Why some software companies still make you talk to a salesperson
blog.reifyworks.com
blog.reifyworks.com
You hear things like: "We'd like to set up a meeting to plan a trial in Q1 and a full deployment in Q3"
Well, how I would do it is go to the form on the front page, add a credit card and do the trial. When Q3 comes I'd go the plan page and slide it all the way to the right.
Of course, that's not how their purchasing works, so you hold extra meetings and add extra cost. But it's funny when someone tries to jump through hoops and you have to hold them up for them.
I can understand big companies need a formal process though to protect themselves from potentially expensive mistakes when they have so many employees and are such an big mark for con-men.
The old adage when the price listed says '$ call us', it's a big number. For a certain class of application (ERPs, CMS, etc), sure does make sense, because pricing is very complex. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I would be baffled by a company that tells me the cost is tens or hundreds of dollars, but this doesn't exist.
The middle ground is products that are in the low hundreds to several thousands of dollars. There's a number of times where I have come across something that appears to fulfill a need I have, but that I could also do myself (whether by spending a week or because there's an open-source version that does 80% to base on).
Keep in mind there's always extra friction and admin overhead to dealing with commercial software, which has to be considered as part of purchasing: does it need a license to run on my build server? Does it have any kind of per-user charge, requiring extra system work to track? Are there redistribution licensing problems? Is there some stupid DRM that's going to cause me grief? Are you capable of dealing with a separate technical user (me) and paying user (my accounting department)? Am I going to have to deal with annual renewals? etc..
So if it turns out the direct cost is less than building it myself, it's a much easier decision. If it's significantly higher, now I have to really weigh the above against the opportunity cost and risk.
When I can't even see where in the spectrum the software lies, but I'm going to have to spend at least 30 minutes on the phone with some sales person to figure that out (plus probably deal with them periodically harassing me for the next year), the whole thing is that much less appealing.
I tend to move on to the next one, and only come back if there are no remotely similar options. It makes me sad a bit because there's no way this company can know they lost me as a customer merely by putting '$ call us' (even if the price would have been acceptable).
In terms of it making you a bit said that companies don't know they're losing your money, I would say that they actually probably do know. They may or may not care about that missed opportunity, but in most cases, I bet it hurts them to know that they can't serve you. The ideal case for a company is to be able to serve the customers who want their product. In reality, every company has to make a number of tradeoffs, many of which are directly related to the stage and size of the company, and in some cases that means they'll never be able to serve everyone.
I think it's also interesting to think about why some companies won't just put a pricepoint on their pricing page. In most cases, this is seen as a strategic decision, for one reason or another. I think putting something like "starting at $10,000/year" or something like that is a good place to start, though. What do you think?
Just went through this exact process with Bomgar. Our company was debating between TeamViewer and Bomgar. TV = All pricing on page. BG = Can't see anything, must call in and 'speak to salesman'.
The sales process with BG was so long and drawn out - multiple emails to setup calls, wouldn't provide basic info in writing, etc. In the end we just went with TeamViewer highest end edition.
Came to find out about a month later that Bomgar pricing may've been the cheaper option for our use case. Oh well...
The ones with their pricing for fixed plans listed publicly on their site got our business.
"Starting at $9 / month / server" starts all your pricing conversations at $9 / month / server, even if the solution they called to ask about is listed at $150 / month / server. That wastes a ton of sales time following up with people who can't afford what they think they can afford.
"Typically priced around $10,000" scares off people who might be able to buy a smaller package.
starving-student use case (with obvious keywords showing it's starving-student) = $9
typical low-end use case = $150
typical high-end use case A = $5k
typical high-end use case B = $10k
anything else = "call us"
It's not going to be more involved than a call, I don't have to deal with your sales people and I get, at worst, an approximate figure.
If your pricing cannot fit within this model, I would assume you do price discrimination or have serious pricing issues.
Else I know I am gonna get screwed. First, the price will be set as my face fits (there is even an expression for that in my language, I am unsure how it translates to English which does not seem to have the equivalent saying); that means depending how the salesman judges me, he will set a price according to the maximum of what he imagines I am ready to pay. If I call from another company, I may get a different offer for the same product. If I word my request differently, he may infer I am the sucker of the day.
Then he will expect me to bargain. Fuck that. That means his second or final offer still provides him the reasonable benefit he needs. Which also means that he only provides lubricant now and he was ready to fuck me dry with the same plastic smile in the first place if I did not bargain. How can I trust someone like that? How can I trust I got a fair price? What if I hear someone else got a different price? Will I be pissed at the seller or... very pissed at the seller?
