in the 6/7 figure range.
That's awesome. And, I think that's what a lot of people here are talking about: options.
If your customers largely wants sales calls and sales engineers, that's great. But don't ignore the (smaller) population that does prefer no-calls.
Person buying the product has an idea of what they need. The information available within someone's head is naturally going to be much, much greater than any website.
Not to mention, that information can be accessed randomly and immediately. Searching if a product has feature Z is time consuming and you'll probably read about features A-Y. But asking a person can reveal the answer immediately.
If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.
A large SaaS customer is the opposite.
As for B2B sales, if AWS can show their pricing online, which has to be among the most complex pricing in existence - then so can every other SaaS company.
One of the many reasons calls happen is that customers say "I need XYZ feature in order to do this deal," and the salesperson then needs to ask why they need XYZ feature, and what they want to accomplish, and maybe existing ABC feature actually meets their need, or maybe the company needs to develop XYZ feature to secure the contract. Once you get into a complex domain, that is not happening over email.
The article contains good advice to many businesses out there, but it's worth considering the situations where it doesn't apply, too.
But if you're selling what's already on the truck, as most of these companies are, then there is no reason for the "call for pricing" for a standard enterprise plan. Pricing pages should have a separate column for custom/bespoke solutions, where it makes sense to have "schedule a call".
Yes, they will. I recall watching a whole kind of documentary of it somewhere on Youtube. Essentially, luxury brands will fully customize cars for customers and have calls/meetings with them to discuss how the car will be customized. It costs $$$$$ but they'll do it.
I think, too, that more important than income is the fact that these rich people should be driving their cars. It's a way to keep the brand positioned in that market.
We need to hop on calls to close customers, but honestly we could probably cut 1/3 of those calls by following some of those suggestions.
i.e. better documentation, ready to go pricing proposals, pre-filled security questionnaires, etc.
Parting thought: SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship something INTO SPACE. I bet you can figure out a way to tell me your SaaS price, in ballpark terms, and what it depends upon...
https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf
To save a click, that PDF at this moment says clearly:
STANDARD PAYMENT PLAN [for Falcon 9] (through 2024) $69.75 M Up to 5.5 mT TO GTO
If they can put a specific base price on their website, so can any SaaS.
I assure you that 7 figure deals happen every day on AWS, for example, without human intervention. Not all of them happen that way, but enough that it's not surprising.
Not publishing reference prices is a strong indicator the company is basically running a scam.
But mostly it was so they could charge NRO more for their birds, by not having a price on their website.
I don’t call and it’s not for the reason you suggest, but because I won’t talk to an automaton once then endure multiple calls and emails trying to sell me their offering. I’ve been down that road enough times and sales people usually go to spam.
For your information, the hidden price is often times in line with the market. They hide it so they can do market segmentation without changing the product and to gather information about potential customers.
So thank you for your most useful recommendation which changes nothing for me. I follow it for reasons other than your ill-informed assumptions.
talk to one of your sales minions 15 times in a month because at shyster school they teach you "no" is just one step on the path to a "yes"
1) I agree that there are markets where "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." (However, I think those are extremely rare, and don't believe Enterprise software, even expensive enterprise software, is usually one of those markets.)
2) I agree that "cheap" people who are unwilling to buy expensive software are likely going to "hate calls."
3) I also believe it is true that, "If a potential buyer is willing to go through the time and effort to schedule a call, even before they know if the product will work, and even before they know what it costs, they are MUCH more likely to be able to afford it than someone unwilling to do that."
But that doesn't mean that potential buyers who "hate calls" and prefer to know what something costs before-hand are "cheap." Many very expensive products list the price (or at least the maximum price, right on the website): [Luxury cars](https://www.mbusa.com/en/vehicles/build/g-class/suv), [Mansions](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1900-Spindrift-Dr-La-Joll...)...
I don't think Tesla customers are "cheap". Not only is the price is right on the website, you can [buy it in a few clicks](https://www.tesla.com/models/design#overview). That's not because their target market is "cheap people who hate calls". (Also, have you ever spoken to a Tesla buyer who wishes they could have had a call with a car salesman first?)
I don't think people who buy multi-million dollar homes are "cheap". The starting (maximum) price is listed right there. I can't imagine that someone thinking, "I wonder how much are they asking for that 20 room mansion?" is a signal that they are "cheap."
I can see the value in not wasting a seller's time with cheap people who will be crappy customers. I think you could do it just as easily by clearly stating ballpark prices and/or the components of prices up front, rather than gating it solely based on whether someone is willing to schedule a call.
It is, to put it politely, horseshit.
They can't if the price is arbitrary and subject to negotiation, like a car at a dealership. Not saying that happens everywhere or even most places, but it's one explanation.
If the pricing is made up of a number of complicated usage components, it would be great to give both a ballpark for a given description of usage, and a brief explanation as to what goes into the price.
I think sellers either forget how much more information they have than the buyer, or know, and try to take advantage of it.
One of the best conference talks I ever saw was from a pool contractor explaining that it is indeed hard to answer the question, "How much does a pool cost?" because it can vary SO MUCH. But he found that explaining the components of pricing, along with examples and ballparks, was more than sufficient, and that his business took off as a result of publishing that information, rather than hiding it behind a sales call. (Looked it up - this is not the exact talk I saw, but it was this guy: https://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/uattr/marcus-sheridan-hubsp...)
