[HN Gopher] No Calls
___________________________________________________________________
No Calls
Author : ezekg
Score : 1480 points
Date : 2025-01-16 14:17 UTC (1 days ago)
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| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some e-mail
| threads should have been a call.
| lucasban wrote:
| Right, it's ultimately about picking the right medium for a
| given discussion, be that tickets, email, a call, or some kind
| of messaging. That can vary person to person as well, so it's
| always a bit of a compromise.
| pydry wrote:
| This is my primary issue with async communication. Ive had
| email and slack conversations which lasted days where there was
| a 4 hour gap between messages and it is horrible.
|
| In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
| ezekg wrote:
| > In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
|
| You also have no time to formulate a thoughtful answer to
| complex questions, though, which is one my issues. Calls are
| fine for some things, but 90% of calls could be an email
| because they contain discussion that needs more than 15
| minutes of thinking. And a lot of the time, these calls need
| a summary email to even keep track of what was said!
|
| I think the gap issue in async communication is a feature,
| not a bug.
| CalRobert wrote:
| 4 hours is a perfectly reasonable response time for an email.
| It's not IM
| pydry wrote:
| Right. The point is that reasonable response time can turn
| a 10 minute conversation into a 48 hour long conversation
| that requires me to context switch 11 times over two days
| instead of just once.
|
| If it's a straightforward product that might not happen. If
| it's a product with lots of subtle complications and I need
| to ask lots of questions whose answers depend on their
| answers to previous questions it will definitely happen.
| jimbokun wrote:
| But not for responding to a question on a call!
|
| That's one reason calls can be superior in some situations.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > In a call you can't be ignored
|
| As someone on the Autistic spectrum... yes, yes you most
| certainly can. When you're speaking I'm (not necessarily
| voluntarily-)daydreaming about my current
| hyperfocus/obsession. I'm tuned-in just enough to not reply
| with something so far out of left field that it gives away
| that my attention is elsewhere, but I'm definitely _not_
| listening to you. Your words are going in one ear and right
| out the other. I 'll shoot you an e-mail for "clarification"
| later.
|
| I hate this about myself and I've worked very hard to
| overcome it, but after thirty-seven years I've learned to
| accept that it's my baseline. I'll have to actively work
| against it for the rest of my life.
|
| Unfortunately, this applies to meetings and lectures as well.
| In school and, later, university I had to go to class _and_
| teach myself the material each night.
| pydry wrote:
| This is probably one reason why not too many people with
| autism end up doing sales.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Agreed. I can hardly imagine doing sales and I don't
| really have any of the typical social anxiety, etc.-- my
| masking is really good.
| rvbissell wrote:
| Are you me? I think you might be me.
| acuozzo wrote:
| I am.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some
| e-mail threads should have been a call.
|
| I like to think I can "read the room". I particularly try to
| send email, versus a call, when the recipient will need to take
| time to prepare a thoughtful reply.
|
| I've had several calls, sparked after a detailed email, where I
| end up reading my message literally word-for-word only to be
| met with the response: "Yeah-- we I'll need to respond to that
| offline".
|
| Just. Read. My. Damned. Email.
|
| I think very little of people who won't take the time to read
| anything longer than a couple sentences. It's especially
| galling because I work hard to write terse, bottom-line-up-
| front style-emails.
|
| Hot take: W/ LLMs being used to summarize text, and robust
| text-to-speech, maybe I won't have as time-wasting calls. The
| kind of person who can't be bothered to read probably likes
| those kinds of things.
| jerf wrote:
| "If your messaging is vague, people will need to get on a call to
| understand what you actually offer."
|
| I am so tired of someone at work saying "Hey, we're thinking of
| using X" (or "going to use X"), and I go to their web page, and
| what is X? Why, it's a tool that will unlock the value of my
| business and allow unparalleled visibility into my business to
| connect with my customers and brings highly-available best-of-
| breed services to us to secure and empower our business, which
| has up to this point just been businessin' along without the full
| power of businessy business that we could have been businessing
| if we just businessed this business product earlier.
|
| But...
|
| .. what _is_ it?
|
| Is it a hosted database? Is it a plugin to Salesforce CRM? Is it
| a training program? Is it a deployable appliance or VM image? Is
| it a desktop application? Is it a cloud service? Is it an API? Is
| it some sort of 3rd party agency meant to replace some bit of my
| business? Who is meant to use it? Developers? Business? Finance?
| Ops?
|
| These are all very basic questions that are only the very
| beginning of understanding of what the product actually is, and I
| frequently can't even _guess_ based on the home page. I have more
| than once been told we 're using one of these products and linked
| to the homepage in question, and still had to come back and ask
| the person "Yes, but what _is_ it? "
|
| The best thing you can do is hit the developer docs page, if
| there is one, but even then it's fairly rare for there to be a
| clear answer. You have to poke through frequently disorganized,
| task-based documents with no clear progression as to "here's
| where to start with our product" and frankly some products have
| defeated me even so. I can get as far as "Ah, you have some sort
| of web interface" and probably some clue about what it actually
| is, but that hardly nails it down. You'd think I could juts
| derive the answer almost immediately.
|
| So glad it's not my job to poke through these things. I have to
| imagine there's a lot of people who would equally find it a
| breath of fresh air to hit a website and have _some sort of idea
| what it is_ in 30 seconds or less.
|
| I understand, even if it's not my personal philosophy, still
| being vague on price so you have to call about that. I don't
| understand the idea behind hiding what your product even _is_
| behind such a thick layer of vague buzzwords that a professional
| in the field is still left virtually clueless about what it
| actually is even after a careful read.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Of course, if you had already fully unlocked the value in your
| business, you'd be leveraging accelerating growth and reaching
| synergies few can even contemplate. Your go to market strategy
| would be adaptable, extensible, on-demand, customer focused,
| market driven.
|
| How about we circle back to put a fork in it?
|
| But seriously, when I see such nebulous companies, I
| immediately look elsewhere. They are either trying to sell
| snake oil or are just too clueless to understand what's
| actually important.
|
| Either way - a waste of time and effort.
| bux93 wrote:
| Even more frustrating is when you're specifically looking for a
| simple tool to do X, but the marketing material is so
| aspirational you can't even find out if they offer X, and
| finally when you figure out that they DO offer X, it turns out
| it's only X, and not world peace and an end to hunger like they
| promised.
|
| You just want a single-sign-on thingamajig with 2FA, but the
| website is selling ultimate trustworthiness and compliance in
| an everchanging regulatory environment for dynamic and growing
| digital natives with federated AI. Hmm.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| I always try looking up the product or company on Wikipedia. If
| there's an article there, that's more often than not a lot more
| helpful than the company's own web page.
| focusedone wrote:
| Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the
| company I work at _please_ adopt this strategy. Please explain
| clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what
| the enterprise license costs on the homepage.
|
| Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to
| schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic
| security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before
| we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone
| who *does* post that stuff online.
|
| I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
|
| I wish I could use what this guy is selling.
| paulg2222 wrote:
| You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse.
| Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Not the parent, but I love communication. I love being able
| to send a chat message to a teammember and get a response in
| an hour, or an email at 8pm and read the response next
| morning. What I hate is having to schedule calls for next
| Friday just to get a response to a basic question, or being
| dragged into pointless half an hour meeting just to say two
| sentences about what I'm doing today.
|
| But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love
| that stuff
| soco wrote:
| They're maybe the same managers who love the RTO for the
| sake of RTO.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > you seem to be communication-averse
|
| Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a
| teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone.
| _However_ , as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily
| bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I
| loathe telephone calls now.
|
| I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many
| times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct
| during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is
| to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person
| with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous
| communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have
| the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to
| properly word the uncomfortable question.
| soco wrote:
| This might be the very reason they prefer to call you, to
| force you into rushed decisions. Because otherwise I can't
| imagine the reason for spending scheduling time and minutes
| (hours) of chitchat just to answer a couple of very basic
| and totally repeatable question.
| rubslopes wrote:
| I have the same problem as the parent comment, and over
| time, I learned that people would take advantage of it,
| just as you mentioned. So, I decided to make my default
| response to every offer: 'Let me think about it, and I'll
| call you back.' Sometimes I only ask for one hour, but I
| always need some time to think on my own about the
| opportunity and make a sensible decision. This habit has
| improved things a lot for me!
|
| Since getting married, I've gained an additional great
| excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this
| important decision.'
| diggan wrote:
| > Since getting married, I've gained an additional great
| excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this
| important decision.'
|
| Tip for unmarried people: You can still use the trick
| above, no one would know or even care :)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yup. Used to do sales. People are make way better
| decisions async (over email) than in person or on a call.
| People feel pressure to say yes in the moment and then
| the cost of later saying no is much greater than it would
| have been to say no over email.
|
| The stress and all the negatives people are posting about
| here is the point.
|
| Before you demonize any company doing this... Know just
| about every company with a product has a sales team of
| some kind and they are all operating with similar models.
| You are being annoyed by some sales people while the
| sales people at your company are annoying someone else.
| adamc wrote:
| Some of us are time-wasting averse. I am never going to
| recommend a product without a lot of answers, and it is never
| going to get green-lighted without my boss feeling confident
| of the answers. The faster I get the answers, the more likely
| we are to follow-up. When getting answers is like pulling
| teeth, other solutions get considered, including "develop
| something in-house".
| f1shy wrote:
| I absolutely love communication, meeting people, etc. as far
| as it makes sense! Typically is much better written.
| Everything can be forwarded, is documented, no
| misunderstandings...
| kaffekaka wrote:
| I agree about everything you wrote except the
| misunderstandings. Written communication absolutely can and
| do give rise to misunderstandings.
| f1shy wrote:
| I doubted for a second, as I wrote that. Yes, written
| communication can lead to misunderstanding, but more
| often in chat. Mails are a little better in that regard
| in my experience. Because they are saved and seen by many
| people, is easier to analyze what has been said, context,
| etc.
|
| But in general I would say, both can generate
| misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle
| down.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They're not communication-averse. They're just _not stupid_.
|
| The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid,
| highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it
| bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can.
| Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms.
| Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they
| will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company
| relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be
| sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to
| engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any
| alternative available.
|
| This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the
| hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise
| and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right
| thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone
| else.
| thayne wrote:
| > Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
|
| That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And
| even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff,
| technical staff often have an influence on the decision
| unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
| f1shy wrote:
| > Please explain clearly what your product does
|
| Please please!!! I'm so tired of sites with promises "double
| your productivity" "never lose a file again" blabla... but they
| never say what the product is really.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yeah, product websites have turned into pharmaceutical ads.
| "Ask your doctor about Blogprexa!"
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I've been reading about landing pages for my project, and the
| standard formula is apparently to place that front-and-
| centre, with what your product actually does second. So
| often, though, it seems like they're so eager to tell you how
| brilliant the product is, they forget to tell you what it
| actually does.
|
| And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a
| language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app,
| and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers
| (technical people who may be interested in languages) than
| people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in
| languages, generally not technical).
|
| So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on
| different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have
| you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's
| worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go
| "How can this help me?".
|
| Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it,
| and collect some stats.
|
| Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!"
| (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt
| conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard
| advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| sure, features vs benefits
|
| reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete
| happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of
| beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and
| still no idea what the product is or how it's
| differentiated.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _sure, features vs benefits_
|
| Yeah, I don't understand why the standard advice is what
| it is. Are most adults that stupidly naive to not realize
| that _benefits_ are just lies? No company is actually
| able to predict how and how much their product can
| benefit their customers. Only customers themselves can
| predict that, and to do it, they need to know the actual
| things the product does, i.e. the _features_ , which also
| happen to be the only objective things the company can
| say.
|
| And yes, in many cases, the buyer may not know enough to
| correctly evaluate the features - but such buyer should
| be aware that, in such situation, they're even less able
| to tell if the benefits listed are realistic, or just
| blatant lies. Buying by benefits is _stupid_ - the smart
| thing is to find someone who understands the features and
| ask them for advice.
| joquarky wrote:
| Same with some projects' readme.md: it will have a change log
| and a few random details, but it doesn't tell me what it
| does.
| ezekg wrote:
| This is the worst, especially when it's a library! Like,
| show me the code!
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
|
| Because historically and even presently to a distressing
| degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount
| mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the
| product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does
| it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you
| don't need a sales call because a sales email is more
| effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson)
| when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.
|
| Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care
| about you as a customer. They care about making _their quota_
| and /or getting _their commission._ I appreciate at my current
| employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that
| really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or
| solving a large problem, we don 't do commissions, we just pay
| good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working
| is not incentivized to sell _as much as possible,_ they 're
| incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and
| how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up
| paying.
| karatinversion wrote:
| > we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries
|
| The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't
| pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at
| selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than
| selling the prodct.
| koolba wrote:
| Sales has to be commission based and you always hire at
| least two salesman.
|
| The biggest driver to make a sale is the commission. The
| second biggest is fear of getting sacked because you're not
| making as many sales as the other guy.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is
| you're fired.
| kjs3 wrote:
| A classic. "Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross" and "Boiler Room" are
| a great sales themed movie night.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Pretty much this or something like it, at least in my
| experience the last 30+ years.
|
| Sales seems to attract folks who are highly 'coin
| operated'. The large majority (yes...always with the
| exceptions) really, deep down, don't care about how cool
| the tech is, or how it's going to change the world...they
| care about the game of sales and you keep score in the
| game by how much commission you earn. You really want the
| salesthing that comes in with "Forget about the salary or
| draw, I want a 100% commission comp plan" because that's
| someone who is confident enough in their ability to sell
| that they aren't worried about paying the mortgage or
| buying groceries.
|
| Tangentially, one of the worst things I've seen a sales
| org do is cap commissions. All that incentivizes is "I
| hit my cap...ima gonna go hang out on my boat until next
| quarter because why work for sales I'm not going to get
| comp'ed on".
| sim7c00 wrote:
| 'coin operated' people. thank you for that. :)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| GP's company is (at least in their eyes) not interested in
| _selling_ per se - quoting:
|
| >> _That means the sales person as they 're working is not
| incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're
| incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs,
| and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they
| end up paying._
|
| I don't know what the name for that other thing is, but
| it's indeed distinct from "selling" that salespeople do,
| which boils down to begging, cajoling, tricking or coercing
| you to buy their shit, no matter how useless or downright
| harmful to you is, because that's what commissions combined
| with competition incentivize. Not surprisingly, the bottom-
| feeder telemarketing sweatshops are where this model is
| present in its purest form - extreme competition, frequent
| bonuses for top performers, and quick firing for not being
| a top performer.
|
| If I have a choice, I _never_ want to "buy" whatever
| someone's "selling" - I only want to do the whatever is the
| "buying" equivalent for the not-selling thing I don't have
| the name for.
|
| It's not a B2B-specific phenomenon either. The B2C
| equivalent of those salespeople are car salesmen (which
| have meme status at this point), telemarketers, and those
| people doing the Amway model, trying to sell some
| Tupperware knockoffs[0] or barely working vacuum cleaners
| or whatnot at 3-10x inflated prices, making you feel like
| you had a good time instead of having just been scammed.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Ironically, Tupperware was _also_ sold in this model,
| but it at least _wasn 't shit_.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| Nah, you definitely need calls. The idea that any product
| sells itself to the point that a venture backed startup needs
| is laughable. Lots of potential customers are clueless but
| excited and in order to book large contracts, you need
| someone to be a steward to work the contract through the
| byzantine maze of leadership and procurement.
|
| Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective
| fact that it works to bring more dollars in, and the idea
| that they say some magic words and then the customer suddenly
| wants to buy is childish. They identify and address needs and
| pain points.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Lots of potential customers are clueless but excited and
| in order to book large contracts, you need someone to be a
| steward to work the contract through the byzantine maze of
| leadership and procurement._
|
| That's called _exploitation_ , not stewardship.
|
| It is what it is, but let's not pretend that the
| relationship here is anything but adversarial. The
| incentives are such that dishonesty and malice brings in
| more sales, so honest salespeople get quickly outcompeted
| by their dishonest co-workers, and companies with honest
| business models get outcompeted by those with dishonest
| ones. Buyers are in no position to change this, but that
| doesn't mean they have to pretend it's fine, or play along.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective
| fact that it works to bring more dollars in
|
| Except as we can see in this thread, it's not objective
| fact. They chase many customers away with such tactics and
| are blissfully unaware.
| Levitz wrote:
| >Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not
| care about you as a customer. They care about making their
| quota and/or getting their commission.
|
| This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one
| thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and
| product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different
| calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to
| decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions
| they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which
| you are informed that some important feature is out of the
| question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a
| bunch of people with nothing to show for it.
|
| Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting
| the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I
| guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person"
| thing going on.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to
| omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response
| mechanism. I guess there 's also a "people's person" vs
| "things person" thing going on._
|
| To me, it's refusing to show up with a knife to a gun
| fight. The company needs a thing. The "things person"
| stands no chance in direct confrontation with a "people's
| person" and they know it, so they to avoid calls (direct or
| otherwise) to level the playing field. A "people's person"
| _could_ fare much better against the seller 's "people's
| persons", but then a "people's person" is in much worse
| position to understand the thing the company needs in the
| first place.
|
| For buying things, a win-win outcome can occur only when
| people on both both buyer and seller side are "things
| persons".
|
| It's basically a Prisoner's dilemma, with "people's person"
| and "things person" in place of "defect" and "cooperate".
| snacksmcgee wrote:
| The irony of HN discovering how capitalism works when they're
| on the receiving end of it.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| But they say what they do on their product page. They provide a
| solution.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| On the other hand, I would hate to wade through email chains,
| type out large emails and wait for delayed async responses
| drawn out over days. I thrive when I can read the
| documentation, come prepared to a call and have my questions
| answered quickly in real time. There's also something about
| quickly parsing the realtime information that brings out the
| best and most relevant questions in me.
| ikanreed wrote:
| A lot of companies don't actually sell a product that does
| anything useful, though. They sell an idea that sounds useful
| to management, and obscuring the truth earns more money.
| snacksmcgee wrote:
| A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-funded
| forum: scummy garbage makes money. Taking sales people out
| for steak and whiskey makes money. Lying makes money. (That
| last point is especially funny considering how startups lie,
| too, like having a landing page and no product but collecting
| emails like you do.)
|
| The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every
| time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| > The economy is built on grifting, at this point
|
| I agreed until here. Obviously, lying isn't the only way to
| make money. I make furniture and fix windows in old houses
| for a living. Am I grifting?
|
| When you stretch into hyperbole, you lose the ability to
| convince people in the middle.
| calebio wrote:
| It's not that hyperbolic. I'd say the economy isn't built
| on you making furniture and fixing windows in old houses
| for a living.
|
| Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on
| folks like you? No.
| tomxor wrote:
| > Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on
| folks like you? No.
|
| Are you sure?
|
| If you ignore human constructs such as companies and
| organisations and quantify based on classifications that
| make more sense for aggregates of workers, you might be
| surprised how little of the economy is built on the F500
| let alone venture capital unicorns.
| kortilla wrote:
| What do you think the economy is built on? Do you realize
| how much is spent on basic things like energy, food,
| construction of roads, buildings, houses?
|
| It's very obvious when people straight up lie in these
| industries because the physical thing never materializes.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yeah, if people were lying about utilities and
| infrastructure we'd have a right mess... like sewage
| pumped into rivers and onto beaches whilst water
| executives take home PSmillions. Those same companies
| begging for taxpayers money to do maintenance whilst
| paying out billions to shareholders. And infrastructure
| projects that look weirdly like ways to divert PSbillions
| of tax resources into private hands whilst achieving
| essentially no benefit.
