I dont like talking to sales people but I get where they are coming from. It might also be using the opportunity to do some discovery as to what people are using the platform for and who are those people.
But I agree that they should make provisions for people who just want to pay and get to business.
They might also want to massively price segment. Basically they don't want to quote you a price until they've got a feel for where your pain point is. If you're a whale, they want to reserve the right to bleed you dry by not preemptively quoting a lower sticker price way below your budget. But yeah, to me it still just screams "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
>But yeah, to me it still just screams "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
We're talking about buying product: I have at least to ensure the product does what I need it to do before even considering buying the product, and I can do that on my own. We're not talking about selling airplanes here, where there might be some setting up required for me to test the specs, neither are we talking about software targeted to governmental agencies or the intelligence community. We're talking about products that claim they do X for the knowledge worker, but fail to provide a way for a knowledge worker to test X.
This can be turned to: "If you have to talk to me before I could use or buy the product, something's fishy".
That's Theranos/Nikola hyping the product with claims it can do things but nobody ever saw it do that thing.
I get the price segmentation argument, though there may be better ways to extract more value by providing tailored services to large clients to solve problems only large clients have.
>It might also be using the opportunity to do some discovery as to what people are using the platform for and who are those people
The way we do that is giving people access to the platform, letting some time go by, then engaging the users and asking questions. We also have Slack channels in case they have problems.
Why we leave them alone: because I don't like it when someone immediately engages us asking us a bunch of questions when we start using something, or try and up-sell right when I'm discovering the product. I also don't like energetic chatbots popping up on different tabs of the same website, making all kinds of sounds wanting to get my attention to help me. Back off, I'll close that site and will not visit it again.
We give people time so we could at least observe what's broken. Did the person not start using the product immediately? Why? Was the user unsuccessful accomplishing a key task with a key feature of the product? Why? Is it a problem of discoverability, or is it just that it is not our target user? How can we improve that either way?
But I agree that they should make provisions for people who just want to pay and get to business.