[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What happens when I click "request for quote...
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Ask HN: What happens when I click "request for quote" on your SaaS?
How do you come up with the pricing that is offered to me on your
enterprise plan?
Author : mjbale116
Score : 137 points
Date : 2024-06-19 10:06 UTC (1 days ago)
| zkirill wrote:
| Sometimes no pricing is offered because the lead quality is
| judged to be too low to move forward.
| salesynerd wrote:
| To add from my experience, some customers just want the pricing
| to do comparison shopping, justify their bespoke system
| development efforts, or just to know what is happening in the
| market. I have had a situation where I didn't offer pricing as
| the lead was really not the right fit; they went ahead and
| complained directly to my higher management. Luckily, I had
| already marked the lead as closed in my CRM with the required
| explanation and my reporting manager had faith in me.
| mtmail wrote:
| Enterprise customers can ask for different payment terms (bank
| transfer instead of credit card, 30/60/90 day payment goals),
| legal and security review, different termination periods,
| amendments to the standard contract, sometimes different
| currency. So it starts a discussion of their requirements. Some
| companies won't even tell you their requirements before signed
| NDAs were exchanged. Others require you to create an account at
| their finance system (SAP, Cisco, Oracle Financials and such).
|
| Then depending how formal the customer is the reply can be a text
| email with a quote, a formal quote that looks almost like an
| invoice (PDF), or even a 10 page draft document for further
| discussion.
|
| This might sound like a lot of extra work, something that can't
| easily be automated, but those companies are used to long sales
| processes. The product manager needs to liaison with their legal
| department, then with their accounting department. "Request for
| quote" and "contact sales" are essentially the same.
| mtmail wrote:
| Oh, I didn't answer the "How do you come up with the pricing"
| part.
|
| Pricing is usually the same only scaled higher. We have an
| Excel spreadsheet that's an extension of the public pricing
| page. Then we look if something is complicating the contract
| (but we might only insist on minimum contract length, not
| higher price) or making it easier (they need less features
| which actually cost us less money and we can give discounts).
|
| That's for an established SaaS. I assume any new SaaS only few
| months old will just make prices up on-the-fly (we did!).
| Terretta wrote:
| It's not the price. It's the stupid insistence on putting
| "SSO" -- which even a single dev should be doing, preferably
| using OIDC so nobody does any work! -- behind that button.
| nlitened wrote:
| Those who really need SSO are willing to pay extra -- why
| not charge them more for something that is useful for them?
| kuschku wrote:
| OIDC is the only way to get proper 2FA into all services
| without adding tons of friction. Friction reduces
| acceptance and usage of 2FA.
|
| Every service that puts SSO in an enterprise tier is a
| security risk and shouldn't be touched with a 10 foot
| pole.
|
| Go ahead and put Kerberos and SAML and maybe even LDAP
| SSO in Enterprise tier, but if you put OIDC in enterprise
| tier, you're responsible when your customers will get
| inevitably hacked.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Should != _really needs to_. There 's a _lot_ of money in
| the delta between the two.
| flessner wrote:
| As a customer that process makes sense if I had those extra
| requirements, but why do so many SaaS lock SSO
| (Google/Microsoft) behind their Enterprise offerings?
|
| I get that it's for differentiation between plans, but as a
| customer it feels weird to walk into this pricing black hole
| just for SSO. Maybe you have some experience with that?
| mtmail wrote:
| I don't have experience with SSO. It's a typical feature SaaS
| tries to charge extra for
| (https://www.enterpriseready.io/#features). Maybe they don't
| have an add-on feature in their billing app.
| codegeek wrote:
| also known as https://sso.tax
| mathiasn wrote:
| or even better https://ssotax.org
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Most SaaS companies will tell you that they would rather not
| lock this important security feature behind enterprise. But
| the reality is that it is one of the few things enterprise
| will pay for and gate on and as such it's become very
| effective as a differentiator. The edict to gate everything
| behind SSO is powerful in large enterprises and as such they
| will absolutely pay to be able to do that, making it a very
| easy internal sales tactic. The market has spoken, for better
| or worse.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| I read your comment as saying that SSO is denied to
| "regular" (non-enterprise) customers because enterprise
| customers would buy the regular product if it was included
| there, thus pointing out that all the other "enterprise"
| needs (terms, etc) aren't real?
| coding123 wrote:
| Small companies don't need sso because when an employee
| leaves, they just go into all their sass and remove the
| user or change the password. A large company can't work
| without SSO because in an org with hundreds of users they
| can't login to each SASS and disable and enable everyone
| coming and going at the company, which is many per month
| in some cases.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Small companies don 't need SSO_
|
| This is incorrect.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Depends on the definition of "small" which I take to mean
| early stage startups.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Why? You use SSO in your personal life all the time. Why
| would you not want to continue doing so in your business?
|
| If anything, small companies need SSO more than any
| others - those companies usually outsource a lot (SaaS vs
| a dedicated hire), managing credentials is annoying.
| Terretta wrote:
| So we agree that small companies do need it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This is very much correct, and quite self-evident: they
| live without, therefore they don't _need_ it. Wanting
| something != needing it. Companies that _actually need_
| SSO are the ones that have internal or external
| compliance requirements, and /or for which managing users
| without SSO becomes prohibitively expensive. Turns out,
| at that point, they're willing to pay through the roof
| for it.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _quite self-evident: they live without, therefore they
| don 't need it_
|
| Lots of people live without things others observe they
| need. Doesn't make going without a good idea.
|
| > _Companies that actually need SSO are the ones that
| have internal or external compliance requirements..._
|
| This logic is backwards.
|
| Why do you think SSO is a "requirement" that security
| certifications or compliance policies look for? Why did
| that come to be? Who does SSO benefit? Are those personas
| relevant for only large companies or small ones too?
|
| Do beginning drivers not "need" seatbelts or brakes? Or
| are these devices only needed to avoid tickets and pass
| inspection?
