Oh man, I take it you've never operated this part of a scaled business before. Wouldn't you like to know the absolute crap that comes through those forms...and yes even from those who have the intent of "I want to pay more than the self service price tag".
> Wouldn't you like to know the absolute crap that comes through those forms
Usually it's because too much is hidden.
Not a SAS, but I once tapped an ad for redoing my shower. No prices, no way to know even approximately what it should cost.
I wanted more information, but I didn't want a phone call. I filled out the form asking for some high-level information on pricing, and that I didn't want a phone call.
Needless to say, the rep never responded to my inquiry.
But, put yourself in my situation: I don't want calls at random times of the day that are convenient to a salesman. I want to talk on the phone at a time that's convenient to ME, and only if I know the (ballpark) range of what you're selling costs. If a new shower costs $5k, and I won't be in a position to spend that for 18 months, I want to know that I should pick up the phone then, not now.
Regretfully, there's basically nothing you can do to keep crap from entering the funnel. Gating information does -- on the margin -- probably let some unknowing low-quality leads into the funnel.
But low lead quality persists no matter what you do. It's just reality that lots and lots of people will request demos with zero buying intent. Sometimes people are just bored? Sometimes people are scamming? Sometimes people confuse you with a company that has a similar name (e.g. CSC [1] vs. CSC [2]). You'd be shocked how much traffic a SaaS company can get after some random government agency halfway across the world with a vaguely similar name appears in the local news.
It's actually a remarkable amount of work to take a list of N "high-intent" inbound leads, filter out the garbage, and get your ICPs on the phone.
You get crap inbound because the process is frictionless.
> I wanted more information, but I didn't want a phone call. I filled out the form asking for some high-level information on pricing, and that I didn't want a phone call.
Needless to say, the rep never responded to my inquiry.
But, put yourself in my situation: I don't want calls at random times of the day that are convenient to a salesman. I want to talk on the phone at a time that's convenient to ME, and only if I know the (ballpark) range of what you're selling costs. If a new shower costs $5k, and I won't be in a position to spend that for 18 months, I want to know that I should pick up the phone then, not now.
I feel you. I really do. I've been in this position before. But until you operate a business at scale and see what absolute utter crap comes through the door, only then will you really understand what's behind the scenes.
You're also right that some fraction wouldn't be contacting asking for information if the information was more readily available.
They're not shitting on customers and abdicating responsibility for making a better website. They're pointing out something important and unintuitive.
I don't know how to bridge a conversational gap like this because it really is something to experience. Another form of it is job applications. At least 1/3 is just random people.
To try to show some humility beyond "bro u ever done this???":
- My mentally disabled sister, tested at 4th grade level at her peak, and would often spend days applying for random jobs that sounded cool. I'm not talking like "oh Dairy Queen cashier.", I mean, director/CXO etc.
- At my first company, we'd get a contact every 3-6 months, with demo-like questions from the same person. We were small enough that we couldn't chase every lead, made enough money we didn't have to, and I didn't like encouraging active salesmanship. After a couple years, someone followed up asking what his business was like. It was an 11 year old using a point of sale app to get drink orders from his friends from the family pool.
They organised an in-person demo at our office after they filled in the online forms for their "multi-million dollar drinks distribution company", right in our target zone of customer type and size. So we had a few salespeople present to give a swish demo and hopefully win them over.
Turned out to be a 15 year old doing door to door sales of his home made ginger beer. He told us our (half the price of the nearest competitor) product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.
Kudos to our sales guys though: After the initial shock and eye rolling, they treated them like the large business they claimed to be and just used the time to practice their demo/sales techniques.
> He told us our product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.
To be fair, when you're a 15 year old selling homemade drink, everything seems expensive, because you have basically zero costs other than your own time and a sack of sugar and it's difficult to conceive how much money roars around in business with any non-family employee.
I've been working 20-ish years and I still get sticker shock over even quite minor things even though some sap pays me three figures, more than my childhood annual income maybe, a day.
