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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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"
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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".
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?
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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[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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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".)
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.
>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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> "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.
Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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
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".
> 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 £millions. 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 £billions of tax resources into private hands whilst achieving essentially no benefit.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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…
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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?"
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%.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
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!
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.
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/
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
_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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
One of the big benefits of wealth is that everything costs less. This is just an extension of that.
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.
I think he's getting at the pair of boots theory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> make train tickets more adorable
amtrak uwu
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
You sound like the worst possible customer. Don’t you see? Nobody is obligated to serve cheap people.
> 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?
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.
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.
Well, it's all true. Without one of these, there would be no V.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't that exactly how a lot of things are priced? Ie. Snowflake. Pay for compute, pay for storage, etc.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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"
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
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.
>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.
Which is why you shouldn't engage with those sellers and companies they represent unless you have no alternative and are truly desperate.
This is how a lot of consumer businesses are pricing now.
Then they use the same consulting firm as their competitors to set prices.
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.
That is actually price fixing and illegal. Not that in the current regulatory environment that there's likely to be enforcement.
So the college model.
The price is set by the market. It never was and never will relate to the seats/resources used/etc.
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.
is that how you present the price to your own customers? or do you operate on value based pricing?
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.
Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/
I think you mean this link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
Indeed.
Given that I am the original russian translator of this article, shame on me for not remembering exactly which article it was.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I'd wait to see if they have a good black friday sale.
you mean... the gift shop with the model rockets?
No, go to https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=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.
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.
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.
It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)
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."
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.
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.
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.
As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch things into space. Your software situations are more complex?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(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 :)
The last sentence got garbled?
I’d extend that to sales calls where they try to get you to bend your requirements to fit the mis-aligned product.
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.
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
They don't do emails? What are they, illiterate?
Quite possibly.
i think so xD
What's the most expensive software you bought?
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.
I'm just thinking about 6 to 7 figures software investment and trying to understand how you could do that without several meetings.
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.
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.
“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”
Are you me? I'm a CTO too, and I feel _exactly_ like this.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Case in point this dumpster fire of a product: aparavi.com
> 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.
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.
TLDR; please don't call him, he really doesn't like calls. Must be a gen z
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
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.
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.
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/
CTO's time is worth ~$10k a day, spending a day "on calls" to save $2.50 is unacceptable.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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)?
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.
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.'
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.
Fair enough. I sell to modern B2B tech companies so am obviously biased towards that.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
> 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.
Five nines?
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.
People buy 100k cars online nowadays, why wouldn’t a great online presence also work?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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"
Assume the price is too high for you if you have to talk to sales and go some where else, simple as that?
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.
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.
This is exactly what mediocre salespeople tell their bosses to keep their jobs.
It is, to put it politely, horseshit.
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.
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.
> SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship something INTO SPACE.
https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/
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.
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…
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.
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.
What's an mT? Millitonne?
Metric ton, I believe.
> 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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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".
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?
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
Nah, what you do is you add this feature for everyone, unless it doesn't make sense
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.
> for everyone
YES!
Adding features just for single customers doesn't scale, adding features useful to many customers does.
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
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?
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.
The things I hate about this with SAAS products is they usually gate keep things like sso behind the enterprise plans.
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.
> 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).
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".
Doh! Siri isn’t the best for commenting.
Enterprise sales wishes they could have customer fill up carts.
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.
> 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.
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[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.
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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".)
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.
A classic. "Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross" and "Boiler Room" are a great sales themed movie night.
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".
'coin operated' people. thank you for that. :)
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.
>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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The irony of HN discovering how capitalism works when they're on the receiving end of it.
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.
> ... 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.
Ironically, I also actually can't figure out what this company does from its website.
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.
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.
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.
>> "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.
Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).
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.
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.
Did you find ChatGPT responses accurate for queries like this?
The responses have not been enshittified _yet_.
> 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].
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is the worst, especially when it's a library! Like, show me the code!
Yeah, product websites have turned into pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about Blogprexa!"