|
| /crying-in-UK
|
| One of many stories about HS2 -- they managed to not
| document procurement though, so the judges didn't turn
| find evidence of corruption in that aspect (different
| story) --
| https://www.railtech.com/all/2023/10/23/british-high-
| speed-r...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It's very obvious when people straight up lie in these
| industries because the physical thing never
| materializes._
|
| Sort of. The trick in these industries is to instead
| cheat on quality of materials and workmanship. Which is
| how we're drowning in physical products to buy, and yet
| most of them are barely functioning garbage - they've all
| been "value engineered" to near breaking point.
| hathawsh wrote:
| Here is a breakdown of the US GDP in 2023:
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-gdp-by-
| indu...
|
| I think it's fair to say that a large component of the
| top two industries (professional services and real
| estate) are shady. OTOH, there are a lot of industries
| that seem less prone to corruption and more likely to
| reward people for honest work.
|
| That's just my POV, though.
| csomar wrote:
| I'd actually say it's opposite. The economy is built on
| folks like him but rewards other folks making it seems
| like his contribution to the economy is nil.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| What percentage of the GDP is furniture making and window
| fixing? Yours is a noble profession, and like most noble
| professions is barely a blip in the grand Machiavellian
| scheme of capitalism
| kortilla wrote:
| People building physical things makes up far more of the
| GDP than VC-backed startups producing vaporware
| marxisttemp wrote:
| If you mean manufacturing vs tech sector, then yes;
| however much of manufacturing has become automated. I was
| referring to actual craftsmen crafting things. Point
| being, when people talk bad about capitalism, they're not
| talking about artisans or craftspeople or other
| tradespeople plying their trade, they are referring to
| the system by which capital is accrued and hoarded by the
| owner class
| kjs3 wrote:
| I get what you mean, but one could argue its a bit
| hyperbolic (maybe false equivalence?) to draw a line
| between the economic impact of small biz/single
| proprietor and the economy writ large.
|
| That said...thank gawd there's still room for biz like
| yours.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| VC is an absolute cancer. All of these grifters claim to
| love free markets, but the entire ecosystem is just
| propping up companies operating at a loss until all their
| competitors fold. At least these useless buzzword B2B
| companies actually have some gormless entity willing to pay
| them enough to keep the lights on without another 500
| million dollar check from Daddy Andreessen lol
| kjs3 wrote:
| _A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-
| funded forum: scummy garbage makes money._
|
| I don't think you quite understand how VC works.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Let me explain it to them, then: it's not simply that
| "scummy garbage makes money". It's that scummy but shiny
| garbage is given away for free, which makes the company
| look great to potential buyers - typically large
| corporations or the public (via IPO) - which allows the
| company to be sold for stupid amounts of money before the
| buyer realizes they bought a garbage factory, and _this_
| is what makes investors money.
|
| People who got the free shiny scummy garbage? They don't
| matter, their only role is to grow a counter on financial
| reports, and to serve as a backup plan - because when the
| potential buyers realize too soon what they were about to
| buy, the people holding the previously free garbage can
| be squeezed for some money to hopefully make the
| investors whole.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| "...like you do" Is this a typo or a personal attack to the
| parent?
| figgyc wrote:
| I think it's just a grammar thing, meant to read "having
| a landing page and no product, but collecting emails like
| you do [have a product]" - so not the parent being
| disingenuous but the general practice.
| andirk wrote:
| "like" = "as if", and not in a Clueless inflection.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > That last point is especially funny considering how
| startups lie, too, like having a landing page and no
| product but collecting emails like you do.
|
| How dare companies do market research with potential buyers
| to know what to build before they start building it! If
| only we could setup massive factories that pump out hot
| garbage that nobody wants and build roads to nowhere like
| the soviets did.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Indeed. This is basically enterprise sales, and sales guys
| will not be happy with anything else.
| speckx wrote:
| I just sent this article to an enterprise sales rep who has
| been email me for weekly days for the last several weeks,
| even thought I told them I was no interested and away on
| vacation.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| Ironically, I also actually can't figure out what this company
| does from its website.
| diggan wrote:
| The title on the website says "licensing & distribution", the
| paragraph under that repeats it and the code example shows
| some software trying to authorize a serial key to see if it's
| valid or not.
|
| I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in
| some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done
| any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it
| is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
| michaelt wrote:
| It seems reasonably clear to me, yes - although
| "distribution" could mean a lot of things.
|
| As the documentation is all public, though, it's easy
| enough to see what they're offering.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration,
| checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from
| being kind of an outdated problem).
| cyral wrote:
| Right, I thought it was extremely clear. The code sample on
| the homepage really makes it click right away for
| developers and confirm that it's what they need. While
| developers might not be the decision person, I bet they get
| a ton of leads from developers who find this company and
| then ask their management for it.
| nipponese wrote:
| Recently I have been dropping the URL in ChatGPT and asking
| what the company actually builds, problems they solve, and
| how they make money. Especially for consulting firms, they
| really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by
| obfuscating what they actually do.
| sesm wrote:
| Did you find ChatGPT responses accurate for queries like
| this?
| nipponese wrote:
| The responses have not been enshittified _yet_.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Especially for consulting firms, they really try to
| differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating
| what they actually do.
|
| I mean, isn't that what Zombocom was created for? I always
| assumed it existed to parody those firms.
|
| You can do anything at Zombocom[tm].
| melvinmelih wrote:
| Initially, I thought it was a solution for companies to
| manage their miscellaneous software licenses, but after some
| time I figured out it's a solution if you want to offer your
| own licensing. The gen-z ultra-wide fonts didn't help with
| readability either.
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" The gen-z ultra-wide fonts didn't help with
| readability either."_
|
| The font is "Owners XXWide" and the font designer's various
| mentions in publications suggest Elder Millennial at the
| latest. I don't think we can blame the kids for this one.
| castillar76 wrote:
| Even just the pricing component would be lovely -- I'm _so
| tired_ of the "call us to discuss license cost" for anything
| larger than "absurdly tiny". You don't need to make it penny-
| accurate, even: I just need a sense of scale. If your product
| costs something wildly outside my budget, wouldn't you rather
| save your time to talk with people that can actually afford
| what you're selling?
|
| (I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and
| no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely _nothing
| you say_ will make it possible to "find those dollars
| somewhere".)
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| I've seen (and experienced as the seller) 2 main reasons:
|
| 1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from
| every enterprise client 2. we don't actually know our own
| economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest
| effort to quote it within a magnitude
|
| A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is
| too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but
| typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke
| development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be
| costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a
| starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good
| use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal
| answers, more complex than just a formula...
| castillar76 wrote:
| I could see that -- having worked for a large network
| vendor in the past, there are some things that just don't
| lend themselves to any kind of pricing without some kind of
| scoping discussion. :)
|
| Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more
| companies _think_ they have that problem than actually have
| that problem.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Its difficult because lying about "implementation details" is a
| marketing detail.
| arisudesu wrote:
| May it happen that CloudFlare stops sending their call
| invitations to me. I have an account at them which has shared
| access to company domains, because sometimes I was needed to
| assist with them. CloudFlare reps repeatedly e-mail me to
| schedule a call, even after I replied to them and told that I
| am not a person directly responsible for our domains and asked
| to stop mailing me. Whoever was their rep at that time,
| answered that they will stop. Some time passed, and they
| started e-mailing again. Eventually I started putting their
| e-mails to spam folder.
| retrochameleon wrote:
| I was in an email back and forth with someone that cold emailed
| us about a service. Sometimes, I say "what the hell" and take
| their pitch and see if it's actually worthwhile. But this guy,
| after I asked him some basic details about his service and what
| differentiates them, refused to answer my questions and
| insisted on getting on a call.
|
| Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info
| without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm
| not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose
| my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam
| and moved on.
| RobinL wrote:
| Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because:
|
| - it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you
| as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be
| locked in)
|
| - it usually obscures what the product actually does
|
| Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the
| product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to
| find out and charge you even more
| tashian wrote:
| How should a company figure out what to charge for something
| in the first place? Especially a startup that doesn't have
| much market data to go on, and may be making something
| entirely new that no one quite knows the value of. When this
| is the case, one option is to do price discovery. And the way
| to do that is to remove prices from the website, take calls,
| learn about customers and their needs, and experiment.
| earnestinger wrote:
| If client pays for a link that's part of a chain, and
| doesn't want the chain broken, and still has profit, it
| means client can pay more, that link is worth more.
| necovek wrote:
| When you don't how valuable it's going to be, you at least
| know how expensive is it to make.
|
| For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover
| your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable
| profit on top.
|
| If you can't figure that out either, well...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _and may be making something entirely new that no one
| quite knows the value of._
|
| How many such companies even exist at any given point in
| time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost
| none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For
| everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same
| thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem
| in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly
| what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being
| the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to
| work with.
|
| --
|
| [0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap
| paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be
| the first to market with something substantially new, it
| still is just an increment on some existing solution, and
| solves a variant of some existing problem, so there _is_
| data to go on.
| wil421 wrote:
| Have you ever done enterprise contracts? A lot of huge
| companies won't touch smaller products because they can't
| guarantee what they want. These are complex negotiations with
| a lot of a la cart options.
|
| What kind of products are you buying where you don't know
| what they do?
| sim7c00 wrote:
| you are right. an enterprise products can never be ready
| for any enterprise customer. they need custom solutions to
| work with what they already invested millions in. each
| customer is different there. most enterprise products are
| ever expanding 'app platforms' or frameworks ultimately, in
| order to be able to adapt to new customer environments and
| needs quickly and efficiently. if they arent, most
| environments will spit them out quickly and harshly. bad
| for business on either side.
| wil421 wrote:
| The things I hate about this with SAAS products is they
| usually gate keep things like sso behind the enterprise
| plans.
| physicsguy wrote:
| From the other side, have you ever tried to deal with
| corporate customers with SSO?
|
| What normally happens: * Enterprise customer's
| CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.
|
| * You are put in touch with some support guy in India in
| IT
|
| * He doesn't know so has to go out to some external
| consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on
| top of Entra ID
|
| * You end up getting sent a SAML configuration
|
| * Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so
| you reach out again.
|
| * You wait for a response for a month
|
| * The people who actually want to use the product are
| getting annoyed
|
| * Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get
| created, people start using the product.
|
| * 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not
| heard from their IT team despite badgering them.
|
| * Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set
| up and is working.
|
| * Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to
| expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the
| whole game starts all over again because of course all
| the people you previously spoke to have left.
| necovek wrote:
| > quickly and efficiently
|
| Are we considering products like Salesforce or SAP
| "enterprise app platforms" here?
|
| Look for any of a million news reports on multi-year
| "integrations" (sometimes even failed ones but always
| over budget).
| frereubu wrote:
| Totally OT, but I love your typo "a la cart". It makes me
| think of an early 20th century greengrocer with a cart of
| vegetables and fruit trying to appear more sophisticated by
| saying he's selling things "a la cart".
| wil421 wrote:
| Doh! Siri isn't the best for commenting.
|
| Enterprise sales wishes they could have customer fill up
| carts.
| srveale wrote:
| What if you sell a product where it's easy to determine the
| cost for one user signing up by themselves, so you figure out
| the required markup and publish that on your site. But large
| organizations wanting licenses for each user will want a
| discount, will want finer details about contracts, and often
| some kind of unique adaptations to the product for their use
| case. The selling company needs to know if its worth the
| effort, in which case you have requirements gathering and
| negotiations. Of course there will be differential pricing
| depending on what the buyer company wants (cost goes up) and
| if it's a whale of a deal that the seller really wants (cost
| goes down) So... schedule a call?
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort
|
| It's not worth the effort.
|
| It's killing your ability to scale your sales process.
| Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product
| development, as now you have a bunch of one off
| deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you
| want for various tiers of user count.
|
| If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you
| scale are critical.
| precommunicator wrote:
| Nah, what you do is you add this feature for everyone,
| unless it doesn't make sense
| jimbokun wrote:
| > for everyone
|
| YES!
|
| Adding features just for single customers doesn't scale,
| adding features useful to many customers does.
| srveale wrote:
| This is what I meant in my comment. The seller needs to
| know what the buyer wants, maybe its a big bulk discount
| or an extra feature. If the seller decides the discount
| is too steep, or the extra feature doesn't fit with the
| road map, then no deal. Or maybe the deal really is that
| big, and it's worth catering to some one-off demands.
|
| None of this means "hiding" information, but you can't
| put something like "We'll do X hrs of extra work if you
| buy Y licenses". Just like the any store might have a 10%
| discount if you buy a dozen, but if you want 50,000 then
| there will probably be a conversation involved.
| afiori wrote:
| I believe this is one of the main reasons cloudflare
| focused so much on Workers: it allowed them to replace
| much of the one-off features they had to develop for
| various customers
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _you sell a product where it 's easy to determine the
| cost for one user signing up by themselves, so you figure
| out the required markup and publish that on your site._
|
| Then someone at a large organization can multiply this
| number by the expected number of licenses they'll need, and
| get a ballpark estimate for the (upper bound of the) costs
| of the service, which is a critical input in determining
| whether it's even worthwhile to consider talking to the
| vendor. Having that information, the organization can
| _then_ schedule a call to negotiate whatever extra
| adaptations and discounts they need, or realize signing up
| is unlikely to have positive ROI and skip it, which also
| saves the seller from wasting their time on a deal that won
| 't come through.
|
| Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a
| phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted
| on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it
| for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive
| companies for some big money.
| mcny wrote:
| > Vendors that hide critical information and pricing
| behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their
| time wasted on negotiating deals that would never
| succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or
| loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
|
| That or they have "customers" who are knowingly or
| unknowingly incentivized to have the vendor succeed.
|
| People in marketing, often even those in higher levels,
| know Google analytics. They have demonstrated experience
| with it. They want to keep using it. They want their
| employees to keep using it. Google Analytics plus or
| whatever it is called iirc does not have a pricing page
| publicly available.
|
| Why does Google not have pricing available publicly? Why
| do customers put up with Google? Is there any other
| reason?
|
| PS for those curious, I think this is one of the
| limitations we hit with Google Analytics free
|
| > Custom dimensions: 20 custom dimensions
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > it implies differential pricing
|
| Worse than that, calls aren't usually tracked. They will
| forget they told you "oh we won't increase the price next
| year," but they'll damn well remember the green engineer you
| invited to sit the call who blurted out that the $75k/yr
| license fee was "within budget".
| mbesto wrote:
| > Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the
| product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely
| to find out and charge you even more
|
| A super valuable solution to your problem is pernicious
| because...checks notes...a provider is trying to align their
| pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
|
| I can't scratch my head hard enough.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _a provider is trying to align their pricing with the
| value it creates with solving your problem._
|
| That's just an euphemism for "a provider is trying to
| capture for themselves all the value their product creates
| for you".
|
| A real head scratcher. Perhaps has something to do with
| there being no point of buying if all (or even most) of the
| value flows back to the seller? Unless you're a nail
| wholesaler and are happy with 0.1% margins because you sell
| by truckloads anyway.
| BeetleB wrote:
| No, I get the purpose of his comment. For a complex
| product and large customers, it's rare that you can guess
| what is useful to the company and price it appropriately.
| The product may offer 20 features, of which 5 are useful
| to the customer. Your (few) pricing options may be
| insufficient. You may have a pricing that offers only 3
| of the features they need. They're not going to buy it.
| Your next tier may offer 10 options. It has all 5 of what
| they need, but too much more, so it's priced too high.
|
| Even worse, your tier may have 10 options but _still_ not
| capture the 5 they need.
|
| So you negotiate, and they provide you the 5 you need at
| a reasonable price.
|
| This is standard.
|
| Oh, and negotiating a trial period is almost always a
| must. Perhaps a 2 week free trial is not enough for the
| customer. If you could bump it to 4 weeks, it could lead
| to a lucrative sale.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Right. The scenario you describe is reasonable. But as a
| buyer, if you put out those few pricing options, even if
| none of them match all my needs, I get to see both the
| features you offer and the prices you ask, which gives me
| the two critical pieces of information I seek: whether
| you have the capability to satisfy some or all my needs,
| and what order of magnitude we talk about in terms of
| costs. If that information tells me that you might have
| something for us, and it might fit in our budget, then
| I'll be more than happy to call you, and spend whatever
| time is needed to agree on a set of features and a price
| that works for both of us.
|
| The thing I want to desperately avoid is wasting time
| dancing around the salesmen trying to overhype their
| product while staying vague on the details, in hopes to
| get me to buy (and pay as much as I can) regardless of
| whether I get any value from it.
| mbesto wrote:
| > "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the
| value their product creates for you".
|
| And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have
| incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL
| providers all trying to capture the full value of the
| solution they provide. With infinite time, markets
| essentially adjust themselves towards this goal. As long
| as that number is 99.99% (meaning the buyer creates an
| additional 0.01% of economical value) it's still valuable
| for BOTH parties.
|
| FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their
| offering relative to the economic value they create.
| RobinL wrote:
| There's a theory an economics that says that the more
| different prices a provider can charge the more of the
| surplus they capture (ie they can tilt that percentage
| towards the seller and away from the buyer).
|
| Of course, if they're a monopoly provider and the buyer
| really needs it, they have to cough up. But generally
| there are substitute products. So the buyer would do well
| to look for an alternative that doesn't do differential
| pricing to capture more surplus for themselves.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have
| incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL
| providers all trying to capture the full value of the
| solution they provide._
|
| Because:
|
| 1) In efficient markets, all users also try to capture
| full value they get from the they bought. Efficient
| competition is purely adversarial.
|
| 2) You say, "As long as that number is 99.99% (...) it's
| still valuable for BOTH parties". Unfortunately,
| incomplete information and information asymmetry makes it
| more than likely that the "is trying to align their
| pricing" so that this number is _more than 100%_. That
| is, if you 're not careful, they'll scam you.
|
| The two above are arguments why this is a problem _for
| the buyer, in practice_. The next one is more general:
|
| 3) Everything that's good and nice and human happens
| inside _economic inefficiencies_. For human beings, a
| truly efficient market is _a literal definition of hell_
| - everyone 's suffering as much as possible, spending all
| their energy to earn exactly enough to barely survive.
|
| > _FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their
| offering relative to the economic value they create._
|
| As it should be.
|
| I'll say here what I say to people who talk about
| stopping to post anything publicly, lest it ends up in
| LLM training data:
|
| _Trying to capture for yourself 100% of the economic
| value you 're producing is an extreme form of greed._
| When companies try to do that, they get called _evil_ and
| used as examples of everything that 's wrong with late-
| stage capitalism and such. Human society works best when
| people _don 't_ capture all their productive output, when
| they actually do leave some money on the table, because
| this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and
| create more value - which, again, if they don't capture
| entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top
| of it.
|
| All of us who produce, we also consume. Society and its
| markets form an ecosystem, which needs some inefficiency
| to evolve, be resilient and thrive.
|
| (See also: running any system at 100% capacity is
| "efficient" up until some random event causes the load to
| grow ever so slightly, even for a tiny moment, at which
| point the system suffers a cascade of failures and dies.)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| the obscuring is just as bad as the differential pricing
|
| 9 times out of 10 even when you get on a call with them they
| just tell you the product does everything but their
| "consulting" or "support" will work to "configure" the
| product for you to do it. Meaning, it doesn't do that and
| they are going to sell you high priced consulting to ram
| their square peg into your round hole until you either beg
| them to stop or become stockholmed and invested enough that
| you are persuading your own stakeholders that it really does
| what it was supposed to.
