It's pretty funny doing it the other way, where your customers expect a huge sales process and you built out self-serve first.
You hear things like: "We'd like to set up a meeting to plan a trial in Q1 and a full deployment in Q3"
Well, how I would do it is go to the form on the front page, add a credit card and do the trial. When Q3 comes I'd go the plan page and slide it all the way to the right.
Of course, that's not how their purchasing works, so you hold extra meetings and add extra cost. But it's funny when someone tries to jump through hoops and you have to hold them up for them.
I've experienced a lower level of this too. They want a quote even though the price is right there on the website. They ask for the "sales team" (uh, hi). After weeks of silence, they send you a purchase order, want an invoice, don't pay their invoice for a month, and finally pay by international wire transfer or once even by mailing a cheque! Sometimes they can't buy it themselves and have to ask their preferred reseller to set up a reseller agreement with my company which is "just buy it like any other customer".
I can understand big companies need a formal process though to protect themselves from potentially expensive mistakes when they have so many employees and are such an big mark for con-men.
I recently bought a piece of enterprise software and before we got our login credentials the company we bought it from made me complete a six hour software training.
Some good points here, but doesn't help the frustration as a potential customer.
The old adage when the price listed says '$ call us', it's a big number. For a certain class of application (ERPs, CMS, etc), sure does make sense, because pricing is very complex. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I would be baffled by a company that tells me the cost is tens or hundreds of dollars, but this doesn't exist.
The middle ground is products that are in the low hundreds to several thousands of dollars. There's a number of times where I have come across something that appears to fulfill a need I have, but that I could also do myself (whether by spending a week or because there's an open-source version that does 80% to base on).
Keep in mind there's always extra friction and admin overhead to dealing with commercial software, which has to be considered as part of purchasing: does it need a license to run on my build server? Does it have any kind of per-user charge, requiring extra system work to track? Are there redistribution licensing problems? Is there some stupid DRM that's going to cause me grief? Are you capable of dealing with a separate technical user (me) and paying user (my accounting department)? Am I going to have to deal with annual renewals? etc..
So if it turns out the direct cost is less than building it myself, it's a much easier decision. If it's significantly higher, now I have to really weigh the above against the opportunity cost and risk.
When I can't even see where in the spectrum the software lies, but I'm going to have to spend at least 30 minutes on the phone with some sales person to figure that out (plus probably deal with them periodically harassing me for the next year), the whole thing is that much less appealing.
I tend to move on to the next one, and only come back if there are no remotely similar options. It makes me sad a bit because there's no way this company can know they lost me as a customer merely by putting '$ call us' (even if the price would have been acceptable).
>When I can't even see where in the spectrum the software lies, but I'm going to have to spend at least 30 minutes on the phone with some sales person to figure that out (plus probably deal with them periodically harassing me for the next year), the whole thing is that much less appealing.
Just went through this exact process with Bomgar. Our company was debating between TeamViewer and Bomgar. TV = All pricing on page. BG = Can't see anything, must call in and 'speak to salesman'.
The sales process with BG was so long and drawn out - multiple emails to setup calls, wouldn't provide basic info in writing, etc. In the end we just went with TeamViewer highest end edition.
Came to find out about a month later that Bomgar pricing may've been the cheaper option for our use case. Oh well...
Sometimes I wonder is this is by design and using a dark pattern relying on the sunk cost fallacy and loss aversion... "I've already spent hours on obtaining this thing if I turn back now I've wasted all my time." It's what I truly believe some car dealerships utilize. They drag things out so that you don't actually "walk away" from the "deal" when they start pulling BS. Anyone who does this ought not be trusted. Why would/should I do business with someone that acts so shady?
There's no way to win with ballpark pricing. Even if you have a consistent unit you sell by (servers, users, etc.), the feature set, volume, and contract term can move that price by a huge amount.
"Starting at $9 / month / server" starts all your pricing conversations at $9 / month / server, even if the solution they called to ask about is listed at $150 / month / server. That wastes a ton of sales time following up with people who can't afford what they think they can afford.
"Typically priced around $10,000" scares off people who might be able to buy a smaller package.
In terms of it making you a bit said that companies don't know they're losing your money, I would say that they actually probably do know. They may or may not care about that missed opportunity, but in most cases, I bet it hurts them to know that they can't serve you. The ideal case for a company is to be able to serve the customers who want their product. In reality, every company has to make a number of tradeoffs, many of which are directly related to the stage and size of the company, and in some cases that means they'll never be able to serve everyone.
