Right, it’s ultimately about picking the right medium for a given discussion, be that tickets, email, a call, or some kind of messaging. That can vary person to person as well, so it’s always a bit of a compromise.
This is my primary issue with async communication. Ive had email and slack conversations which lasted days where there was a 4 hour gap between messages and it is horrible.
In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
> In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
You also have no time to formulate a thoughtful answer to complex questions, though, which is one my issues. Calls are fine for some things, but 90% of calls could be an email because they contain discussion that needs more than 15 minutes of thinking. And a lot of the time, these calls need a summary email to even keep track of what was said!
I think the gap issue in async communication is a feature, not a bug.
Right. The point is that reasonable response time can turn a 10 minute conversation into a 48 hour long conversation that requires me to context switch 11 times over two days instead of just once.
If it's a straightforward product that might not happen. If it's a product with lots of subtle complications and I need to ask lots of questions whose answers depend on their answers to previous questions it will definitely happen.
As someone on the Autistic spectrum... yes, yes you most certainly can. When you're speaking I'm (not necessarily voluntarily-)daydreaming about my current hyperfocus/obsession. I'm tuned-in just enough to not reply with something so far out of left field that it gives away that my attention is elsewhere, but I'm definitely not listening to you. Your words are going in one ear and right out the other. I'll shoot you an e-mail for "clarification" later.
I hate this about myself and I've worked very hard to overcome it, but after thirty-seven years I've learned to accept that it's my baseline. I'll have to actively work against it for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, this applies to meetings and lectures as well. In school and, later, university I had to go to class and teach myself the material each night.
> I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some e-mail threads should have been a call.
I like to think I can "read the room". I particularly try to send email, versus a call, when the recipient will need to take time to prepare a thoughtful reply.
I've had several calls, sparked after a detailed email, where I end up reading my message literally word-for-word only to be met with the response: "Yeah-- we I'll need to respond to that offline".
Just. Read. My. Damned. Email.
I think very little of people who won't take the time to read anything longer than a couple sentences. It's especially galling because I work hard to write terse, bottom-line-up-front style-emails.
Hot take: W/ LLMs being used to summarize text, and robust text-to-speech, maybe I won't have as time-wasting calls. The kind of person who can't be bothered to read probably likes those kinds of things.
"If your messaging is vague, people will need to get on a call to understand what you actually offer."
I am so tired of someone at work saying "Hey, we're thinking of using X" (or "going to use X"), and I go to their web page, and what is X? Why, it's a tool that will unlock the value of my business and allow unparalleled visibility into my business to connect with my customers and brings highly-available best-of-breed services to us to secure and empower our business, which has up to this point just been businessin' along without the full power of businessy business that we could have been businessing if we just businessed this business product earlier.
But...
.. what is it?
Is it a hosted database? Is it a plugin to Salesforce CRM? Is it a training program? Is it a deployable appliance or VM image? Is it a desktop application? Is it a cloud service? Is it an API? Is it some sort of 3rd party agency meant to replace some bit of my business? Who is meant to use it? Developers? Business? Finance? Ops?
These are all very basic questions that are only the very beginning of understanding of what the product actually is, and I frequently can't even guess based on the home page. I have more than once been told we're using one of these products and linked to the homepage in question, and still had to come back and ask the person "Yes, but what is it?"
The best thing you can do is hit the developer docs page, if there is one, but even then it's fairly rare for there to be a clear answer. You have to poke through frequently disorganized, task-based documents with no clear progression as to "here's where to start with our product" and frankly some products have defeated me even so. I can get as far as "Ah, you have some sort of web interface" and probably some clue about what it actually is, but that hardly nails it down. You'd think I could juts derive the answer almost immediately.
So glad it's not my job to poke through these things. I have to imagine there's a lot of people who would equally find it a breath of fresh air to hit a website and have some sort of idea what it is in 30 seconds or less.
I understand, even if it's not my personal philosophy, still being vague on price so you have to call about that. I don't understand the idea behind hiding what your product even is behind such a thick layer of vague buzzwords that a professional in the field is still left virtually clueless about what it actually is even after a careful read.
Of course, if you had already fully unlocked the value in your business, you’d be leveraging accelerating growth and reaching synergies few can even contemplate. Your go to market strategy would be adaptable, extensible, on-demand, customer focused, market driven.
How about we circle back to put a fork in it?
But seriously, when I see such nebulous companies, I immediately look elsewhere. They are either trying to sell snake oil or are just too clueless to understand what’s actually important.
Even more frustrating is when you're specifically looking for a simple tool to do X, but the marketing material is so aspirational you can't even find out if they offer X, and finally when you figure out that they DO offer X, it turns out it's only X, and not world peace and an end to hunger like they promised.