| hathawsh wrote:
| People who behave this way are spammers and I mark their emails
| as spam. It's a small gesture, but it feels good to help
| identify the spammers.
| mrandish wrote:
| > ... post that stuff online.
|
| > I do not understand why that's difficult
|
| It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I
| founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley
| tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate
| what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly
| mystified me.
|
| After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think
| the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales
| and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales
| and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem
| to be 'performing' their job functions generically without
| deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and
| sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context".
| That's why so many product information pages follow templates
| which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are
| pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages
| lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for
| marketing copy: _only_ lead with statements of fact about what
| makes this product different from the top three alternatives
| which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope,
| anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that
| we could get sued for lying about.
|
| Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most
| introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They
| are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales
| metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make
| increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why
| anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an
| alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing
| sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of
| #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'.
| After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders,
| there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose
| trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and
| everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it
| worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head
| count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies
| aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart
| (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples
| to it each year.
| blitzar wrote:
| Burt. This bloke won't haggle!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8
| slama wrote:
| My understanding is that enterprise purchasing teams are often
| evaluated based on their ability to secure discounts compared to
| the initial sticker price of the software. Therefore, having a
| firm sticker price might make them less incentivized to purchase
| your SaaS. I suspect many companies don't put pricing up front so
| the email can say "Normally, we charge X per seat, but we'll give
| you a special volume offer of Y"
| ezekg wrote:
| It's a part of the enterprise dance, sure, but I wouldn't say
| they become deincentivized to purchase if you say no to
| discounts or negotiations, at least up to p99.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| The two categories of enterprises I've seen most react
| differently. There are staid, predictable and well understood
| businesses that highly value discounts, some to the point of
| absurdity. There are also enterprises with a more dynamic
| nature that are going in new directions and highly value
| flexibility. Most fall in one of those camps, and sometimes
| both.
| duxup wrote:
| One thing I find with enterprise is your call sometimes isn't
| entirely about you selling them on your product. It's about
| learning about the enterprise, from them.
|
| It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the
| dynamics between different departments at that company. Even
| issues they don't realize they have that are solvable. I find
| none of that comes out very clearly in emails that tend to be
| bullet point style focused but don't reveal the nature of the
| issue.
|
| I don't like calls either, but they are useful.
| ezekg wrote:
| I agree with this. This is why I still do the occasional
| 'discovery call' with people directly involved in a project --
| and is very clearly communicated as _not_ being a sales call.
| tttttrhoww wrote:
| One of the most infuriating b2b calls I've ever been on was
| setup by our vendor to sound like this. After almost a year
| of using their product (on a month to month plan), they
| wanted to check-in and see what features we were using, what
| we liked, didn't like and show us the new stuff they'd
| released etc. And then in the last 10 minutes of an hour long
| call, they dropped a little "we just need to go over some
| administrative details" bomb where they started negotiations
| to get us on a year long contract. I will never accept
| another discovery call from this vendor again. It was such a
| huge piss off.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah that's terrible. I'd be all "not today man, talk about
| the other stuff". If they didn't take that, I'd be done
| with the call.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Weird reaction to say the least assuming you were happy
| with the product. I've been on calls where the vendor is
| already on thin ice because the product doesn't work and
| we're just making sure they are taking us seriously, where
| AE knuckleheads try to use that as an opportunity to upsell
| a higher tier of support or something. That's annoying and
| ime never goes well.
|
| Offering an annual contract though, which presumably comes
| with a volume discount is a totally normal practice that
| should benefit both parties assuming it's executed well.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I do understand what you are writing.
|
| For me, I can find out way more _quantifiable_ information by
| just doing 15 minutes of OSINT, or even simpler pull up your D
| &B report.
|
| I do not trust my emotions.
| duxup wrote:
| You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact
| needs and understand the product and so on, that's good,
| you're probably right.
|
| But when it comes to something complex, something someone
| hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between
| enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same
| direction, an email almost never covers it and often
| enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.
|
| If you don't address / discover those things it is
| potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.
|
| I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on
| the call and even asking about basic features, then one
| department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that
| because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the
| first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk
| about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.
|
| I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there,
| not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own
| processes and working it out internally.
|
| In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of
| course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is
| explaining or offering solutions.
|
| Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work
| for some things.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact
| needs and understand the product and so on, that 's good,
| you're probably right._
|
| It's not that - or at least not just that. The key insight
| I feel some comments here are missing is, from the buyer's
| perspective, the process is risky and (with market economy
| being what it is), _adversarial until proven otherwise_.
| All you 're saying is true, but until I know you better, I
| can't tell whether you have my best interests in mind, or
| are trying to plain scam me.
|
| To use an analogy, there's a reason people go on dates and
| gradually open up to a potential partner over extended
| amount of time, instead of just marrying the first person
| who promises the right things on the spot.
| madars wrote:
| Many organizations have a shadow org chart that you won't
| learn from the website but will get some sense of that
| structure in human interactions like calls.
| brandon272 wrote:
| A D&B report is not going to tell you everything you need to
| know about a company and the dynamics and problems it has
| with respect to the problem space that you and your company
| deal with.
|
| I mean, you could somehow get access to an entire company's
| email history and it _still_ won 't tell you everything you
| need to know. Whether people like it not, sometimes direct,
| high-bandwidth human interaction is required to adequately
| understand an issue.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| > and it still won't tell you everything you need to know
|
| Talking to them will? we cannot have it both ways (the
| entire company's email history is not enough to tell me
| what I need, but meeting for an hour, say three times with
| the salesperson will).
|
| I think you _are_ right, but I do not need _everything_. I
| just need good enough to make a decision to move forward.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It 's about feeling out their organization, their issues,
| and the dynamics between different departments at that company.
| Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable._
|
| I'd like to trust you and your intentions specifically, but in
| the general case, this relationship is adversarial, so as the
| potential buyer, I definitely do _not_ want you to "feel me
| out", and further disadvantage me in the coming negotiations.
| I'm fine letting you on the details of my organization, its
| issues and interdepartmental dynamics, but only at the point
| when I know enough about you and your product to feel safe you
| aren't just going to scam me.
| francis-io wrote:
| As someone who is also introverted and looking to start a
| business in the next few months, this is something I'm going to
| seriously consider.
|
| When I'm on the consuming end of a service, I would always rather
| help my self than interact with a sales person or support team.
| boole1854 wrote:
| The post is about how they have a no-calls policy, even for
| enterprise sales. The author brags, "I nuked the 'book a call'
| button from my pricing page".
|
| ...But their pricing page actually has a big "Schedule a Call"
| button when you drag the pricing slider into enterprise
| territory: https://keygen.sh/pricing/
|
| What am I missing?
| ezekg wrote:
| > No sales calls, except for a short 'discovery call' if
| absolutely needed. Discovery calls are just a formality.
|
| Author here. Quoted text is from the conclusion at the end of
| the post.
|
| I do the occasional 15m 'discovery call.' It's not a sales
| call, but more of an formality where we intro each other and
| then move onto email for deeper discussions.
| boole1854 wrote:
| Ah ha! Makes sense. Thank you.
| moffkalast wrote:
| One sane man in a sea of glorified door-to-door salesmen that
| govern B2B.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I would add video chats into this waste of time.
|
| I can confirm as a (largeish) buyer, i despise useless calls and
| video conferences.
|
| I do not have time, and it costs me money to hop on a 20 minute
| call just to find out it was a presentation of their slicks that
| were in PDF, or go through 30 slides that they could have emailed
| me.
|
| It costs me money for a vendor and internal teams to eat time,
| and my cost change depending on the time of the day. My rate is
| highest during mid to late day. If you send me an email with the
| info and I can read it in my morning quiet time, it (mentally &
| $$) cost less, and I will be less grouchy.
|
| there are some times when a call works. If the emails are
| fruitless because the writers lack the ability to be succinct, or
| cannot articulate what they need.
|
| edit: @spiderfarmer wrote it much better.
| Vaslo wrote:
| My wife works in sales. She always pushes people to her email via
| her voicemail or email signature. When people need really
| technical support, there is a group of dedicated people to help
| with that aspect. Technical support really isn't her job but in
| her mind it kind of is as being an important point of first
| contact to keep the relationship strong.
|
| Granted, you need to be very responsive to your email, including
| monitoring it a little on the off hours.
|
| She continues to grow her business territory each year for almost
| 2 decades and almost never makes sales phone calls. She does do
| scripted presentations for big deals from time to time but gets
| some support for those.
| codegeek wrote:
| Did the author forget to take "Schedule a Call" button from their
| pricing page if you drag the slider all the way to the right ? :)
| Kinda contradicts the entire post.
| ezekg wrote:
| I touch on this at the end of the post. It's a short 15m
| 'discovery call', not a sales call. It's essentially a
| formality to intro each other, make sure we're human, and move
| onto email for any further discussion. Essentially, not all
| enterprises will shoot you a cold email to start the
| conversation, so this call is to capture those leads, with the
| end-goal of having all real discussion in email.
|
| tl;dr: some enterprises will bounce if they don't see a 'book a
| call' button.
| Kiro wrote:
| But the entire article is based on the decision to remove
| "book a call" from the Enterprise pricing.
| ezekg wrote:
| No, the entire post is around the decision to remove sales
| calls from the pipeline.
| Kiro wrote:
| Still, you didn't remove it as you claim in the article.
| For a potential customer booking a call there's no
| difference, even if your intention is for it to only be a
| "discovery call". What did you actually change on the
| website?
| ezekg wrote:
| Actually, I did remove it, and it was gone for a long,
| long time (years). But only recently did I add it back
| because I discovered through a/b testing that I was
| losing leads that didn't want to cold email us, so
| instead of a cold email, they schedule a quick 15m call
| that takes little to no preparation for on my end. What
| it's not is a sales call, and it very quickly moves to an
| email thread. I am very clear that we don't do further
| calls past the discovery call -- it's all email (or Slack
| if they want extended support).
| portaouflop wrote:
| So if a potential customer for your Enterprise tier says
| "sure ezegk I will pay you 6k/mo but only if you do a
| second call with me to discuss some open questions I had"
| you will refuse and tell them you will only communicate
| via email? I find that very hard to believe...
| ezekg wrote:
| It's a hypothetical, and it has literally never happened.
| If they're ready to buy, they'll buy. If they need a
| quick call, ofc I can jump on at that point, but it
| really depends on what the call is about -- e.g. if they
| want to know how to do something, email is a better
| medium for technical topics.
| codegeek wrote:
| You seem to be doing this in good faith but honestly, there
| is no difference between 'Discovery Call" and a "Sales Call".
| The point is that the customer has to speak with someone
| first. I do think it is required for enterprise deals but the
| premise of your post seems to say otherwise.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Yeah, I was annoyed at this too but I think they're
| differentiating it by having the price already set, and
| it's just a way for Companies to do the intro dance if they
| want to. I know my immediate decision-makers at my company
| wouldn't use a vendor if there was no call.
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| The call offered here is optional isn't it? You can engage
| entirely over email for enterprise deals.
| ezekg wrote:
| There absolutely is a difference between one 15-minute call
| to see faces vs a pipeline of ten 30- to 60-minute calls
| discussing requirements, compliance, pricing, billing,
| onboarding, implementation, and support over the course of
| 6 months.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Sales calls usually start with a discovery call then move
| to those later stages in the pipeline though, so you're
| just calling a sales call by another name.
| ezekg wrote:
| I think this is being quite pedantic, especially if
| you've done enterprise sales before.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Well, no, it seems your distinction is what is pedantic,
| as you are differentiating between discovery calls and
| sales calls when most would call them one and the same.
| This in my opinion undermines the point of your article.
| ezekg wrote:
| Fair enough. The point of #nocalls is to dip out of the
| dance, not of all communication. :)
|
| You can take it to the extreme, like I did for a long
| time, or adapt it for yourself.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I just read your other comment [0], this idea makes more
| sense in that you don't do any future calls, it's more
| like customer support in terms of helping them answer
| questions rather than beginning a pipeline.
|
| [0]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385#42730669
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I find it quite funny that if you go to the pricing page, they'll
| funnel you into a call if you get to the enterprise part.
| ezekg wrote:
| I've touched on it in a few places, but you're right that there
| feels like a disconnect there which I didn't catch until
| pointed out. But there really isn't too much of a disconnect,
| and it's nothing nefarious. It's simply that over the years of
| doing #nocalls, I discovered that I was losing some leads that
| didn't want to cold email us, so instead, I added a 'discovery
| call' as a way to capture these leads -- not as a way to put
| myself, and them, into some sort of endless sales call
| pipeline, but as a way to start the conversation.
|
| Really, all one of these discovery calls really are is a short
| 15 minute call where I intro myself for 30s, they intro
| themselves, and then I hear about their problem. After that, I
| tell them yes/no we can solve that with X/Y/Z, thenI tell them
| I'll follow up via email with additional links and
| documentation unless there are any further pressing questions.
| And in that email, I ask that they CC relevant team members
| onto the email thread for further discussion.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| Maybe this goes without saying, but this requires really good
| self-serve for _most_ customers. In general it seems like the
| trend is more fragmentation, rather than just "more email" but
| that does mean less call-driven --
| https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
| stapedium wrote:
| If you are selling to a non-technical user, phone calls give them
| a hint of your support. Email support is horrible. Turn around
| times are too slow. This is the reason I wont buy another
| framework laptop.
| ezekg wrote:
| You can get around this objection by simply being punctual with
| email.
| jval43 wrote:
| Counterpoint: Recently dealt with a vendor at work and asked
| their support several highly technical questions together with
| a bug report for an issue we were having.
|
| They not only answered in 1 day, but also provided a real
| solution / workaround for our issue, as well as a technical
| answer to the questions and a technical analysis of why the bug
| occurs.
|
| Outstanding support, and I would never have guessed it from
| their website.
| necovek wrote:
| I've had both great and terrible email support (great where L1
| immediatelly involved L2 support and I got a straight up
| solution in 15 mins, for instance), but getting something done
| over a voice call has never been that great!
|
| If L1 can solve things for you, a call sometimes can work, but
| really, if they can't, it meant multiple calls with L1 and
| multiple calls with L2 (in one recent example, it took 4 months
| for an issue to be resolved by internal support at BigCo where
| I was repeatedly asked for the same screenshot, including them
| recording me get to it a number of times, until I pinged their
| manager's manager via email pointing how they have the solution
| in there if they only read my emails, and got it resolved 2h
| later).
| Eridrus wrote:
| This only works if your sales strategy is all about inbound
| sales, i.e. content marketing (like this article)/ads.
|
| But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly
| rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this
| guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.
|
| It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small
| deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is
| 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely
| much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a
| call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.
|
| But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product
| than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.
|
| Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the
| correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a
| high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader
| demand.
| cainxinth wrote:
| It also only works if your product is quite good. I think we
| can assume a fairly normal distribution for the quality of
| products where the vast majority are neither very good or bad.
| An average company with average products will be more inclined
| to try aggressive sales and marketing tactics because they
| don't have a great product to help motivate sales.
| tacticus wrote:
| > I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution
|
| Sturgeons law applies more to enterprise software and
| products than any other space
|
| "ninety percent of everything is crap" is just insufficient
| in describing how bad the solutions in this space are.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Five nines?
| Aromasin wrote:
| I'd disagree - at the ends of the curve, there are a lot of
| products that are effectively identical, at which point it's
| a race to the bottom on price (often meaning a slow decline
| in features until things are "cost-optimised") unless they
| can bring another value-add to the table which is where
| salespeople come in. Some of the best companies with the best
| products have extensive sales teams because they don't race
| to the bottom on price - they outcompete on getting first to
| market of features that they only get to because they
| understand their customer pain points deeply and find out
| when the value add is.
|
| I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be
| designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more.
| Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow
| lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those
| protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were
| requests by customers with super niche requirements you
| couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of
| postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers
| (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip
| designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it.
| They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol
| used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost
| every Premier League football game you watch on TV.
|
| Good products are often only good because the sales team was
| out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a
| customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them
| and acted on that.
| blakesmith wrote:
| Love this anecdote. Having a really capable sales team that
| actually listens to customers unique needs, and feeds that
| back into a better product can be such a huge asset. Your
| sales team is usually a huge repository of unique customer
| pain and problems (opportunities!)
| mihaaly wrote:
| "But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated
| product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than
| they do."
|
| And how a call will make it simpler? Or why a telephone call
| becomes part of the service provided for the additional
| (higher) price (instead of other alternatives)?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The more that people spend the more they want to talk to an
| actual human to make sure their product and psychological
| needs are taken care of, in terms of being comfortable with
| the sale mentally too.
| ezekg wrote:
| I haven't found this to be true, and I've done some pretty
| large enterprise deals 100% over email.
|
| People usually want a call because they don't know
| something, not 'just because.'
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Depends at what level the company is at, especially if
| they're non-technical. I've found that non-tech VPs and
| executives definitely want a call, they'd never approve
| an email-only deal.
| ezekg wrote:
| Fair enough. I sell to modern B2B tech companies so am
| obviously biased towards that.
| veggieroll wrote:
| Maybe that's true for some people. But there's a lot of
| frustration being shown here and elsewhere that proves
| there is a demographic of people who really don't want
| this.
|
| Cars are similar I think. Sure maybe some people need help.
| But there's is huge demand for a one-click, no-negotiation
| car buying "experience" (or lack of experience rather).
|
| My conspiracy theory is that this has more to do with
| Salespeople and established sales channels (dealers) not
| being able to understand this both because their job
| depends on it and because they are naturally people-
| persons. So it feels intuitive to them and they have
| trouble understanding/accepting that many other are not.
| cloverich wrote:
| Mostly fair, but I disagree about the need for outbound for
| rapid growth, based on some recent experience. Good PMF and
| you'll be drowning in inbound. Still need a call and white
| glove for bigger deals though.
| manmal wrote:
| People buy 100k cars online nowadays, why wouldn't a great
| online presence also work?
