Ask HN: “Contact us for pricing” nonsense
I am looking to purchase advanced communication device manufactured by specific vendor - but every single website has this "Contact us for pricing" links.
This certainly is an invitation to sales dance and subsequent spam.
I'd rather avoid that and buy from reseller/store that is clear and opened about their pricing.
This "contact us for pricing" approach certainly doesn't help to win business (at least mine).
Just wonder if this kind of policies are dictated and enforced by actual manufacturer or is that a habit of a specific industry?
72 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadMy other guess is that the resellers have figured out that while they cannot fleece you on the price of the device - they all sell the same, identical hardware after all - they can charge you extra for services, support insurance and extra options as long as those prices aren't readily available for comparison.
I also found one site that has "add to card to reveal pricing" - which is perfectly fine with me. The problem with that specific site is that they only carrying outdated models.
PS: this is hardware device, not SaaS or service.
Say a reseller does exactly what you suggest: initially they might make more money that the competition simply because their sales approach is favored by customers but pretty soon the competition would catch on and embrace the same sales approach. Now everyone have a smaller profit margin on the product or, even worse, might get dragged in a price war.
Most sales people aren't very good and there is a bad stigma that perpetuates
Working on the GCP equivalent if you prefer :]
I used to work with IBM big data analytical tool and honestly you should get a medal for closing sales on this garbage.
Now, a contact us approach sounds like a huge waste of time for you. You know what you want. You can describe it exactly. Know what? Most people don't. They need and appreciate the help.
A contact us approach is basically the sales process adjusted to the market needs.
It is a habit of many industries because purchasing is a complex process most people dont get. Throw in the complexity of a corporation and you have a recipe for disaster.
- You aren't their target audience. I come from enterprise SaaS, where we often force people to talk to someone, and working with sales is not a problem for the people we care about. I know that someone who has your reaction (calling it a "sales dance" and assuming you'll be spammed) is unlikely to be a real buyer, since real buyers are accustomed to the sales process. They also appreciate that sales reps for this type of product can be really valuable. Maybe you're the exception here, but it's worth losing your business to filter out bad leads.
- They've done the math and realized that when they get someone on the phone, they are better able to build a long term relationship and have a substantially greater customer LTV. They lose some customers, but the ones they retain end up being higher enough in value to offset the loss.
- The product can't be sold as a standalone item - it requires setup and integration, and without understanding what you have in place already, they can't give you a quote. Of course, this seems less likely for a hardware solution.
- Related to the above, it's possible that it's a complex product to set up, and they've found that if they don't get you on the phone, you're likely to screw up the setup and get mad at them and/or return it. Better to scare you away up front if you're ultimately just going to take up time and end up getting a refund.
Ultimately, the answer to this question and any like it is that if they're competent, they do this because they've done the research and determined that it is better for them (typically in terms of revenue generation, but really better is defined as they see fit).
Just like healthcare, come to think of it. Good luck finding out what the cost of procedures are at each hospital or provider
May I ask whether you ever collected hard data, at least internally, from trying this multiple ways, perhaps earlier in the growth of your business if you're well established today? Or did you just hire sales people who know that this is "how things are done" in your industry? In my experience working with businesses aiming for enterprise sales who operate this sort of policy, it is almost always the latter, and there are often principal-agent problems as well because of the compensation arrangements for the sales staff.
In my experience working with both smaller businesses or within larger ones, this definitely does cost a lot of money in lost sales sometimes. However, enterprise sales isn't really my field, and I don't have any frame of reference to know how many such failed transactions happen compared to how much extra those same suppliers might be squeezing out of juicier targets.
Edit: As an example of the sort of deal I'm thinking of here, suppose a business with a headcount in the 10K range didn't pursue a SaaS solution to something that they expected to cost on the order of $1M/year, because the decision-makers lost patience with being given the run-around and instead decided to commission an in-house solution. Is that likely to have been a significant loss to a large SaaS business, or is that kind of customer just too small to worry about in the world of enterprise sales?
There was also a lot of analysis of churn, and for one company that was the big driver of the change - companies that engaged with sales took up measurably less time from customer success post-sale and were much less likely to churn.
That said, I've also come in later and seen the talk to sales culture already there, clearly driven by experience at the VP/C-level.
That said, what I have found to be pretty much universally true is that for enterprise SaaS deals over a certain figure (typically something like 100kish, though it can differ by customer industry/type of software), the buyer expects to talk to someone and won't consider a company that doesn't have a sales team.
FWIW, in the actual case I was first thinking of, the potential customer did make contact. It wasn't a lack of up-front price specifically that killed that deal, though as things turned out, maybe it was a bad omen. The ultimate cause of the failed deal was the decision-makers becoming frustrated, because after making contact, the sales people just seemed to want ever more information out of them without giving a straight answer on pricing and other basic contractual details.