It was a crazy ride, I got a sales person assigned, and this person kept asking me questions I couldn't answer. I kept telling them what my job was, and if my report would be positive they might be able to sell 50-200 developer licenses. But they kept pushing me to answer business questions I couldn't answer. It's not my job to know that stuff, and I wasn't allowed to share information about company internals to a third party.
In the end our team never completed that report, and I just put this sales person into all my block lists. Never heard from them again ;)
I was never really sure if they were scared we would abuse an evaluation license, but it was a reputable company (nothing shady at all, no US sanctions, nothing). Even if they had no idea about the market we were in, just reading the Wikipedia article about the company would've shown them, that this is someone they would probably like to be in business with.
Disclaimer: I am not employed by or affiliated with sonar qube.
I had a similar buying experience recently, where a SaaS had a cloud option and a local option, which varied slightly. The cloud option kind of told us what we needed to know, but a trial license of the local option let us actually verify that it would work with our use case.
PS: but that's not the point. We needed an evaluation license, but the sales person just kept bugging us with questions. Like how our environments were set up, what products we want to integrate it with, how our teams are build, how much team growth was planned, and so on.
A lot of internal things that you don't want to share, especially if you are not part of the purchasing department. They probably have some guidelines what they are willing to share and what not. Even when putting aside the security risks by sharing internal information, it could also hurt the purchasing departments negotiation strategies, if the sales person already knows more than they shared with them.
PPS: We didn't want to have SonarQube at all, we didn't like the reports at all, mostly false positives in our case to work through (but I can see that some teams could benefit from it). The requirement came from some check boxes to be ticked for an audit.
Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.
I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
I wish I could use what this guy is selling.
But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now.
I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.'
Tip for unmarried people: You can still use the trick above, no one would know or even care :)
The stress and all the negatives people are posting about here is the point.
Before you demonize any company doing this... Know just about every company with a product has a sales team of some kind and they are all operating with similar models. You are being annoyed by some sales people while the sales people at your company are annoying someone else.
But in general I would say, both can generate misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle down.
The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available.
This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.
And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical).
So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?".
Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats.
Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and still no idea what the product is or how it's differentiated.
Yeah, I don't understand why the standard advice is what it is. Are most adults that stupidly naive to not realize that benefits are just lies? No company is actually able to predict how and how much their product can benefit their customers. Only customers themselves can predict that, and to do it, they need to know the actual things the product does, i.e. the features, which also happen to be the only objective things the company can say.
And yes, in many cases, the buyer may not know enough to correctly evaluate the features - but such buyer should be aware that, in such situation, they're even less able to tell if the benefits listed are realistic, or just blatant lies. Buying by benefits is stupid - the smart thing is to find someone who understands the features and ask them for advice.
Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.
Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.
The biggest driver to make a sale is the commission. The second biggest is fear of getting sacked because you’re not making as many sales as the other guy.
Sales seems to attract folks who are highly 'coin operated'. The large majority (yes...always with the exceptions) really, deep down, don't care about how cool the tech is, or how it's going to change the world...they care about the game of sales and you keep score in the game by how much commission you earn. You really want the salesthing that comes in with "Forget about the salary or draw, I want a 100% commission comp plan" because that's someone who is confident enough in their ability to sell that they aren't worried about paying the mortgage or buying groceries.
Tangentially, one of the worst things I've seen a sales org do is cap commissions. All that incentivizes is "I hit my cap...ima gonna go hang out on my boat until next quarter because why work for sales I'm not going to get comp'ed on".
>> That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
I don't know what the name for that other thing is, but it's indeed distinct from "selling" that salespeople do, which boils down to begging, cajoling, tricking or coercing you to buy their shit, no matter how useless or downright harmful to you is, because that's what commissions combined with competition incentivize. Not surprisingly, the bottom-feeder telemarketing sweatshops are where this model is present in its purest form - extreme competition, frequent bonuses for top performers, and quick firing for not being a top performer.
If I have a choice, I never want to "buy" whatever someone's "selling" - I only want to do the whatever is the "buying" equivalent for the not-selling thing I don't have the name for.
It's not a B2B-specific phenomenon either. The B2C equivalent of those salespeople are car salesmen (which have meme status at this point), telemarketers, and those people doing the Amway model, trying to sell some Tupperware knockoffs[0] or barely working vacuum cleaners or whatnot at 3-10x inflated prices, making you feel like you had a good time instead of having just been scammed.
--
[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.
Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in, and the idea that they say some magic words and then the customer suddenly wants to buy is childish. They identify and address needs and pain points.
That's called exploitation, not stewardship.
It is what it is, but let's not pretend that the relationship here is anything but adversarial. The incentives are such that dishonesty and malice brings in more sales, so honest salespeople get quickly outcompeted by their dishonest co-workers, and companies with honest business models get outcompeted by those with dishonest ones. Buyers are in no position to change this, but that doesn't mean they have to pretend it's fine, or play along.
Except as we can see in this thread, it's not objective fact. They chase many customers away with such tactics and are blissfully unaware.
This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which you are informed that some important feature is out of the question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a bunch of people with nothing to show for it.
Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.
To me, it's refusing to show up with a knife to a gun fight. The company needs a thing. The "things person" stands no chance in direct confrontation with a "people's person" and they know it, so they to avoid calls (direct or otherwise) to level the playing field. A "people's person" could fare much better against the seller's "people's persons", but then a "people's person" is in much worse position to understand the thing the company needs in the first place.
For buying things, a win-win outcome can occur only when people on both both buyer and seller side are "things persons".