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| A 100K car is a commodity product with very limited
| customization.
|
| If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to
| make a new one for you personally.
|
| A large SaaS customer is the opposite.
| randerson wrote:
| You can go to the Porsche configurator website and design a
| personally customized globally unique $300K+ car, and it
| shows you not only the price but also what it'll look like.
| So there's obviously nothing _technical_ preventing them
| from letting people just order online, like with Tesla.
| Frustratingly, you have to still go into a dealer for them
| to click the submit order button, and they might add a
| markup for this privilege despite them adding negative
| value to the experience. It is just as frustrating as B2B
| sales. I'm sure some buyers want to speak to a human, but
| enthusiasts tend to know exactly what they want and they
| dread having to "build a relationship" and wonder if they
| got screwed because they didn't negotiate hard enough /
| aren't good-looking enough / etc.
|
| As for B2B sales, if AWS can show their pricing online,
| which has to be among the most complex pricing in existence
| - then so can every other SaaS company.
| pythko wrote:
| I think you and the parent comment are talking about
| different scales. A large SaaS company deal could be
| $300k _per month per customer_ , and the sales process
| for a company like that can involve changing the software
| to meet the needs of the customer. A very early lesson is
| that what the customer says they need is not always the
| same as what they actually need.
|
| One of the many reasons calls happen is that customers
| say "I need XYZ feature in order to do this deal," and
| the salesperson then needs to ask why they need XYZ
| feature, and what they want to accomplish, and maybe
| existing ABC feature actually meets their need, or maybe
| the company needs to develop XYZ feature to secure the
| contract. Once you get into a complex domain, that is not
| happening over email.
|
| The article contains good advice to many businesses out
| there, but it's worth considering the situations where it
| doesn't apply, too.
| randerson wrote:
| It certainly makes sense for a deep dive sales
| interaction if you're actually going to your product or
| engineering team to make changes.
|
| But if you're selling what's already on the truck, as
| most of these companies are, then there is no reason for
| the "call for pricing" for a standard enterprise plan.
| Pricing pages should have a separate column for
| custom/bespoke solutions, where it makes sense to have
| "schedule a call".
| driverdan wrote:
| Funny that you picked Porsche as an example. Their sales
| process is much like the terrible B2B experience. They
| won't even sell you many of their cars if you haven't
| purchased something cheaper from them in the past. Walk
| into a dealer, tell them you want to purchase a GT3 RS,
| and they'll laugh you out the door.
| csomar wrote:
| > If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going
| to make a new one for you personally.
|
| Yes, they will. I recall watching a whole kind of
| documentary of it somewhere on Youtube. Essentially, luxury
| brands will fully customize cars for customers and have
| calls/meetings with them to discuss how the car will be
| customized. It costs $$$$$ but they'll do it.
|
| I think, too, that more important than income is the fact
| that these rich people should be driving _their_ cars. It
| 's a way to keep the brand positioned in that market.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| So you agree that when companies want to truly give a
| customized experience to their customers, they would get
| on a call with them? I guess we are on the same page
| then.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| But I guess 100k cars are bought are bought more in person
| than 10k cars. For most people, the more money you spend, the
| more you'd like to talk to a real human being.
| manmal wrote:
| That's not the case actually, if you consider that 10k cars
| are mostly used ones. Those are usually test driven, and
| haggled over first. And often taken in to a dealership to
| check the internals.
| themanmaran wrote:
| We're primarily an enterprise b2b company, so definitely
| couldn't get away with the "no calls" culture. BUT the "why do
| calls happen" section is applicable to anyone really.
|
| We need to hop on calls to close customers, but honestly we
| could probably cut 1/3 of those calls by following some of
| those suggestions.
|
| i.e. better documentation, ready to go pricing proposals, pre-
| filled security questionnaires, etc.
| encoderer wrote:
| That's what makes this approach interesting to share. By now
| everybody is familiar with the enterprise software sales
| process and it's nice to see how other companies are doing it.
| keepamovin wrote:
| OMG I'm doing this.
| psim1 wrote:
| I hate "let's just have a quick call" people. It's never quick,
| it's always manipulative, and always a waste of time.
|
| I have a client who tries to use calls to weasel out of paying
| for things. Finally I refused to talk to him on the phone any
| more. Some invoices remain outstanding but I'm not willing to
| waste more time listening to BS. I can spend my time making money
| from responsible people and meanwhile continue to have my invoice
| system pester him.
|
| Re: sales, there is no such thing as a quick sales call.
| api wrote:
| I love this aspiration and it's something I wanted to do, but
| unfortunately if you get into a situation where you're wanting to
| sell to larger more old-school enterprise or government customers
| it's going to be hard to impossible to execute. Unless your
| product is low cost and has no higher-level enterprise offerings,
| you're going to have to have sales.
| rjurney wrote:
| Sounds like he ran up against the snails pace of enterprise
| sales. It takes patience. When I cofounded a company selling a
| KYC solution to global banks, I did a survey of 30 FinTech
| founders on how long it took to get ink on paper with a global
| bank. 18 months was the usual answer, and it took even longer to
| get an actual check. If demand for your product is from large
| enterprises and you don't plan for this up front you simply can't
| survive. SaaS and "no meetings" are a great alternative... if the
| demand is there and it scales to a real opportunity. A lot of
| startups get lured into dealing with calls because a huge company
| with a potential $1M+ sale looms and they could raise their next
| round now if they close it. It is hard to say no.
| MattyMc wrote:
| > #4: They want to build trust
|
| For my business (micro-SaaS EdTech), the value of building trust
| with my customers cannot be understated. Further, I don't believe
| i can effectively build trust with my customers in the way the
| author describes; without meetings.
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| I have a small B2C app that requires no calls or interactions in
| general to get customers, just support afterwards. Currently have
| a few hundred subscriptions. It's not much but makes me pretty
| happy.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| I'm glad you are having success, but B2C is _wildly_ different
| than B2B. I can 't think of any B2C company that could do calls
| with customers. The economics don't make sense. Instead they
| use large advertising buys to communicate, one way, with
| current and prospective customers
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| This is one reason I think B2C is good for solo devs despite
| people constantly criticizing it.
| ezekg wrote:
| I disagree. B2C requires too much volume, both in terms of
| sales and support, because the price has to be so low imo.
|
| You either have to find PMF or you're going to die.
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| If you learn how to do SEO you can get lots of free
| volume. You need PMF though. The support is only needed
| if your product doesn't work well or is hard to
| understand.
| chias wrote:
| > we have a security page that outlines all of this, and
| essentially answers the questions that are in most security
| questionnaires we've seen.
|
| And yet, you still have to fill them in, because the people who
| ask you for them don't actually care to read them or do the data
| entry, and generally don't even understand them. It's often clear
| that they're the people who are supposed to be filing them out,
| when you get questions like "is the data stored according to our
| internal "level 3" designation described on this intranet page".
| I find it so frustrating. They say they have questions. They
| don't have questions, and they don't care about the answers. They
| care about whether their spreadsheet automatically highlights and
| cells in red.
|
| "But hey, you want that sale don't you? So do my homework"
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I notice that when I started my software career everything was
| mostly emails and some text messaging. Then 10 years later, even
| before the pandemic, everything was a call. These weren't even
| sales people, but other developers. Its like everybody suddenly
| became allergic to putting things in writing and when pressed to
| do so they couldn't.
|
| Yes, there are some advantages to sharing screens. But, being
| able to communicate with both precision and brevity in writing
| has its advantages. I strongly believe this skill is what
| prioritized me for promotion over my peers. It certainly wasn't
| my work ethic. Hard work is not well valued when somebody who
| works less hard delivers more.
| masto wrote:
| This pops up at an interesting time. I'm thinking about starting
| a business that will require me to sell services to enterprise
| customers, and I feel much the same way about phone calls. I
| thought I would just have to get good at it, but maybe there's an
| opportunity to rethink the base assumptions. If my potential
| customers would rather have an e-mail exchange, I'd be all for
| it, so at the very least I can present that option up front.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| If you dread customer calls, don't start a business that will
| require to sell services to enterprise customers. It's that
| simple.
| dartos wrote:
| This feels related to that "Nobody Cares" post from yesterday.
|
| Nobody cares that calls are a pain, so everyone just keeps having
| them.
| meow_mix wrote:
| this is not a good idea for most enterprise or even early-stage
| startups
|
| I don't think their business seems impressive enough to really
| make this argument either
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous
| products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a
| substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid
| "let's get on a call" game.
|
| If your website doesn't give me enough information to:
|
| 1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally
| speaking) meet my needs/requirements.
|
| 2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable
| given what your product does.
|
| Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure
| you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than
| once as well when there were no other good competitors.
|
| That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place,
| because they definitely do. The key to using the call
| successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into
| true _details_ about my needs, _after_ I know that you 're at
| least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done
| _efficiently_. We don 't need a 15 minute introduction and
| overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about
| weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for
| additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things
| to do.
|
| I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on
| my company and needs in order to push useful information forward,
| and I also understand that many potential customers will not take
| the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the
| sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you
| can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes
| looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to
| ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest
| in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of
| time before-hand to look at our website.
| freedomben wrote:
| Oh I might add another huge thing: Have a way to
| justify/explain your pricing and how you came to that number.
| When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me
| pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on
| what you think I can pay. That's going to backfire on you
| because after you send me pricing, I'm going to ask you how you
| arrived at those numbers. Is it by vCPU? by vRAM? by number of
| instances? by number of API calls per month? by number of
| employees? by number of "seats"? If you don't have some
| objective way of determining the price you want to charge me,
| you're going to feel really stupid and embarrassed when I drill
| into the details.
| JoshTko wrote:
| I'm confused by this, why would sales team know in detail the
| vRAM contribution to sales price, and how is it relevant to
| your purchase decision? I've never heard of enterprise/SAAS
| pricing to be based primarily using cost plus pricing.
| adammarples wrote:
| Isn't that exactly how a lot of things are priced? Ie.
| Snowflake. Pay for compute, pay for storage, etc.
| malfist wrote:
| Some things are sure. But not most. You wouldn't expect
| to go to McDonald's and they tell you (or even know) how
| much the fertilizer to grow the corn that feed the pigs
| that made the bacon contributed to the price you pay for
| a burger
| atq2119 wrote:
| If McDonald's insisted on having a long sales phone call
| to sell me a burger, then yeah, I'd expect them to be
| able to provide me that information.
| gitgud wrote:
| Really? That means you basically want to know what profit
| margins they're running at... which no business would
| want to (or should need to) reveal
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| That's exactly what's happening to you when you're the
| prospective buyer in one of those calls.
|
| I'm not in sales, but I've had a job once where I could
| see all the financials. And we would very often be
| charging one customer 10x what we charged another for
| exactly the same tier of service. Sometimes the huge
| corps would be paying more for a lower service tier than
| a small corp on a higher tier.
| WJW wrote:
| You can find that information in quarterly published
| information for all publicly traded companies, and for
| many non-public companies with only slightly more
| searching.
| IanCal wrote:
| But McDonalds absolutely can tell you an objective
| measure of what they charge you based on what you're
| getting. They charge you x per burger and y per fries and
| ...
|
| The examples contained CPU and ram but that's not what
| they say everything should be - just some objective
| measure.
|
| Snowflake charge by time, storage and size of machine -
| though they never tell you what the machine actually is
| underneath. I don't know what their "large" is.
|
| Maybe it's by concurrent users, maybe amount of hours of
| support, maybe API calls.
|
| I think the key thing was "we'd charge you X because
| you'd use Y" rather than "we'd charge you X because you
| look like you might pay it"
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes especially enterprise software marketed toward
| platforms/infrastructure usually are priced this way.
| SaaS products aimed at consumers or high-level business
| (like HR, Accounting, etc) often don't, so depending on
| what people's experience is mostly they may think
| differently
| freedomben wrote:
| Some products (especially infrastructure) still bill based
| on (outdated and often irrelevant) core counts and memory
| count. A few years ago I talked to a seller of a PDF
| library/toolkit who wanted to know my production and
| staging core count before they would quote me a price.
| Explaining to them that it runs in a serverless function
| on-demand was fun, especially because they would say things
| like, "well, what's your average?" I would often reply and
| say my average is defined by a function where you take the
| number of active users (which itself is highly elastic) and
| calculate for average runtime at 4 cores per user for
| approximately 50 ms per page (which page count is highly
| elastic too) and sum to get "average core use per month".
| Needless to say it was like pushing a rope.
|
| More common now with SaaS seems to be employee count or
| some other poor proxy measurement for usage. I love
| _actual_ usage based billing, but some of the proxies
| people pick are ridiculous. Like, if I have 5 seats or 500
| employees, but 2 users spend 6 hours a day in the software
| and then 10 others maybe look at it once a quarter, paying
| the same for those is absurd and is _not_ usage-based
| billing at all.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Usage-based pricing makes sense when you're buying
| infrastructure products. For (most?) other things, the
| price is based on value, not material cost.
|
| The cost of that PDF generation might as well round up to
| zero, but developing the tech cost multiple man-years of
| work. How do you price that "objectively" unless you're
| given a breakdown of the company R&D expenses, operation
| costs and margins. That is not a reasonable request.
| Either you're happy paying $X because it solves your
| problem and brings equivalent value to your business, or
| you're not.
|
| I do agree seat-based pricing is often ridiculous, but
| that's a problem for the free market to solve.
| Alternatives usually pop up given enough demand.
| freedomben wrote:
| I agree that in general usage-based pricing makes the
| most sense (particularly as that is a good proxy for
| measuring how much "value" someone is getting from it),
| my biggest complaint was that the way they were trying to
| measure it was dumb and very outdated. It really only
| made sense in a world where everyone was still running on
| physical servers or VMs. I would certainly concede that
| pricing is a _very_ hard problem for a product like this,
| but whatever pricing they come up with should at least
| map onto the system it 's being used in. Basing it off of
| number of pages of PDFs generated might would make sense,
| but they insisted on knowing how many CPU cores I would
| be allocating (which makes little sense when it's
| deployed as a highly elastic lambda function!)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You sound like the worst possible customer. Don't you
| see? Nobody is obligated to serve cheap people.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _You sound like the worst possible customer. Don't you
| see? Nobody is obligated to serve cheap people._
|
| No, I don't see, but it's clear from your personal attack
| that you do see and that you can help me, so thank you in
| advance. Please, help me to see.
|
| Can you please point out to me where I'm being the "worst
| possible customer" ? Is it because I refuse to lie and/or
| make shit up to jam my extremely square peg into their
| round hole? (which I might add, would open me to legal
| liability down the road if I guessed wrong (lawsuit for
| underpaying license fees), or would mean I drastically
| overpay and even bankrupt the company if I guess way too
| high. What if I get one customer and use 500ms of a
| single vCPU all month, but I guessed 50 vCPU?).
|
| If they want to know things that I don't even know in
| order to price them, what else should I do? I have a
| theoretical product that doesn't exist yet, with 0 users,
| 0 vCPUs, and 0 vRAM because it isn't deployed yet. I have
| no idea if I'll get 10 users in the first year or
| 10,000,000. How many vCPUs and vRAM should I tell them so
| they can price it? Keep in mind this will be deployed in
| an AWS lambda function so it scales literally on-demand,
| demand that we have no idea of yet because the product
| doesn't exist. We also have no idea how much CPU and RAM
| it will even need, because again it doesn't exist so it
| can't be profiled or measured. If you can't answer that,
| I won't accuse you of being "the worst possible customer"
| ;-)
|
| Maybe a different approach. I have a PDF library that I
| want to sell you. I typically charge $10,000 per vCPU per
| month. You are thinking about building a product on top
| of my library and ask me for pricing (which I don't
| publish anywhere so you have absolutely no idea what to
| expect). You have no idea how many users (if any) you'll
| have, and you plan to deploy this as a lambda function
| that can scale from 0 to Infinity almost on-demand. I ask
| you how many vCPU per month you're going to use so I can
| quote you a price. What is your answer?
| eastbound wrote:
| Salespeople often misunderstand value-based pricing. If a
| product costing V dollars is made of N parts, then each
| part provider claims their value is V, so they deserve
| V-$1.
|
| A PDF conversion may be required for the end-users, but
| it doesn't make the entirety of the value of the product.
| It just doubles it, as well as the N features before
| that. But although each feature doubles the value of the
| product, the order of features doesn't matter; A PDF
| export might have been added as the second feature, but
| the 10th feature still doubled it.
| WJW wrote:
| It's uncanny how accurately this maps to departments
| claiming they contribute V-$1 of the total profits. Sales
| argues they bring all the money, engineering argues sales
| would have nothing to sell without the products being
| made, platform claims no products would run without the
| infra they provide, support claims everything would grind
| to a halt without their constant babysitting of the
| users, etc etc. Only HR and Facilities don't claim to be
| directly responsible for any revenue, but that's only
| because everyone needs them anyway.
| stavros wrote:
| Well, it's all true. Without one of these, there would be
| no V.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > How do you price that "objectively" unless you're given
| a breakdown of the company R&D expenses, operation costs
| and margins.
|
| You ballpark how long it would take you to build
| something similar? You don't need any breakdown for that,
| just a marginally competent engineer on staff.
| immibis wrote:
| Software developers:
|
| > we can't do estimates.
|
| Software developers as soon as estimating something would
| be beneficial for them.
|
| > all you need is one of us on staff, to do estimates.
| mattzito wrote:
| I spend a lot of time on pricing and packaging of SaaS
| software and the challenge is real. Everybody says they
| want simple pricing, which often aligns to seats or MAU -
| but then they want usage-based pricing, but then they're
| concerned about unpredictable costs and spiky usage.
|
| Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a free lunch -
| you can have simple and predictable but you will have
| some users that you pay for that aren't getting value.
| You can have usage-based billing, but then you run the
| risk that anyone who uses an antipattern for the product
| will suddenly cost you a ton (or consume all of their
| allocated quota and be dead in the water, which is
| differently bad).
|
| The more flexibility you offer, the more complexity
| you're putting onto customers and sales teams to
| understand what's the best way for them to consume the
| software.
|
| There's also a lot of market pressure to "follow the
| crowd" - even if you have an option that is (in your
| mind) more customer friendly/favorable, if you are
| structuring your pricing differently than the
| competition, there will be customers who are concerned
| that they're not getting "a good deal" or concerned that
| the structure will end up being less favorable to them
| over time (after all, why does everybody ELSE do it this
| other way?). Sales reps also prefer pricing strategies
| that are at least structurally consistent with other
| products on the market, because it makes their lives
| easier.
|
| Similarly, it's very difficult to change pricing nad
| packaging later on - changing price is relatively simple,
| but changing units of billing or retiring an old offering
| can be an extremely difficult task.
|
| (disclaimer: these are just my own opinions, everything
| is hard)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I've seen companies square this circle with capped hybrid
| billing strategies. Customer gets charged the min of
| bills. Bureaucratic customers that need specific billing
| models can pick them but most people will accept the
| savings.
| mattzito wrote:
| It's funny, this was actually one scenario that I thought
| about mentioning but I had to get on a plane and was
| running out of time.
|
| It is true you CAN do this, but very few do, for a few
| reasons:
|
| One is, it's bad for margins - when you build a pricing
| model, you inevitably end up creating a system where some
| customers subsidize other customers. You assume each user
| or unit of usage is going to cost you X/unit and you
| charge X+Y. There is inevitably going to be a
| distribution of users and their usage patterns and costs,
| and the 90% percentile is probably going to be 5X, and
| the 10% is probably going to be .2X. There's not any
| malice there, it's just that different users have
| different usage scenarios and they use the product
| differently.
|
| Another reason relates to the issues with usage-based
| billing. Even in that scenario, whatever usage dimension
| you measure on will have users that don't fit the profile
| and they still end up being subsidized (from a margins
| perspective) by customers that DO map to the profile. A
| really naive example - you're a database company, you
| want to be cheap for people to get started, you go with
| usage based billing and charge based on storage. For most
| customers, that works - assuming your product value is
| apparent and differentiated, I think most people would
| understand that "I have to pay more because I'm storing
| more data, and accessing that data can be more expensive,
| queries more complex, and the utiltiy that I get from the
| database scales as the quantity of storage increases".
| Great, usage based billing, let's do it.
|
| But - then you have users who store very small amounts of
| data but with incredibly high query volumes. Your options
| are to either just eat the cost of those users (which
| might be fine for some amount of time) or now start to
| add additional dimensions on which you meter usage. So
| now you charge for storage AND cpu time AND maybe
| concurrent connections if that's a problem AND bandwidth.
| Congratulations, you have now created the perfect usage-
| based billing model, which perfectly assigns customer
| charges to handle the multitude of usage patterns that
| customers experience.
|
| BUT, it's really complicated to explain to people, and
| it's really complex to predict costs. That has two
| implications, one of which is that your value proposition
| has to be increasingly compelling as complexity
| increases. To use the database example, at some point
| someone at a customer will say "honestly, wouldn't it be
| more predictable if we just spun up a couple of VMs and
| ran a database instance ourselves?". Complex usage-based
| pricing works if you've got incredible technology that
| would be difficult to impossible for a customer to deploy
| themselves, but if your value prop is convenience and/or
| abstraction, you're diminishing that value as you make
| the pricing model increasingly less convenient and less
| abstract.