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| If smaller/early stage shops adopt SSO and other sensible
| practices early on, it makes scaling easier and cheaper
| in the long run.
|
| I've gone through a few "migrations to SSO" after years
| of non-SSO with customers in the past and it's a fucking
| expensive nightmare.
| nlitened wrote:
| > I've gone through a few "migrations to SSO" after years
| of non-SSO with customers in the past and it's a fucking
| expensive nightmare.
|
| Yet the customers still paid, so it was worth for them.
| Too wrote:
| SSO has lots of other benefits. MFA primarily. This is
| non negotiable these days, even for the smallest company.
| I've not seen many services supporting this without SSO.
|
| Don't get me started on the services that have their own
| smart ideas on what constitutes a safe password. Max 8
| characters with no repeated letters and of which 4 must
| be an emoji, with automatic logout every 12 minutes. Yes
| those still exist.
|
| Password policies are things you want control over in
| your IdP to avoid all this BS. SSO really should be
| standard.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _This is non negotiable these days, even for the
| smallest company._
|
| Says who?
|
| In reality, users don't care. Regulators, however,
| sometimes do, which leads to certifications and
| compliance requirements - and _only then_ SSO and MFA
| become non-negotiable.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Most enterprise features are nice-to-haves. SSO is a
| must-have for companies with enough security or
| compliance ceremony, which includes most enterprises.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| As a company, I much rather not deal with passwords, MFA,
| and password/MFA-reset procedures. That costs money to
| develop and maintain.
|
| Storing ClientID and ClientSecret for OpenID, or some keys
| for SAML per customer is much easier, and a lot less risky.
|
| After all, I'm in the business of solving (insert SaaS
| problem), not in the business of solving authentication.
| Terretta wrote:
| So add a cost to regular pricing as a checkbox, and let
| people not talk to you.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| In my experience SSO is high-touch. Sure there are self-
| service portals and control panes but big company IT
| departments are ticket processing machines, and it becomes a
| game of broken telephone to make changes. When something
| doesn't work, what do you do?
|
| Offering SSO as part of an enterprise SKU offering implies
| there is a high-touch relationship out of the gate, and that
| there is a higher chance of success and adoption, including
| getting SSO set up right.
|
| Furthermore many large behemoth corporations have strange SSO
| configurations and it's not unusual to require bespoke
| configuration let alone debugging time.
| Terretta wrote:
| Custom SSO, fine.
|
| But "Sign in with..." or "Continue with..." M365 and Google
| gets you almost all SMB, and with Apple gets you
| individuals who spend money.
|
| Add a domain check and you have the quick and dirty
| equivalent of SAML SSO without any touch at all.
|
| https://id.atlassian.com/login
|
| https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth
| walterbell wrote:
| See the "Free SSO providers" column at
| https://ssotax.org.
| tetha wrote:
| This is the strategy we're adopting at work.
|
| People are currently implementing a simple self-service
| for common SAML and OIDC providers, like O365 and such.
| This will be free and recommended for all customers to
| use, because I believe in providing actual security for
| our customers.
|
| And then you can order a consulting project on top to
| figure out a good way to import user groups, user
| identities and such into the platform, and ideally to
| integrate our preferred group structures with a customers
| existing approval and group structures. This also
| includes help to initially connect us to the IDP. This is
| priced at a relatively cheap consultant level.
|
| And then there is a second tier of consulting projects if
| the customer is using a non-standard IDP and can't do it
| on their own. Like, we have one customer that has an in-
| house developed SAML provider, but the original people
| who worked on it aren't there anymore. That was an
| interesting project and I learned way more stuff about
| SAML than I ever wanted, and also fixed a bug in their
| SAML provider code. This is priced right between "subject
| matter experts" and "no".
|
| That's what I consider a very fair split. Simple SSO for
| everyone, especially on standard providers. And if you
| want to save a day or two of your identity and
| authentication teams, you can hand us some cash to do so.
| Smaller customers generally won't need this, they usually
| just have 1-2 groups they want to push and that's easy to
| do, but large customers with complex directories and many
| users in different departments like these projects a lot.
| nunez wrote:
| Because SSO outside of the OAuth2 happy flow [0] can be a
| pain in the ass to develop for and support.
|
| Some customers use Okta; great! But some of those customers
| have Okta configured in ways that don't work with your auth
| service. Some customers use Okta as a downstream to their
| _actual_ IdP, which could be Keycloak (a million different
| ways to configure that) or, god forbid, some custom thing
| they wrote. You've gotta support that.
|
| Some customers (the ones that will pay the REALLY big bucks)
| use Active Directory Federated Services and SAML-based auth.
| SAML is XML/SOAP. Gigantic pain. Gotta support it.
|
| Some customers want LDAP/LDAP-S based auth. Gotta support
| that.
|
| Given all this, it makes much more financial sense to lock
| that behind customers who are willing to pay the big dollars
| for enterprise-y features AND support instead of dealing with
| infinitely long support tickets.
|
| [0] There is no such thing as a happy OAuth2 flow.
| vinckr wrote:
| Its pretty trivial to support the use cases you mentioned
| with Ory OAuth2/Hydra and Ory Kratos.
|
| LDAP is harder, but IMO you dont need it unless you operate
| in a very specific industry.
| mbesto wrote:
| I tell you why: SSO means I'm going through a qualified
| purchasing route, which means getting finance/procurement and
| then subsequently IT involvement. SSO implies I'm using the
| product company wide, versus a group of 2~10 people in the
| marketing group. As others have mentioned, there is a very
| justifiable reason to have a relationship between sales and
| procurement/IT.
|
| Unpopular opinion - you may like to call it an SSO tax, but I
| think it's perfectly reasonable from both sides. The reality
| is - if you're a 10 person startup and the "SSO tax" is
| annoying, then simply don't do the SSO version...you have 10
| people in your company, you can get them all to use a
| password manager with MFA. If you're worried about security
| then fine, don't you think it's worth paying a little more?
|
| If people's issue with the "SSO tax" is that the SaaS
| software provider is making incremental money for very little
| effort/investment, then I would love to explain how the
| economics of most SaaS tenancy models work with regards to
| infrastructure spend...
| Terretta wrote:
| Having been an infrastructure provider for 30 years, this
| answer is largely unjustifiable.
|
| It's a bunch of handwaving to try to get price
| discrimination for a "how the Internet is supposed to work"
| standard everyone, even a single dev client of the SaaS,
| should be using.
|
| And that the SaaS provider should be _pushing_ so they don
| 't have the liability of subscriber credential database
| protection ...
| mbesto wrote:
| > even a single dev client of the SaaS, should be using.
|
| Having assessed 600+ software companies (many of which
| are 5-50 employees), I'd say about half of them use MFA
| consistently across their business. And it's not a
| budgetary issue, but more of a logistic/IT/prioritization
| one.
| kuschku wrote:
| It'd be 100% if SSO was commonly included.
| DandyDev wrote:
| 10 person startup -> that is a strawman if I ever saw one.
| There are many 100 person scale ups that are pre-profit for
| who the hassle of managing separate accounts for X SaaS
| tools for 100+ people is justifiably too much to ask but
| who can also not justify paying literally 50x as much as
| the highest non Enterprise tier
| mbesto wrote:
| > literally 50x
|
| This is _literally_ not the case. The pricing is nowhere
| near 50x - in fact if you negotiate the rates are only
| marginally higher than the tier below it.
|
| FWIW - the sentiment I get here is that the gripe isn't
| necessarily the pricing (you notice how no one has quoted
| specific increases?) but that they have to pick up the
| phone to talk to someone for what they believe to be such
| a small feature.
|
| > There are many 100 person scale ups that are pre-profit
| for who the hassle of managing separate accounts for X
| SaaS tools for 100+ people
|
| So you're telling me that a company is complaining that
| they have to pay extra money for features that reduce
| their administrative burden and limit their risk, thereby
| costing them less money? Explain that one to me...