It's basically a Prisoner's dilemma, with "people's person" and "things person" in place of "defect" and "cooperate".
The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
I agreed until here. Obviously, lying isn't the only way to make money. I make furniture and fix windows in old houses for a living. Am I grifting?
When you stretch into hyperbole, you lose the ability to convince people in the middle.
Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on folks like you? No.
Are you sure?
If you ignore human constructs such as companies and organisations and quantify based on classifications that make more sense for aggregates of workers, you might be surprised how little of the economy is built on the F500 let alone venture capital unicorns.
It’s very obvious when people straight up lie in these industries because the physical thing never materializes.
/crying-in-UK
One of many stories about HS2 -- they managed to not document procurement though, so the judges didn't turn find evidence of corruption in that aspect (different story) -- https://www.railtech.com/all/2023/10/23/british-high-speed-r...
Sort of. The trick in these industries is to instead cheat on quality of materials and workmanship. Which is how we're drowning in physical products to buy, and yet most of them are barely functioning garbage - they've all been "value engineered" to near breaking point.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-gdp-by-indu...
I think it's fair to say that a large component of the top two industries (professional services and real estate) are shady. OTOH, there are a lot of industries that seem less prone to corruption and more likely to reward people for honest work.
That's just my POV, though.
That said...thank gawd there's still room for biz like yours.
I don't think you quite understand how VC works.
People who got the free shiny scummy garbage? They don't matter, their only role is to grow a counter on financial reports, and to serve as a backup plan - because when the potential buyers realize too soon what they were about to buy, the people holding the previously free garbage can be squeezed for some money to hopefully make the investors whole.
How dare companies do market research with potential buyers to know what to build before they start building it! If only we could setup massive factories that pump out hot garbage that nobody wants and build roads to nowhere like the soviets did.
I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
As the documentation is all public, though, it's easy enough to see what they're offering.
I mean, isn't that what Zombocom was created for? I always assumed it existed to parody those firms.
You can do anything at Zombocom[tm].
The font is "Owners XXWide" and the font designer's various mentions in publications suggest Elder Millennial at the latest. I don't think we can blame the kids for this one.
(I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)
1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from every enterprise client 2. we don't actually know our own economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest effort to quote it within a magnitude
A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal answers, more complex than just a formula...
Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more companies think they have that problem than actually have that problem.
Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.
- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)
- it usually obscures what the product actually does
Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top.
If you can't figure that out either, well...
How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with.
--
[0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?
What normally happens: * Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.
* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT
* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID
* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration
* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.
* You wait for a response for a month
* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed
* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.
* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.
* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.
* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.
Are we considering products like Salesforce or SAP "enterprise app platforms" here?
Look for any of a million news reports on multi-year "integrations" (sometimes even failed ones but always over budget).
Enterprise sales wishes they could have customer fill up carts.
It's not worth the effort.
It's killing your ability to scale your sales process. Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product development, as now you have a bunch of one off deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you want for various tiers of user count.
If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you scale are critical.
YES!
Adding features just for single customers doesn't scale, adding features useful to many customers does.
None of this means "hiding" information, but you can't put something like "We'll do X hrs of extra work if you buy Y licenses". Just like the any store might have a 10% discount if you buy a dozen, but if you want 50,000 then there will probably be a conversation involved.
Then someone at a large organization can multiply this number by the expected number of licenses they'll need, and get a ballpark estimate for the (upper bound of the) costs of the service, which is a critical input in determining whether it's even worthwhile to consider talking to the vendor. Having that information, the organization can then schedule a call to negotiate whatever extra adaptations and discounts they need, or realize signing up is unlikely to have positive ROI and skip it, which also saves the seller from wasting their time on a deal that won't come through.
Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
That or they have "customers" who are knowingly or unknowingly incentivized to have the vendor succeed.
People in marketing, often even those in higher levels, know Google analytics. They have demonstrated experience with it. They want to keep using it. They want their employees to keep using it. Google Analytics plus or whatever it is called iirc does not have a pricing page publicly available.
Why does Google not have pricing available publicly? Why do customers put up with Google? Is there any other reason?
PS for those curious, I think this is one of the limitations we hit with Google Analytics free
> Custom dimensions: 20 custom dimensions
Worse than that, calls aren't usually tracked. They will forget they told you "oh we won't increase the price next year," but they'll damn well remember the green engineer you invited to sit the call who blurted out that the $75k/yr license fee was "within budget".
A super valuable solution to your problem is pernicious because...checks notes...a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
I can't scratch my head hard enough.
That's just an euphemism for "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the value their product creates for you".
A real head scratcher. Perhaps has something to do with there being no point of buying if all (or even most) of the value flows back to the seller? Unless you're a nail wholesaler and are happy with 0.1% margins because you sell by truckloads anyway.
Even worse, your tier may have 10 options but still not capture the 5 they need.
So you negotiate, and they provide you the 5 you need at a reasonable price.
This is standard.
Oh, and negotiating a trial period is almost always a must. Perhaps a 2 week free trial is not enough for the customer. If you could bump it to 4 weeks, it could lead to a lucrative sale.
The thing I want to desperately avoid is wasting time dancing around the salesmen trying to overhype their product while staying vague on the details, in hopes to get me to buy (and pay as much as I can) regardless of whether I get any value from it.
And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL providers all trying to capture the full value of the solution they provide. With infinite time, markets essentially adjust themselves towards this goal. As long as that number is 99.99% (meaning the buyer creates an additional 0.01% of economical value) it's still valuable for BOTH parties.
FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
Of course, if they're a monopoly provider and the buyer really needs it, they have to cough up. But generally there are substitute products. So the buyer would do well to look for an alternative that doesn't do differential pricing to capture more surplus for themselves.
Because:
1) In efficient markets, all users also try to capture full value they get from the they bought. Efficient competition is purely adversarial.
2) You say, "As long as that number is 99.99% (...) it's still valuable for BOTH parties". Unfortunately, incomplete information and information asymmetry makes it more than likely that the "is trying to align their pricing" so that this number is more than 100%. That is, if you're not careful, they'll scam you.
The two above are arguments why this is a problem for the buyer, in practice. The next one is more general:
3) Everything that's good and nice and human happens inside economic inefficiencies. For human beings, a truly efficient market is a literal definition of hell - everyone's suffering as much as possible, spending all their energy to earn exactly enough to barely survive.
> FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
As it should be.
I'll say here what I say to people who talk about stopping to post anything publicly, lest it ends up in LLM training data:
Trying to capture for yourself 100% of the economic value you're producing is an extreme form of greed. When companies try to do that, they get called evil and used as examples of everything that's wrong with late-stage capitalism and such. Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
All of us who produce, we also consume. Society and its markets form an ecosystem, which needs some inefficiency to evolve, be resilient and thrive.
(See also: running any system at 100% capacity is "efficient" up until some random event causes the load to grow ever so slightly, even for a tiny moment, at which point the system suffers a cascade of failures and dies.)
And all of us engineers get paid REALLY WELL because people sell software for us. Software is cheap relative to its value. Stop complaining that you're getting ripped off.
> Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
You have no evidence to support this.
That's not at all clear, an it's its own can of worms.
A lot of software, even widely-used software, may as well have negative real value, because its perceived value is just an accounting trick. Any time you see software allowing someone to do something that required a specialist before, particularly in company setting, it's more than likely that the value is negative. Think e.g. everyone doing their own expenses. A company used to have a bunch of moderately paid jobs dedicated to doing that. Naturally, people doing those jobs quickly got very efficient at it. In comes software, those jobs get eliminated, and now you're having everyone - including all the absurdly highly paid engineers (software or otherwise) - having to semi-regularly (not regularly enough to get efficient at it) drop what they're doing and spend half a day or more on doing expenses. Productivity goes down across the board for obvious reasons. But, what the business sees, is a) legible savings on eliminated finance jobs, and b) mysterious "costs disease" that seems to be affecting the company (and market at large), keeping productivity below expectations.
Mysterious my ass.
Then, a lot of software is directly or indirectly serving adtech. This is where most of the high salaries in tech come from. Software is cheap and programmers are paid well because it's all funded by scamming everyday people and ruining their lives. That's a nearly inexhaustible money source. The actual value of all that software provides people, integrated over the entire society? Deeply in the negative.
Then, there's plenty of SaaS businesses that would be more ergonomic and efficient if replaced by an Excel spreadsheet. Those deliver negative value to customers almost by definition.
Etc.
Sure, there's some software that's delivering way more value than it costs. But there's much less of such software than people think.
9 times out of 10 even when you get on a call with them they just tell you the product does everything but their "consulting" or "support" will work to "configure" the product for you to do it. Meaning, it doesn't do that and they are going to sell you high priced consulting to ram their square peg into your round hole until you either beg them to stop or become stockholmed and invested enough that you are persuading your own stakeholders that it really does what it was supposed to.
> I do not understand why that's difficult
It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me.
After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about.
Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.
It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable. I find none of that comes out very clearly in emails that tend to be bullet point style focused but don't reveal the nature of the issue.
I don't like calls either, but they are useful.
Offering an annual contract though, which presumably comes with a volume discount is a totally normal practice that should benefit both parties assuming it's executed well.
For me, I can find out way more quantifiable information by just doing 15 minutes of OSINT, or even simpler pull up your D&B report.
I do not trust my emotions.
But when it comes to something complex, something someone hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same direction, an email almost never covers it and often enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.
If you don't address / discover those things it is potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.
I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on the call and even asking about basic features, then one department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.
I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there, not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own processes and working it out internally.
In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is explaining or offering solutions.
Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work for some things.
It's not that - or at least not just that. The key insight I feel some comments here are missing is, from the buyer's perspective, the process is risky and (with market economy being what it is), adversarial until proven otherwise. All you're saying is true, but until I know you better, I can't tell whether you have my best interests in mind, or are trying to plain scam me.
To use an analogy, there's a reason people go on dates and gradually open up to a potential partner over extended amount of time, instead of just marrying the first person who promises the right things on the spot.
I mean, you could somehow get access to an entire company's email history and it still won't tell you everything you need to know. Whether people like it not, sometimes direct, high-bandwidth human interaction is required to adequately understand an issue.
Talking to them will? we cannot have it both ways (the entire company's email history is not enough to tell me what I need, but meeting for an hour, say three times with the salesperson will).
I think you _are_ right, but I do not need everything. I just need good enough to make a decision to move forward.
I'd like to trust you and your intentions specifically, but in the general case, this relationship is adversarial, so as the potential buyer, I definitely do not want you to "feel me out", and further disadvantage me in the coming negotiations. I'm fine letting you on the details of my organization, its issues and interdepartmental dynamics, but only at the point when I know enough about you and your product to feel safe you aren't just going to scam me.