|
| The other factor is that someone has to build and manage
| the metering of all of these things. Even a single
| dimension like storage is complicated - how do I bill for
| additional storage? Do I look at the total storage at the
| end of the month and multiply by X? That hurts users who,
| say, run end of month batch jobs - but for you, users
| that use huge amounts of temporary space and then free
| them before the end of the month, that hits your bottom
| line (depending on your own architecture). So maybe you
| want to charge on a daily basis, but now every problem
| gets more complicated.
|
| Then, if you extend that across multiple billing
| dimensions, it's just gotten harder and more complicated.
| Now it's rock and a hard place time - you can stick to
| one abstract usage measure that is easy to reason about,
| but you're inevitably going to have some users that
| underpay based on that usage measure and some that
| overpay. Or you can add more dimensions and make things
| more "fair", but everybody's lives are harder, both for
| the customer and for you and your team.
|
| When you give customers automatic optimization, you get
| the worst of both worlds - you make less money on the
| bottom 10% (usage-wise) of users/customers because they
| end up falling into the usage based billing, and you make
| less money on the top 10% because there is capped upside
| for you as the provider. For customers, sure, it saves
| them money, but what you're really giving them is a price
| cap (not to exceed X).
|
| I would say for the sales teams, it's also not great,
| because they have all of the challenges of explaining two
| different models. For enterprises, it's a mess because 1)
| they'll probably want to negotiate specific billing terms
| for their use cases (we don't want to pay X for
| bandwidth, we want to pay Y) and other structural terms,
| all of which your billing system needs to support.
|
| At the end of the day, however you charge for anything is
| an abstraction layer on top of your costs. That's true if
| you charge per user, or per object, or per gig, or per
| connection, or whatever else. It's all unit-based pricing
| even if it's not _usage_ -based procing. You have to
| decide how much work you want your engineers, customers,
| salespeople, etc. to do in order to build, explain, and
| understand how much someone will pay for software.
|
| My general advice is to pick the simplest pricing model
| that protects your margins and prevents abuse. For
| infrastructure-y products, things like storage, compute,
| network, are all reasonable meters. For SaaS products for
| business users, per-user pricing is well-understood, and
| there are things you can do if you really want to apply a
| usage-based element there (bill based on MAU, or have a
| MAU component separate from seats purchased). But there's
| really only two scenarios - you pick a small number of
| meters and understand that some customers will subsidize
| other customers, or you meter across a bunch of
| dimensions that align to your costs and create a lot of
| complexity for your customers. Blending the two gives you
| worse margins and the complexity of both options
| combined.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Yes, it's worse for margins. However, we're in a thread
| about how potential customers don't want to risk either
| spending lots of money for services they won't use or
| dealing with spikes. Not choosing one or the other
| inherently puts the cost on the provider, shrinking
| margins.
|
| I don't think it's an especially hard model to understand
| though. It's commonly called pay-as-you-go in consumer
| mobile plans and sold as the cheapest option to customers
| that may not even speak the language the fine print is
| written in. Those consumers still understand the service
| they're getting.
|
| Telecom is actually a good example of how granular
| billing _can_ get, but still produces an incredible
| profit margin even with simple pricing strategies.
| mattzito wrote:
| Sure, it's also very easy to understand paying for deli
| cold cuts by the pound, but it doesn't make it a good
| comparison.
|
| Consumer telecom is a great example of a very constrained
| problem space. There's two levers, call time and data.
| And the population of people who are consuming that are
| limited to the size of the family.
|
| By contrast, enterprise telecom is incredibly
| complicated, with variable pricing by region, by time,
| type of inbound number, and then the software that sits
| atop that telecom is an additional license.
|
| Telecom is also largely a commodity - one provider is the
| same as the other. SaaS providers are fundamentally
| trying to not be commodities, and so the comparison is
| weak at best.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Consumer telecom is simple because providers have chosen
| to simplify the pricing strategy, not because they don't
| have other billing metrics available. You aren't required
| to have a complicated pricing structure even for
| incredibly complicated services. Doing so is a deliberate
| product choice with consequences.
|
| They're also not truly fungible, though that's mostly for
| the higher end of the consumer market. Think about
| TMobile's "uncarrier" marketing, or Verizon's network
| coverage marketing.
| immibis wrote:
| And they have high enough volume to average out the
| outliers.
|
| Did you know that in New Zealand, some business/server
| telecoms offer different plans based on how much of your
| traffic goes overseas? It's connected to the rest of the
| world with, like, five really long and expensive
| underwater cables, but it's also a not-quite-tiny market
| itself and if you can serve customers in NZ from a server
| in NZ, you can avoid expensive routing. (Your customers
| will also appreciate having a ping time lower than 300ms,
| even if they don't know what ping time is)
|
| Meanwhile, ISPs in Europe don't charge you extra based on
| how much traffic you send to New Zealand, because you
| could max out your 1Gbps flat rate with NZ-bound traffic
| and it would still be a tiny percentage of all their
| traffic anyway.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Didn't know about NZ, but it doesn't surprise me. Seems
| like we mostly agree.
|
| Another fun trap I've seen on the enterprise side is that
| pinging different towers can have different charges.
| Highest I've seen was $15 _per ping_.
| mattzito wrote:
| I think now we're just arguing semantics. The only
| billing metrics for cell phones that are visible to the
| user are usage in minutes and data. This is the easiest
| type of metric to understand and meter - because it's
| pure aggregation, and you have a fixed window over which
| you count the number of bytes or minutes consumed.
| Compare that to technology metrics like storage consumed,
| query executions, etc. where the variability in units and
| behaviors can be massive.
|
| What would be other metrics that you could bill consumers
| for that they could do anything about?
|
| > You aren't required to have a complicated pricing
| structure even for incredibly complicated services. Doing
| so is a deliberate product choice with consequences.
|
| You're making my point - the simpler you make it, and the
| more abstractions you put, the more decoupled each billed
| object is from the underlying costs. The implications of
| that are that you have to be careful about making sure
| that the economics work out, and that means either you
| have some customers subsidize others or you are very
| confident that customers can't use your product in such a
| way that it turns your numbers upside down. At the same
| time, that abstraction that you choose will not map to
| how every customer wants to buy.
|
| To go back to several posts ago, "per user" pricing is a
| per-unit abstraction that lots of customers like and
| understand. Sure, customers recognize that some users
| will use more than others, but it's a deliberate product
| choice that you abstract the more complicated dimensions
| from the users.
|
| It sounded like YOU, as a buyer, want a DIFFERENT
| abstraction, which is "usage" - and again, that's
| reasonable, but as a product team have to make exactly
| the same calculus, which is "what metric do we use
| instead as a proxy?", with the understanding that there
| are lots of SaaS products where usage patterns are highly
| variable and it is difficult to come up with single units
| that cover your bases without making the per-unit price
| higher than it might otherwise be.
|
| It's not hard to imagine yet another buyer who says
| (assuming the product metric chosen was "storage
| consumed"), "wait, I like usage billing, but your per-GB
| cost is really high for us, because we store a lot of
| data, but we don't access most of it - why can't you just
| charge me for data accessed?". You either say no or add
| more billing dimensions.
|
| > They're also not truly fungible, though that's mostly
| for the higher end of the consumer market. Think about
| TMobile's "uncarrier" marketing, or Verizon's network
| coverage marketing.
|
| It's interesting, because that ALSO proves the point,
| because the only differentiation you are citing are
| things other than what customers are being metered for.
| There's availability differences, but that's orthogonal
| to the billing metric. If I have connectivity, my minute
| on tmobile is the same as my minute on verizon is the
| same as my minute on mint, and the differentiation is
| everything OTHER THAN the billed minute.
|
| To wrap up - I don't disagree with you that there are
| benefits to usage-based billing. The point that I am
| making is that for essentially any SaaS product that has
| any depth, it can be difficult to pick a single metric at
| an attractive price point that a) covers your margins
| across the spectrum of usage behaviors, and b) maps to
| the metric that the vast majority of your users want. If
| you try to make everybody happy, you either lose the
| simplicity or you hurt your underlying margins while
| simultaneously making everybody's lives harder.
| derefr wrote:
| What you described _is_ likely usage-based, in the sense
| that the (presumably cloud) vendor usually has to
| _reserve_ a certain amount of resources per user, "just
| in case", because they don't know / can't predict your
| activity pattern. Same reason VMs are still charged for
| when started but idle: they reserve their CPUs.
|
| What people really want, when they say "usage-based
| billing", is _outcome-based_ billing. They want to get
| charged money whenever they hit the button in your
| software that _makes_ them money (or, for a cost-center,
| _saves_ them money.)
|
| Think of e.g. tax prep companies. (For the average Joe
| employee), they don't charge you money up-front; instead,
| they take a part of the net-positive return they fully
| expect to find you. They make you happy, then take a
| slice of your happiness at the exact point that they're
| making you happy. Outcome-based billing.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yes. There's nothing more obnoxious to me than products
| like Figma where my company has a limited number of full
| licenses. They are super stingy with what my account type
| can do, so the 2 times per year when I need to get
| involved inside a Figma document or even a FigJam board I
| have to go begging for someone else's license, but it
| would be way too costly to pay as much per seat for the
| entire company as we pay for our designers, for whom
| that's obviously a core tool.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give
| me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based
| on what you think I can pay.
|
| That is how 99% of sellers do business. The upper end of the
| price range is what the buyer can pay, the lower end is what
| their competitors are asking for. Some sellers are lucky to
| have few competitors, so they can waste more of the buyers'
| time trying to narrow down exactly how much they can or are
| willing to pay.
| willcipriano wrote:
| This is how a lot of consumer businesses are pricing now.
|
| Then they use the same consulting firm as their competitors
| to set prices.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's how any sensible business sets prices. Your cost
| sets a floor, that's all. You set the price at whatever
| level makes the most money.
|
| Many prices end up being a little higher than costs, but
| that's because competition drives prices down close to
| the floor, not because businesses set out to do that.
|
| Why do grocery stores have coupons? It's not because
| they're charitable. It's because coupons are a way to
| charge higher prices to people more willing to pay.
| Trying to figure out your customer's willingness to pay
| and matching that with your price is nothing new or
| unusual. The tactics just change when the purchase is big
| enough to have dedicated salespeople.
| vajrabum wrote:
| That is actually price fixing and illegal. Not that in
| the current regulatory environment that there's likely to
| be enforcement.
| mhb wrote:
| So the college model.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Which is why you shouldn't engage with those sellers and
| companies they represent unless you have no alternative and
| are truly desperate.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| >you're just making the price up based on what you think I
| can pay
|
| It should be based on the email address used. If, for
| example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged
| more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and
| you get a discount.
|
| My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The
| price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and
| had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich
| people subsidize the repairs of poor people.
| WJW wrote:
| More like the people who appear rich subsidize the repairs
| of the people who appear poor. Probably usually fairly
| accurate but it's amusing to think about the edge cases
| where the truly rich don't feel the need to dress wealthy
| anymore and get their TV repaired for cheap.
| Aeolun wrote:
| One of the big benefits of wealth is that everything
| costs less. This is just an extension of that.
| WJW wrote:
| Don't want to be a hater but the parent of my previous
| post was literally about charging more for rich people.
| That is the entire point of enterprise plans too.
| eru wrote:
| Wealthy people usually spend more---just because they are
| less price sensitive and care more about other metrics.
|
| I'm not sure how everything 'costs less'?
|
| You could say that wealthy people can substitute money
| for time. So they need to spend less eg working hours for
| each good consumed.
| l0ng1nu5 wrote:
| I think he's getting at the pair of boots theory.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
| Aeolun wrote:
| That. You can spend money to save money in the long run.
| Just buy the house instead of having to pay for mortgage.
| Invest it so that it's generating money while you do
| nothing. Many things only accessible if you already have
| money.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I wouldn't go as far to say "everything costs less" but
| it is pretty well that established that poverty is very
| expensive.
|
| A couple of key examples:
|
| Food deserts often mean that groceries are more expensive
| in poorer areas as opposed to neighboring rich ones.
| Additionally, bulk food is cheaper but requires having
| enough funds to buy more than your immediate needs.
|
| It is generally cheaper to own your own home than to rent
| and low income people are going to pay higher interest on
| the same home loan.
|
| It is always cheaper for rich people to borrow money than
| poor people and poor people are often forced into debt in
| situations where rich people can dip into savings. Having
| to pay interest on your rainy day debt is way more
| expensive than getting paid interest on your rainy day
| savings.
|
| That last one is huge, and tends to compound across all
| kinds of other areas, increasing the effective price that
| poor people pay for almost everything.
|
| In the most general sense, it is often feasible to spend
| more money up front to save money down the road. The
| amount of interest poor people have to pay to do this
| reduces or even totally wipes out any savings.
|
| This is all pretty well documented and studied. It's part
| of the unfortunate feedback cycle at the bottom of the
| economic bracket that makes climbing back out harder the
| poorer you get.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I know at least one millionaire who seem to own _maximum_
| one pair of pants that doesn 't have holes in it.
| Especially in tech, it can be hard to tell. The one
| conversation I had with a FAANG CEO, he was wearing
| athletic clothes, as if he'd ducked into the office
| during a run.
| immibis wrote:
| You don't care how much money they have, but how much
| they'll spend on your product. If they won't spend much
| on pants, they probably won't spend much on your product,
| either.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| It's not a good indicator that they won't spend money
| either. These people have a different idea of what's
| worthwhile, and often times indicating status through
| clothing is not something they see a ton of signal in.
| snowfarthing wrote:
| According to "The Millionaire Next Door", this is
| actually a surprisingly common "edge case". The "rich"
| are the people who diligently save and invest, get their
| hands dirty at what they do, and don't care about
| pretenses -- they'll drive a beat-up pickup truck because
| it helps them at their work, and they can take it out for
| fishing and hunting, and they can have it paid off --
| while that pretty Porsche is going to just sit in a
| driveway and rust, because it's too nice to take it for a
| run doing the things you want to do!
|
| Whereas the "high income" people -- typically doctors and
| lawyers -- are spending lots of money on nice suits and
| cars and homes, but have little to show for it in terms
| of actual wealth.
|
| Having said that, I don't mind the rich who aren't
| pretentious getting a discount. I'd call it a "pretention
| tax". What's further ironic is that the former tend to
| appreciate paying a little extra if it ensures that a job
| is well-done, whereas the latter tend to skimp on paying
| extra, and often get the poor-quality results you'd
| expect.
|
| And yes, there's exceptions to both categories, too --
| indeed, it's not as if it's _hard_ to live within your
| means as a doctor or a lawyer, if you don 't mind looking
| a little "lower class" as a result (and if your clientele
| are the working class, this may even be a bonus!). But
| it's nonetheless a fascinating dynamic to keep in mind!
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor
| people.
|
| tbh I have no problem with this as long as the work was
| done well.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Correct. Market value is not the cost of making X plus a
| margin. Many people get that wrong.
|
| Marker value is what someone else is willing to pay.
| yndoendo wrote:
| If I remember correctly, Amtrak does something like this
| for pricing their train tickets. It is not the cost of
| going from A to B. It is priced so the more populated area
| travelers, North East Coast, pay higher to help reduce the
| cost for those in the middle of the USA. This helps make
| tickets more adorable for the more poor individuals.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| > make train tickets more adorable
|
| amtrak uwu
| carimura wrote:
| I've always wondered about this. My wife always tells me to
| close the garage when folks come to the house to give us
| bids on jobs so they don't see the cars. Not that a Tesla
| indicates wealth but I guess it indicates something? I tell
| her she's paranoid... maybe she's not.
| Latteland wrote:
| I think your wife is right. I have a tesla and I always
| think about that indicating something. Also Tesla's are
| so ubiquitous it doesn't matter that much like it used to
| be, and you can get a used one for pretty cheap. But that
| rich guy reputation still persists.
|
| And then now that we have Elon Musk following the Howard
| Hughes self destructive cycle (greatest video game player
| AND ceo of 5 companies who posts all day on social
| media), there's a very possible negative takeaway -
| especially in tech it's hard to know. I live in a
| ridiculous world, I actually see 'got mine before elon
| was a doofus' bumper stickers. We should all try to judge
| each other on actual behavior and choices. I'm an asshole
| completely separate from buying a tesla a decade ago,
| people.
| cafard wrote:
| Henry Ford was a real piece of work for a good while. I'm
| not sure how much it would have affected his sales--not
| that he was selling to the upper end of the market.
| ozim wrote:
| You know it might be also priced on "this guy feels like a
| pain to work with after the way he asks questions, let's put
| the price up". There is no way to objectively explain that
| without having person offended - so I am going to put a price
| I think will cover me dealing with BS questions or attitude
| of the customer and if he walks it is still a good deal for
| me.
|
| We might think that companies need every single sale - well
| no sometimes you want to fire a customer or not take one on.
| TristanBall wrote:
| You don't have to change you process, so you can still
| explain it rationally.
|
| Just leave off the "then I multiplied by 10" part.
|
| Which I did by accident once ( not by 10, but it was still
| substantial )... but it turned out the customer was
| delighted because we were still 50% vs their existing
| vendor.
|
| Enterprise pricing is a farce.
|
| I very much agree with the poster above about vendors
| disqualifying themselves.. another red flag for me is the
| Two Suits and Skirt pre-sales Hydra Monster that big
| vendors love to send around, to scare you into letting them
| capture all the value that their purporting to provide you.
|
| And yes, the above shows I've been both sides of the fence.
| I felt it was going to be good experience, and it was, but
| I have regrets too.
| risyachka wrote:
| The price is set by the market. It never was and never will
| relate to the seats/resources used/etc.
| immibis wrote:
| The price is set by the market as a function of some
| sellers charging by seats, others by resources used, etc,
| and some buyers preferring simple pricing models, others
| preferring usage-based, etc.
| ascorbic wrote:
| >just making the price up based on what you think I can pay
|
| It's called supply and demand, and it's the way things have
| been priced since the dawn of commerce. The only time the
| price is based on cost is when the market is competitive
| enough to drive that price down, and the cost acts as the
| floor. Even then, if you can get your costs below those of
| your competitors then it's your competitors cost that can act
| as the floor.
|
| The way things should be priced is based on the value it
| gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value
| per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below
| $100 for it.
| radicalcentrist wrote:
| No it's not called supply and demand, it's called price
| discrimination. The way things should be priced is based on
| the value it gives the market as a whole. Anything further
| is an anti-competitive attempt to vacuum up more of the
| buyer surplus.