|
| > There are many 100 person scale ups that are pre-profit
|
| Also, put yourself in the seat of the owner of a software
| provider, would you rather win the sales opportunities of
| 10,000s of businesses that aren't pre-profit or the
| hundreds of businesses that match your criteria? I know
| who I'd be marketing to...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Startups/scaleups can grow arbitrarily large pre-profit;
| that's not a feature, that's a bug.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> why do so many SaaS lock SSO (Google /Microsoft) behind
| their Enterprise offerings?_
|
| "Price discrimination" is a pricing strategy where very
| similar products are sold at different prices in different
| market segments.
|
| Imagine you've invented an amazing silver bullet that makes
| software developers 30% more productive.
|
| For the likes of Google who pay developers $200k/year,
| getting 30% more productivity would be a great deal even if
| you were charging them $10k per user per year, because that
| productivity boost is worth $60k.
|
| For unpaid students, casual users, open source projects and
| cash-strapped micro-businesses - a 30% improvement in $0 is
| still $0 so they can't afford much. Maybe $50/user/year, and
| they'll still complain like hell about it. But it'll help
| your tool spread and build word-of-mouth.
|
| So how do you price your product - $50 or $10,000?
|
| With "price discrimination" you can do both. Offer a cheap
| tier for home users and micro-businesses, and an enterprise
| tier with features Google desperately wants, at a much higher
| price.
|
| By having prospective customers call for pricing, your sales
| folk can research each customer and figures out whether
| they're the kind of place that pays their developers
| $200k/year or more like $30k/year - allowing them to figure
| out how much the product is worth to that particular
| customer.
| supafastcoder wrote:
| Is there a solution out there that manages all this paperwork
| and custom requirements/contracts?
| bearjaws wrote:
| Enterprises want you to use their contract, depending whats in
| there the price only goes up.
|
| SOC2 reports, SLA monitoring dashboards, 5% annual increase
| limits, they can put literally anything as a requirement.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| And the seller can say "no" as well. It's a scary proposition
| for old hats, but I've only ever seen it make a small number of
| buyers frustrated with the lack of special treatment (but buy
| the product anyway, and in all but one case turn our to be
| great, engaged customers).
| brudgers wrote:
| The company responds, "How may we help you?"
|
| Maybe you are shopping on price.
|
| Maybe you are seeking bespoke services.
| hartator wrote:
| We have public pricing for our Enterprise plan:
| https://serpapi.com/enterprise
| htrp wrote:
| I always assumed that the sales rep guesses a price point that
| you're willing to pay based on how big your company is (and of
| course building in the inevitable 20% discount your procurement
| team will want).
| keiferski wrote:
| YMMV, but in my experience this is less common than you think
| and is instead more based on the baseline costs of specific
| features or customizations the client wants.
|
| In other words, it's rare to have a huge variation of costs
| given to customers for the same product, even if they are
| higher or lower for certain customers.
| axegon_ wrote:
| My current company is not a SaaS but I have worked at two in the
| past and both did the exact same thing: schedule a call with a
| sales person.
| rsstack wrote:
| I've been part of the team that sets up this process at a few
| SaaS's, and I've done SaaS procurement for a while, so I clicked
| that button often (if I didn't know anyone at the company).
|
| 1. It gets added to a list of marketing website leads, which is
| owned by SDRs/BDRs who are there to filter and qualify leads.
| These are usually early-career people, with a base salary + quota
| for qualifying leads. The website is many times their least
| preferred channel of leads due to the quality, but they can't
| ignore it because sometimes good customers do come through there.
|
| 2. The SDR will either work over email or on a call; their goal
| is to identify if you're a real potential customer (vs shopping
| for prices, vs confused about what we sell), write up notes, and
| identify which customer segment you belong to (geography +
| business type + business size).
|
| 3. You will then speak to a salesperson (with varying titles
| "Account Executive", "Sales Director", "Regional VP of Enterprise
| Sales", or whatever inflated title makes sense for that sales
| organization). Their goal is to confirm they're speaking to the
| right person in your organization (or wasting their time), if
| your use case is meaningful enough for the "enterprise plan"
| (they can't sign too small deals), what your budget is, what your
| usage will be like, etc.
|
| 4. Pricing could be made up by guessing your price point, but
| it's rare. It is difficult to consistently make up pricing that
| works over time and doesn't have many lowball deals that harm the
| company's revenue long-term, and salespeople often don't
| understand the technical details well enough to make things up
| that make sense. Usually, there will be a pricing framework and
| an internal calculator (very often, a spreadsheet with formulae
| and VLOOKUPs) that will give them a range. They can then choose
| what number within that range to offer, based on who they think
| you are and how far off they are from their quarterly quota.
|
| 5. They can then negotiate the number, or the included features,
| or the payment terms (upfront payment, multi-year contract, exit
| clauses, etc.) which can be translated into discounts if they're
| favorable to the seller.
| eloisant wrote:
| How is a lead from the website bad quality? It's litterally a
| customer saying "I want to subscribe and pay more than the
| self-service price tag", no?
| kroolik wrote:
| Its more like "Im interested in subscribing and paying more"
| jkingsman wrote:
| Or it's someone who's intrigued by the concept of the product
| and is curious how much it costs. All it literally can be
| interpreted as is "a [probable] human is curious how much
| this costs" -- intent to purchase varies from positive to
| zero.
| preetamjinka wrote:
| Depends on who clicks the button. It could be a junior person
| doing some research for their team, in which case they are
| not the decision maker nor the one with the budget/writing
| the check.
|
| If a VP clicks on the button, that's a different story.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| At a prior employer usually a team lead (without purchasing
| authority) would be told to go get a quote, go through all
| the BS, and only then hand over to "the higher authority"
| who can actually make the decision.
|
| Which predictably often lead to vendors losing out because
| their sales people ghosted team leads.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If I'm tasked with finding a price, the VP or whoever I
| report to will only find out about the services that have
| meaningful replies. And if a reply ever insinuated I was
| too low level to communicate with, that's the last they'd
| hear from where I work.
| asoneth wrote:
| At every company I've seen the executive asks a manager to
| develop a report comparing a up to a dozen options. Then
| the manager delegates to a few of their directs to actually
| slog through all the sales discussions and compile the
| analysis.
|
| The only possible way I can imagine someone with the title
| "VP" going to a vendor's website and clicking a "get quote"
| button to get a sales call at a random time from some
| junior salesperson is if we're talking about one of those
| companies where they give inflated titles and anyone who
| isn't an intern is a VP-of-something-or-other.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yeah, VP clicking that button is <10 people company that
| has 5 C-Level titles, a few VPs and a few SWEs that do
| the without fancy titles.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| On the contrary. The enterprise always gets a big discount.