Reasonable but as you are probably aware you are potentially leaving some sales on the table.
I'm the sole tech buyer for my entire company (SME) (because I'm the only techie on staff so it naturally fell to me) and I loathe "Contact us for pricing" enough that given two equal(ish) options I'll pick the one with the "Foo costs X"/"Bar costs Y" pricing.
Also heavy after sales contact (Dell are buggers for this) puts me right off as well, if I buy a product from someone I maybe want one email a quarter with similar products and that is it, if we are in the market for a new product I'll go do the research at that point and buy it.
My time is critical to me because I wear lots of hats and want to get the none-core part of my role done quickly and smoothly.
I totally understand why people don't want to build a relationship with a sales person. However, I don't want transactional customers, which is how I perceive them.
Again, reasonable from both sides. You shouldn't try to sell to everyone.
I hate calling only to find out you're selling for triple the price of comparables because of "magic beans" reasons.
Otherwise, wouldn't showing the pricing just upset your competitors?
Also, can't one of your competitor ask you for a quote and figure that out as a fake customer?
For a business, you want to build relationships, not just have transactional customers. The more custom or integrated your solution is, the more important this is. (Also, it's the best way to make sure your customers are deriving the most value from your product, which is a win-win.)
Yes, competitors can do that, but that additional friction means they won't stay up to date, and you have a chance to discover what's going on.
I know exactly what i want and rather avoid wasting time on upsells thrown at me.
I understand that sales departments strongly prefer "bait and pimp" vs. "sell and forget" strategy - but some customers and often significant ones will give business to competitors if former is the only strategy to generate revenues.
>- Related to the above, it's possible that it's a complex product to set up, and they've found that if they don't get you on the phone, you're likely to screw up the setup and get mad at them and/or return it. Better to scare you away up front if you're ultimately just going to take up time and end up getting a refund
Oh man I've run into this and you make an exception for someone, give them pricing and it is just confusion and a mess because they don't need integration.... except for all the integration they need...
I’ve never really had this problem but my sample size is small.
If you're a senior person in your workplace, I suppose you could make a junior employee do the call, with strict instructions not to give out your name or contact info to the sales rep. A bit mean but also a perk of seniority
In particular, we had a very high-touch sales process that started with cold-calling or references. The marketing website was more likely to act as an aid to a cold call than as Google traffic.
Second, it was a more abstract product with a custom implementation that had to pull data from whatever pre-existing software they were using.
Also, it was a very young product that was constantly evolving with ad-hoc deals and pricing. Some would buy the software package outright with full integration, demanding high-touch support and training. Others were willing to go with our “development partner” package, with a 50% discount off any custom implementation - but we also retained the ability to decline those customizations if they didn’t fit with our vision.
Also, the product was so abstract, it was very rare that its potential would be understood without a conversation.
Finally, often the person “tasked” with buying the software was not actually the holder of the purse strings. They usually needed a boss or other stakeholder to sign off and write the check. So it wasn’t really advantageous to discuss the price and sticker-shock that the lower level employee might experience, vs the business owner who was more used to making those types of purchases. Really, we needed to turn the person who was doing the inquiry into an advocate for our product within their organization. If they could advocate the value of our product to the check writer in an effective manner, it reduced the friction for us to come in and tell the check writer the price of the solution. Then we let them make the judgement call.
Another part of this is that since the sales process was very high touch, and since we were so small. There was a serious opportunity cost to incur if our sales guy was wasting his time creating materials for a particular customer who wasn’t going to buy. So we would quickly qualify the customer by getting them to pay a non-trivial amount of money to RESEARCH the implementation. If they paid that qualifying cost, we would ask for information on all of the software systems they had in place, along with database schema information. Then we would pour over it to determine what we could do with that data, if it would be a successful implementation, and if there was any data missing that we’d need to collect. Either from a UI or through a bulk dump from some obscure archive. That was definitely not worth the opportunity cost of a barely interested customer.
Overall, I think we were trying to be honest and fair. Not trying to price gouge or anything, but it was a very complicated product, and it was a complicated sale.
Now being a technically minded business owner, I have been on the other end of this and found it to be extremely annoying. But it is not too often that whatever product I am looking at is being researched directly by a business owner with check-writing ability, and one who is also coming from a technical background. So while it annoys me, I get why the company/product is choosing to do that.
If that isn’t your cup of tea, call the salesperson. And tell them you need this now as a replacement part. If your hardware cycle is 3 years down the road, they will wait 3 years to find you again to try to sell you $100k+ in gear.
Some do not even have database models where you can register as a customer or integrator. You have to contact them to be registered as customer, so you can get acess to datasheets and manuals - its ridiculous.
The sales process did take much longer than buying something off of Amazon, which was very annoying. But I did get it relatively quickly and it did work for my purposes, so there's that.