Burt. This bloke won't haggle!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8
You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
> 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.
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.
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.'
> 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 :)
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.
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
They're maybe the same managers who love the RTO for the sake of RTO.
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".
> 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.
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.
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…
I agree about everything you wrote except the misunderstandings. Written communication absolutely can and do give rise to misunderstandings.
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.
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.
But they say what they do on their product page. They provide a solution.
Its difficult because lying about "implementation details" is a marketing detail.
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.
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.
Indeed. This is basically enterprise sales, and sales guys will not be happy with anything else.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 £millions. 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 £billions 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...
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.
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
People building physical things makes up far more of the GDP than VC-backed startups producing vaporware
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
> 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.
"...like you do" Is this a typo or a personal attack to the parent?
"like" = "as if", and not in a Clueless inflection.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
...welcome to industrial sales :-(
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some e-mail threads should have been a call.
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.
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.
> 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.
4 hours is a perfectly reasonable response time for an email. It’s not IM
But not for responding to a question on a call!
That's one reason calls can be superior in some situations.
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.
> 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.
Are you me? I think you might be me.
I am.
This is probably one reason why not too many people with autism end up doing sales.
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.
> 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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is being quite pedantic, especially if you've done enterprise sales before.
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.
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.
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
The call offered here is optional isn't it? You can engage entirely over email for enterprise deals.
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.
But the entire article is based on the decision to remove "book a call" from the Enterprise pricing.
No, the entire post is around the decision to remove sales calls from the pipeline.
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?
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).
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…
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.
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.
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/
>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.
But that’s a sales call still, no?
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
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?
It's addressed in the article.
“ No sales calls, except for a short 'discovery call' if absolutely needed.”
But it’s the default call to action for bigger inquiries
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.
They still provide a price and the call is optional.
It switched at around 1,000 for me.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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).
You can get around this objection by simply being punctual with email.
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
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?"
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%.
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.
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.
If you dread customer calls, don’t start a business that will require to sell services to enterprise customers. It’s that simple.
"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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Side question: How does the bubble-merge effect on the home page[1] work? [1] https://keygen.sh/
It's a WebGL metaball shader. Felt artistic one day, and I'm a nerd for Cloudflare's lava lamp wall. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Sounds like you solved the problem though?
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.
> 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"
> #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.
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!
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.
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?
> 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.
Ah ha! Makes sense. Thank you.
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...
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
For context, keygen allegedly has $195.4K revenue and 100 customers in 2024.[1]
[1]: https://getlatka.com/companies/keygen
Keygen had 100 paying customers 6 years ago. I don't report Keygen's revenue publicly.
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.
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.
inspired by this post just wrote down small story about one of the calls
https://antiantihuman.com/programmable-intimacy
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.
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
This is one reason I think B2C is good for solo devs despite people constantly criticizing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Demo meetings are for the people who own the checkbook not the people who will be doing the work.
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?
Never heard of Fair Source licensing before.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
I can’t recall ever seeing the contraction “who’re” before. For obvious reasons I suppose.
Currently reading the Dune series so this was a nod to Herbert's odd contractions. :)
Really? It's a quite common contraction even taught in schools last I remember.
Humans talk to people. It's about building a relationship.
Email also consists of talking to a human, just fyi.
Great article! Genuinely helpful to the entrepreneur community here.
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.
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.
Added: https://keygen.sh/blog/feed.xml
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.
One sane man in a sea of glorified door-to-door salesmen that govern B2B.
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.
Good thing I talk to my customers all the time!
...via email. :)
I totally love it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OMG I'm doing this.
Not holding BS SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI certifications in the security space is probably even more non-conformist than nocalls.
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?
This feels related to that “Nobody Cares” post from yesterday.
Nobody cares that calls are a pain, so everyone just keeps having them.
> 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.
Spoken like an extrovert. :)
I can relate.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
_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.
Cool name. Looks like a cool product. I'd pay more if it plays MIDI while generating my license key.
I might be able to arrange for that.
*keygen noises intensify*