| Or features not available to self service subs such as api
| access, etc
|
| Enterprise pays more due to volume , but generally pay less
| on a per user or whatever the unit that constitutes the seas
| is
| DandyDev wrote:
| That is not my experience at all. I have recently procured
| or discussed pricing terms for a few SaaS solutions on
| Enterprise tier and without exception the Enterprise
| pricing is a multiple per unit of the highest self service
| tier. Even after negotiating the price down.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Enterprise pricing is a multiple per unit of the
| highest self service tier
|
| As it should be. Enterprises are notoriously difficult to
| support because the decision makers there believe their
| size allows to them to dictate to the seller anything and
| everything, including the seller's product roadmap.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| Unless of course you are a small fish who just needs sso
| for compliance and for some reason you get to pay like
| you are a $5B conglomerate despite still very much
| preferring to just pay an advertised price and not spend
| a month of people's time in negotiations
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _a small fish who just needs sso for compliance_
|
| Unfortunately, a need for SSO is about the only reliable
| way to gouge a large corporation. As a small fish you may
| like SSO, want SSO, you may even think you _need_ SSO,
| but you really can get by without just fine. You 're
| small - you can get around the requirements, or pivot, or
| whatever. A corporation is big and slow and can easily
| get themselves into a situation where not adding SSO will
| become a blocker for deals denominated in double-triple
| digit millions, but abandoning your product or the whole
| business segment will cost similar amount of money. In
| that situation, the vendor can have a field day milking
| the cash cow.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Did Enterprise have features unavailable through self
| serve?
| olivermuty wrote:
| You could just look at the worlds most sold enterprise
| product: O365.
|
| Enterprise much more expensive and filled with features you
| can't even buy as addons in the lower tiers. An E5 license
| is sometimes almost three times more expensive than the
| self service license, but includes all the crap Microsoft
| can stuff in the license in return (some of it useful, like
| P2 AAD, MDM etc).
| rsstack wrote:
| It is very often in one of these categories:
|
| 1. Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-
| service but doesn't have the budget to pay more. 2. Someone
| willing to pay more but not enough more. 3. Someone who's
| just trying to compare prices between vendors but isn't a
| serious buyer (especially when not an existing customer). 4.
| Various non-obvious spam (affiliate resellers, etc.). 5.
| Someone who's interested but can't get a sale to happen given
| their role: has no budget and their manager doesn't have
| budget, has no authority on technical decisions. 6. Someone
| who's only curious. 7. Etc. etc. etc.
|
| The level of effort required to press that button is very
| low, so it isn't that great of a filter. Again, they take
| those calls because the lack of filtering doesn't mean it's
| never a quality lead.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Someone who wants only one feature that 's not in self-
| service but doesn't have the budget to pay more._
|
| Or, it's someone who the SaaS vendor _forced_ to click that
| button by putting OIDC ( "Sign in with..." or "Continue
| with...") behind that, using "SSO" as a price
| discriminator.
| Systemmanic wrote:
| https://sso.tax/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Right. The phenomenon is real, but the description on
| that site seems a bit obtuse on purpose:
|
| > _For organizations with more than a handful of
| employees, this feature is critical for IT and Security
| teams (...) In short: SSO is a core security requirement
| for any company with more than five employees._
|
| No, it isn't. They'd _like it very much_ , but the SSO
| tax is proof positive that this is _not_ a truly
| _critical_ feature for small customers. In fact, it
| pretty much measures at which point it becomes critical.
| mbesto wrote:
| Oh man, I take it you've never operated this part of a scaled
| business before. Wouldn't you like to know the absolute crap
| that comes through those forms...and yes even from those who
| have the intent of "I want to pay more than the self service
| price tag".
| tjoff wrote:
| Feels well deserved though? Treat your customers as shit
| etc.
| mbesto wrote:
| lol what?
|
| > Treat your customers as shit etc.
|
| They aren't your customers unless they start paying you.
| That's the point.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Treat your _potential_ customers as shit, then.
| mbesto wrote:
| If they're shit _potential_ customers then yes that 's
| exactly the point.
|
| As you might have read in other comments, the point of
| the form is to create a filtering mechanism to sift out
| the shit.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Here's how we filter out shit customers at my company: We
| publish our god damned prices clearly.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| They will never _become_ your customers if you don't give
| them a chance to pay you.
|
| Websites that put a cart online with a checkout process
| manage to get "customers" just fine. If you think you
| want to give everyone a custom quote then don't complain
| when people ask for one.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Websites that put a cart online with a checkout process
| manage to get "customers" just fine.
|
| Actually this is a funny point to bring up - believe it
| or not, there are legitimate situations in which a
| potential customer _requires_ that they speak to someone
| or they will simply ignore the company. So as a software
| provider, it 's absolutely true that you may indeed miss
| out on potential revenue if you dont have an established
| channel that isn't a "simple online cart".
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| Completely agreed. A good solution allows low-friction
| transactions to happen very easily, while keeping the
| option open for more deliberation.
|
| But from your previous comments, although you are singing
| praises for the custom solution, you actually find it
| annoying when people use it?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _there are legitimate situations in which a potential
| customer requires that they speak to someone or they will
| simply ignore the company._
|
| That's a good point. There are a lot of those, and a
| significant fraction is about some information critical
| to the customer, that is not present or not entirely
| obvious on the site. Things like:
|
| - Are you double-plus sure that when I order a violet
| widget, I get a violet widget? The UI isn't inspiring
| confidence, and there's a deadline, so unless I can be
| certain, I'll go with the more expensive vendor whose
| site is more clear on that.
|
| - There's bunch of bank holidays and stuffs coming up in
| the next couple days; I need to be sure you'll send the
| package tomorrow at the latest, or it'll hit a weekend
| and then a holiday and it'll arrive late, by which time
| it'll be worthless for me.
|
| Etc.
|
| I've abandoned plenty of carts due to inability to
| clarify things like that, and I've many times
| significantly overpaid just to deal with a vendor or
| system where I don't need to ask for clarification in the
| first place.
|
| Still, here's the thing: in each case, I had enough
| information already that I knew I want to buy. I knew the
| costs and delivery estimates and exact models/parameters.
| Without all those information, I wouldn't be calling to
| clarify - I wouldn't consider buying in the first place.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Wouldn't you like to know the absolute crap that comes
| through those forms
|
| Usually it's because too much is hidden.
|
| Not a SAS, but I once tapped an ad for redoing my shower.
| No prices, no way to know even approximately what it should
| cost.
|
| I wanted more information, but I didn't want a phone call.
| I filled out the form asking for some high-level
| information on pricing, and that I didn't want a phone
| call.
|
| Needless to say, the rep never responded to my inquiry.
|
| But, put yourself in my situation: I don't want calls at
| random times of the day that are convenient to a salesman.