On Sunday (first workday here), I needed a PoE injector that could take in 24V DC and step it up to PoE+ voltages (around 50V iirc), so I looked around, and found an industrial one that matched my requirements. On the manufacturere's website, there was only a GET QUOTE button, and when searching for the model number, I couldn't find a place where I could just buy the thing.
So I clicked on GET QUOTE and filled in my details, company, work email, etc.. I then got an automated email saying my request was received along with details of the request (just the one PoE+ Injector).
We needed this for a fairly tight deadline, so we ended up getting an industrial PoE+ switch, which also gave us some added flexibility, and had 2 units on my desk by Tuesday.
Fast forward to today (Thursday), I get a call from a local distributor who had _no idea_ which product I requested a quote for, and just asked about what my needs are. I of course told them it's no longer relevant, and they decided to send me an email with some wildly irrelevant brochures for ruggedized tablets.
All this is to say, if the manufacturer just put up a price or link to buy online, I would have likely ordered 1-3 units on the spot, either directly or via a distributor. But they decided to complicate the process, and lost the sale to someone who was willing to just sell the products instead of trying to get me on a call.
I also had a look at the distributor's website, and they seem to offer various vague "compute platforms" and "industry-specific solutions", I typed in the model number into the search box, and got no results, and when I typed in the manufacturer, it just brought me to a page saying they are a "Platform Partner", with another contact button.
People came telling me they could do anything, but everything was too shallow.
I turned it around. I would say “we have 40 mins. I will run through a list of our current pain points or challenges. If you feel you can add value to any of those, pick your best 3 and shoot an email and specific material next week”
The change was dramatic. Many sales people actually thanked later saying it was much more productive for them too.
We have lunch or dinner now and then and meet at sector events. We share a lot of what are our challenges, what works, what doesn’t, who is good and who is not and how much we are paying our suppliers
If a sales person took the info across the street, chances are a) they already known about it or b) the person across the street will ring me to let me know.
Again, I don’t meet the sales rank and file, in many cases the Senior Partner across the table also knows me well (past clients, suppliers or colleagues).
Speaking as an introverted engineer myself, the number one turn-off on any given product is a lack of transparent pricing info or locking any sort of demonstration behind a mandatory contact harvester for a call or email chain. I don’t want to commit to a bunch of social “dances” when I’m trying to solve a technical problem, nor do I want to deal with overly pushy salespeople who either don’t understand my problem or immediately want to upsell to meet their own goals or quotas.
If your tool solves my problem, I will pay you money. That’s the transaction. Everything else - the swag, the sales calls, the free lunches, the conference tickets, the sportsball box seats - is extraneous to my core goal, which is solving the problem.
Right now, unless you’re some sort of 10x rockstar extrovert, you’ve gotta play the game by the existing rules. It’s why I applaud this particular company’s position, since it means I don’t have to worry about being undermined by some outside salesperson with a quota to meet and a gift budget they haven’t emptied.
In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
You also have no time to formulate a thoughtful answer to complex questions, though, which is one my issues. Calls are fine for some things, but 90% of calls could be an email because they contain discussion that needs more than 15 minutes of thinking. And a lot of the time, these calls need a summary email to even keep track of what was said!
I think the gap issue in async communication is a feature, not a bug.
If it's a straightforward product that might not happen. If it's a product with lots of subtle complications and I need to ask lots of questions whose answers depend on their answers to previous questions it will definitely happen.
That's one reason calls can be superior in some situations.
As someone on the Autistic spectrum... yes, yes you most certainly can. When you're speaking I'm (not necessarily voluntarily-)daydreaming about my current hyperfocus/obsession. I'm tuned-in just enough to not reply with something so far out of left field that it gives away that my attention is elsewhere, but I'm definitely not listening to you. Your words are going in one ear and right out the other. I'll shoot you an e-mail for "clarification" later.
I hate this about myself and I've worked very hard to overcome it, but after thirty-seven years I've learned to accept that it's my baseline. I'll have to actively work against it for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, this applies to meetings and lectures as well. In school and, later, university I had to go to class and teach myself the material each night.
I like to think I can "read the room". I particularly try to send email, versus a call, when the recipient will need to take time to prepare a thoughtful reply.
I've had several calls, sparked after a detailed email, where I end up reading my message literally word-for-word only to be met with the response: "Yeah-- we I'll need to respond to that offline".
Just. Read. My. Damned. Email.
I think very little of people who won't take the time to read anything longer than a couple sentences. It's especially galling because I work hard to write terse, bottom-line-up-front style-emails.
Hot take: W/ LLMs being used to summarize text, and robust text-to-speech, maybe I won't have as time-wasting calls. The kind of person who can't be bothered to read probably likes those kinds of things.
It is pretty annoying that the first call is almost always with an SDR who can't answer basic questions about the product, whose whole job is to make sure you are a qualified customer, and book a second call. The goal of that call is basically answer their questions as fast possible, book the next call, and get off the phone.
On the second call, hopefully with a sales rep and a good solutions engineer -- you don't have to politely listen to their whole spiel, more often then not they'll be very happy if you start peppering them with very specific questions, rather than sitting through the generic demo. A good solutions engineer is able to answer my questions a lot faster than I can find the answer on the website.
It's also highly beneficial to have individual names and phone numbers inside the company if things don't go so well once you're a customer -- if google shuts down your gsuite account, it's nice to have your account rep's cell phone number.
