Most sales, especially within IT, is about trust.
Scaring a customer into buying with “fear of missing out” and you risk push them even longer away.
Scaring a customer into buying with “fear of missing out” and you risk push them even longer away.
Like healthcare, it's hard to treat individual private buyers as an efficient market. Housing has become more like NFTs and memestonks (It can only go up!)... which is true until it isn't and everything goes down. Supporting prices through leverage and regulatory control is now so ingrained that it's hard to do price discovery. (edit: strangely, like memecoins you can actually overbuild a lot of housing like in China and keep prices going up for up to a decade out of sheer buyer momentum)
One scummy trick in that area is owning multiple brands. My understanding is the appliance market is very consolidated (basically 2 main players own almost all the brands). They've carefully maintained the separate identities of the brands they acquired, even as they consolidated design/production, so any "badwell" they create will have a good chance of just causing the customer to switch to another one of their products.
There probably should be some kind of "reverse-trademark" law that requires companies to maintain only one brand in a product area. Trademark is about allowing them to protect their reputation from bad actors, and my "reverse-trademark" would protect consumers from using multiple trademarks to avoid the consequences of a bad reputation.
Our CIO ordered us to switch away from VMware when Broadcom made changes to the licenses. We are a mid-sized company with 1500+ employees. If I remember correctly, Broadcom anticipated some customers would switch away, but they could still profit more from their larger customers.
My friend works at a bank. They switched from Azure to Google Cloud because Microsoft's prices "didn't make sense" to them.
trust is a key in IT.
Where I work currently they won’t move off AWS because the relationship is really good and the support has been good (so I’ve been told) and they have had the relationship for quite some time so even though we could get better pricing with GCP or switching some things to more specialized yet reliable vendors we default to AWS for almost everything because the relationship is seen as solid and trustworthy with history to back it up
Doesn’t mean we don’t get quotes from other providers in negotiations at contract renewal time and use frameworks / technologies that allow us to switch vendors pretty easily if we needed and I know there is an upper limit here. However it’s also one of those “we pay a little more for peace of mind and familiarity” things, so it’s with some (relatively marginal) higher cost
But, I certainly don't use it to pressure the customer.
This is probably a bad assumption. A change in the offer price does not reflect on their trustworthiness. You’re also tricking yourself because someone wanting to lock you in down the road and raise the price won’t do it up front, they’ll do it later.
An offer price can change due to market conditions. The statement that price can’t be guaranteed is an optimistic speculation that sales or costs might jump, so you can buy now before their business increases and prices rise due to higher costs or demand. You can legitimately benefit if you buy before prices go up. You certainly can gamble that prices won’t go up, but if they do and you waited, it doesn’t mean the other party can’t be trusted, it means you lost the bet.
If you wait and get a higher price, that could even be a sign that the company is more trustworthy than if the offer doesn’t change. But of course there’s no guarantee. And ultimately there is no guarantee that when you buy a service on a limited time contract that you won’t have prices jump later when you’re ‘locked in’. It would be quite silly to not expect the renewal price later to rise for a variety of reasons, and you should have contingencies in place and be willing, able, and ready to switch providers.
I don't know what companies you are working in, but if the service is deemed valuable enough really nobody cares about money as long as it's in the ballpark of what similar services costs. And When it comes to time, yes all projects starts with "we gonna start using this this week" but we also know it takes a year to roll out even the most basic tool in a medium sized organization so a couple of weeks here and there doesn't really make a difference either.
All that matters is if the tool seems to solve your problems – and the price is not significantly different from the competitors and having a sales person bugging you every single day telling you you need to make the decision now because otherwise who knows what might happen to the price – honestly they can just go ** themselves. I make the decision when I'm ready, and if they are deciding to significantly jack up the price in between that period they are just making themself less trustworthy.
To your point perhaps, one thing large organizations value above most things is predictable cost. They actually don’t want usage based pricing because it’s unpredictable and could spike, even if the usage based cost is significantly lower on average.
I tried marketing usage based pricing to companies for too long before realizing that it was a disincentive working against me and that price didn’t matter much.
This is one of the primary reasons why I avoid any SaaS that I might actually come to depend on. It's a trap that is an inherent part of that model.
If you are selling something under $10k, then you can often get one person with budget approval up to $10k to buy it on a whim, and that's much easier. But that actual level is hard to figure out.
All that being said, your point feels like it could be restated to say they care a lot more about protecting their jobs. And, it is really strong right now.
Did not seem to negatively impact their sales after all... probably same mechanics on Booking.com etc. with hotel rooms.
I have a sort of life rule about being sold to -- if anyone is saying/implying that I need to make a purchasing decision quickly, my decision will always be to not make the purchase. There's no such thing as "act now or you lose" in the wider marketplace.