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| > It's called supply and demand
|
| Supply of the kinds of services under discussion here is
| rarely limited in any practical sense, so scarcity does not
| play.
|
| > The way things should be priced is based on the value it
| gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of
| value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little
| below $100 for it.
|
| This ignores opportunity cost. Very few buyers have
| infinite cash, they do tend to have infinite ways they
| could spend money though and many of them will give a far
| better return than a couple of percent.
|
| In reality if you're adjusting your pricing to try and
| extract the most you think you can get away with from the
| customer, you will lose a substantial number of buyers -
| and probably more so with buyers who have a technical
| mindset.
| Latteland wrote:
| And also, the customer has the money and gets to make a
| choice. Sure, supply and demand is a real thing. But there
| is also a notion of friction blocking the sale. Everyone
| absolutely hates considering a new purchase that doesn't
| give you clarity on details and price.
|
| So that CTO says I'm probably not going to bother with you
| if you don't have a clear price. I also practice this
| purchasing way. Everyone should. So sure, someone in sales
| will fight to the death to justify their strategy of
| obfuscation and charging what the market will bear, and to
| try to justify their presence in the sales process with
| some kind of commission and argument about how they caused
| pain for the buyers and got more money. Meanwhile, company
| B sold me a widget for whatever, I already paid them, there
| was no salesperson wasting time on either side.
| immibis wrote:
| As a corporate executive, buying things for good prices
| is a substantial part of your job. You're not some
| grandma looking for a movie to watch who will bail if she
| can't figure out how much it costs. Sure, you can refuse
| to buy things altogether, but it won't be very good for
| your company - these kinds of companies seem to have been
| broadly outcompeted by ones that do buy things.
| freedomben wrote:
| Sure, but as a corporate executive you also have a
| limited amount of time. If you invest all of your time on
| inefficient sales processes then you may only get to
| consider one or two or three providers. If instead you
| eliminate the ones that have bad signs (like heavy price
| obfuscation) you can instead focus on the vendors that
| don't do those things. In the end you might not get the
| best product and/or the best price, but the same is also
| true if you waste all your time jumping through sales
| hoops and aren't able to examine more players.
|
| If jumping the hoops guaranteed the best price, then I
| would agree with you, but I would vehemently disagree
| that it does.
| j1elo wrote:
| What you're saying is akin to someone entering a clothes
| shop and the store clerk asking what they work on, to gauge
| the T-shirt prices according to the client's salary.
| exe34 wrote:
| is that how you present the price to your own customers? or
| do you operate on value based pricing?
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I've always agreed with this take but now as a B2B founder
| doing sales, I think it can honestly be interpreted a lot
| more charitably.
|
| I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things,
| like:
|
| * How much will it cost us to support you based on what
| you're using our platform for?
|
| * How expensive is this problem for you today?
|
| * From there, how much money could we save you?
|
| My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and
| that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing
| together. It seems pretty reasonable.
|
| Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make
| sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for,
| instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own
| time.
| _nhh wrote:
| I wanted to hire a personal trainer who just couldnt coordinate
| a call with me and I asked him to send me the details per mail.
| They said they dont do emails so didnt choose them as it was to
| scammy for me
| moffkalast wrote:
| They don't do emails? What are they, illiterate?
| _nhh wrote:
| i think so xD
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Quite possibly.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Going to add the most important thing: It is perfectly fine to
| end calls early if it feels like it has phased itself out.
| Don't be afraid to do so! Everyone on the call is costing
| someone else a lot of income. This goes for internal or
| external calls.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes, seriously. When a sales call is scheduled 30 minutes but
| 5 minutes in we have a conclusion, you get a lot of good will
| points from me if you thank me for my time, ask me if there's
| any other questions I have, and then conclude the call. You
| can even make this explicit with a quip like, "I'll give
| everybody 20 minutes back!" then it's clear you are being
| courteous with our time.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Some people dont know when to end calls early and everyone
| else is too polite to tell them to end it. I had a manager
| who made it a point to suggest to end a call early. I try
| not to force calls to end early unless I know everyone on
| the call. I notice when its all devs its really easy to
| suggest ending early vs when non devs are on a call unless
| a dev manager does it.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| For #2, someone once said there are two pricing models (was it
| Joel Spolsky? Don't recall..):
|
| $0 - $999 - direct sale/download, pricing on website
|
| $50,000+ - full sales team, no pricing on website
|
| And essentially not much in between... this has perhaps changed
| a bit with SaaS, but this is still semi true.
| egorfine wrote:
| Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's like a restaurant, with no prices on the menu.
|
| _" If you have to ask..."_
|
| I would definitely like to never have to talk to another
| "people person," and no-calls-but-we'll-give-you-the-info-
| you-need policy sounds great.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You mean a restaurant that gets away with serving
| mediocre food for ridiculous prices, because the "no
| prices on the menu" gimmick generates enough
| status/prestige to compensate for any customer
| dissatisfaction? I.e. the restaurant equivalent of being
| famous for being famous.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Wouldn't know. I generally avoid those joints.
|
| My tastes are a lot more plebeian.
|
| Unfortunately, I have to eat in one, every now and then,
| but I always walk away disappointed.
| crottypeter wrote:
| I think you mean this link:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
| rubber-...
| egorfine wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Given that I am the original russian translator of this
| article, shame on me for not remembering exactly which
| article it was.
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm a freelancer and sometimes I have to recommend software or
| services for my clients.
|
| When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those
| that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor
| intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions
| on me, but many lost tens of thousands.
|
| API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Are you me? I'm a CTO too, and I feel _exactly_ like this.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| TLDR; please don't call him, he really doesn't like calls. Must
| be a gen z
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| your probably leaving money on the table then
|
| i'd find that unacceptable as a ceo
|
| you got to do the work to do what's best for the company, not
| yourself
| mlyle wrote:
| But part of doing what's right is considering opportunity
| cost.
|
| If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too
| much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to
| procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it.
|
| The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on
| useless calls.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| when your purchasing 100k+ products having a conversation
| makes a lot of sense
|
| lots of opportunities to find easy win-win
|
| finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working
| with them can lead to a good outcome
|
| obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff
| mlyle wrote:
| There's a bazillion things we could be thinking about
| buying.
|
| Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's
| any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial
| sales call to find out that information isn't optimal.
|
| As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work.
| And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but
| expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to
| _qualify_ the vendor.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No, they're protecting money on their company's table from
| being taken by random sellers. "Let's get on a call" game
| seldom leads to better deals for the buyer.
| Moru wrote:
| I see it like this. If the seller can have salespeople
| waiting on a call, there can be better deals somewhere
| else. If the seller can have people cold-calling other
| companies, there most certainly is a better deal around
| that they don't want me to know about.
|
| Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the
| grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have
| detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to
| apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up
| by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Who knows, maybe there is no better deal, maybe the cold-
| calling salesman is actually offering the very best deal
| there is on the market. Then again, maybe the Nigerian
| prince really needs help with their fortune, and I really
| just won a car for being the millionth visitor on that
| news site[0].
|
| Point being, some stranger is calling me and asking for
| my money. I don't know enough about them to give them
| money just because they say it's going to be worth it.
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://xkcd.com/570/
| blitzar wrote:
| CTO's time is worth ~$10k a day, spending a day "on calls" to
| save $2.50 is unacceptable.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| I'd extend that to sales calls where they try to get you to
| bend your requirements to fit the mis-aligned product.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable
| given what your product does.
|
| My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22
| metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark
| estimate for your boring enterprise software library
| licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.
| dimatura wrote:
| Agreed. As someone in a place to make purchasing decisions, if
| I can just sign up and try something without having to "jump on
| a call" and sit through a demo, I'm more likely to do so. I'm
| more willing to meet afterwards if I like what I see.
|
| As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company
| after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later
| conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first
| customer!
| eastbound wrote:
| You can go to the SpaceX website and see the price of
| rockets. You can literally enter your credit card numbers to
| pay for it.
| mushufasa wrote:
| you mean... the gift shop with the model rockets?
| WJW wrote:
| No, go to https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassi
| fication=2&la... and click through a couple of times. It
| literally asks you for your contact data and credit card
| number so you can pay 650k USD for launching 15 kg to
| LEO.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Technically you're just paying the $5,000 deposit with
| your card. They probably don't want to eat the card
| processing fees on the full amount and will request some
| other sort of transfer for the remainder.
| dimatura wrote:
| I'd wait to see if they have a good black friday sale.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Also, this is very minor but phrases like "get on a call" or
| worse, references to jumping or hopping, really irritate me.
| What's wrong with that good old English verb "to have"? Or
| better yet, call is (believe it or not) a verb! Can I call you?
| Maybe. Can we hop on a quick call? Absolutely not.
| griomnib wrote:
| This sort of cuts both ways, I'm on the small business selling
| side.
|
| Sometimes somebody will want a call, I'll do my dance, tell
| them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower
| price - which isn't on offer. That blows a lot of my time.
|
| On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel
| problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in
| cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I've
| built I really do need a call to figure out if there's a
| missing feature or similar I'd need to build out, or if there's
| some implementation detail that's highly specialized to a given
| situation.
|
| By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price
| listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing
| with offer to have a call for complex situations.
| ryandrake wrote:
| As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch
| things into space. Your software situations are more complex?
| jaredklewis wrote:
| That doesn't seem like a logical inference to me.
|
| A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list
| for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house
| construction is more complex than space flight.
|
| It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too
| variable to list in any meaningful way.
|
| For a SaaS product with significant custom integration
| work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in
| the same way.
| kijin wrote:
| A small-scale contractor doesn't have a price list, but a
| real estate developer who builds an entire subdivision at
| a time definitely has a price list. There might be taxes
| and fees on top of that, but everyone expects that
| anyway. At least the base product should have a clear
| price tag.
|
| If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs
| $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more
| comfortable asking whether the custom integration work
| will cost $50k or $100k.
| griomnib wrote:
| There are many companies that charge "x" per weight of "y"
| to go from "a" to "b". How they get "y" from "a" to "b" is
| complex, but the actual pricing is quite simple compared to
| bespoke business solutions. It's just freight.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > SpaceX can provide unique interfaces for Payloads with
| mechanical interfaces other than 8", 15", or 24". The Sales
| team will contact you with pricing if you select this
| optional service.
| psyclobe wrote:
| Case in point this dumpster fire of a product: aparavi.com
| randerson wrote:
| My least favorite is when I relent and get on their call, and
| after 30 minutes of answering their questions, they say "OK,
| next step is we'll schedule another call with our product
| specialist, because i'm just a sales guy and i didn't really
| understand most of that."
| sjburt wrote:
| The worst part is that the sales person has to go back and
| pitch their team on whether it's worth their time to get back
| to you.
| shin_lao wrote:
| What's the most expensive software you bought?
| zoogeny wrote:
| lol, believe it or not this was an interview question one of
| my Director of Engineering used to use to sus out the
| experience of people. As I read the parent comment I was
| thinking the same thing.
|
| Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know
| what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.
| shin_lao wrote:
| I'm just thinking about 6 to 7 figures software investment
| and trying to understand how you could do that without
| several meetings.
| driverdan wrote:
| Easy, use JIRA and give your whole company seats. Add on
| some other Atlassian products and you'll quickly get to
| 4-5 figures per month.
| joemclarke wrote:
| I'm a CTO as well and never get on these types of calls to get
| more details and pricing since they can be such a big waste of
| time. Someone else from our organization will get on the call
| instead and then give me the pricing details so we can make a
| decision.
| chefandy wrote:
| I've had too many bad sales experiences to deal with that. The
| second someone tries to force me into a sales call for a non-
| customized or self-configurable service or product, I assume
| they're just shamelessly setting me up to extract as much money
| from me as they possibly can. I just can't assume good faith on
| the part of a company that only distributes product information
| through someone making a commission. It feels like they're
| inviting me into a mouse trap.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| To add to those two, I need a working demo (in sandbox of
| course) of the product without which there's no way for me to
| validate to what extent your product meets my requirements. It
| doesn't matter how many screenshots, product explainers, videos
| you might have put up. Nothing comes close to a sandbox. Trial
| period is also fine.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| At the beginning of this year i had some reflection on projects
| at two clients. While the businesses of both clients is vastly
| different, they were kinda using the same setup: One business
| critical system. The rest was mostly standard stuff and both
| companies are about the same size.
|
| Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT.
| The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of
| the clients business. The approval of the project took about
| two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The
| project took more than a year, mostly because of communication
| chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed.
|
| Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT.
| The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some
| emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties
| agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took
| about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got
| cake.
| cutemonster wrote:
| It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and
| agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| When my team organizes calls or onsite mtgs with vendors, they
| always tell them to remove the first 10 slides because we are
| not interested in why security matters, how it changed over the
| last 20 years and how great the company is.
|
| They repeat this a few times so that it is clear.
|
| Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I
| asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this
| is very important.
|
| So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi
| cutemonster wrote:
| The last sentence got garbled?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| (sorry, somehow the end vanished)
|
| Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left
| the room.
|
| I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we
| need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying
| that the first 10 slides were removed :)
| ArnoVW wrote:
| When evaluating and making purchasing decisions for my security
| department, I have the same dislike of this approach. And
| generally for me it is a red flag.
|
| Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally
| it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do
| not want to give the price because they don't know the price;
| they're still finding out how much they can charge.
| brightball wrote:
| "Get on a call" is code for "we have commissioned sales people
| and in order to make that work we can't let inbound leads from
| our website bypass them"
| mooreds wrote:
| We sell a devtool (FusionAuth, an authentication server).
|
| We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit
| confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we
| do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you
| can buy it with a credit card.
|
| In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of
| enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm
| aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing
| calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their
| particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible
| discounts.
|
| Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of
| implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as
| good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can
| definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow?
| (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article
| about a short discovery call.)
|
| All that to say:
|
| * email/async communication is great
|
| * meet your customers where they are
|
| * docs are great and clear messaging pays off
|
| * devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month)
| deserve different go to market motions
| numbsafari wrote:
| At least you offer a pricing calculator.
|
| When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or
| deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing
| available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we
| assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's
| good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and
| "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that
| delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of
| magnitude different.
|
| If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire
| kicking with a demo account.
|
| So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be
| the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory
| glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of
| "initial investigation" we might do.
|
| I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space
| with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think
| "there's an opportunity there".
| mooreds wrote:
| > I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space
| with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think
| "there's an opportunity there".
|
| That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things:
|
| * prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or
| margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and
| therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced
| transparently and eat the market
|
| * the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a
| firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue
| ocean opportunity
| ralusek wrote:
| I'm also a CTO frequently making product decisions, and I refer
| to it as "Boomer pricing." You want to get on a call with me to
| assess the size of my company and whether or not I have some
| bureaucratic, unconcerned entity with an indiscriminate
| pocketbook. Clear pricing up front, and ideally a pricing
| calculator, or I don't even consider it.
|
| If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you
| found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call.
| I want you to find my product, compare it will full
| transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best
| suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume
| to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in
| their product on its own merits.
| ezekg wrote:
| > I want you to find my product, compare it will full
| transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it
| best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately
| assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually
| confident in their product on its own merits.
|
| Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales
| dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't
| want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they
| probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e.
| likely to become a support burden.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > There are numerous products I likely would have purchased,
| but I either find a substitute or just go without because I
| won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.
|
| > I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there
| were no other good competitors.
|
| I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business
| decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off
| to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your
| wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot
| more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems
| like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness
| to play stupid games.
| freedomben wrote:
| That's a significant over-simplification and ends up wrong in
| many cases. Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as
| rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. Generally
| speaking, in the short term renting is almost always cheaper,
| but there's a break-even point at which buying (aka building)
| becomes cheaper. Owning the system also grants considerable
| ability to build it to be exactly what you need, instead of
| hacking around deficiencies and/or begging your account
| manager to get your feature approved and implemented.
|
| There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business
| decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that
| without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have
| to use your best judgment and hope you get it right.
|
| Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't
| necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many
| cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project
| that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we
| can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial
| project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a
| major piece of our product or value proposition in which case
| you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you
| don't control.
| burnte wrote:
| I'm 100% agreement, right down to the CTO/CIO role. I just
| don't do business with them, period. I have a strict rule not
| to do business with people how cold call/cold email, hide info,
| and force pointless meetings. Once salesmen realize that I'm
| actually a very low maintenance customer who just knows what
| they want, they love me, I'm free commission to them because
| they never have to expend energy on me.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Off topic but a developer using keygen.sh is at the mercy of any
| "keygen.sh key generator" program out there, no ? Crackers can
| centralize cracking all those software by only figuring out once
| the algorithm. Whereas if you implement your own dirty key
| licensing crackers would need to do manual work for your
| software. So, whats the point of this service here ?
| bgdam wrote:
| I assume keys generated via Keygen.sh live in a centralized
| database against which the client verifies the keys upon
| startup. Keygen crackers only work against algorithmically
| verified licence keys.
| tmoertel wrote:
| I'm going to guess that the _algorithm_ behind key generation
| is "record a series of random bytes (from a truly random
| source): that's a new key". Pretty hard to crack.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Geohot says nearly the same thing. "Its much cheaper for them to
| waste your time than it is for you to waste theirs."
|
| https://youtu.be/GLGuA2qF3Kk?&t=320
| some_furry wrote:
| This is an incredibly inspiring story to read. Thanks for
| sharing!
|
| Never having to take a sales call to grow a company is _the
| dream_ for an introvert like me. And, as an open source
| developer, I care a lot about clear communication, transparency,
| and high-quality documentation.
|
| Looking at the Keygen front page, I can see how effective they
| would be at targeting the kind of customer they'd want.
|
| I personally have no use for software licensing products, but if
| I did, I would probably choose keygen just on the merits of this
| blog post.
| elzbardico wrote:
| As a customer, I absolutely abhor that the I need to book a call
| with sales to buy any enterprise product. Please, for the friggin
| love of <insert your deity or whatever rocks your boat here>
| let's do it over email!
| podviaznikov wrote:
| inspired by this post just wrote down small story about one of
| the calls
|
| https://antiantihuman.com/programmable-intimacy
| hackitup7 wrote:
| Having spent ~15 years in enterprise software I doubt that this
| works at higher price points but holy hell is this guy living the
| dream
| ahnberg wrote:
| I totally love it!
| tnolet wrote:
| I'm a founder (and started solo like the OP) in the tech / devops
| / infra space. Doing calls, and in-person meetings is the 10x
| accelerator for sales. The OP is quite right in his assessment of
| what types of calls there are. Pretty spot on.
|
| However, the moment you can afford to have AE (Account
| Executives) and "sales" in general to field these calls, you
| might benefit. He IS leaving money on the table.
|
| (yes, we have all pricing, free plan and super extensive docs on
| our site. But still calls and meetings seal the sweetest deals)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It's very obvious that keygen's market is people who hate sales
| calls.
|
| Every market is different. Don't generalize your market to this
| market. Companies also go through phases where, what works for
| them when they are small and working in a niche won't work when
| they are larger. I suspect that keygen will need to do sales
| calls at some point when they are larger; if they choose to
| grow into that market.
| crazymoka wrote:
| Always wondered how you can protect a php or python package with
| a license key. Its code, you can just ignore the key in the
| source code, can you not?
| philip1209 wrote:
| I've found that a good YouTube video can replace demo meetings,
| too.
|
| We got a later-stage startup to integrate with our API entirely
| off of a demo video.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Demo meetings are for the people who own the checkbook not the
| people who will be doing the work.
| tw04 wrote:
| This whole thing works when you're small, right up until it
| doesn't. If you never have a call with a customer you never have
| a relationship. If you never have a relationship you have no idea
| what's important to them, if there's risk of churn, or if there's
| a competitor sniffing at your door.
|
| I doubt the random engineer you emailed with is going to send you
| an email letting you know their CTO had dinner with a competitor
| who is offering to undercut you by 10%.
| shishy wrote:
| I mean I think the OP is referring to sales call for
| differential pricing. Any mature product would have product
| team looking at active accounts (even if enterprise sign up was
| self-service) and scheduling calls to understand needs and
| drive product improvements. There's never a substitute for that
| for the reasons you said.
| nkotov wrote:
| I'd love to do this. The context switching between doing
| development and then sales is so freaking high for me that I
| basically had to dedicate a specific day to just doing calls and
| the rest of the days to only doing dev work.
|
| I'm in the camp that I'd rather hire the right person to do the
| job better than me (in sales) and focus where I'm most strong in
| instead.
| omoikane wrote:
| One thing that email is not the best tool for is back-and-forth
| dialog. Once an email thread got to be a certain length or spans
| some number of days, it becomes difficult to follow. The
| increased roundtrip latency is also unfortunate.