| I want to talk on the phone at a time that's convenient to
| ME, and only if I know the (ballpark) range of what you're
| selling costs. If a new shower costs $5k, and I won't be in
| a position to spend that for 18 months, I want to know that
| I should pick up the phone then, not now.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Usually it's because too much is hidden.
|
| No. It's. Not.
|
| You get crap inbound because the process is frictionless.
|
| > _I wanted more information, but I didn 't want a phone
| call. I filled out the form asking for some high-level
| information on pricing, and that I didn't want a phone
| call.
|
| Needless to say, the rep never responded to my inquiry.
|
| But, put yourself in my situation: I don't want calls at
| random times of the day that are convenient to a
| salesman. I want to talk on the phone at a time that's
| convenient to ME, and only if I know the (ballpark) range
| of what you're selling costs. If a new shower costs $5k,
| and I won't be in a position to spend that for 18 months,
| I want to know that I should pick up the phone then, not
| now._
|
| I feel you. I really do. I've been in this position
| before. But until you operate a business at scale and see
| what absolute utter crap comes through the door, only
| then will you really understand what's behind the scenes.
| threetonesun wrote:
| If the cost of dealing with the crap is high enough, you
| put up a friction filter. Think about healthcare, a
| doctor's time is incredibly important, so you've got
| admins and nurses in front of them.
|
| Internet aside, it seems like those filter roles are much
| less likely to exist these days. Either you get someone
| who has no idea what's worth filtering, or you have to
| try to communicate with the expert directly and burn
| their time figuring out who's worth following up with.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Think about healthcare, a doctor's time is incredibly
| important, so you've got admins and nurses in front of
| them.
|
| lol, that's exactly what the grandparent author
| explained.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Think about healthcare, a doctor 's time is incredibly
| important, so you've got admins and nurses in front of
| them._
|
| Incredibly important for filling in billing paperwork,
| because practicing medicine is an increasingly small
| fraction of a doctor's time. This doesn't necessarily
| counter your point, but it's interesting how job
| allocation makes little sense and most expensively
| trained people are used to do the most menial jobs,
| because it's somehow cheaper than keeping extra headcount
| of lower-paid clerical workers.
|
| Same is the case in software industry. A lot software
| engineer's work involves dealing with bullshit that
| should be, and used to be, handled by a dedicated staff.
| ses1984 wrote:
| It's. Both.
|
| Maybe if transparent pricing were posted, some people
| would choose not to submit, but it won't stop all the
| crap from coming in.
| refulgentis wrote:
| They're right, at least a third is nonsense slop.
|
| You're also right that some fraction wouldn't be
| contacting asking for information if the information was
| more readily available.
|
| They're not shitting on customers and abdicating
| responsibility for making a better website. They're
| pointing out something important and unintuitive.
|
| I don't know how to bridge a conversational gap like this
| because it really is something to experience. Another
| form of it is job applications. At least 1/3 is just
| random people.
|
| To try to show some humility beyond "bro u ever done
| this???":
|
| - My mentally disabled sister, tested at 4th grade level
| at her peak, and would often spend days applying for
| random jobs that sounded cool. I'm not talking like "oh
| Dairy Queen cashier.", I mean, director/CXO etc.
|
| - At my first company, we'd get a contact every 3-6
| months, with demo-like questions from the same person. We
| were small enough that we couldn't chase every lead, made
| enough money we didn't _have_ to, and I didn 't like
| encouraging active salesmanship. After a couple years,
| someone followed up asking what his business was like. It
| was an 11 year old using a point of sale app to get drink
| orders from his friends from the family pool.
| EionRobb wrote:
| Ooh we had a one of those!
|
| They organised an in-person demo at our office after they
| filled in the online forms for their "multi-million
| dollar drinks distribution company", right in our target
| zone of customer type and size. So we had a few
| salespeople present to give a swish demo and hopefully
| win them over.
|
| Turned out to be a 15 year old doing door to door sales
| of his home made ginger beer. He told us our (half the
| price of the nearest competitor) product was too
| expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed
| in business like he would.
|
| Kudos to our sales guys though: After the initial shock
| and eye rolling, they treated them like the large
| business they claimed to be and just used the time to
| practice their demo/sales techniques.
| djoldman wrote:
| This "crap" coming through the door must be at least
| partially a result of price tiering and offering.
|
| You either:
|
| 1. Pay sales people to construct custom slices of
| services with custom prices and force them and your
| customers to hash it out via communication.
|
| or
|
| 2. Commit to choose-your-own-adventure offerings where
| customers just check boxes and see pricing change in real
| time.
|
| Option 1 retains negotiation advantage and makes more
| money for the company even though they pay sales people.
|
| Option 2 removes sales people and gives up negotiation
| advantage, which customers would love.
|
| Saying that, in the option 1 scenario, "crap" comes
| through the door because the process is frictionless is
| like saying a person died of suffocation instead of that
| they were strangled in a domestic dispute: there's a lot
| more going on.
| refulgentis wrote:
| They're right, at least a third is nonsense slop.
|
| You're right that some fraction of people reaching out
| for into wouldn't be reaching out for info if the info
| was readily available.
|
| This is very true, to the point its reflexively and
| obviously true.
|
| It does not falsify the lived experience you'll have at a
| business with contact forms, be it for job applications,
| or product inquiries.
|
| > Saying "crap" comes through the door because the
| process is frictionless is like saying a person died of
| suffocation instead of that they were strangled in a
| domestic dispute
|
| This has to win some sort of prize for analogies.
|
| Here's mine:
|
| An open contact form on the internet is like leaving your
| front door wide open in a busy city. Sure, some people
| might wander in because they couldn't find your house
| number, but you'll also get lost tourists asking for
| directions, door-to-door salespeople hawking their wares,
| and the occasional raccoon looking for a snack. No amount
| of information on your facade will prevent the guy who
| thinks your living room is a public restroom from
| stumbling in.
| djoldman wrote:
| > An open contact form on the internet is like leaving
| your front door wide open in a busy city. Sure, some
| people might wander in because they couldn't find your
| house number, but you'll also get lost tourists asking
| for directions, door-to-door salespeople hawking their
| wares, and the occasional raccoon looking for a snack. No
| amount of information on your facade will prevent the guy
| who thinks your living room is a public restroom from
| stumbling in.
|
| Agreed. I guess the point is that that is obvious to
| anyone who has ever run a website, and therefore facile.
|
| It neatly skips over or ignores the fact that you don't
| have to have any crap come through the door at all: just
| put multiple signup buttons that require payment.
|
| Coming at this another way: salespeople should be smiling
| and celebrating when crap comes through the door because
| without negotiated "enterprise" plans, the companies
| would probably make less money and have less need for
| salespeople.
|
| Instead of crap, maybe it's salesperson gold?
| refulgentis wrote:
| A solution to people who want to talk to someone before
| they buy is to add multiple layers of buttons that make
| them buy first?
|
| The salespeople should be celebrating every incoming
| contact because having contacts at all means you get
| sales?