You just want a single-sign-on thingamajig with 2FA, but the website is selling ultimate trustworthiness and compliance in an everchanging regulatory environment for dynamic and growing digital natives with federated AI. Hmm.
I always try looking up the product or company on Wikipedia. If there's an article there, that's more often than not a lot more helpful than the company's own web page.
Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what the enterprise license costs on the homepage.
Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.
I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
Not the parent, but I love communication. I love being able to send a chat message to a teammember and get a response in an hour, or an email at 8pm and read the response next morning. What I hate is having to schedule calls for next Friday just to get a response to a basic question, or being dragged into pointless half an hour meeting just to say two sentences about what I'm doing today.
But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now.
I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
This might be the very reason they prefer to call you, to force you into rushed decisions. Because otherwise I can't imagine the reason for spending scheduling time and minutes (hours) of chitchat just to answer a couple of very basic and totally repeatable question.
I have the same problem as the parent comment, and over time, I learned that people would take advantage of it, just as you mentioned. So, I decided to make my default response to every offer: 'Let me think about it, and I'll call you back.' Sometimes I only ask for one hour, but I always need some time to think on my own about the opportunity and make a sensible decision. This habit has improved things a lot for me!
Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.'
Yup. Used to do sales. People are make way better decisions async (over email) than in person or on a call. People feel pressure to say yes in the moment and then the cost of later saying no is much greater than it would have been to say no over email.
The stress and all the negatives people are posting about here is the point.
Before you demonize any company doing this... Know just about every company with a product has a sales team of some kind and they are all operating with similar models. You are being annoyed by some sales people while the sales people at your company are annoying someone else.
Some of us are time-wasting averse. I am never going to recommend a product without a lot of answers, and it is never going to get green-lighted without my boss feeling confident of the answers. The faster I get the answers, the more likely we are to follow-up. When getting answers is like pulling teeth, other solutions get considered, including "develop something in-house".
I absolutely love communication, meeting people, etc. as far as it makes sense! Typically is much better written. Everything can be forwarded, is documented, no misunderstandings…
I doubted for a second, as I wrote that. Yes, written communication can lead to misunderstanding, but more often in chat. Mails are a little better in that regard in my experience. Because they are saved and seen by many people, is easier to analyze what has been said, context, etc.
But in general I would say, both can generate misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle down.
They're not communication-averse. They're just not stupid.
The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available.
This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
> Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.
I've been reading about landing pages for my project, and the standard formula is apparently to place that front-and-centre, with what your product actually does second. So often, though, it seems like they're so eager to tell you how brilliant the product is, they forget to tell you what it actually does.
And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical).
So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?".
Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats.
Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and still no idea what the product is or how it's differentiated.
Yeah, I don't understand why the standard advice is what it is. Are most adults that stupidly naive to not realize that benefits are just lies? No company is actually able to predict how and how much their product can benefit their customers. Only customers themselves can predict that, and to do it, they need to know the actual things the product does, i.e. the features, which also happen to be the only objective things the company can say.
And yes, in many cases, the buyer may not know enough to correctly evaluate the features - but such buyer should be aware that, in such situation, they're even less able to tell if the benefits listed are realistic, or just blatant lies. Buying by benefits is stupid - the smart thing is to find someone who understands the features and ask them for advice.
> I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.
Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
> we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries
The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.
Sales has to be commission based and you always hire at least two salesman.
The biggest driver to make a sale is the commission. The second biggest is fear of getting sacked because you’re not making as many sales as the other guy.
Pretty much this or something like it, at least in my experience the last 30+ years.
Sales seems to attract folks who are highly 'coin operated'. The large majority (yes...always with the exceptions) really, deep down, don't care about how cool the tech is, or how it's going to change the world...they care about the game of sales and you keep score in the game by how much commission you earn. You really want the salesthing that comes in with "Forget about the salary or draw, I want a 100% commission comp plan" because that's someone who is confident enough in their ability to sell that they aren't worried about paying the mortgage or buying groceries.
Tangentially, one of the worst things I've seen a sales org do is cap commissions. All that incentivizes is "I hit my cap...ima gonna go hang out on my boat until next quarter because why work for sales I'm not going to get comp'ed on".
GP's company is (at least in their eyes) not interested in selling per se - quoting:
>> That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
I don't know what the name for that other thing is, but it's indeed distinct from "selling" that salespeople do, which boils down to begging, cajoling, tricking or coercing you to buy their shit, no matter how useless or downright harmful to you is, because that's what commissions combined with competition incentivize. Not surprisingly, the bottom-feeder telemarketing sweatshops are where this model is present in its purest form - extreme competition, frequent bonuses for top performers, and quick firing for not being a top performer.