I think it's also interesting to think about why some companies won't just put a pricepoint on their pricing page. In most cases, this is seen as a strategic decision, for one reason or another. I think putting something like "starting at $10,000/year" or something like that is a good place to start, though. What do you think?
No. The reason you have to talk to a sales person is so they can size you up and figure out how much they can charge. It's called price discrimination.
Exactly. When there is no price list, I do not even bother to go further, I switch to another product/company.
Else I know I am gonna get screwed. First, the price will be set as my face fits (there is even an expression for that in my language, I am unsure how it translates to English which does not seem to have the equivalent saying); that means depending how the salesman judges me, he will set a price according to the maximum of what he imagines I am ready to pay. If I call from another company, I may get a different offer for the same product. If I word my request differently, he may infer I am the sucker of the day.
Then he will expect me to bargain. Fuck that. That means his second or final offer still provides him the reasonable benefit he needs. Which also means that he only provides lubricant now and he was ready to fuck me dry with the same plastic smile in the first place if I did not bargain. How can I trust someone like that? How can I trust I got a fair price? What if I hear someone else got a different price? Will I be pissed at the seller or... very pissed at the seller?
Oh, and meanwhile, he has wasted my time, and he has wasted his own time talking and talking, or exchanging several mails across several days. I have had salesmen coming to my office, and then during the meeting calling their company each time I asked something to get a different price than the official one. What is the point of this cinema? I know the guy on the phone is just reading a price list, he's not making complex financial calculations for stuff in the range of $100. Why doesn't the first guy have it? He knows he's not going to use the official price anyway.
If they get kicks from that, that's fine, find themselves a game or a sport that does the same. Because now they are costing their company money, and that money has to be taken from the price I pay, so I necessarily pay more than if they had just put a price list. Price list that they do have ready, because they're not pulling the prices they tell me out of their asses. But they keep it 'secret', as keeping it secret is the only justification of their job existence.
I just want a price list, that includes the proper benefit to have their company live fine, that's all. I can read the varying "prices per quantity" columns as the salesman does, thank you.
EDIT: and I forgot the case when the price is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher than what we can afford. I want to know it immediately, before I spend any minute considering the product, which may be all bells an whistles, but since I cannot afford anyway, it doesn't matter. So it makes me adjust my expectations.
Not always. We charge everyone exactly the same price (no discounting ever for anyone), yet we have to sell through sales staff because most customers don’t know what they want. The sales people have to work out what the customer really wants (very rarely is it what they first say) and then guide them towards the right product.
I think this article misses the biggest reason Sales exists as a profession: because customers need help understanding what they're buying!
It costs money to hire Sales people, and if a company were able to sell its products entirely as a self-service option, that would help them improve margins. So people in the Sales profession have to justify their existence every single day - what have you done for me lately etc.
The only way to succeed in the profession is to show results, to help customers understand and extract the value of what they're buying so they can come back to buy more and tell their friends.
You might see Sales people succeed in the short-term by lying or cheating their customers but that doesn't last. Your reputation catches up to you. Depending on the industry, every one knows everyone else, and the only way to truly succeed in the long term is to make sure you create a win-win for both the customer and your employer, every time, on every sale.
> I think this article misses the biggest reason Sales exists as a profession: because customers need help understanding what they're buying!
This is another common and overlapping problem, companies that can't explain what they're selling. No one should need to talk to a salesman to understand what they're buying, if they do then the marketing has failed. I wonder if this is caused be sales teams being in charge of the website and not wanting to make themselves obsolete.
It seems to be infecting OSS too, just last night I was considering installing fedora but the website manages to tell me absolutely nothing (https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/).
For complex software, it's not always practical to list everything it does and expect customers to search for all the things they want to do with it, or even know what they want. It can be more efficient if the customer explains what they want to use it for then you (as the salesman) can use your deeper knowledge of the product to decide if it's suitable for their needs before they invest time learning about it. There could be subtle issues that become showstoppers, like maybe it's not compatible with some other software they already use or it doesn't work well at the scale they need, etc.
That might still be a marketing failure. Perhaps there's a better way to capture that salesman knowledge and apply it to the customer automatically, or perhaps it's a failure of the product design that it's so complicated in the first place.
You don't have to list everything it can possibly do, but you can tell me what it's main functions are, list the incompatibilities, list the integrations offered etc. You can have online documentation "how to do x with $product" articles. You can tell me who it isn't suited for, etc.