|
| These are narrowly true, I assume first isn't something
| you're seriously advocating for, and second is a form of
| "starving kids in africa"/"i used to walkup hill to
| school both ways" fallacy.
|
| FWIW, I don't get the impression anyone is arguing for
| "how do we ensure _every_ contact we invest in is viable?
| " or "We need to figure out how to ensure salespeople
| never have negative emotions about an incoming contact's
| quality".
| ned_at_codomain wrote:
| Regretfully, there's basically nothing you can do to keep
| crap from entering the funnel. Gating information does --
| on the margin -- probably let some unknowing low-quality
| leads into the funnel.
|
| But low lead quality persists no matter what you do. It's
| just reality that lots and lots of people will request
| demos with zero buying intent. Sometimes people are just
| bored? Sometimes people are scamming? Sometimes people
| confuse you with a company that has a similar name (e.g.
| CSC [1] vs. CSC [2]). You'd be shocked how much traffic a
| SaaS company can get after some random government agency
| halfway across the world with a vaguely similar name
| appears in the local news.
|
| It's actually a remarkable amount of work to take a list
| of N "high-intent" inbound leads, filter out the garbage,
| and get your ICPs on the phone.
|
| [1] https://www.cscglobal.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Computer_Sciences_Corporation
| Suppafly wrote:
| It depends if it's a real 'request quote' option and not just
| something that gate-keeps the actual content on the site. I
| know in my job I've had to click through some of those sorts
| of things and enter my email just to get past the landing
| page of a company to get basic details of what their product
| includes.
| mindslight wrote:
| With the classic setup where "request quote" is the only
| option, it's likely someone who wanted simple straightforward
| prices. But then they reached the saleswall and relented into
| entering their contact information based on a faint hope they
| might still yet get a simple number back. Then by the time
| your high touch middleman recovers from his coke bender and
| gets around to sending them a telegram or raising the
| semaphore flags, they've already long forgotten about you.
| Natsu wrote:
| > It's litterally a customer saying "I want to subscribe and
| pay more than the self-service price tag", no?
|
| No, you can get idiots who are trying to sell you crap,
| random confused job seekers (who may or may not also be
| spammers), etc.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| "I am a competitor looking for information about your
| service"
|
| "I am a jerk trying to annoy you"
|
| "I am a bot scraping your web site"
|
| "The people setting up the website are incompetent and a
| blank entry was just added to the database"
|
| "I am a dishonest salesperson with a harebrained scheme to
| pad my metrics"
|
| I do think we just found the poster who has not worked in
| sales, though. Please, be sure to count your blessings!
| kuschku wrote:
| If you waste my time by hiding the pricing on your website,
| it's just fair that I'll waste your time in return.
|
| So whenever a site has hidden the pricing, I'll submit a
| few requests to make sure it costs them just as much time
| as it cost me.
| supafastcoder wrote:
| Curious: what do you do when it's not a good enterprise lead
| but you still don't want to burn them as a customer? Do you
| point them to the self service solution?
| yannyu wrote:
| Sometimes you'll have commercial/digital reps that handle
| high volume, low revenue customers. The company may also have
| a self-service/credit card swipe product option, or a free
| tier, or a support-only option.
| rsstack wrote:
| When I worked at companies with self-service plans, we'd
| direct them there and say that we can't provide provide them
| enterprise service for now, until their company grows or
| their budget grows. When we didn't have self-service, we were
| just polite and that's all we could do.
| chromoblob wrote:
| > identify if you're a real potential customer (vs shopping for
| prices)
|
| ... what?
| rsstack wrote:
| When people buy software they often speak to multiple vendors
| to compare prices. 90% of the time, they already know what
| they're going to use and they're only getting competitor
| quotes to show to their execs that they made the right
| decision. It isn't worth the time of the salespeople to
| entertain them, understand their usage, and give a quote if
| the customer already knows they want to use a competitor's
| product. Sometimes it is, sometimes not.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > It isn't worth the time of the salespeople to entertain
| them, understand their usage, and give a quote if the
| customer already knows they want to use a competitor's
| product.
|
| This quote reminds me of an eye-opening speech I attended
| way back about the things you learn about when you run a
| business.
|
| One of the lessons was that hiring the wrong salesperson
| can put you out of business. When you're hiring the first
| time, you think they're going to maximize their
| commissions. In reality, a lot of people are satisfied
| getting half the income they could by only taking the easy
| money. They might have to work five or ten times as hard to
| make the second half of sales, so they let those customers
| know they're disinterested and they go elsewhere.
|
| The tougher half of sales are maybe 90% of the potential
| customers, or maybe more than that. You lose 90% of your
| customer base initially, then people talk to others about
| their experience, you've lost half of the rest, and
| suddenly you're no longer a viable business.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Half of sales are 90% of potential customers? Lost me
| there
|
| But I agree the first few sales people are crucial,
| that's why the founders do it usually
| timr wrote:
| The _tougher half_ of sales. In other words, 90% of your
| potential customers are concentrated amongst the half of
| leads that are difficult to close.
|
| I don't know if that specific ratio is true, but it feels
| right. The OP's scenario is vivid to me. So many
| salespeople just want the fish to jump in the boat...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > they already know what they're going to use
|
| I'm curious about how they know.
|
| I'm actually in that exact process, and have absolutely no
| idea if half of the providers I'm looking at have a decent
| product.
|
| There's no free tier so I can't just create random accounts
| and see for myself. To your point, I'm also not the last
| decision point, but will be the poor soul explaining why we
| should choose X or Y to get someone up the chain to approve
| the money.
|
| Your point probably stands for companies that will blindly
| buy the overpriced market leader anyway, and do whatever it
| takes to make it work whatever the proposition. But that's
| not even half of the market I think, very few companies
| actually require the top of the line service, by
| definition.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| If you know you are way over priced, anyone shopping for the
| best price will never choose you - therefore they aren't a
| "real potential customer".
| chromoblob wrote:
| So everyone is "way overpriced" then? Parent describes
| everyone, not just someone.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Everyone with "contact for pricing" is
| nunez wrote:
| i've been doing this sales engineering thing for the last two
| years and have seen a little bit of how this works.
|
| you'll get a list price (the price that the company needs to sell
| at with lots of margin added on top), and, depending on how
| serious you are and your actual needs, you'll get a "real" price
| after a sales person/sales engineer qualifies you.
|
| there are a million ways big-money SaaS licenses can be
| discounted, but it always depends on the buyer, the relationship,
| how "sticky" they'll be (i.e. will they use it for a year and
| bounce, or could they be a multi-year loyal customer), sales
| targets and how much other stuff they might purchase.
|
| also, like a previous poster said earlier, there are lots and
| lots and LOTS of ways that enterprise software can be purchased.
| "request for quote" sales flows covers that.
|
| SaaS companies do this because so much of B2B pricing is a
| function of value and willingness to pay for that value.