If I have a choice, I never want to "buy" whatever someone's "selling" - I only want to do the whatever is the "buying" equivalent for the not-selling thing I don't have the name for.
It's not a B2B-specific phenomenon either. The B2C equivalent of those salespeople are car salesmen (which have meme status at this point), telemarketers, and those people doing the Amway model, trying to sell some Tupperware knockoffs[0] or barely working vacuum cleaners or whatnot at 3-10x inflated prices, making you feel like you had a good time instead of having just been scammed.
--
[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.
Nah, you definitely need calls. The idea that any product sells itself to the point that a venture backed startup needs is laughable. Lots of potential customers are clueless but excited and in order to book large contracts, you need someone to be a steward to work the contract through the byzantine maze of leadership and procurement.
Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in, and the idea that they say some magic words and then the customer suddenly wants to buy is childish. They identify and address needs and pain points.
> Lots of potential customers are clueless but excited and in order to book large contracts, you need someone to be a steward to work the contract through the byzantine maze of leadership and procurement.
That's called exploitation, not stewardship.
It is what it is, but let's not pretend that the relationship here is anything but adversarial. The incentives are such that dishonesty and malice brings in more sales, so honest salespeople get quickly outcompeted by their dishonest co-workers, and companies with honest business models get outcompeted by those with dishonest ones. Buyers are in no position to change this, but that doesn't mean they have to pretend it's fine, or play along.
>Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission.
This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which you are informed that some important feature is out of the question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a bunch of people with nothing to show for it.
Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.
> Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.
To me, it's refusing to show up with a knife to a gun fight. The company needs a thing. The "things person" stands no chance in direct confrontation with a "people's person" and they know it, so they to avoid calls (direct or otherwise) to level the playing field. A "people's person" could fare much better against the seller's "people's persons", but then a "people's person" is in much worse position to understand the thing the company needs in the first place.
For buying things, a win-win outcome can occur only when people on both both buyer and seller side are "things persons".
It's basically a Prisoner's dilemma, with "people's person" and "things person" in place of "defect" and "cooperate".
On the other hand, I would hate to wade through email chains, type out large emails and wait for delayed async responses drawn out over days. I thrive when I can read the documentation, come prepared to a call and have my questions answered quickly in real time. There’s also something about quickly parsing the realtime information that brings out the best and most relevant questions in me.
A lot of companies don't actually sell a product that does anything useful, though. They sell an idea that sounds useful to management, and obscuring the truth earns more money.
A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-funded forum: scummy garbage makes money. Taking sales people out for steak and whiskey makes money. Lying makes money. (That last point is especially funny considering how startups lie, too, like having a landing page and no product but collecting emails like you do.)
The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
> Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on folks like you? No.
Are you sure?
If you ignore human constructs such as companies and organisations and quantify based on classifications that make more sense for aggregates of workers, you might be surprised how little of the economy is built on the F500 let alone venture capital unicorns.
What do you think the economy is built on? Do you realize how much is spent on basic things like energy, food, construction of roads, buildings, houses?
It’s very obvious when people straight up lie in these industries because the physical thing never materializes.
Yeah, if people were lying about utilities and infrastructure we'd have a right mess... like sewage pumped into rivers and onto beaches whilst water executives take home £millions. Those same companies begging for taxpayers money to do maintenance whilst paying out billions to shareholders. And infrastructure projects that look weirdly like ways to divert £billions of tax resources into private hands whilst achieving essentially no benefit.
> It’s very obvious when people straight up lie in these industries because the physical thing never materializes.
Sort of. The trick in these industries is to instead cheat on quality of materials and workmanship. Which is how we're drowning in physical products to buy, and yet most of them are barely functioning garbage - they've all been "value engineered" to near breaking point.
I think it's fair to say that a large component of the top two industries (professional services and real estate) are shady. OTOH, there are a lot of industries that seem less prone to corruption and more likely to reward people for honest work.
I'd actually say it's opposite. The economy is built on folks like him but rewards other folks making it seems like his contribution to the economy is nil.
What percentage of the GDP is furniture making and window fixing? Yours is a noble profession, and like most noble professions is barely a blip in the grand Machiavellian scheme of capitalism
If you mean manufacturing vs tech sector, then yes; however much of manufacturing has become automated. I was referring to actual craftsmen crafting things. Point being, when people talk bad about capitalism, they’re not talking about artisans or craftspeople or other tradespeople plying their trade, they are referring to the system by which capital is accrued and hoarded by the owner class
I get what you mean, but one could argue its a bit hyperbolic (maybe false equivalence?) to draw a line between the economic impact of small biz/single proprietor and the economy writ large.