Perhaps it's too much free (as in beer) software and over exposure to ridiculously cheap-through-insane-scale consumer goods - a whole mid-grade phone for the same cost as a meal for two, say. But I think there's also a huge disconnect with how we tell children the world of "good, capitalist work", in which they'll probably spend the rest of their lives, works, and how it really works. About all you really get is Peppa Pig setting up a lemonade stand and learning a lesson on the value of hard work, say, and a jagged line graph briefly mentioned on the news.
The school system, at least for me, was extremely light on that kind of thing, even when you include economics (which I didn't take). In fact even in the media, other then specifically financial things like the FT, how the whole world actual or books in the subject specifically, how everything actually functions at any practical level is just...never really mentioned. Kids might know every kind of dinosaur, the function of the bits on the steam engine, the names of the sails on a ship-of-the-line, but it's almost like everyone has agreed we just don't need to talk about daily reality. It's like a huge "draw the rest of the owl" meme.
Because for most kids the rest of the daily reality will never matter? The only thing relevant to them is how much money appears on their bank account every month.
Of course, it’s not really conceivable they’ll ever need to know the names of the sails of a ship if the line either.
This "crap" coming through the door must be at least partially a result of price tiering and offering.
You either:
1. Pay sales people to construct custom slices of services with custom prices and force them and your customers to hash it out via communication.
or
2. Commit to choose-your-own-adventure offerings where customers just check boxes and see pricing change in real time.
Option 1 retains negotiation advantage and makes more money for the company even though they pay sales people.
Option 2 removes sales people and gives up negotiation advantage, which customers would love.
Saying that, in the option 1 scenario, "crap" comes through the door because the process is frictionless is like saying a person died of suffocation instead of that they were strangled in a domestic dispute: there's a lot more going on.
You're right that some fraction of people reaching out for into wouldn't be reaching out for info if the info was readily available.
This is very true, to the point its reflexively and obviously true.
It does not falsify the lived experience you'll have at a business with contact forms, be it for job applications, or product inquiries.
> Saying "crap" comes through the door because the process is frictionless is like saying a person died of suffocation instead of that they were strangled in a domestic dispute
This has to win some sort of prize for analogies.
Here's mine:
An open contact form on the internet is like leaving your front door wide open in a busy city. Sure, some people might wander in because they couldn't find your house number, but you'll also get lost tourists asking for directions, door-to-door salespeople hawking their wares, and the occasional raccoon looking for a snack. No amount of information on your facade will prevent the guy who thinks your living room is a public restroom from stumbling in.
Most of those are so obvious you could throw them out with a simple pattern matching scheme. Getting a lot of crap doesn’t really matter if you can filter it all with 5m of work per day.
I need less than a glance at the text on my contact form when I’ve seen the email address.
Beware the false negative. I'd probably fall victim to a lot of HN users' filters because I have a @yahoo.com email. However, I've had it since 1998 and I'm not likely to give it up any time soon.
> An open contact form on the internet is like leaving your front door wide open in a busy city. Sure, some people might wander in because they couldn't find your house number, but you'll also get lost tourists asking for directions, door-to-door salespeople hawking their wares, and the occasional raccoon looking for a snack. No amount of information on your facade will prevent the guy who thinks your living room is a public restroom from stumbling in.
Agreed. I guess the point is that that is obvious to anyone who has ever run a website, and therefore facile.
It neatly skips over or ignores the fact that you don't have to have any crap come through the door at all: just put multiple signup buttons that require payment.
Coming at this another way: salespeople should be smiling and celebrating when crap comes through the door because without negotiated "enterprise" plans, the companies would probably make less money and have less need for salespeople.
A solution to people who want to talk to someone before they buy is to add multiple layers of buttons that make them buy first?
The salespeople should be celebrating every incoming contact because having contacts at all means you get sales?
These are narrowly true, I assume first isn't something you're seriously advocating for, and second is a form of "starving kids in africa"/"i used to walkup hill to school both ways" fallacy.
FWIW, I don't get the impression anyone is arguing for "how do we ensure every contact we invest in is viable?" or "We need to figure out how to ensure salespeople never have negative emotions about an incoming contact's quality".
If the cost of dealing with the crap is high enough, you put up a friction filter. Think about healthcare, a doctor's time is incredibly important, so you've got admins and nurses in front of them.
Internet aside, it seems like those filter roles are much less likely to exist these days. Either you get someone who has no idea what's worth filtering, or you have to try to communicate with the expert directly and burn their time figuring out who's worth following up with.