I get three answers
1. Not allowed ( manufacturer/vendor regs)
2. High Touch sales, "anyone who was over worried about price isn't likely a buyer/good match" real buyers know the price range and we need to customize/vet the buyer
3. Highly customizable product that they cant or won't invest into making possible to pre-price online, probably wont get added to a cart and shipped or sold without a buyer wanting to actually talk to someone)
( for example, a 150k Caterpillar with various attachment options)
This isn't a good reasons not to have a guide to the pricing though (e.g., the base price plus the rough prices of popular options). That can be super useful for determining if this is possibly something the buyer might want to buy, and saves them a ton of time calling salesmen.
The other two reasons are reasonable.
Last year I was on a market for high-end car (~$100k price tag) and one dealer who had the vehicle we wanted absolutely refused to give the price via email and insisted that I had to drive 1 hr for a personal visit.
I did very fair, prolonged effort to try to get them to sell me a car to no avail.
Ended up flying 2 hrs to another city where they had a car (of a different brand) with a specs I loved. I ended up enjoying driving it back home.
Being stubborn, hard-nosed sales person clearly doesn't pay off, no matter the excuse.
And value based pricing...
You shouldn't be forced to "call for pricing".
If you want to walk in with the attitude that you know what is best, I recommend writing down what you need and why you need it in advance, so you can communicate you know what your needs are without insisting on a solution. The recommended thing may or may not be what you thought you wanted. If you can't write down your needs clearly and concisely, buying what you thought you wanted is likely to turn into an expensive waste of time for all parties.
Source: was good salesperson in a former life
It's a suboptimal process to limit options because you personally are affronted by having to talk with someone on the phone.
I’ve done the same thing with a £60k piece of farm machinery recently. I took the time to write to the more opaque dealers, apologising for not considering them but noting that their pricing wasn’t transparent, and therefore they lost the business regardless of the price they would have quoted.
If more of us don’t do this, we’ll be stuck with sleazy salesmen and the “how much can we extract from this gullible customer” model indefinitely.
This is not only taking the long view, but really a form of public service.
A million other selfish thoughtless people have it as good as they do, only because some number of less-thoughtless people stood on principle once in a while and simply demanded better rather than taking the 100% path of least resistance 100% of the time.
Just because the stories about people standing on principle are sticky doesn't mean they cause good outcomes. (Also, there's the other side of the coin, where people who stand on principles cause great harm, intentionally or otherwise.)
The problem is that to buy this thing I still have to go through the sleazy, "personalized", time wasting sales process from the beginning per each reseller to achieve [presumably] the best price.
This is like 1980's
As an example, how about a ballpark figure for everything that AT&T has for internet connectivity. Search things like "AT&T OC3 GSAadvantage" with and without PDF and I got this(https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0249J/0TQT0R.3OCL...)
If the government buys it and it isn't secret or a one off item or service, there is pricing for it on the web. For some, the price won't be useful. If you looked up contracts for something like tech support, it might not be possible to find out what exactly they were asking for. But if it is something you can put a part number on or a service that is somewhat commodity, you should have a good chance of getting some sort of pricing.
I also have the feeling that they are ripping me off if I don't negotiate, because why else wouldn't you be upfront with your pricing?
Nice to see that Atlassian became really successful with their upfront pricing.
1. You seem to be looking for commodity pricing -- that is, you just want the product/service, and you do not want any others services related to it.
2. Most (all?) of the vendors are unwilling to provide open commodity-level pricing. This makes me think that one of two things (perhaps both) are in play. One is that the margin on commodity-level pricing just isn't worth the time. If that's the case, good luck finding a vendor -- maybe go straight to the manufacturer.
3. The other (more likely imho) is that the device requires something else to reach its full potential/value, and that something else is variably priced (e.g., set up, follow up, maintenance, etc.). If that's the case, make the call and either buy their expertise or demonstrate that you do not need their expertise. You can get to a near-commodity price fairly quickly if you actually know your stuff.
4. You seem to think that the "song and dance" is a waste of time. As a provider, I want satisfied customers. I want to add value to their experience purchasing through me. There exist cases where certain unsophisticated customers think that all they need is a product or service, and they do not realize that the real value add is in something else (e.g., the proficiency with which the product is used, onboarding, etc.). There are a lot of products and services for which this holds true. I have declined to do business with people because I knew they would use the product/service I was selling them in an inefficient manner and then blame me for it not working.
5. My general thought about customers like you who are not even willing to pick up the phone is that I do not want you as a customer. If you can qualify yourself as needing absolutely zero support, I am happy to sell you a product or service at a lean margin, and I have a sales process that accommodates that. If you do not trust me to qualify you as a customer, then feel free find someone else to do business with.
6. Beware of becoming a pathological customer. You may find that somehow your options are much narrower than others around you. Good business people engage in mutually beneficial relationships -- show that you can add value to the relationship (money is just one factor).