That said...thank gawd there's still room for biz like yours.
VC is an absolute cancer. All of these grifters claim to love free markets, but the entire ecosystem is just propping up companies operating at a loss until all their competitors fold. At least these useless buzzword B2B companies actually have some gormless entity willing to pay them enough to keep the lights on without another 500 million dollar check from Daddy Andreessen lol
Let me explain it to them, then: it's not simply that "scummy garbage makes money". It's that scummy but shiny garbage is given away for free, which makes the company look great to potential buyers - typically large corporations or the public (via IPO) - which allows the company to be sold for stupid amounts of money before the buyer realizes they bought a garbage factory, and this is what makes investors money.
People who got the free shiny scummy garbage? They don't matter, their only role is to grow a counter on financial reports, and to serve as a backup plan - because when the potential buyers realize too soon what they were about to buy, the people holding the previously free garbage can be squeezed for some money to hopefully make the investors whole.
I think it's just a grammar thing, meant to read "having a landing page and no product, but collecting emails like you do [have a product]" - so not the parent being disingenuous but the general practice.
> That last point is especially funny considering how startups lie, too, like having a landing page and no product but collecting emails like you do.
How dare companies do market research with potential buyers to know what to build before they start building it! If only we could setup massive factories that pump out hot garbage that nobody wants and build roads to nowhere like the soviets did.
I just sent this article to an enterprise sales rep who has been email me for weekly days for the last several weeks, even thought I told them I was no interested and away on vacation.
The title on the website says "licensing & distribution", the paragraph under that repeats it and the code example shows some software trying to authorize a serial key to see if it's valid or not.
I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).
Right, I thought it was extremely clear. The code sample on the homepage really makes it click right away for developers and confirm that it's what they need. While developers might not be the decision person, I bet they get a ton of leads from developers who find this company and then ask their management for it.
Recently I have been dropping the URL in ChatGPT and asking what the company actually builds, problems they solve, and how they make money. Especially for consulting firms, they really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating what they actually do.
Initially, I thought it was a solution for companies to manage their miscellaneous software licenses, but after some time I figured out it's a solution if you want to offer your own licensing. The gen-z ultra-wide fonts didn't help with readability either.
>> "The gen-z ultra-wide fonts didn't help with readability either."
The font is "Owners XXWide" and the font designer's various mentions in publications suggest Elder Millennial at the latest. I don't think we can blame the kids for this one.
Even just the pricing component would be lovely — I'm so tired of the "call us to discuss license cost" for anything larger than "absurdly tiny". You don't need to make it penny-accurate, even: I just need a sense of scale. If your product costs something wildly outside my budget, wouldn't you rather save your time to talk with people that can actually afford what you're selling?
(I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)
I've seen (and experienced as the seller) 2 main reasons:
1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from every enterprise client
2. we don't actually know our own economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest effort to quote it within a magnitude
A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal answers, more complex than just a formula...
I could see that — having worked for a large network vendor in the past, there are some things that just don't lend themselves to any kind of pricing without some kind of scoping discussion. :)
Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more companies think they have that problem than actually have that problem.
May it happen that CloudFlare stops sending their call invitations to me. I have an account at them which has shared access to company domains, because sometimes I was needed to assist with them. CloudFlare reps repeatedly e-mail me to schedule a call, even after I replied to them and told that I am not a person directly responsible for our domains and asked to stop mailing me. Whoever was their rep at that time, answered that they will stop. Some time passed, and they started e-mailing again. Eventually I started putting their e-mails to spam folder.
I was in an email back and forth with someone that cold emailed us about a service. Sometimes, I say "what the hell" and take their pitch and see if it's actually worthwhile. But this guy, after I asked him some basic details about his service and what differentiates them, refused to answer my questions and insisted on getting on a call.
Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.
- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)
- it usually obscures what the product actually does
Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
How should a company figure out what to charge for something in the first place?
Especially a startup that doesn't have much market data to go on, and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of.
When this is the case, one option is to do price discovery.
And the way to do that is to remove prices from the website, take calls, learn about customers and their needs, and experiment.
If client pays for a link that’s part of a chain, and doesn’t want the chain broken, and still has profit, it means client can pay more, that link is worth more.
> and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of.
How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with.
--
[0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.
Have you ever done enterprise contracts? A lot of huge companies won’t touch smaller products because they can’t guarantee what they want. These are complex negotiations with a lot of a la cart options.