Also, differential pricing is a perhaps a silly dance we all do, but it's life when making purchases of a certain size. It can also work in your favor as a buyer -- if you can, figure out when the company's quarter end is, and line your purchase with that -- there's a pretty good chance they'll be incentivized to cut you a good deal if they're trying to hit their numbers. Also, even if you're not planning on buying from a competitor, get a quote from them, and say "your competitor gave me X price, Im going to go with them unless you do better."
No it isn't. I have never once found a situation where there wasn't an alternative to the vendors who try to waste your time with "call for pricing". There are companies who do business honestly, and I choose to use them.
tl;dr: some enterprises will bounce if they don't see a 'book a call' button.
You can take it to the extreme, like I did for a long time, or adapt it for yourself.
Or did you all upvote without actually checking that XD
And the important part is that they still provide a price, rather than hide the price with a call button. The call is optional, not a requirement to get a quote.
But it’s the default call to action for bigger inquiries
Of course, some people do prefer calls, but I think there’s a disproportionate default to “book a call first” when selling.
After a year, our company was bought and merged with a competitor and we got to see how their sales team worked.
They had a dozen sales guys doing the exact same job as our man, however, they met with prospective clients, had lunch, and 'worked the field'.
Our one man with a phone outsold all of the others combined.
Having a more efficient sales process can be a game changer.
However, the moment you can afford to have AE (Account Executives) and "sales" in general to field these calls, you might benefit. He IS leaving money on the table.
(yes, we have all pricing, free plan and super extensive docs on our site. But still calls and meetings seal the sweetest deals)
Every market is different. Don't generalize your market to this market. Companies also go through phases where, what works for them when they are small and working in a niche won't work when they are larger. I suspect that keygen will need to do sales calls at some point when they are larger; if they choose to grow into that market.
They not only answered in 1 day, but also provided a real solution / workaround for our issue, as well as a technical answer to the questions and a technical analysis of why the bug occurs.
Outstanding support, and I would never have guessed it from their website.
If L1 can solve things for you, a call sometimes can work, but really, if they can't, it meant multiple calls with L1 and multiple calls with L2 (in one recent example, it took 4 months for an issue to be resolved by internal support at BigCo where I was repeatedly asked for the same screenshot, including them recording me get to it a number of times, until I pinged their manager's manager via email pointing how they have the solution in there if they only read my emails, and got it resolved 2h later).
Maybe it could be done via email which is the point of this blog, but I never had the confidence to try that.
For reliable and specific matters using calls is unfit for the purpose. I avoid talking about those as a primary medium, being only suplementary. Something not written down never existed in the end.
In matters I do not know to the slightes, where to begin with, talking to a person is better starting with. Then after getting my bearings step back to the reliability of written words and written discussions and written agreements and such is the way.
And those insist on speeking instead of providing written info is a big warning sign about something fishy (intent of misdirection, incompetency, cluelessness, confused internals, ...) is hiding there.
I would love if we could talk with potential vendors directly through email. I think I one waited several months for the gatekeeper to ask the vendor engineers a 10 question document.
Granted, you need to be very responsive to your email, including monitoring it a little on the off hours.
She continues to grow her business territory each year for almost 2 decades and almost never makes sales phone calls. She does do scripted presentations for big deals from time to time but gets some support for those.
Although the alternative to that is not necessarily voice calls. Text chats would have been great, but which platform do you use? Everyone has got their own instant messaging systems these days.
There is also the perception that voice calls have a reduced likelihood of leaving a record, which is why some people are only reachable by phone.
Those voice interactions felt like some sort of psychological barrier that couldn't be bypassed any other way, at least initially, but once I have opened up a non-voice channel, that's what we tend to use going forward.
“Discovery calls are just a formality” was something I cringed at. It’s basically the most important part of the sales process.
The author also didn’t like the sales process where pricing is fuzzy. But for enterprise sales there is a very good reason for this: you need to size up how your solution solves business pain for your customer and how much money it saves or makes them. If you are saving AT&T a billion dollars with your solution but you’re only charging them $1000/month, you’ve royally fucked up. And a big client like AT&T will stress your support and engineering staff with a lot of requests for help and customizations.
At some point the author perhaps should have recognized the need to have someone who knows enterprise sales on their side rather than going it alone. I wanted the author so badly to admit that it’s something they’re are bad at and that they should get help. They are probably leaving a lot of growth on the table by having this amateur sales strategy.
I would recommend to the author the book Sales on Rails. It’s a great resource for understanding how technical enterprise sales works. The author seems completely unaware of the account executive sales engineer sales team that is so common because it works.
If the author is lucky to expand their business further they will hit a point where leads stop just contacting them. They will have to make cold calls and surface customers who aren’t obviously interested. This no-call strategy will not fly at every type of company.
I doubt the random engineer you emailed with is going to send you an email letting you know their CTO had dinner with a competitor who is offering to undercut you by 10%.
"... I usually prefer discussing async, via email, so I can provide more comprehensive answers and solutions, especially that we are talking about specific technical requirements.
Via email, we also have everything written down, if we ever need to recall/search for some specific detail. Does this work for you, or do you have other suggestion?"
A simple rule like, "You have to have pricing for you software service displayed on your website, if it's algorithmic you have to be transparent about the formula, how the variables are calculated, and provide a calculator".
Sure there are other good reasons to have a call - it is nice to have a high-bandwidth exchange about the needs of the company and build a relationship with the customer so you could still have calls for that purpose but if they're just trying to compare services, making it harder for the customer is just anti-competitive and leads to a less efficient marketplace.
