Comment by jampa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jampa | Hacker News Reader

I remember working at a company where we used a vendor extensively in their mid-tier plan. We wanted an enterprise plan with more features, so we reached out to buy it.

So, their salesperson was shooting a penalty with no goalkeeper: All they needed to do was send an offer, and we would negotiate and close the deal.

Instead, they called my CTO multiple times, all at awkward times, like during his lunch. When he didn't pick up, they started calling HIS WIFE. The CTO eventually unplugged the vendor, and we had to find an alternative.

Ironically, another competing vendor we contacted did the same: they never stopped calling, they never wanted to schedule a proper meeting by email, and when you picked up, they didn't want you to hang up, even when you were busy.

I don't know how sales in tech can be so bad. Not even car dealers are like that. If I see a form stating, "Contact us for pricing," I am never doing it. I don't want to be grilled for 30 minutes on BDE calls: "Can you even pay us?" and then another hour of death by PowerPoint until they finally give you a price. That is, if they don't spam calls first.

This made me recall a sales interaction with a company myself. Somehow a sales person from a company noticed we were in the market for an somewhat expensive product their company was selling.

They always called during lunch hours (three times). When I finally had a short moment, there was (1) nothing substantial the sales person could tell me about their products or their prices, (2) they had no idea how we (public sector) have to buy things and wanted me to make an exception and when I asked them to just email me their offer to my publicly available email address (3) they didn't.

By that point that company would have been better off not having a sales person. And that type of experience was up to today nearly the only thing that happened with sales, except for one time where the company sent a technician to have a look at our circumstances which worked great.

I've had even worse. We wanted to buy a product and couldn't do so on our own, so I left my contact information on their "speak to a sales person" form.

No response for a week. So I emailed an email address that was included in the onboarding email.

No response for another week. So I sent their CEO a message on LinkedIn. Hey, I really want to buy, let's talk.

No response for another week (and four months later). So I gave up.

For B2B, there are often close relationships with client interests. If a small firm signs a non-compete and NDA with a competitor, it can cost a lot more than a single sale to chat.

Also, in niche industries everyone already knows one another for decades. People looking to fragment that market are seen as a problem even if they don't know they are a problem.

It is rude to "ghost" people, but it is unfortunately a modern pop-culture trend. Most competent firms should at minimum refer your team to a competitor if their schedule is full for the year. =3

> If a small firm signs a non-compete and NDA with a competitor, it can cost a lot more than a single sale to chat.

this has nothing to do with not answering emails.

> People looking to fragment that market are seen as a problem even if they don't know they are a problem.

you mean customers?

> It is rude to "ghost" people, but it is unfortunately a modern pop-culture trend

no its not. ignoring people is as old as time.

> this has nothing to do with not answering emails.

For you maybe, sometimes the entitled do not recognize the liability their antics bring to other business dynamics.

>you mean customers?

You mean your potential 1 sale is worth more than years long account activity your competitors have shown? Some customers are just not worth the grief, and you make more profit not selling to them... Too-big or too-small some people are just are not worth the risk... You'll be out of business if you ignore this...

>> It is rude to "ghost" people,

>no its not. ignoring people is as old as time.

Hence the mystery is solved, some companies won't want that kind of contradictory business relationship liability. People often can't get away with that behavior unless they are running a fast food outlet with low value stakes. lol =3

The main cause of this phenomenon is the simple fact that, many B2B startups are going to try their hardest to charge you the maximum you can afford, rather than a standard price. So their first job is to figure out how deep your pockets are.

Another cause is that, a lot of B2B startups are building the plane while flying it - they don't actually have all of the enterprise features they claim to have (or at least, the features aren't yet generalized enough - think "if customer.name == 'BigCo' then DoBigCoThing()" type of code). So they need to figure out what your needs are, and thus what things will need to be cobbled together by the time the deal closes.

It doesn’t even have to be as nefarious as trying to maximally charge. Very often what seems like a simple product offering can actually be quite nuanced with services or goods bundled or unbundled. I’ve listened to many sales calls where the buyer was asking for the wrong thing, and giving a quote for that thing doesn’t really do anyone any good. In my experience the best sales people are really trying their best to tailor their offerings to the needs of the customer even going so far as pointing them at cheaper products or even another company if it fits their needs better.

The datadog sales team would do that kind of things to us, which basically led to us banning them from even consideration.

Love that goalkeeper line. 100% my experience with so many SaaS companys.

@netlify I hope you see this. You are terrible at the buyer-pull. We want log shipping, but to get that, we have to go into the "enterprise" tier... We are a startup with very little money, and what is log shipping worth to us? Not hundreds a month. Honestly it's worth a little less than whatever the cost of us moving to Vercel is (where log shipping is not part of enterprise).

So now I've now been through multiple sales emails from them trying to get me on a call to "discuss how we can help you" which I know is just going to be Netlify trying to upsell me into a bunch of "enterprise" features we don't need. Just tell me the price and let me click a button to enable it!

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