|
| Although the alternative to that is not necessarily voice calls.
| Text chats would have been great, but which platform do you use?
| Everyone has got their own instant messaging systems these days.
|
| There is also the perception that voice calls have a reduced
| likelihood of leaving a record, which is why some people are only
| reachable by phone.
| ezekg wrote:
| But how do you organize and recall the transient discussion
| that happened on a call? Hint: an email summary, or some kind
| of summary document. And the latter also works with long email
| chains.
| omoikane wrote:
| My personal experience is that emails and written documents
| are how things actually get done, but sometimes we have to go
| through voice calls and in-person meetings in order to get
| that far.
|
| Those voice interactions felt like some sort of psychological
| barrier that couldn't be bypassed any other way, at least
| initially, but once I have opened up a non-voice channel,
| that's what we tend to use going forward.
| aniijbod wrote:
| I'm the opposite. I live for calls. I don't like text messages.
| I'm not great at face-to-face. But over the phone, I'm at my
| best.
| thallavajhula wrote:
| Never heard of Fair Source licensing before.
| rubythis wrote:
| If you don't want to make phone calls, isn't that what an
| employee is for?
|
| To do everything that you don't want to...
| constantcrying wrote:
| Different communication strategies have different strengths. The
| strength of talking, in person or over the internet is that the
| response is near instant, the greatest strength of written
| communication is that it is near permanent and delayed.
|
| Remembering what you talked about two weeks ago can be hard,
| E-Mail allows you to look back and re-read about what has
| happened before (important for both sides). It also relieves you
| from the burden of having a response ready in seconds.
|
| I do not think you could sell a car over E-Mail, but for a
| technical product, where technical questions need to be answered
| I do think it is different. But I also think it is a problem of
| management, which intentionally avoids technical issues.
| ezekg wrote:
| > Remembering what you talked about two weeks ago can be hard,
| E-Mail allows you to look back and re-read about what has
| happened before (important for both sides). It also relieves
| you from the burden of having a response ready in seconds.
|
| In addition, you can recall and copy/paste responses from
| previous emails.
|
| This is one reason why I really, really like email.
| gaudystead wrote:
| Maybe I'm in the minority, but I recently went through the
| process of purchasing a car from another state and would've
| LOVED for it all to occur over email (and texting), but the
| dealership insisted that some of the communications _had_ to
| occur over a phone call.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I remember buying a Tesla, all via their website, then picking
| it up when ready. Car sales really should be that simple, at
| least for new cars where you don't have to actually physically
| assess the vehicle in person like for used cars.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| This article inspires me to institute a similar policy regarding
| zoom meetings in my lab. For some things, a quick chat is needed
| sure, but most of the time, writing and responding to an email in
| a thorough and thoughtful manner is 1000% more effective.
| WolfCop wrote:
| I can't recall ever seeing the contraction "who're" before. For
| obvious reasons I suppose.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Really? It's a quite common contraction even taught in schools
| last I remember.
| ezekg wrote:
| Currently reading the Dune series so this was a nod to
| Herbert's odd contractions. :)
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Not holding BS SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI certifications in the
| security space is probably even more non-conformist than nocalls.
| ezekg wrote:
| That's fair. It's something I'll be prioritizing this year, but
| hasn't ever really been an issue tbqh. But maybe after I obtain
| these I'll realize that I should have done it a long time ago?
| lordraj wrote:
| I wonder if part of the reason people are comfortable ditching
| calls is that we're already transitioning to a world where AI can
| handle so much of the back-and-forth. Tools like ChatGPT and
| automatic summarizers make it easy to manage and process large
| volumes of written communication, so async feels almost
| effortless.
|
| On the other hand, it's less clear if we've got good AI solutions
| for real-time calls. Yes, we have speech-to-text and live
| transcription, but they still require more setup and don't always
| capture context as smoothly as a neatly structured email thread.
| For people who want everything documented and searchable--even
| the decision-making logic--AI-assisted written communication just
| works better right now.
|
| I'm curious if future AI tools will make synchronous calls more
| appealing by automatically generating real-time summaries or
| helping participants get to the crux of the discussion faster.
| But at least for the moment, it seems AI is nudging us toward
| async rather than giving us a richer live conversation
| experience.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| This model works for customers where the user and the buyer are
| the same person (or highly aligned) but in many other cases, the
| "procurement team" gets in the way and is literally paid to make
| calls and negotiate. I love this approach but am concerned about
| its scalability.
| subomi wrote:
| "They're not only awkward, but a 30 minute call takes up hours of
| my headspace." This is so apt. I've found that I have the best
| calls with people who provide specific notes about what they want
| to discuss--the more specific the note, the less headspace the
| call requires.
|
| Maybe it could be done via email which is the point of this blog,
| but I never had the confidence to try that.
| mihaaly wrote:
| We have a saying in my home country, roughly: 'spoken words fly
| away, written words remain'.
|
| For reliable and specific matters using calls is unfit for the
| purpose. I avoid talking about those as a primary medium, being
| only suplementary. Something not written down never existed in
| the end.
|
| In matters I do not know to the slightes, where to begin with,
| talking to a person is better starting with. Then after getting
| my bearings step back to the reliability of written words and
| written discussions and written agreements and such is the way.
|
| And those insist on speeking instead of providing written info
| is a big warning sign about something fishy (intent of
| misdirection, incompetency, cluelessness, confused internals,
| ...) is hiding there.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| But there's literally a button on their pricing page to "Book
| discovery call" if you increase the slider above 100k????
|
| Or did you all upvote without actually checking that XD
|
| https://keygen.sh/pricing/
| adverbly wrote:
| It switched at around 1,000 for me.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _No sales calls, except for a short 'discovery call' if
| absolutely needed._
|
| And the important part is that they still provide a price,
| rather than hide the price with a call button. The call is
| optional, not a requirement to get a quote.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| But that's a sales call still, no?
| tngranados wrote:
| I even went back to check the post date, but it's from today
| and yet they do have a "book a call" button. I don't get it. Is
| this just marketing?
| ziddoap wrote:
| It's addressed in the article.
| tngranados wrote:
| " No sales calls, except for a short 'discovery call' if
| absolutely needed."
|
| But it's the default call to action for bigger inquiries
| ziddoap wrote:
| They still provide a price and the call is optional.
| ezekg wrote:
| In my experience, most enterprise leads will still cold
| email you with their requirements. It's relatively rare
| for me to receive a cold booking or cold trial, but this
| is there to not lose those leads who would otherwise not
| send that cold email. The point of #nocalls is to dip out
| of the dance, not all communication.
| hn8726 wrote:
| There's still a price shown _and_ a direct link to start a
| trial. It's reasonable to assume that more people paying over
| 1k/mo would like a discovery call more than a free trial right
| away, so this option is more prominent. But both are available
| tomatohs wrote:
| A friend described calls as "high bandwidth information
| transfer."
|
| An average typing speed is 40wpm but an average conversation is
| between 120 - 150 wpm so about 3 - 4x bandwidth.
|
| Calls also offer sub second latency and maximum priority.
|
| When you add video and audio in there, the pure amount of data
| transferred is higher.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Weird that I'd say almost exactly the opposite. 1-1 speaking is
| one of the slowest forms of communication today.
|
| Writing copy is 1-many and the many readers can read much
| faster than they can listen.
|
| Making a demo video is also 1-many and can be sped up (who
| doesn't listen to content at at least 1.2x these days?).
| tomatohs wrote:
| I agree with you IRT scale but not speed.
|
| Copy and demo videos are essentially one way communication
| channels ("fire and forget"). The creator has no idea if the
| message was understood.
|
| Also, writing copy or making a video typically takes 10 -
| 100x longer than consuming the same video.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I work at $bigco and there is a team of people whose job is to
| sit on these calls when we want to engage with a vendor.
| Engineers aren't even allowed on these calls and everything is
| filtered through the gatekeeper.
|
| I would love if we could talk with potential vendors directly
| through email. I think I one waited several months for the
| gatekeeper to ask the vendor engineers a 10 question document.
| green-salt wrote:
| I am so behind this even in day to day interactions. I do not
| need to have a 1 hour meeting or teams call for something that
| could be an email thread.
| stego-tech wrote:
| This guy and I are on the same page. Love his boldness at
| committing to the "No calls" bit, and I wish them nothing but
| success.
|
| Speaking as an introverted engineer myself, the number one turn-
| off on any given product is a lack of transparent pricing info or
| locking any sort of demonstration behind a mandatory contact
| harvester for a call or email chain. I don't want to commit to a
| bunch of social "dances" when I'm trying to solve a technical
| problem, nor do I want to deal with overly pushy salespeople who
| either don't understand my problem or immediately want to upsell
| to meet their own goals or quotas.
|
| If your tool solves my problem, I will pay you money. That's the
| transaction. Everything else - the swag, the sales calls, the
| free lunches, the conference tickets, the sportsball box seats -
| is extraneous to my core goal, which is _solving the problem_.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Then don't do calls, tell them "this is my problem", describe
| it well, and insist on email communication. Tell them X$ is the
| price that you are willing to pay and stay firm on it. I think
| this will work for most companies - if not then you probably
| don't want to do business with them. Who is forcing you to do
| social dances? State the problem, state what you want as
| solution and sign the contract, done.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Yeah, that doesn't work unless you're in the C-suite
| generally. Every time I've tried to throw up that sort of
| firm wall, the sales people just reach out above me - and
| ultimately usually end up forcing the sale even if the
| product doesn't meet our needs, because they're able to
| convince the higher-ups that it actually does and that their
| Engineers (i.e., me and my team) are mistaken.
|
| Right now, unless you're some sort of 10x rockstar extrovert,
| you've gotta play the game by the existing rules. It's why I
| applaud this particular company's position, since it means I
| don't have to worry about being undermined by some outside
| salesperson with a quota to meet and a gift budget they
| haven't emptied.
| 83457 wrote:
| Off-Topic: What is the best way to "subscribe" to blogs like
| this? Is there a popular service/tool out there even for blogs
| that don't have RSS or TwitterX? Or, just keep a list of blogs of
| interest and check occasionally? Thanks.
| ezekg wrote:
| Good point. I really need to get an RSS feed set up. I'll work
| on that! I do post on X, but RSS would be better.
| ezekg wrote:
| Added: https://keygen.sh/blog/feed.xml
| XCSme wrote:
| I literarily wrote this e-mail yesterday, when an enterprise
| customer asked to discuss, I hate calls:
|
| "... I usually prefer discussing async, via email, so I can
| provide more comprehensive answers and solutions, especially that
| we are talking about specific technical requirements.
|
| Via email, we also have everything written down, if we ever need
| to recall/search for some specific detail. Does this work for
| you, or do you have other suggestion?"
| adverbly wrote:
| I might have missed it, but doesn't it seem like the best option
| would have been to provide an option for both? Some people
| (especially of a certain generation) absolutely prefer calls.
| Seems best to just meet the customer where they're at.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| I felt this way for a long time, until a couple years ago.
| Talking with your mouth uses a completely different part of your
| brain than talking with your fingers. There's pros and cons to
| both methods. It's nice to have an ace up your sleeve when your
| competition is other nerds with great writing skills.
| freetanga wrote:
| Been on the other side, running Technology in 3 listed companies.
|
| People came telling me they could do anything, but everything was
| too shallow.
|
| I turned it around. I would say "we have 40 mins. I will run
| through a list of our current pain points or challenges. If you
| feel you can add value to any of those, pick your best 3 and
| shoot an email and specific material next week"
|
| The change was dramatic. Many sales people actually thanked later
| saying it was much more productive for them too.
| freedomben wrote:
| This makes a good point. Many salespeople want the process to
| be more effective as well. Their time is money, just like ours.
| Good communication principles absolutely apply
| portaouflop wrote:
| Most people you talk to on that level either don't know what
| the pain points are or don't want to tell you out of fear that
| you exploit that knowledge.
| freetanga wrote:
| Most colleagues in the same role in the same industry are
| good friends or friends of friends.
|
| We have lunch or dinner now and then and meet at sector
| events. We share a lot of what are our challenges, what
| works, what doesn't, who is good and who is not and how much
| we are paying our suppliers
|
| If a sales person took the info across the street, chances
| are a) they already known about it or b) the person across
| the street will ring me to let me know.
|
| Again, I don't meet the sales rank and file, in many cases
| the Senior Partner across the table also knows me well (past
| clients, suppliers or colleagues).
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Great article! Genuinely helpful to the entrepreneur community
| here.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| In most of these discussions, people on the sales side claim,
| "but our customers WANT this! Trust us!" and most of the people
| on the buying side scream, "We hate this. Please let us buy it
| without this song and dance." It's a shocking disconnect to me.
| (For what it's worth, I'm squarely on the fouder/engineering
| buying side and hate the call song and dance, and only engage in
| it as a last resort.)
|
| Parting thought: SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship
| something INTO SPACE. I bet you can figure out a way to tell me
| your SaaS price, in ballpark terms, and what it depends upon...
| FateOfNations wrote:
| > SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship something INTO
| SPACE.
|
| https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not just that, they also plain tell you how much it costs to
| buy an entire rocket launch for yourself.
|
| https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf
|
| To save a click, that PDF at this moment says clearly:
|
| STANDARD PAYMENT PLAN [for Falcon 9] (through 2024) $69.75 M
| Up to 5.5 mT TO GTO
|
| If they can put a specific base price on their website, so
| can any SaaS.
| andyferris wrote:
| What's an mT? Millitonne?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Metric ton, I believe.
| portaouflop wrote:
| You can put the 7 figure price on your webpage but I assure
| you that no one will pay it without taking to you in
| person...
| jaggederest wrote:
| I've watched 7 figure deals go through self-service
| onboarding before, zero touch. I think the sales team
| eventually reached out, but they were using the product
| before they ever had a sales call. They certainly will
| pay it without talking to you in person. There's an
| asterisk here though, which is that you have to be
| essentially the best player in your field and really well
| known.
|
| I assure you that 7 figure deals happen every day on AWS,
| for example, without human intervention. Not all of them
| happen that way, but enough that it's not surprising.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's fine. People don't necessarily want to do one-
| click purchase on 7 figure prices, they just want to know
| the order of magnitude, so they can determine whether to
| make that call in the first place.
|
| Not publishing reference prices is a strong indicator the
| company is basically running a scam.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I love that SpaceX does that, because it proves once and for
| all that the sales tactic of "we need to know the details of
| your use case" is a lie. Some B2B software application is less
| complicated than launching things into space, so if SpaceX can
| provide pricing anyone can. They simply choose not to because
| they're hoping to waste your time and get you to succumb to the
| sunk cost fallacy.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's worth noting that prior to SpaceX every single rocket
| was hand crafted, and often varied in key details based on
| the payload. Certain when it came to (people-intensive)
| integration tests and launch prep work. There's partly a
| legitimate reason ULA needed customer details before
| providing a quote.
|
| But mostly it was so they could charge NRO more for their
| birds, by not having a price on their website.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The disconnect has such a simple explanation that it's brutal
| how long this conversation is: nobody wants to make stuff for
| cheap people, and people who hate calls are really cheap.
| the-grump wrote:
| Show me the high price on a web page so I can go "that's too
| much for this stingy old grump" rather than making me talk to
| one of your sales minions.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Assume the price is too high for you if you have to talk to
| sales and go some where else, simple as that?
| the-grump wrote:
| Were you born to annoy people?
|
| I don't call and it's not for the reason you suggest, but
| because I won't talk to an automaton once then endure
| multiple calls and emails trying to sell me their
| offering. I've been down that road enough times and sales
| people usually go to spam.
|
| For your information, the hidden price is often times in
| line with the market. They hide it so they can do market
| segmentation without changing the product and to gather
| information about potential customers.
|
| So thank you for your most useful recommendation which
| changes nothing for me. I follow it for reasons other
| than your ill-informed assumptions.
| blitzar wrote:
| > rather than making me talk to one of your sales minions
|
| talk to one of your sales minions 15 times in a month
| because at shyster school they teach you "no" is just one
| step on the path to a "yes"
| TheTaytay wrote:
| I agree with you on three things:
|
| 1) I agree that there are markets where "if you have to ask,
| you can't afford it." (However, I think those are extremely
| rare, and don't believe Enterprise software, even expensive
| enterprise software, is usually one of those markets.)
|
| 2) I agree that "cheap" people who are unwilling to buy
| expensive software are likely going to "hate calls."
|
| 3) I also believe it is true that, "If a potential buyer is
| willing to go through the time and effort to schedule a call,
| even before they know if the product will work, and even
| before they know what it costs, they are MUCH more likely to
| be able to afford it than someone unwilling to do that."
|
| But that doesn't mean that potential buyers who "hate calls"
| and prefer to know what something costs before-hand are
| "cheap." Many very expensive products list the price (or at
| least the maximum price, right on the website): [Luxury
| cars](https://www.mbusa.com/en/vehicles/build/g-class/suv),
| [Mansions](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1900-Spindrift-
| Dr-La-Joll...)...
|
| I don't think Tesla customers are "cheap". Not only is the
| price is right on the website, you can [buy it in a few
| clicks](https://www.tesla.com/models/design#overview). That's
| not because their target market is "cheap people who hate
| calls". (Also, have you ever spoken to a Tesla buyer who
| wishes they could have had a call with a car salesman first?)
|
| I don't think people who buy multi-million dollar homes are
| "cheap". The starting (maximum) price is listed right there.
| I can't imagine that someone thinking, "I wonder how much are
| they asking for that 20 room mansion?" is a signal that they
| are "cheap."
|
| I can see the value in not wasting a seller's time with cheap
| people who will be crappy customers. I think you could do it
| just as easily by clearly stating ballpark prices and/or the
| components of prices up front, rather than gating it solely
| based on whether someone is willing to schedule a call.
| inopinatus wrote:
| This is exactly what mediocre salespeople tell their bosses
| to keep their jobs.
|
| It is, to put it politely, horseshit.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > I bet you can figure out a way to tell me your SaaS price, in
| ballpark terms, and what it depends upon...
|
| They can't if the price is arbitrary and subject to
| negotiation, like a car at a dealership. Not saying that
| happens everywhere or even most places, but it's one
| explanation.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| This is true! And frankly, it's the most likely explanation.
| Even then, I'd appreciate a "starting/maximum" price (which
| is what car dealerships and home listings do). "This is the
| price, unless you want to spend the time trying to negotiate
| it down..."
|
| If the pricing is made up of a number of complicated usage
| components, it would be great to give both a ballpark for a
| given description of usage, and a brief explanation as to
| what goes into the price.
|
| I think sellers either forget how much more information they
| have than the buyer, or know, and try to take advantage of
| it.
|
| One of the best conference talks I ever saw was from a pool
| contractor explaining that it is indeed hard to answer the
| question, "How much does a pool cost?" because it can vary SO
| MUCH. But he found that explaining the components of pricing,
| along with examples and ballparks, was more than sufficient,
| and that his business took off as a result of publishing that
| information, rather than hiding it behind a sales call.
| (Looked it up - this is not the exact talk I saw, but it was
| this guy: https://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/uattr/marcus-
| sheridan-hubsp...)