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?
you are right. an enterprise products can never be ready for any enterprise customer. they need custom solutions to work with what they already invested millions in. each customer is different there. most enterprise products are ever expanding 'app platforms' or frameworks ultimately, in order to be able to adapt to new customer environments and needs quickly and efficiently. if they arent, most environments will spit them out quickly and harshly. bad for business on either side.
From the other side, have you ever tried to deal with corporate customers with SSO?
What normally happens:
* Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.
* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT
* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID
* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration
* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.
* You wait for a response for a month
* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed
* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.
* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.
* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.
* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.
Totally OT, but I love your typo "a la cart". It makes me think of an early 20th century greengrocer with a cart of vegetables and fruit trying to appear more sophisticated by saying he's selling things "a la cart".
What if you sell a product where it's easy to determine the cost for one user signing up by themselves, so you figure out the required markup and publish that on your site. But large organizations wanting licenses for each user will want a discount, will want finer details about contracts, and often some kind of unique adaptations to the product for their use case. The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort, in which case you have requirements gathering and negotiations. Of course there will be differential pricing depending on what the buyer company wants (cost goes up) and if it's a whale of a deal that the seller really wants (cost goes down) So... schedule a call?
> The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort
It's not worth the effort.
It's killing your ability to scale your sales process. Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product development, as now you have a bunch of one off deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you want for various tiers of user count.
If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you scale are critical.
This is what I meant in my comment. The seller needs to know what the buyer wants, maybe its a big bulk discount or an extra feature. If the seller decides the discount is too steep, or the extra feature doesn't fit with the road map, then no deal. Or maybe the deal really is that big, and it's worth catering to some one-off demands.
None of this means "hiding" information, but you can't put something like "We'll do X hrs of extra work if you buy Y licenses". Just like the any store might have a 10% discount if you buy a dozen, but if you want 50,000 then there will probably be a conversation involved.
I believe this is one of the main reasons cloudflare focused so much on Workers: it allowed them to replace much of the one-off features they had to develop for various customers
> you sell a product where it's easy to determine the cost for one user signing up by themselves, so you figure out the required markup and publish that on your site.
Then someone at a large organization can multiply this number by the expected number of licenses they'll need, and get a ballpark estimate for the (upper bound of the) costs of the service, which is a critical input in determining whether it's even worthwhile to consider talking to the vendor. Having that information, the organization can then schedule a call to negotiate whatever extra adaptations and discounts they need, or realize signing up is unlikely to have positive ROI and skip it, which also saves the seller from wasting their time on a deal that won't come through.
Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
> Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
That or they have "customers" who are knowingly or unknowingly incentivized to have the vendor succeed.
People in marketing, often even those in higher levels, know Google analytics. They have demonstrated experience with it. They want to keep using it. They want their employees to keep using it. Google Analytics plus or whatever it is called iirc does not have a pricing page publicly available.
Why does Google not have pricing available publicly? Why do customers put up with Google? Is there any other reason?
PS for those curious, I think this is one of the limitations we hit with Google Analytics free
Worse than that, calls aren't usually tracked. They will forget they told you "oh we won't increase the price next year," but they'll damn well remember the green engineer you invited to sit the call who blurted out that the $75k/yr license fee was "within budget".
> Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
A super valuable solution to your problem is pernicious because...checks notes...a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
> a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
That's just an euphemism for "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the value their product creates for you".
A real head scratcher. Perhaps has something to do with there being no point of buying if all (or even most) of the value flows back to the seller? Unless you're a nail wholesaler and are happy with 0.1% margins because you sell by truckloads anyway.
No, I get the purpose of his comment. For a complex product and large customers, it's rare that you can guess what is useful to the company and price it appropriately. The product may offer 20 features, of which 5 are useful to the customer. Your (few) pricing options may be insufficient. You may have a pricing that offers only 3 of the features they need. They're not going to buy it. Your next tier may offer 10 options. It has all 5 of what they need, but too much more, so it's priced too high.
Even worse, your tier may have 10 options but still not capture the 5 they need.
So you negotiate, and they provide you the 5 you need at a reasonable price.
This is standard.
Oh, and negotiating a trial period is almost always a must. Perhaps a 2 week free trial is not enough for the customer. If you could bump it to 4 weeks, it could lead to a lucrative sale.
Right. The scenario you describe is reasonable. But as a buyer, if you put out those few pricing options, even if none of them match all my needs, I get to see both the features you offer and the prices you ask, which gives me the two critical pieces of information I seek: whether you have the capability to satisfy some or all my needs, and what order of magnitude we talk about in terms of costs. If that information tells me that you might have something for us, and it might fit in our budget, then I'll be more than happy to call you, and spend whatever time is needed to agree on a set of features and a price that works for both of us.