Oh, and meanwhile, he has wasted my time, and he has wasted his own time talking and talking, or exchanging several mails across several days. I have had salesmen coming to my office, and then during the meeting calling their company each time I asked something to get a different price than the official one. What is the point of this cinema? I know the guy on the phone is just reading a price list, he's not making complex financial calculations for stuff in the range of $100. Why doesn't the first guy have it? He knows he's not going to use the official price anyway.
If they get kicks from that, that's fine, find themselves a game or a sport that does the same. Because now they are costing their company money, and that money has to be taken from the price I pay, so I necessarily pay more than if they had just put a price list. Price list that they do have ready, because they're not pulling the prices they tell me out of their asses. But they keep it 'secret', as keeping it secret is the only justification of their job existence.
I just want a price list, that includes the proper benefit to have their company live fine, that's all. I can read the varying "prices per quantity" columns as the salesman does, thank you.
EDIT: and I forgot the case when the price is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher than what we can afford. I want to know it immediately, before I spend any minute considering the product, which may be all bells an whistles, but since I cannot afford anyway, it doesn't matter. So it makes me adjust my expectations.
It costs money to hire Sales people, and if a company were able to sell its products entirely as a self-service option, that would help them improve margins. So people in the Sales profession have to justify their existence every single day - what have you done for me lately etc.
The only way to succeed in the profession is to show results, to help customers understand and extract the value of what they're buying so they can come back to buy more and tell their friends.
You might see Sales people succeed in the short-term by lying or cheating their customers but that doesn't last. Your reputation catches up to you. Depending on the industry, every one knows everyone else, and the only way to truly succeed in the long term is to make sure you create a win-win for both the customer and your employer, every time, on every sale.
We have no trouble selling to people who know they have a problem (we are first in Google if they search for a solution), our problem is all the people that aren’t even looking. Our sales people have to literally physically cold call people to educate them that they have a problem as nothing else works.
The good news is the LTV is high enough to support this form of selling, but it certainly is a huge pain.
I am not meaning that our users are unaware that they have a problem in general, but they are unaware their problem has any solution. People only look for solutions to problems they think have solutions. Otherwise it becomes like bad weather and just accepted.
This is another common and overlapping problem, companies that can't explain what they're selling. No one should need to talk to a salesman to understand what they're buying, if they do then the marketing has failed. I wonder if this is caused be sales teams being in charge of the website and not wanting to make themselves obsolete.
It seems to be infecting OSS too, just last night I was considering installing fedora but the website manages to tell me absolutely nothing (https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/).
I think it's a bit simplistic to suggest that an entirely one-way communication can solve all problems well.
There is logic behind hiring some people to build the product, and different people to explain the product.
That might still be a marketing failure. Perhaps there's a better way to capture that salesman knowledge and apply it to the customer automatically, or perhaps it's a failure of the product design that it's so complicated in the first place.
I never said not to have salesmen, just don't make it the only way to get this basic information.
Documentation is much more encompassing and often in more of a wiki format. You could include a recipes section for example, which apart from being useful for customers, it can also show off what the software can do. A FAQ section is another very common one. People asking for a manual is really people asking "how do I do X".
(Though I understand also what secondary functions they serve -- or at least appear to serve -- for some companies).
I also don't buy from companies that don't publish their manuals online. I nearly always read the manual before buying, because 99% of the time the marketing copy or "specifications" page is inadequate to properly evaluate the product. If the manuals aren't published, they might have something to hide or they might be in the habit of making documentation conditional on support contracts. Either way it makes it impossible for me to evaluate the product.
Respect your sales people - they need to be as good at their gig as you are at yours.
Yeah, sure. That's the perfect example of typical commercial bullshit speech that drives me nuts at you guys.
> from people of similarly specialised actual talents.
Yeah sure, they are not at all people who ended up there because:
1. They were not able to do anything else.
2. They have a lust for money and playing with people.
Please cut the crap, when you hold this kind of speeches, I know you're already trying to make me a fool.
By the way, salespeople who make 6 or 7 figures in commission per annum didn't pick that job because they weren't "able to do anything else."
Are you telling me SV engineers have picked jobs where they make 6 figures coincidentally? Or maybe they just ended up there because:
1. They were shy nerds who couldn't do anything but code 2. They hate money so they pick jobs that put them in the 90th income percentile
Or maybe... it looks like things are a bit more complicated and clichés aren't adding much to the discussion.
"Here are the mean, median, and mode prices for the solutions we offer to our customers:" ?