| faizshah wrote:
| What about from the customer perspective what do enterprise
| customers want to see happen?
|
| I'm guessing you want someone to reach out to you for a video
| call where they can tell you whether the product works with your
| Identity Provider, follows your security standards, and has a
| human who you can negotiate with set starting price per
| license/head/unit.
| observationist wrote:
| "Request a quote" is a sales tactic to elicit as much money as
| possible from larger customers. It's never the reasons being
| bandied about, like complexity in enterprise agreements or
| customized discounts for scale, or any of the reasons the people
| slinging the product might have convinced themselves are true.
| It's about getting the opportunity to introduce sales tactics
| that a straightforward and honest price menu would provide.
|
| "Request a quote" is a sign to me that the company is dishonest,
| with high pressure sales tactics, toxic incentives, and a culture
| of maximizing profit over providing quality service. I've never
| seen a counter-example of an awesome, high performing company I
| loved working with, who went the extra mile, use "Request a
| quote" or similar tactics.
|
| "Request a quote" is a corporate version of a street busker con,
| with them needing to get up close and personal, to shuffle the
| numbers and dazzle you with "here's what we are willing to do,
| _just for you_! " as their hand slides into your pocket.
|
| There are always better options that somehow manage to be honest,
| clear, and upfront with pricing. If a company is hiding the
| price, it's to get away with something that you'd call out as
| sketchy if you knew all the information in advance. Even if it's
| only to force an interaction with a skilled sales agent, it's a
| despicable tactic.
| mocamoca wrote:
| Just to balance things a little
|
| Sometimes the cost of an offer is not linear with some metric
| or easily predictable.
|
| And sometimes the offering company is not Salesforce and just
| does not have resources or existing similar customers to model
| price adequately
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| You're misunderstanding the dynamic. There are many SAAS
| companies that present a public-facing abstraction of a
| "sticker price", but the actual price that large customers pay
| has no consistent relationship with that price, because of
| exactly the factors you're dismissing. No enterprise
| procurement department will agree to pay a sticker price, and
| few enterprises will be satisfied with "sticker service".
|
| Why aren't companies honest and upfront about this? Sometimes
| they are. Slack, for example
| (https://app.slack.com/plans/T02EPKPG3) is pretty
| straightforward: you can pay $7.25 if you're a normie company,
| $12.50 if you have more advanced needs, or you can request a
| quote if you're a giant enterprise who's going to be expensive
| to support. The risk is that a company which really ought to be
| in the "request a quote" tier ends up in a lower one and then
| has mismatched expectations. I've seen one case where a
| sticker-price-tier customer was absolutely outraged that nobody
| would set up a call with engineering for him.
| runako wrote:
| > complexity in enterprise agreements
|
| > be honest, clear, and upfront with pricing
|
| I have seen SaaS sales where the prospect (not the vendor)
| required contracts to be executed prior to determining
| requirements. This involved legal on both sides to be involved.
| Once the trial was started, the prospect required many changes
| to the app, API, data model, and other fundamental aspects of
| the SaaS.
|
| In order to account for this, what number would you put on the
| website's pricing page?
| kuschku wrote:
| Plan S: $
|
| Plan M: $$
|
| Plan L: $$$
|
| Custom: Call +1 555 1234 5678
| runako wrote:
| > Custom: Call +1 555 1234 5678
|
| OP is specifically saying this is a scummy pressure sales
| tactic. I am asking for a specific number to put there
| instead, in the interest of transparency.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| $X for a "take it or leave it" contract, with all the terms
| attached for the prospect's legal team to peruse at their own
| leisure, and then a "call us if you need something more
| bespoke" button.
| runako wrote:
| > "call us if you need something more bespoke"
|
| OP is specifically saying this is always a scammy sales
| tactic. I am asking for a way to arrive at a scalar $ value
| to put on the website to avoid this tactic of "talking to
| the customer to determine the price."
| mminer237 wrote:
| The price without changes to the app?
| runako wrote:
| That's not a number that represents what the buyer is
| looking for though, so it doesn't help. I guess to be
| transparent you could put some text like "if you don't want
| to buy one of these plans, we are not the vendor for you?"
| senordevnyc wrote:
| _I 've never seen a counter-example of an awesome, high
| performing company I loved working with, who went the extra
| mile, use "Request a quote" or similar tactics._
|
| I bet those companies also have a "request a quote" process for
| their enterprise customers, who do not pay the public prices,
| you just don't see it.
| geenat wrote:
| You generally get sent through a predatory sales pipeline and
| extorted.
|
| Think very hard before using something not upfront about pricing.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, this is the correct answer for 85% or more of SaaS
| businesses. As a CTO who makes buying decisions, the worst
| thing you can do if you want my business is bury the pricing
| behind one of these. I know the game, I despise the game, and I
| don't have time or willingness to "do the enterprise dance"
| unless I am already a happy customer. Even then, I've migrated
| to competing services to avoid that, so consider that when
| designing your "sales pipeline"
| wrs wrote:
| The trouble is, if you pick a winner, they get acquired and
| implement a traditional sales pipeline that bites you on your
| next renewal.
| DANmode wrote:
| Name and shame?
|
| That's egregious.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not sure there's a big enough hard drive to store
| that list. (joking about the hard drive space)
|
| If you start with a list of every SaaS company, and then
| delete 10% of them at random, you probably have a good
| approximation of the offenders though.
| baetylus wrote:
| You may be among a growing number, but for now, this stance
| is the exception -- especially in other executive positions.
| cush wrote:
| I think this is a common misconception around sales. The prices
| aren't upfront because there's too many variables. Price is
| determined by more than just number of employees. There's also
| individual SKUs for each employee, usage tiers, etc. Once
| there's more than one variable it's probably too complex and
| you need a quote.
|
| It's not extortion. A good salesperson is looking for a good
| customer that actually needs the product. They want to make
| sure that the product is a good fit for the customer. Selling
| to a business that doesn't need the product is not only a waste
| of time, but it actually costs the business, as the customer
| will quickly cancel and all the work the account executive put
| in to learning the business ends up in a net loss
| wrs wrote:
| This could occasionally be true, but in my experience it's
| much more common that this is a signal that either the
| vendor's internal processes are stuck in the early 2000s, or
| they are indeed going to run an arbitrary negotiation process
| to drive up prices.
|
| I had one large, famous call center vendor who were running
| on a monolithic Java backend in their own data center, with a
| six-week implementation time for a completely vanilla
| configuration, and for which the simplest change required a
| professional services engagement. There is no technical
| reason the entire thing couldn't have been done with self-
| service signup and configuration, and indeed that's how their
| smaller, younger competitors do it.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| If you are selling software to enterprise that's 100k a
| year and multiple SKUs, buyer will want to negotiate and
| not just discounts, its volumes, payment terms, contract
| length all of which affect price. If only it were so simple
| cush wrote:
| Whether the vendor's internal processes are stuck in the
| early 2000s or not doesn't negate anything I said. The
| quotes are multi-variate and it's not extortion.
