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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

I'm in violent agreement with this. If I have to call you to get a price, I've already moved on.

It works backwards too: If having to call me to get a price makes you move on, you wouldn't afford me anyway.

Well, I might have $10k - $20k/year to spend, but not have $100k/year to spend. This isn't the difference between someone looking at a $10k product with a $50 budget. Lots of time these Sales Rep Funnels are just there to put you in contact with a sales rep that will try to upsell you on anything that they can, even if you don't need it.

[redacted] was such a company. We could not buy (well 'lease' as it's software) the product without agreeing to also purchase training sessions for end-users from them. Even trying to get developers to talk to technical people (so the product could be evaluated) had to be mediated by a sales person so that they could inject their pitches (and up-sells) whenever possible on the conference call.

Edit: Pulling the name just to avoid possible issues. I'll just say that it was a company selling a data warehousing / business intelligence product that a company I worked for needed to use a small portion of to fulfill some contractual obligations (i.e. purchased a company, and needed to port their 100% Microsoft stack over to their 100% OSS stack while retaining feature parity for the acquired company's only customer -- a major Hollywood studio).

This is how my calls with Akamai usually go. The last one was how they tried to sell us ~$50K in DDOS prevention services that Cloudflare does for $200/month. Insert "Are you fing kidding me" face here during call

Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line, but they were the rubber-stamp variety once something was seen as necessary for the project. Many of those decisions were based on "here's a handful of options, there's others we can follow up on if none of these are satisfactory" conversations. Anyone that required contacting them for a ballpark estimate ended up in the second group, and as often as not were not even considered.

"you wouldn't afford me anyway"
Yes, and included in this price is the Sales person doing a sales pitch in site, the mountains of reports and price proposals, the hours of conference calls, the kickbacks to whoever makes the decisions and a nice margin so that the price can be negotiated
And unless you're doing something really, really hard you're overpriced anyway

Who says it's a choice between publishing the price on a public webpage and forcing the user to make the call?
The "Get free trial/demo/brochure" link to a contact form works fine: that way the company gets to decide whether they want to call you or send a form email with pricing/signup information. In theory a service like Eloqua could even automate who gets a link to the pricing page and who gets a call from the sales rep, although I suspect salespeople generally have better judgement on what looks like a good lead.
And in the mid-high priced B2B market, if you move on without leaving an email/telephone number your enquiry probably wasn't serious enough to warrant giving you a price.

Sounds like there's a market for me to employ people in the third world to call/email companies who don't publish their prices and then for me to publish that info (Think Glassdoor.com for SaaS services without transparent pricing).

It's practically the raison d'etre for third party subscription agents that already exist, although their business model revolves around actually handling the purchasing part and charging a fee for it. I guess your alternative: flat rate access to a well structured general price list of software, data services and biz intel products would have some value to some BigCorp purchasing specialists, but would it cover the costs of putting it together?
It's also pretty easily ignored at the high end of the market where salespeople won't quote anybody without a proper telephone conversation and/or valid company email, and will claim every package is highly customised (even if it isn't). Even at the low end it's easily dismissed as "out of date", "inaccurate" or "for a different service we've discontinued"... and believe me I've had that conversation plenty of times about third party guesstimates of product prices when those excuses were actually true

I'm the same way. Why even have a website if after looking at the site for twenty minutes to get some idea, even a ballpark of pricing, you're going to try and push me to call/email someone to get a price quote??
Nothing gets me more annoyed than companies and their sites that do this. It's completely the opposite reason for having a website in the first place. DUH

They do this because they are signalling that they're not interested in your business. They are interested in the business of companies that can afford to pay someone to go through the dance of reaching out and setting up a call to learn about pricing.

Haha. Good way to put it. Feel the same way. We talked more about it here: "Why Your Secret Pricing Strategy is Overrated" - http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-...

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