The thing I want to desperately avoid is wasting time dancing around the salesmen trying to overhype their product while staying vague on the details, in hopes to get me to buy (and pay as much as I can) regardless of whether I get any value from it.
> "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the value their product creates for you".
And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL providers all trying to capture the full value of the solution they provide. With infinite time, markets essentially adjust themselves towards this goal. As long as that number is 99.99% (meaning the buyer creates an additional 0.01% of economical value) it's still valuable for BOTH parties.
FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
There's a theory an economics that says that the more different prices a provider can charge the more of the surplus they capture (ie they can tilt that percentage towards the seller and away from the buyer).
Of course, if they're a monopoly provider and the buyer really needs it, they have to cough up. But generally there are substitute products. So the buyer would do well to look for an alternative that doesn't do differential pricing to capture more surplus for themselves.
> And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL providers all trying to capture the full value of the solution they provide.
Because:
1) In efficient markets, all users also try to capture full value they get from the they bought. Efficient competition is purely adversarial.
2) You say, "As long as that number is 99.99% (...) it's still valuable for BOTH parties". Unfortunately, incomplete information and information asymmetry makes it more than likely that the "is trying to align their pricing" so that this number is more than 100%. That is, if you're not careful, they'll scam you.
The two above are arguments why this is a problem for the buyer, in practice. The next one is more general:
3) Everything that's good and nice and human happens inside economic inefficiencies. For human beings, a truly efficient market is a literal definition of hell - everyone's suffering as much as possible, spending all their energy to earn exactly enough to barely survive.
> FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
As it should be.
I'll say here what I say to people who talk about stopping to post anything publicly, lest it ends up in LLM training data:
Trying to capture for yourself 100% of the economic value you're producing is an extreme form of greed. When companies try to do that, they get called evil and used as examples of everything that's wrong with late-stage capitalism and such. Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
All of us who produce, we also consume. Society and its markets form an ecosystem, which needs some inefficiency to evolve, be resilient and thrive.
(See also: running any system at 100% capacity is "efficient" up until some random event causes the load to grow ever so slightly, even for a tiny moment, at which point the system suffers a cascade of failures and dies.)
> All of us who produce, we also consume. Society and its markets form an ecosystem, which needs some inefficiency to evolve, be resilient and thrive.
And all of us engineers get paid REALLY WELL because people sell software for us. Software is cheap relative to its value. Stop complaining that you're getting ripped off.
> Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
> And all of us engineers get paid REALLY WELL because people sell software for us. Software is cheap relative to its value.
That's not at all clear, an it's its own can of worms.
A lot of software, even widely-used software, may as well have negative real value, because its perceived value is just an accounting trick. Any time you see software allowing someone to do something that required a specialist before, particularly in company setting, it's more than likely that the value is negative. Think e.g. everyone doing their own expenses. A company used to have a bunch of moderately paid jobs dedicated to doing that. Naturally, people doing those jobs quickly got very efficient at it. In comes software, those jobs get eliminated, and now you're having everyone - including all the absurdly highly paid engineers (software or otherwise) - having to semi-regularly (not regularly enough to get efficient at it) drop what they're doing and spend half a day or more on doing expenses. Productivity goes down across the board for obvious reasons. But, what the business sees, is a) legible savings on eliminated finance jobs, and b) mysterious "costs disease" that seems to be affecting the company (and market at large), keeping productivity below expectations.
Mysterious my ass.
Then, a lot of software is directly or indirectly serving adtech. This is where most of the high salaries in tech come from. Software is cheap and programmers are paid well because it's all funded by scamming everyday people and ruining their lives. That's a nearly inexhaustible money source. The actual value of all that software provides people, integrated over the entire society? Deeply in the negative.
Then, there's plenty of SaaS businesses that would be more ergonomic and efficient if replaced by an Excel spreadsheet. Those deliver negative value to customers almost by definition.
Etc.
Sure, there's some software that's delivering way more value than it costs. But there's much less of such software than people think.
the obscuring is just as bad as the differential pricing
9 times out of 10 even when you get on a call with them they just tell you the product does everything but their "consulting" or "support" will work to "configure" the product for you to do it. Meaning, it doesn't do that and they are going to sell you high priced consulting to ram their square peg into your round hole until you either beg them to stop or become stockholmed and invested enough that you are persuading your own stakeholders that it really does what it was supposed to.
It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me.
After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about.
Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.
My understanding is that enterprise purchasing teams are often evaluated based on their ability to secure discounts compared to the initial sticker price of the software. Therefore, having a firm sticker price might make them less incentivized to purchase your SaaS. I suspect many companies don't put pricing up front so the email can say "Normally, we charge X per seat, but we'll give you a special volume offer of Y"
It's a part of the enterprise dance, sure, but I wouldn't say they become deincentivized to purchase if you say no to discounts or negotiations, at least up to p99.