> Think about healthcare, a doctor's time is incredibly important, so you've got admins and nurses in front of them.
Incredibly important for filling in billing paperwork, because practicing medicine is an increasingly small fraction of a doctor's time. This doesn't necessarily counter your point, but it's interesting how job allocation makes little sense and most expensively trained people are used to do the most menial jobs, because it's somehow cheaper than keeping extra headcount of lower-paid clerical workers.
Same is the case in software industry. A lot software engineer's work involves dealing with bullshit that should be, and used to be, handled by a dedicated staff.
I still don’t know why my company requires me to fill out how much time I work on the projects they’ve assigned to me on the hours they specified. Every day…
If SpaceX can put their costs online in a pricing calculator, your SaaS can too.
It's not my fault I'm a "low quality lead" because you didn't put any pricing on your SaaS page and your price point is way outside what I'm willing to pay.
They will never _become_ your customers if you don't give them a chance to pay you.
Websites that put a cart online with a checkout process manage to get "customers" just fine. If you think you want to give everyone a custom quote then don't complain when people ask for one.
> Websites that put a cart online with a checkout process manage to get "customers" just fine.
Actually this is a funny point to bring up - believe it or not, there are legitimate situations in which a potential customer requires that they speak to someone or they will simply ignore the company. So as a software provider, it's absolutely true that you may indeed miss out on potential revenue if you dont have an established channel that isn't a "simple online cart".
> there are legitimate situations in which a potential customer requires that they speak to someone or they will simply ignore the company.
That's a good point. There are a lot of those, and a significant fraction is about some information critical to the customer, that is not present or not entirely obvious on the site. Things like:
- Are you double-plus sure that when I order a violet widget, I get a violet widget? The UI isn't inspiring confidence, and there's a deadline, so unless I can be certain, I'll go with the more expensive vendor whose site is more clear on that.
- There's bunch of bank holidays and stuffs coming up in the next couple days; I need to be sure you'll send the package tomorrow at the latest, or it'll hit a weekend and then a holiday and it'll arrive late, by which time it'll be worthless for me.
Etc.
I've abandoned plenty of carts due to inability to clarify things like that, and I've many times significantly overpaid just to deal with a vendor or system where I don't need to ask for clarification in the first place.
Still, here's the thing: in each case, I had enough information already that I knew I want to buy. I knew the costs and delivery estimates and exact models/parameters. Without all those information, I wouldn't be calling to clarify - I wouldn't consider buying in the first place.
Do you think for example Intel gets contacted by "shit customers"? If a business is communicating clearly that they only offer very expensive solutions to very big customers, they're not going to be contacted by small fry.
Depends on who clicks the button. It could be a junior person doing some research for their team, in which case they are not the decision maker nor the one with the budget/writing the check.
If a VP clicks on the button, that's a different story.
At every company I've seen the executive asks a manager to develop a report comparing a up to a dozen options. Then the manager delegates to a few of their directs to actually slog through all the sales discussions and compile the analysis.
The only possible way I can imagine someone with the title "VP" going to a vendor's website and clicking a "get quote" button to get a sales call at a random time from some junior salesperson is if we're talking about one of those companies where they give inflated titles and anyone who isn't an intern is a VP-of-something-or-other.
At a prior employer usually a team lead (without purchasing authority) would be told to go get a quote, go through all the BS, and only then hand over to “the higher authority” who can actually make the decision.
Which predictably often lead to vendors losing out because their sales people ghosted team leads.
If I’m tasked with finding a price, the VP or whoever I report to will only find out about the services that have meaningful replies. And if a reply ever insinuated I was too low level to communicate with, that’s the last they’d hear from where I work.
With the classic setup where "request quote" is the only option, it's likely someone who wanted simple straightforward prices. But then they reached the saleswall and relented into entering their contact information based on a faint hope they might still yet get a simple number back. Then by the time your high touch middleman recovers from his coke bender and gets around to sending them a telegram or raising the semaphore flags, they've already long forgotten about you.
That is not my experience at all. I have recently procured or discussed pricing terms for a few SaaS solutions on Enterprise tier and without exception the Enterprise pricing is a multiple per unit of the highest self service tier. Even after negotiating the price down.