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| Just this week I encountered this exact thing
|
| On Sunday (first workday here), I needed a PoE injector that
| could take in 24V DC and step it up to PoE+ voltages (around 50V
| iirc), so I looked around, and found an industrial one that
| matched my requirements. On the manufacturere's website, there
| was only a GET QUOTE button, and when searching for the model
| number, I couldn't find a place where I could just buy the thing.
|
| So I clicked on GET QUOTE and filled in my details, company, work
| email, etc.. I then got an automated email saying my request was
| received along with details of the request (just the one PoE+
| Injector).
|
| We needed this for a fairly tight deadline, so we ended up
| getting an industrial PoE+ switch, which also gave us some added
| flexibility, and had 2 units on my desk by Tuesday.
|
| Fast forward to today (Thursday), I get a call from a local
| distributor who had _no idea_ which product I requested a quote
| for, and just asked about what my needs are. I of course told
| them it's no longer relevant, and they decided to send me an
| email with some wildly irrelevant brochures for ruggedized
| tablets.
|
| All this is to say, if the manufacturer just put up a price or
| link to buy online, I would have likely ordered 1-3 units on the
| spot, either directly or via a distributor. But they decided to
| complicate the process, and lost the sale to someone who was
| willing to just sell the products instead of trying to get me on
| a call.
|
| I also had a look at the distributor's website, and they seem to
| offer various vague "compute platforms" and "industry-specific
| solutions", I typed in the model number into the search box, and
| got no results, and when I typed in the manufacturer, it just
| brought me to a page saying they are a "Platform Partner", with
| another contact button.
| 23july2024 wrote:
| ...welcome to industrial sales :-(
| egorfine wrote:
| As a CTO, I would definitely hesitate to make a corporate
| purchase without seeing a "Request a call" button. I don't need a
| call. I would almost never book one. But I need to be sure that
| live people are behind the web site.
| nofunsir wrote:
| What you do at Keygen is you take the specifications from the
| customer and bring them down to the software engineers?
|
| Yes, yes that's right.
|
| Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them
| directly to the software people?
|
| Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at
| dealing with customers.
|
| So you physically take the specs from the customer?
|
| Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed.
|
| So then you must physically bring them to the software people?
|
| Well. No. Ah sometimes.
| mikeocool wrote:
| From a customer perspective, if you're making purchases of a
| certain size "Call for Pricing" is just a dance you need to learn
| to do.
|
| It is pretty annoying that the first call is almost always with
| an SDR who can't answer basic questions about the product, whose
| whole job is to make sure you are a qualified customer, and book
| a second call. The goal of that call is basically answer their
| questions as fast possible, book the next call, and get off the
| phone.
|
| On the second call, hopefully with a sales rep and a good
| solutions engineer -- you don't have to politely listen to their
| whole spiel, more often then not they'll be very happy if you
| start peppering them with very specific questions, rather than
| sitting through the generic demo. A good solutions engineer is
| able to answer my questions a lot faster than I can find the
| answer on the website.
|
| It's also highly beneficial to have individual names and phone
| numbers inside the company if things don't go so well once you're
| a customer -- if google shuts down your gsuite account, it's nice
| to have your account rep's cell phone number.
|
| Also, differential pricing is a perhaps a silly dance we all do,
| but it's life when making purchases of a certain size. It can
| also work in your favor as a buyer -- if you can, figure out when
| the company's quarter end is, and line your purchase with that --
| there's a pretty good chance they'll be incentivized to cut you a
| good deal if they're trying to hit their numbers. Also, even if
| you're not planning on buying from a competitor, get a quote from
| them, and say "your competitor gave me X price, Im going to go
| with them unless you do better."
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > From a customer perspective, if you're making purchases of a
| certain size "Call for Pricing" is just a dance you need to
| learn to do.
|
| No it isn't. I have never _once_ found a situation where there
| wasn 't an alternative to the vendors who try to waste your
| time with "call for pricing". There are companies who do
| business honestly, and I choose to use them.
| portaouflop wrote:
| What was the biggest contract you inked this way? I can't
| imagine a company is willing to pay 6-7 figures without at
| least talking to one human on the other side.
| rglover wrote:
| Love that this at the top of HN right now. I understand having an
| _option_ to do a call, but when it 's mandatory just for a bigger
| customer to get access to a product, it makes little sense. It's
| like asking a fish to swim a little closer to the hook. The fish
| knows what you're doing, you know what you're doing, and it's
| zero fun for anyone involved.
| jigneshdarji91 wrote:
| Side question: How does the bubble-merge effect on the home
| page[1] work? [1] https://keygen.sh/
| ezekg wrote:
| It's a WebGL metaball shader. Felt artistic one day, and I'm a
| nerd for Cloudflare's lava lamp wall. :)
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > When the next person asked for a call, I responded with a
| simple "No, we don't do calls, but happy to help via email. Feel
| free to CC any relevant team members onto this thread."
|
| "No calls" and "talk to right people" is unrelated. Just have a
| call with the engineer. At least you know they heard you not just
| ignored a cc.
| ddgflorida wrote:
| I can relate.
| thaack wrote:
| I'm building something to bypass this entirely. As an IT Director
| I absolutely despise when I'm evaluating a SaaS product, and they
| don't have public pricing and my only option is to book a call.
|
| This is annoying because:
|
| 1) I have to spend 2-3 calls with salespeople (intro, demo
| usually minimum) - huge waste of time. I've already evaluated
| your product and determined it fits my needs.
|
| 2) At the end of all of those meetings after a couple weeks (plus
| the time it takes to get the quote approved) the product could be
| completely out of my budget. For tools like PAM or vulnerability
| management the pricing is relatively arbitrary.
|
| So, I started creating https://vendorscout.net when people who
| have previously received quoting can anonymously upload the
| pricing they received for so and so users/endpoints so that you
| can get on the site and look up relatively accurate pricing for
| the product. I'm still working on the MVP but if you are
| interested, I'd love some help.
| nipponese wrote:
| Once you move the slider on this site to Ent-1, you get a price,
| but you still get "Let's book a call".
|
| Why?
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| This dysfunction is much worse with hardware and unique to US/
| Europe and almost non existent in China. In US, Europe, regularly
| to buy the simplest of sensors (which can cost < 100$), the price
| won't be written and I need to fill a form with a bunch of
| details (why do you need to know my company industry?), and then
| schedule a call, just to buy the thing.
|
| In Chinese websites you can just see the price at website, and
| they mention different prices for different volumes. And if I
| need something custom, I can contact them and they would build
| it.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Sounds like you solved the problem though?
| widenrun wrote:
| I hope this reaches other companies selling to technical people.
| I've also been a CTO at a $xxM ARR company, and I made several
| buying decisions for competitors who let me try their product
| without requiring a meeting.
|
| Of course, some people do prefer calls, but I think there's a
| disproportionate default to "book a call first" when selling.
| andix wrote:
| I was once involved in a purchase for SonarQube for a bigger
| company (around 50-200 developers using it). It was just a
| horrible experience. My task was just to evaluate the software in
| a smaller team, get some evaluation licenses and write a report
| what our experience was.
|
| It was a crazy ride, I got a sales person assigned, and this
| person kept asking me questions I couldn't answer. I kept telling
| them what my job was, and if my report would be positive they
| might be able to sell 50-200 developer licenses. But they kept
| pushing me to answer business questions I couldn't answer. It's
| not my job to know that stuff, and I wasn't allowed to share
| information about company internals to a third party.
|
| In the end our team never completed that report, and I just put
| this sales person into all my block lists. Never heard from them
| again ;)
|
| I was never really sure if they were scared we would abuse an
| evaluation license, but it was a reputable company (nothing shady
| at all, no US sanctions, nothing). Even if they had no idea about
| the market we were in, just reading the Wikipedia article about
| the company would've shown them, that this is someone they would
| probably like to be in business with.
| mcny wrote:
| Sonar cloud is free of cost for open source projects. Perhaps
| it would be better to use that as an evaluation tool? If you
| tried it, what did you find lacking about it?
|
| Disclaimer: I am not employed by or affiliated with sonar qube.
| gbear605 wrote:
| It depends on the evaluation needed. Maybe they wanted to
| verify that SonarQube would be able to handle their code
| structure, but they also had requirements that it has to work
| locally only and they couldn't send proprietary code to a
| SaaS. You can't evaluate that using SonarCloud, but a couple
| days with an evaluation license are exactly what you need.
|
| I had a similar buying experience recently, where a SaaS had
| a cloud option and a local option, which varied slightly. The
| cloud option kind of told us what we needed to know, but a
| trial license of the local option let us actually verify that
| it would work with our use case.
| andix wrote:
| We needed to test the integration into the company CI
| pipeline. One of the requirements was to fully run it in a
| private cloud environment, maybe even without internet access
| (this was required for some projects for security reasons).
|
| PS: but that's not the point. We needed an evaluation
| license, but the sales person just kept bugging us with
| questions. Like how our environments were set up, what
| products we want to integrate it with, how our teams are
| build, how much team growth was planned, and so on.
|
| A lot of internal things that you don't want to share,
| especially if you are not part of the purchasing department.
| They probably have some guidelines what they are willing to
| share and what not. Even when putting aside the security
| risks by sharing internal information, it could also hurt the
| purchasing departments negotiation strategies, if the sales
| person already knows more than they shared with them.
|
| PPS: We didn't want to have SonarQube at all, we didn't like
| the reports at all, mostly false positives in our case to
| work through (but I can see that some teams could benefit
| from it). The requirement came from some check boxes to be
| ticked for an audit.
| sneak wrote:
| This exists because sales guys don't know how to type, and
| generally have poor reading comprehension.
|
| Typing out 3-4 sentences is an order of magnitude harder for them
| than making a few minute phone call.
|
| I require everyone I hire take a typing speed test and know how
| to touch type. If they can't and they are a must-hire, I make
| their first two weeks involve an hour or two of typing tutor use.
| It's essential to an asynchronous workforce.
| eertami wrote:
| _and_ touch type? I don't think touch typing is necessarily
| essential, surely the speed test is enough. I never learned to
| touch type but 100+ wpm is not a problem, or 120+ wpm if
| focusing.
| charles_f wrote:
| Cool name. Looks like a cool product. I'd pay more if it plays
| MIDI while generating my license key.
| ezekg wrote:
| I might be able to arrange for that.
|
| _*keygen noises intensify*_
| nostromo wrote:
| Agreed on most sales calls being unnecessary.
|
| But no internal calls? That's crazy.
|
| No, I don't love calls, but I also don't love spending days on
| email threads when we could have a 30-minute conversation with
| all the stakeholders present (along with all the non-textual
| clues one gets from talking in real time to another human).
|
| Is asynchronous communications sometimes a positive? Yes, sure.
| But it's also a big negative when you just need to discuss an
| issue, make a decision, and move on.
| luckylion wrote:
| While I find it excessive as well, it might have its benefits.
| If you're very strict about it, you'd have to either fail, or
| find ways to be efficient without it. That might mean
| communicating more explicitly and succinctly, so you don't need
| non-verbal cues, and don't need days to catch up, and that
| unlocks crazy amounts of efficiency.
|
| But most companies who'd try that would probably fail before
| they achieve it.
| necovek wrote:
| You overestimate the ability of people to communicate
| "explicitly and succinctly".
|
| With a mathematical background, I can weigh every word
| carefully and only include words that add meaning. One short
| sentence can say a lot.
|
| But people will still assume things, ignore some of those
| words, and misinterpret so it aligns with their views. When
| you quickly notice this in a sync communication (which is
| much easier in a video call compared to an IM chat or even a
| phone call if you can read facial expressions, body language
| and tone), that's easily fixed, but email thread can go on
| for days.
|
| But I agree that you need both (I prefer text, really, but
| see my point).
| luckylion wrote:
| I absolutely agree, it's much easier to find out whether
| someone understood your message, or what they actually want
| to achieve, or whether they know what the goal is, when you
| have additional cues.
|
| Once you have less need for these cues because everyone is
| open and says "I don't understand what you are asking,
| please rephrase it in simpler terms", or "I have no idea
| what this project is. Do you know what our goal is?", it
| gets a lot easier and quicker. But it's very hard to
| assemble a team that does that well.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| This may be a place were regulation would be helpful, there is a
| bit of a prisoner dilemma here where companies want to maintain
| the ability to price discriminate and so there is a strong
| motivation to keep the status quo vs bucking the trend and losing
| the consumer surplus.
|
| A simple rule like, "You have to have pricing for you software
| service displayed on your website, if it's algorithmic you have
| to be transparent about the formula, how the variables are
| calculated, and provide a calculator".
|
| Sure there are other good reasons to have a call - it is nice to
| have a high-bandwidth exchange about the needs of the company and
| build a relationship with the customer so you could still have
| calls for that purpose but if they're just trying to compare
| services, making it harder for the customer is just anti-
| competitive and leads to a less efficient marketplace.
| Artoooooor wrote:
| I never buy anything that doesn't put its price upfront, at least
| for a basic configuration. I understand that any customization
| will change the price, and usually the cost will increase in this
| case. I'm OK with it. I also understand that when something is
| designed from scratch, then the price may only be known after the
| design. But I've only been in such situation once. In most cases
| it's just hiding the vital information from the customer.
| qrian wrote:
| For context, keygen allegedly has $195.4K revenue and 100
| customers in 2024.[1]
|
| [1]: https://getlatka.com/companies/keygen
| ezekg wrote:
| Keygen had 100 paying customers 6 years ago. I don't report
| Keygen's revenue publicly.
| dangus wrote:
| There's good advice in this article like making your product
| messaging clear but there's also terrible advice here.
|
| "Discovery calls are just a formality" was something I cringed
| at. It's basically the most important part of the sales process.
|
| The author also didn't like the sales process where pricing is
| fuzzy. But for enterprise sales there is a very good reason for
| this: you need to size up how your solution solves business pain
| for your customer and how much money it saves or makes them. If
| you are saving AT&T a billion dollars with your solution but
| you're only charging them $1000/month, you've royally fucked up.
| And a big client like AT&T will stress your support and
| engineering staff with a lot of requests for help and
| customizations.
|
| At some point the author perhaps should have recognized the need
| to have someone who knows enterprise sales on their side rather
| than going it alone. I wanted the author so badly to admit that
| it's something they're are bad at and that they should get help.
| They are probably leaving a lot of growth on the table by having
| this amateur sales strategy.
|
| I would recommend to the author the book Sales on Rails. It's a
| great resource for understanding how technical enterprise sales
| works. The author seems completely unaware of the account
| executive sales engineer sales team that is so common _because it
| works_.
|
| If the author is lucky to expand their business further they will
| hit a point where leads stop just contacting them. They will have
| to make cold calls and surface customers who aren't obviously
| interested. This no-call strategy will not fly at every type of
| company.
| pfoof wrote:
| You are so much spot on with this post. Nothing puts off more
| than someone on LinkedIn asking "When do you have time to have a
| call to talk about what I can do for your company?" or even
| worse: "Here's my calendly, pick the spot you would like!" Not to
| mention I am not a decisive person in the company, the largest
| choice I can do is whether I work on a Mac or a PC.
|
| If I'm in a better mood, I ask them to send me some e-mail or PDF
| with what they have to offer.
|
| I am adding your post to my bookmarks and will always reply to
| such messages with it.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| One part of the article I found funny/absurd was that he was
| tired of talking with potential buyers who were not technical
| enough or authoritative enough to understand the product or make
| the purchase. And buyers like me are tired of talking with
| salespeople who are not technical enough to answer my questions
| or authoritative/knowledgeable enough to make the sale. That
| implies to me that in an effort to protect employee time, BOTH
| the buyers and sellers are often sending under-qualified, lesser
| paid people to these initial conversations, in an effort to vet
| each other before either are willing to take the risk of sending
| in their more expensive people who can make progress. Wow.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Being an introvert, I absolutely hated calls.
|
| Can we stop with this crap already.
|
| You hate calls because you hate calls. Not because you've made up
| a definition of introvert that helps you avoid phone calls.
| ezekg wrote:
| Spoken like an extrovert. :)
| kylegalbraith wrote:
| This is an interesting read and take. I don't think it's
| applicable to everything because not everything fits neatly into
| "if I explain it, you will buy". This also cripples any kind of
| outbound motion, which for some businesses, they may never need
| so that's fine.
|
| On an unrelated note, that squashed font look they're using
| everywhere is really killing my eyes.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| I'm reminded of a company I used to work for that had one sales
| guy with with a phone, you called him and he would quote a price
| and ask if you wanted it. I sat across from him. He never left
| his desk.
|
| After a year, our company was bought and merged with a competitor
| and we got to see how their sales team worked.
|
| They had a dozen sales guys doing the exact same job as our man,
| however, they met with prospective clients, had lunch, and
| 'worked the field'.
|
| Our _one man_ with a phone outsold all of the others _combined_.
|
| Having a more efficient sales process can be a game changer.
| rjdjjdj wrote:
| I am truly astonished by the feedback in this thread. I would
| have called OP a bad salesman for not being able to close a deal
| in the phone.
|
| If I want to buy something, I want a call to weed out the
| unuseful products quickly without having to comb through useless
| websites
| ezekg wrote:
| I thought so, too, and I had imposter syndrome for a long, long
| time. But I wouldn't call myself a bad salesman, seeing as I
| sell to enterprises regularly (just sold a $30k/yr contract
| yesterday). I'm a bit unconventional in my business, and the
| typical high-pressure, size-me-up sales dance just doesn't suit
| me -- and that's okay.
|
| If a customer can't read the website or documentation, I don't
| want them as a customer, because they'll just be a support
| burden. Similarly, if a customer can't determine if a product
| is useful, I either have a messaging problem, or they aren't a
| good fit; they can weed themselves out.
| tunapizza wrote:
| This resonates with my experience. The consulting/software
| company I work for practices price transparency (even though
| we're the most expensive in our market) and pushes hard for email
| communication with leads and clients. Our stuff is heavily
| documented. More substance, less BS.
|
| We used to do lots of sales calls years ago, but 99% of our
| entreprise growth came from being active members of our community
| and talking (email!) to engineers. We still do sales calls, but
| they're essentially what the author calls "discovery calls". And
| we prequalify the shit out of leads before we take a call with
| them -- yes, that means taking a few minutes to learn about what
| they do.
| procufly wrote:
| I was a chief Procurement officer at multiple tech companies and
| just hated sales calls. What I really want is a clear pricing
| structure and a list of documentation to look into.
|
| For anyone tired of the sales pitch, feel free to reach out as
| I've built a company who takes care of the entire procurement
| cycle for you (including negotiations)
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| If there's one thing I hate about sales pitches it's claiming one
| thing and then using weedle words like 'discovery' to essentially
| lie.
| ezekg wrote:
| This feels unfair if it's implying I'm lying for still taking a
| 15m discovery call. #nocalls is about skipping the dance, not
| all communication. You can go to extremes, like I did, or adapt
| it to what works for you. I will say that I have _not_ rejoined
| the enterprise sales dance, and that hasn 't stopped
| enterprises from buying.
| lasermike026 wrote:
| Humans talk to people. It's about building a relationship.
| ezekg wrote:
| Email also consists of talking to a human, just fyi.
| flamingalpaca wrote:
| One thing I've noticed in the security compliance space is that
| asynchronous communication actually works better than calls for
| complex technical reviews. When security teams handle
| questionnaires over email, they can pull in the right SMEs at the
| right time, reference past responses accurately, and give
| thoughtful, precise answers instead of making stuff up on the
| spot.
|
| Plus, good documentation is a force multiplier - if you document
| your security posture well once, you've just saved yourself from
| explaining the same things over and over on different calls. I've
| seen companies go from drowning in back-and-forth calls to
| handling most security reviews purely through email and
| documentation, with their technical teams only jumping in for the
| truly novel questions.
| tonymet wrote:
| You don't actually know your customers needs until you talk to
| them. Most businesses determine how to build their products by
| having conversations with their customers.
| ezekg wrote:
| Good thing I talk to my customers all the time!
|
| ...via email. :)
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