I work for an Enterprise SaaS company who has a "Contact Us" pricing and fully agree with the sentiment. This is how it was explained to me:
* Since we sell mainly to Enterprise they all have procurement people who get measured on how much money they save - with some getting crazy bonuses if they can "save" 50%. So we needed to keep the price inflated by 50% until it gets to them so they can "twist our arm" down to the real price to show their value.
* And if a procurement person can get that 50% off our competitor such that the deal with them makes them look better they'll pick them instead.
* And when we used to put that 2X the real price price on our website some people wouldn't know to twist our arm for the discount and instead just thought we were too expensive. It was also abused by our competitors who were all "Contact Us" to make out they were cheaper than us without giving us the chance to compete.
So instead we do this stupid dance that I hate where we can't even tell the real price to the people in the early meetings (keeping that for procurement at the end of the process) - and we have to do all this fishing to find out who else they are looking at and what their price is that we have to beat before giving them our price. The entire purpose of our Sales Execs is to do this dance to decide whether to give a price and which price they tell to various people at the various stages as far as I can tell - though they actually are pretty good at it...
I came from Amazon where the price was public as were the mechanisms to lower it through various types of commitment so I found the whole thing ridiculous. I have since learned that everybody does it this way and this seems to be the reason. I argued "maybe if we are the one who doesn't in our space then we'll get more business for being the easiest one to deal with?" but I was assured that was not the case and it would just mean procurement people would want 50% off our best price instead...
* Since we sell mainly to Enterprise they all have procurement people who get measured on how much money they save - with some getting crazy bonuses if they can "save" 50%. So we needed to keep the price inflated by 50% until it gets to them so they can "twist our arm" down to the real price to show their value.
* And if a procurement person can get that 50% off our competitor such that the deal with them makes them look better they'll pick them instead.
* And when we used to put that 2X the real price price on our website some people wouldn't know to twist our arm for the discount and instead just thought we were too expensive. It was also abused by our competitors who were all "Contact Us" to make out they were cheaper than us without giving us the chance to compete.
So instead we do this stupid dance that I hate where we can't even tell the real price to the people in the early meetings (keeping that for procurement at the end of the process) - and we have to do all this fishing to find out who else they are looking at and what their price is that we have to beat before giving them our price. The entire purpose of our Sales Execs is to do this dance to decide whether to give a price and which price they tell to various people at the various stages as far as I can tell - though they actually are pretty good at it...
I came from Amazon where the price was public as were the mechanisms to lower it through various types of commitment so I found the whole thing ridiculous. I have since learned that everybody does it this way and this seems to be the reason. I argued "maybe if we are the one who doesn't in our space then we'll get more business for being the easiest one to deal with?" but I was assured that was not the case and it would just mean procurement people would want 50% off our best price instead...