I never said not to have salesmen, just don't make it the only way to get this basic information.
Exactly. Even more than this customers often don’t even know they have a problem that can be solved. You are not going to look for a solution unless you think you have a problem and then think to look for solutions.
We have no trouble selling to people who know they have a problem (we are first in Google if they search for a solution), our problem is all the people that aren’t even looking. Our sales people have to literally physically cold call people to educate them that they have a problem as nothing else works.
I am not meaning that our users are unaware that they have a problem in general, but they are unaware their problem has any solution. People only look for solutions to problems they think have solutions. Otherwise it becomes like bad weather and just accepted.
It makes sense taken seriously. Almost nobody is doing things optimally. There's always room to make more money or save more money or whatever. Figuring those things out is kind of what doing business is. Not trivial at all.
It certainly isn’t trivial. We have tried every other way to let people know about what we offer from advertising, website, phone calls, email, forums, conferences, and even snail mail. Nothing works other than physical cold calling. Unless you are talking directly to them in person they just don’t stop for even 2 seconds to consider they have a problem with a solution.
The good news is the LTV is high enough to support this form of selling, but it certainly is a huge pain.
I am in two minds about this. While I agree that listing the price is best (we do this), many potential customers have a very poor idea of the worth of a software product to them. We find many of our customers had at first dismissed our products because they didn’t know what they do. This is where sales staff are supposed to step in and help the customer understand the value.
I am not too sure what the difference is between documentations and manuals other than the format. The funny thing is if you don’t provide a manual people ask where is the manual, but if you do they don’t read it.
A manual will typically document every function of the software in mind numbing fashion. "Section 4, Subsection 7 - Adding Foos - To add a new foo click the add button as indicated in the picture below".
Documentation is much more encompassing and often in more of a wiki format. You could include a recipes section for example, which apart from being useful for customers, it can also show off what the software can do. A FAQ section is another very common one. People asking for a manual is really people asking "how do I do X".
One thing to note is most people, often especially those with purchasing authority in a company, are not technical and don't care about software in itself. They need solutions to their problems first and foremost. Often, the best way of educating them is through a sales process that breaks down the discovery and identification of the problem and mapping that to solutions that currently exist or can be made to exist with the product offering of a company. The stereotype of an overly pushy car salesperson is a caricature; the best sales people are good at educating potential buyers and thinking through problems they face...not aggressively ramming excessive products down your throat. That being said, there are plenty of terrible sales people out there, to be certain, but it is not useless or misguided as many other folks are alluding to in this thread. I am not aware of any software company doing north of a billion in revenue without a sales function.
Not only do they make you talk to a salesperson before buying their software... a lot of these places make you talk to a "salesperson" (i.e. an internal recruiter) before even referring your resume to someone who can actually evaluate it. Which is sad because I find these "buffer" discussions to be a waste of time, and all-around drag coefficient in the process, generally.
(Though I understand also what secondary functions they serve -- or at least appear to serve -- for some companies).
Salespeople are most effective in situations where convincing one person or one committee within a large prospective company to buy your product will unleash tens or better yet hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to you, the seller. Most other situations should probably be handled with a great web page that shows reasonable pricing.
They are actually more of an exception to the rule. It's certainly possible to have a good software business that is self-service through and through, but very few large (as in multi-billion $$) software companies actually are this way. Even the companies you might think of as good examples will still often have a sales operation to go and get the big contracts.
I also don't buy from companies that don't publish their manuals online. I nearly always read the manual before buying, because 99% of the time the marketing copy or "specifications" page is inadequate to properly evaluate the product. If the manuals aren't published, they might have something to hide or they might be in the habit of making documentation conditional on support contracts. Either way it makes it impossible for me to evaluate the product.
It's a fun fact that lots of companies require that you call them for the price of their very simple and standardized-products, but I know exactly how much it costs to send my stuff to mars.
Talking to a salesperson is a good way to get a tremendous discount. Wait until you're near the end of quarter and they're desperate to fill their quota.
You hear things like: "We'd like to set up a meeting to plan a trial in Q1 and a full deployment in Q3"
Well, how I would do it is go to the form on the front page, add a credit card and do the trial. When Q3 comes I'd go the plan page and slide it all the way to the right.
Of course, that's not how their purchasing works, so you hold extra meetings and add extra cost. But it's funny when someone tries to jump through hoops and you have to hold them up for them.