The two categories of enterprises I’ve seen most react differently. There are staid, predictable and well understood businesses that highly value discounts, some to the point of absurdity. There are also enterprises with a more dynamic nature that are going in new directions and highly value flexibility. Most fall in one of those camps, and sometimes both.
One thing I find with enterprise is your call sometimes isn't entirely about you selling them on your product. It's about learning about the enterprise, from them.
It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable. I find none of that comes out very clearly in emails that tend to be bullet point style focused but don't reveal the nature of the issue.
I agree with this. This is why I still do the occasional 'discovery call' with people directly involved in a project -- and is very clearly communicated as not being a sales call.
One of the most infuriating b2b calls I've ever been on was setup by our vendor to sound like this. After almost a year of using their product (on a month to month plan), they wanted to check-in and see what features we were using, what we liked, didn't like and show us the new stuff they'd released etc. And then in the last 10 minutes of an hour long call, they dropped a little "we just need to go over some administrative details" bomb where they started negotiations to get us on a year long contract. I will never accept another discovery call from this vendor again. It was such a huge piss off.
Weird reaction to say the least assuming you were happy with the product. I've been on calls where the vendor is already on thin ice because the product doesn't work and we're just making sure they are taking us seriously, where AE knuckleheads try to use that as an opportunity to upsell a higher tier of support or something. That's annoying and ime never goes well.
Offering an annual contract though, which presumably comes with a volume discount is a totally normal practice that should benefit both parties assuming it's executed well.
You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact needs and understand the product and so on, that's good, you're probably right.
But when it comes to something complex, something someone hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same direction, an email almost never covers it and often enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.
If you don't address / discover those things it is potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.
I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on the call and even asking about basic features, then one department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.
I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there, not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own processes and working it out internally.
In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is explaining or offering solutions.
Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work for some things.
> You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact needs and understand the product and so on, that's good, you're probably right.
It's not that - or at least not just that. The key insight I feel some comments here are missing is, from the buyer's perspective, the process is risky and (with market economy being what it is), adversarial until proven otherwise. All you're saying is true, but until I know you better, I can't tell whether you have my best interests in mind, or are trying to plain scam me.
To use an analogy, there's a reason people go on dates and gradually open up to a potential partner over extended amount of time, instead of just marrying the first person who promises the right things on the spot.
Many organizations have a shadow org chart that you won't learn from the website but will get some sense of that structure in human interactions like calls.
A D&B report is not going to tell you everything you need to know about a company and the dynamics and problems it has with respect to the problem space that you and your company deal with.
I mean, you could somehow get access to an entire company's email history and it still won't tell you everything you need to know. Whether people like it not, sometimes direct, high-bandwidth human interaction is required to adequately understand an issue.
> and it still won't tell you everything you need to know
Talking to them will? we cannot have it both ways (the entire company's email history is not enough to tell me what I need, but meeting for an hour, say three times with the salesperson will).
I think you _are_ right, but I do not need everything. I just need good enough to make a decision to move forward.
> It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable.
I'd like to trust you and your intentions specifically, but in the general case, this relationship is adversarial, so as the potential buyer, I definitely do not want you to "feel me out", and further disadvantage me in the coming negotiations. I'm fine letting you on the details of my organization, its issues and interdepartmental dynamics, but only at the point when I know enough about you and your product to feel safe you aren't just going to scam me.
The post is about how they have a no-calls policy, even for enterprise sales. The author brags, "I nuked the 'book a call' button from my pricing page".
...But their pricing page actually has a big "Schedule a Call" button when you drag the pricing slider into enterprise territory: https://keygen.sh/pricing/
> No sales calls, except for a short 'discovery call' if absolutely needed. Discovery calls are just a formality.
Author here. Quoted text is from the conclusion at the end of the post.
I do the occasional 15m 'discovery call.' It's not a sales call, but more of an formality where we intro each other and then move onto email for deeper discussions.
I can confirm as a (largeish) buyer, i despise useless calls and video conferences.
I do not have time, and it costs me money to hop on a 20 minute call just to find out it was a presentation of their slicks that were in PDF, or go through 30 slides that they could have emailed me.
It costs me money for a vendor and internal teams to eat time, and my cost change depending on the time of the day. My rate is highest during mid to late day. If you send me an email with the info and I can read it in my morning quiet time, it (mentally & $$) cost less, and I will be less grouchy.
there are some times when a call works. If the emails are fruitless because the writers lack the ability to be succinct, or cannot articulate what they need.