> Enterprise pricing is a multiple per unit of the highest self service tier
As it should be. Enterprises are notoriously difficult to support because the decision makers there believe their size allows to them to dictate to the seller anything and everything, including the seller's product roadmap.
Unless of course you are a small fish who just needs sso for compliance and for some reason you get to pay like you are a $5B conglomerate despite still very much preferring to just pay an advertised price and not spend a month of people's time in negotiations
Unfortunately, a need for SSO is about the only reliable way to gouge a large corporation. As a small fish you may like SSO, want SSO, you may even think you need SSO, but you really can get by without just fine. You're small - you can get around the requirements, or pivot, or whatever. A corporation is big and slow and can easily get themselves into a situation where not adding SSO will become a blocker for deals denominated in double-triple digit millions, but abandoning your product or the whole business segment will cost similar amount of money. In that situation, the vendor can have a field day milking the cash cow.
The more time goes on, and the cheaper actually running SSO becomes, the less this is true. Props to Github for allowing me to do SSO on my 1 man enterprise for $21/month.
Even if you have just 20 people, not having to manage separate sign in’s on all services is just so pleasant. Not pleasant enough to jump from $2400/year to $24k/year on all 10 of them though.
> As a small fish you may like SSO, want SSO, you may even think you need SSO, but you really can get by without just fine.
SSO is the only way to get 2FA working without the friction becoming prohibitive.
If SSO is a paid feature, only in some plans, you're selling an insecure product. You wouldn't make security patches exclusive to the enterprise plan, you shouldn't make 2FA/SSO exclusive either.
Computer systems security isn't binary. It's also not a human right. Or something anyone but small minority cares about beyond the surface level.
Extra security is a feature of enterprise plans precisely because enterprises are forced to buy them by compliance requirements (a good chunk of which is just security theater and blame shifting); no one else cares, people buy stuff, things mostly do not go wrong - a market balance is achieved.
I can see why this isn't ideal or desirable, but security maximalism also has a nasty habit of killing all utility of products and disempowering end-users, so I'm very much in the camp of trading security over other concerns.
You could just look at the worlds most sold enterprise product: O365.
Enterprise much more expensive and filled with features you can't even buy as addons in the lower tiers. An E5 license is sometimes almost three times more expensive than the self service license, but includes all the crap Microsoft can stuff in the license in return (some of it useful, like P2 AAD, MDM etc).
Or it's someone who's intrigued by the concept of the product and is curious how much it costs. All it literally can be interpreted as is "a [probable] human is curious how much this costs" — intent to purchase varies from positive to zero.
1. Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more.
2. Someone willing to pay more but not enough more.
3. Someone who's just trying to compare prices between vendors but isn't a serious buyer (especially when not an existing customer).
4. Various non-obvious spam (affiliate resellers, etc.).
5. Someone who's interested but can't get a sale to happen given their role: has no budget and their manager doesn't have budget, has no authority on technical decisions.
6. Someone who's only curious.
7. Etc. etc. etc.
The level of effort required to press that button is very low, so it isn't that great of a filter. Again, they take those calls because the lack of filtering doesn't mean it's never a quality lead.
> Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more.
Or, it's someone who the SaaS vendor forced to click that button by putting OIDC ("Sign in with..." or "Continue with...") behind that, using "SSO" as a price discriminator.
Right. The phenomenon is real, but the description on that site seems a bit obtuse on purpose:
> For organizations with more than a handful of employees, this feature is critical for IT and Security teams (...) In short: SSO is a core security requirement for any company with more than five employees.
No, it isn't. They'd like it very much, but the SSO tax is proof positive that this is not a truly critical feature for small customers. In fact, it pretty much measures at which point it becomes critical.
It depends if it's a real 'request quote' option and not just something that gate-keeps the actual content on the site. I know in my job I've had to click through some of those sorts of things and enter my email just to get past the landing page of a company to get basic details of what their product includes.
“More than the self-service price tag” is not always a reasonable amount though. The reason I fill out those forms is to find out how much I’ll be swindled. It’s unsurprisng you get a lot of bad leads if you make that information invisible up front.