|
| But even assuming updated systems, how could you give an
| accurate quote without understanding the customer's needs?
| Make someone fill out a big form providing estimates of
| their usage? Now you're just putting the customer on the
| hook for generating the quote. The sales rep can translate
| their requirements into an accurate quote without putting
| the burden on the customer to understand the product more
| than they need to. Also, the customer may need the quote to
| land a contract.
|
| The complexity of the software's pricing is a reflection of
| the complexity of the customer's needs.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I'm a dev, so don't know the exact details. We make a niche B2B
| application that is essential for the daily operation of
| businesses in our niche, with several hundreds of businesses as
| our customers.
|
| Our pricing is in general based on a "fixed" monthly per-module
| price plus max-simultaneous-users price, and then a usage based
| per-transaction price element in addition.
|
| The "fixed" cost can be somewhat different, typically it's a bit
| lower for smaller customers which also takes into account smaller
| customers typically have fewer custom integration needs (ie less
| custom maintenance/support).
|
| The transaction pricing has a volume discount "ladder" with many
| steps. So smaller customers pays a lot more per transaction than
| larger customers. The transaction-based "price ladder" is
| otherwise quite fixed between customers.
|
| This transaction-based element allows us to have reasonable
| overall prices for small as well as large, as it scales with our
| customers' activity. If they have a good month they pay more but
| also have more income.
|
| This model is used for all our customers, from single-employee
| shops to the largest ones we have (many hundreds of simultaneous
| users). Our CEO has been clear he doesn't want to be cheapest,
| but deliver a superior product that justifies the price.
|
| In the 10 years I've been here we've gone from #5 of a group of
| vendors to a dominating position. I think our pricing model has
| been one of the factors that has facilitated this.
| cush wrote:
| Regarding an HR SaaS I'm familiar with. A request gets put on a
| queue for an account executive to call you. The product is
| complex enough (because HR is inherently complex) that it's
| easier to have a conversation about your business to understand
| if the product will be a good fit. They call, and it becomes a
| regular B2B sales meeting.
| hklgny wrote:
| These answers make it seem so much more fancy than it is in most
| cases.
|
| Year 1 - Form posts into slack. Someone calls you and reads the
| price off a pdf.
|
| Year 2 or 3 - form posts into CRM. Someone calls you and reads
| the price off a pdf.
|
| Year 4+ - form posts into CRM. Someone calls you and maybe enters
| some details into a Google sheet.
| dsr_ wrote:
| All pricing is 'enterprise', there are no special small-company
| or single-person offers. A salesperson will receive your
| information, research your company and try to figure out the size
| and whether you are a decision-maker or assigned to look at
| competing services or just looking around. Then they will send
| you an email to set up a meeting.
|
| The pricing will be basically the same rate for everyone, with
| discounts based on actual scale, but there will be a minimum
| commitment which will be calculated to be substantially less than
| your likely bill -- this is to encourage you to actually start
| using the service, rather than sitting on it for another year
| while you wonder if the conversion will be worth the trouble.
|
| (It is. Clients love us after they actually start using us. One
| of our big sales drivers is employees of clients going to work at
| other companies and noting how much worse things are without us.)
|
| Then the client will have due diligence and security
| questionaires and want to negotiate some fine details of the
| contract. Will they require special setup services? More or less
| training than usual? Sometimes this will require a one-time fee.
| autoexec wrote:
| Not one of you are willing to admit that you collect people's
| contact info and then use it to spam them with completely
| unrelated product offerings/"news"/garbage for months/years after
| giving them the price-quote they asked for and the aggressive
| sales pitch they didn't ask for, only to later sell that same
| contact info to third parties as well regardless of if a sale was
| made? All the SaaS people here must be the exception I guess.
| dang wrote:
| I always tell YC startups not to do this when they're launching
| on HN. Well, except when I forget, and then it usually goes bad.
|
| It's in the launch HN instructions we give YC founders, which are
| here if anyone wants to see them:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html. All the advice is valid
| for HN generally, though the logistical aspects are specific to
| YC.
|
| Edit: I even keep a list of examples to scare people:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40237070 (May 2024)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40170609 (April 2024)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39787870 (March 2024)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39513573 (Feb 2024)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31840885 (June 2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31659066 (June 2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31655259 (June 2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630736 (March 2022)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29554111 (Dec 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552753 (Dec 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551538 (Dec 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29551412 (Dec 2021)
| erikig wrote:
| It is telling, perhaps, that a few of these are no longer alive
| (kable, astro etc)
| cush wrote:
| I think there's a big difference between a HN startup not being
| upfront about their simple pricing, hiding it behind the "Start
| for Free!" anti-pattern, and an established B2B SaaS with a
| "Request a Quote" flow. One is deceptive, the other is a
| necessary barrier in doing certain kinds of business
| esafak wrote:
| Every company is different, but they _can_ use everything they
| know about you, all the offers previously made to others, and
| competing products, to optimize your price using a statistical
| model. I recommend reading _Pricing and Revenue Optimization_ by
| Robert Phillips (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31628)
| gumby wrote:
| If it's enterprise, salesperson and VP of sales look up the
| company and try to guess how much they can pay.
|
| Once I was cooling my heels in the lobby of Oracle and, looking
| around realized I'd had a stupid brain fart. So I opened my
| laptop and doubled the price of every line item in the quote
| (felt very high tech in ~1994). They complained about the cost,
| but paid. They would have complained about the original quote:
| complaining about the cost is the first step of negotiation.
|
| I'm surprised there isn't a service that takes the requestor's
| email address (if it's something generic like @gmail.com, DWIM-
| searches LinkedIn), looks them up in an in-house proprietary
| database, and sends you a score (a multiplier).
|
| Someone should start that -- it's probably a quick flip to
| Experian.
| josephwegner wrote:
| Pretty sure that's exactly what Clearbit does. Although now
| their site has some AI hype on it and I can't tell if that's
| just the obligatory AI marketing, or if they actually changed
| their product.
|
| https://clearbit.com/
| insomniacity wrote:
| Say you're a small or solopreneur company, and you don't have any
| enterprise customers yet.
|
| What do you put on a features/pricing page to help you start
| finding out what your enterprise customers might actually want?
| (Not the generic stuff like SSO and audits, but specific to your
| product/market).
|
| Just a generic "Don't see the features you need? Email us!"?
| llmblockchain wrote:
| I can tell you what happens in my service.
|
| When you submit the contact us form I receive a message via
| Matrix on Element. I also receive an email and the submission is
| recorded in postgres.
|
| Depending on the request details, I may reach out to you
| immediately or put you on my task list for 24-48 hours to handle.
|
| I don't sell or do anything with the data. I'm the only person
| that sees it.
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