Plus, good documentation is a force multiplier – if you document your security posture well once, you've just saved yourself from explaining the same things over and over on different calls. I've seen companies go from drowning in back-and-forth calls to handling most security reviews purely through email and documentation, with their technical teams only jumping in for the truly novel questions.
If I'm in a better mood, I ask them to send me some e-mail or PDF with what they have to offer.
I am adding your post to my bookmarks and will always reply to such messages with it.
But no internal calls? That's crazy.
No, I don't love calls, but I also don't love spending days on email threads when we could have a 30-minute conversation with all the stakeholders present (along with all the non-textual clues one gets from talking in real time to another human).
Is asynchronous communications sometimes a positive? Yes, sure. But it's also a big negative when you just need to discuss an issue, make a decision, and move on.
But most companies who'd try that would probably fail before they achieve it.
With a mathematical background, I can weigh every word carefully and only include words that add meaning. One short sentence can say a lot.
But people will still assume things, ignore some of those words, and misinterpret so it aligns with their views. When you quickly notice this in a sync communication (which is much easier in a video call compared to an IM chat or even a phone call if you can read facial expressions, body language and tone), that's easily fixed, but email thread can go on for days.
But I agree that you need both (I prefer text, really, but see my point).
Once you have less need for these cues because everyone is open and says "I don't understand what you are asking, please rephrase it in simpler terms", or "I have no idea what this project is. Do you know what our goal is?", it gets a lot easier and quicker. But it's very hard to assemble a team that does that well.
This is annoying because:
1) I have to spend 2-3 calls with salespeople (intro, demo usually minimum) - huge waste of time. I've already evaluated your product and determined it fits my needs.
2) At the end of all of those meetings after a couple weeks (plus the time it takes to get the quote approved) the product could be completely out of my budget. For tools like PAM or vulnerability management the pricing is relatively arbitrary.
So, I started creating https://vendorscout.net when people who have previously received quoting can anonymously upload the pricing they received for so and so users/endpoints so that you can get on the site and look up relatively accurate pricing for the product. I'm still working on the MVP but if you are interested, I'd love some help.
I don't think their business seems impressive enough to really make this argument either
Remembering what you talked about two weeks ago can be hard, E-Mail allows you to look back and re-read about what has happened before (important for both sides). It also relieves you from the burden of having a response ready in seconds.
I do not think you could sell a car over E-Mail, but for a technical product, where technical questions need to be answered I do think it is different. But I also think it is a problem of management, which intentionally avoids technical issues.
In addition, you can recall and copy/paste responses from previous emails.
This is one reason why I really, really like email.
Yes, there are some advantages to sharing screens. But, being able to communicate with both precision and brevity in writing has its advantages. I strongly believe this skill is what prioritized me for promotion over my peers. It certainly wasn't my work ethic. Hard work is not well valued when somebody who works less hard delivers more.
And yet, you still have to fill them in, because the people who ask you for them don't actually care to read them or do the data entry, and generally don't even understand them. It's often clear that they're the people who are supposed to be filing them out, when you get questions like "is the data stored according to our internal "level 3" designation described on this intranet page". I find it so frustrating. They say they have questions. They don't have questions, and they don't care about the answers. They care about whether their spreadsheet automatically highlights and cells in red.
"But hey, you want that sale don't you? So do my homework"
For my business (micro-SaaS EdTech), the value of building trust with my customers cannot be understated. Further, I don’t believe i can effectively build trust with my customers in the way the author describes; without meetings.
I have a client who tries to use calls to weasel out of paying for things. Finally I refused to talk to him on the phone any more. Some invoices remain outstanding but I'm not willing to waste more time listening to BS. I can spend my time making money from responsible people and meanwhile continue to have my invoice system pester him.
Re: sales, there is no such thing as a quick sales call.
In Chinese websites you can just see the price at website, and they mention different prices for different volumes. And if I need something custom, I can contact them and they would build it.
...But their pricing page actually has a big "Schedule a Call" button when you drag the pricing slider into enterprise territory: https://keygen.sh/pricing/
What am I missing?
Author here. Quoted text is from the conclusion at the end of the post.
I do the occasional 15m 'discovery call.' It's not a sales call, but more of an formality where we intro each other and then move onto email for deeper discussions.
Never having to take a sales call to grow a company is the dream for an introvert like me. And, as an open source developer, I care a lot about clear communication, transparency, and high-quality documentation.
Looking at the Keygen front page, I can see how effective they would be at targeting the kind of customer they'd want.
I personally have no use for software licensing products, but if I did, I would probably choose keygen just on the merits of this blog post.
On an unrelated note, that squashed font look they're using everywhere is really killing my eyes.
I'm in the camp that I'd rather hire the right person to do the job better than me (in sales) and focus where I'm most strong in instead.
"No calls" and "talk to right people" is unrelated. Just have a call with the engineer. At least you know they heard you not just ignored a cc.
Really, all one of these discovery calls really are is a short 15 minute call where I intro myself for 30s, they intro themselves, and then I hear about their problem. After that, I tell them yes/no we can solve that with X/Y/Z, thenI tell them I'll follow up via email with additional links and documentation unless there are any further pressing questions. And in that email, I ask that they CC relevant team members onto the email thread for further discussion.
An average typing speed is 40wpm but an average conversation is between 120 - 150 wpm so about 3 - 4x bandwidth.
Calls also offer sub second latency and maximum priority.
When you add video and audio in there, the pure amount of data transferred is higher.
Writing copy is 1-many and the many readers can read much faster than they can listen.
Making a demo video is also 1-many and can be sped up (who doesn’t listen to content at at least 1.2x these days?).
Copy and demo videos are essentially one way communication channels ("fire and forget"). The creator has no idea if the message was understood.
Also, writing copy or making a video typically takes 10 - 100x longer than consuming the same video.
On the other hand, it’s less clear if we’ve got good AI solutions for real-time calls. Yes, we have speech-to-text and live transcription, but they still require more setup and don’t always capture context as smoothly as a neatly structured email thread. For people who want everything documented and searchable—even the decision-making logic—AI-assisted written communication just works better right now.
I’m curious if future AI tools will make synchronous calls more appealing by automatically generating real-time summaries or helping participants get to the crux of the discussion faster. But at least for the moment, it seems AI is nudging us toward async rather than giving us a richer live conversation experience.
When I'm on the consuming end of a service, I would always rather help my self than interact with a sales person or support team.
If I want to buy something, I want a call to weed out the unuseful products quickly without having to comb through useless websites
If a customer can't read the website or documentation, I don't want them as a customer, because they'll just be a support burden. Similarly, if a customer can't determine if a product is useful, I either have a messaging problem, or they aren't a good fit; they can weed themselves out.
You either have to find PMF or you're going to die.
Can we stop with this crap already.
You hate calls because you hate calls. Not because you’ve made up a definition of introvert that helps you avoid phone calls.
...via email. :)
We got a later-stage startup to integrate with our API entirely off of a demo video.
I am so tired of someone at work saying "Hey, we're thinking of using X" (or "going to use X"), and I go to their web page, and what is X? Why, it's a tool that will unlock the value of my business and allow unparalleled visibility into my business to connect with my customers and brings highly-available best-of-breed services to us to secure and empower our business, which has up to this point just been businessin' along without the full power of businessy business that we could have been businessing if we just businessed this business product earlier.
But...
.. what is it?
Is it a hosted database? Is it a plugin to Salesforce CRM? Is it a training program? Is it a deployable appliance or VM image? Is it a desktop application? Is it a cloud service? Is it an API? Is it some sort of 3rd party agency meant to replace some bit of my business? Who is meant to use it? Developers? Business? Finance? Ops?
These are all very basic questions that are only the very beginning of understanding of what the product actually is, and I frequently can't even guess based on the home page. I have more than once been told we're using one of these products and linked to the homepage in question, and still had to come back and ask the person "Yes, but what is it?"
The best thing you can do is hit the developer docs page, if there is one, but even then it's fairly rare for there to be a clear answer. You have to poke through frequently disorganized, task-based documents with no clear progression as to "here's where to start with our product" and frankly some products have defeated me even so. I can get as far as "Ah, you have some sort of web interface" and probably some clue about what it actually is, but that hardly nails it down. You'd think I could juts derive the answer almost immediately.
So glad it's not my job to poke through these things. I have to imagine there's a lot of people who would equally find it a breath of fresh air to hit a website and have some sort of idea what it is in 30 seconds or less.
I understand, even if it's not my personal philosophy, still being vague on price so you have to call about that. I don't understand the idea behind hiding what your product even is behind such a thick layer of vague buzzwords that a professional in the field is still left virtually clueless about what it actually is even after a careful read.
How about we circle back to put a fork in it?
But seriously, when I see such nebulous companies, I immediately look elsewhere. They are either trying to sell snake oil or are just too clueless to understand what’s actually important.
Either way - a waste of time and effort.
You just want a single-sign-on thingamajig with 2FA, but the website is selling ultimate trustworthiness and compliance in an everchanging regulatory environment for dynamic and growing digital natives with federated AI. Hmm.
To do everything that you don't want to...
Why?
I can confirm as a (largeish) buyer, i despise useless calls and video conferences.
I do not have time, and it costs me money to hop on a 20 minute call just to find out it was a presentation of their slicks that were in PDF, or go through 30 slides that they could have emailed me.
It costs me money for a vendor and internal teams to eat time, and my cost change depending on the time of the day. My rate is highest during mid to late day. If you send me an email with the info and I can read it in my morning quiet time, it (mentally & $$) cost less, and I will be less grouchy.
there are some times when a call works. If the emails are fruitless because the writers lack the ability to be succinct, or cannot articulate what they need.
edit: @spiderfarmer wrote it much better.
We used to do lots of sales calls years ago, but 99% of our entreprise growth came from being active members of our community and talking (email!) to engineers. We still do sales calls, but they're essentially what the author calls "discovery calls". And we prequalify the shit out of leads before we take a call with them -- yes, that means taking a few minutes to learn about what they do.
Yes, yes that's right.
Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?
Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.
So you physically take the specs from the customer?
Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed.
So then you must physically bring them to the software people?
Well. No. Ah sometimes.
Nobody cares that calls are a pain, so everyone just keeps having them.
Typing out 3-4 sentences is an order of magnitude harder for them than making a few minute phone call.
I require everyone I hire take a typing speed test and know how to touch type. If they can't and they are a must-hire, I make their first two weeks involve an hour or two of typing tutor use. It's essential to an asynchronous workforce.
For anyone tired of the sales pitch, feel free to reach out as I've built a company who takes care of the entire procurement cycle for you (including negotiations)
*keygen noises intensify*