My wife works in sales. She always pushes people to her email via her voicemail or email signature. When people need really technical support, there is a group of dedicated people to help with that aspect. Technical support really isn’t her job but in her mind it kind of is as being an important point of first contact to keep the relationship strong.
Granted, you need to be very responsive to your email, including monitoring it a little on the off hours.
She continues to grow her business territory each year for almost 2 decades and almost never makes sales phone calls. She does do scripted presentations for big deals from time to time but gets some support for those.
Did the author forget to take "Schedule a Call" button from their pricing page if you drag the slider all the way to the right ? :) Kinda contradicts the entire post.
I touch on this at the end of the post. It's a short 15m 'discovery call', not a sales call. It's essentially a formality to intro each other, make sure we're human, and move onto email for any further discussion. Essentially, not all enterprises will shoot you a cold email to start the conversation, so this call is to capture those leads, with the end-goal of having all real discussion in email.
tl;dr: some enterprises will bounce if they don't see a 'book a call' button.
Still, you didn't remove it as you claim in the article. For a potential customer booking a call there's no difference, even if your intention is for it to only be a "discovery call". What did you actually change on the website?
Actually, I did remove it, and it was gone for a long, long time (years). But only recently did I add it back because I discovered through a/b testing that I was losing leads that didn't want to cold email us, so instead of a cold email, they schedule a quick 15m call that takes little to no preparation for on my end. What it's not is a sales call, and it very quickly moves to an email thread. I am very clear that we don't do further calls past the discovery call -- it's all email (or Slack if they want extended support).
So if a potential customer for your Enterprise tier says “sure ezegk I will pay you 6k/mo but only if you do a second call with me to discuss some open questions I had” you will refuse and tell them you will only communicate via email?
I find that very hard to believe…
It's a hypothetical, and it has literally never happened. If they're ready to buy, they'll buy. If they need a quick call, ofc I can jump on at that point, but it really depends on what the call is about -- e.g. if they want to know how to do something, email is a better medium for technical topics.
You seem to be doing this in good faith but honestly, there is no difference between 'Discovery Call" and a "Sales Call". The point is that the customer has to speak with someone first. I do think it is required for enterprise deals but the premise of your post seems to say otherwise.
Yeah, I was annoyed at this too but I think they're differentiating it by having the price already set, and it's just a way for Companies to do the intro dance if they want to. I know my immediate decision-makers at my company wouldn't use a vendor if there was no call.
There absolutely is a difference between one 15-minute call to see faces vs a pipeline of ten 30- to 60-minute calls discussing requirements, compliance, pricing, billing, onboarding, implementation, and support over the course of 6 months.
Sales calls usually start with a discovery call then move to those later stages in the pipeline though, so you're just calling a sales call by another name.
Well, no, it seems your distinction is what is pedantic, as you are differentiating between discovery calls and sales calls when most would call them one and the same. This in my opinion undermines the point of your article.
I just read your other comment [0], this idea makes more sense in that you don't do any future calls, it's more like customer support in terms of helping them answer questions rather than beginning a pipeline.
I've touched on it in a few places, but you're right that there feels like a disconnect there which I didn't catch until pointed out. But there really isn't too much of a disconnect, and it's nothing nefarious. It's simply that over the years of doing #nocalls, I discovered that I was losing some leads that didn't want to cold email us, so instead, I added a 'discovery call' as a way to capture these leads -- not as a way to put myself, and them, into some sort of endless sales call pipeline, but as a way to start the conversation.
Really, all one of these discovery calls really are is a short 15 minute call where I intro myself for 30s, they intro themselves, and then I hear about their problem. After that, I tell them yes/no we can solve that with X/Y/Z, thenI tell them I'll follow up via email with additional links and documentation unless there are any further pressing questions. And in that email, I ask that they CC relevant team members onto the email thread for further discussion.
Maybe this goes without saying, but this requires really good self-serve for most customers. In general it seems like the trend is more fragmentation, rather than just "more email" but that does mean less call-driven -- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
If you are selling to a non-technical user, phone calls give them a hint of your support. Email support is horrible. Turn around times are too slow. This is the reason I wont buy another framework laptop.
Counterpoint: Recently dealt with a vendor at work and asked their support several highly technical questions together with a bug report for an issue we were having.
They not only answered in 1 day, but also provided a real solution / workaround for our issue, as well as a technical answer to the questions and a technical analysis of why the bug occurs.
Outstanding support, and I would never have guessed it from their website.
I've had both great and terrible email support (great where L1 immediatelly involved L2 support and I got a straight up solution in 15 mins, for instance), but getting something done over a voice call has never been that great!
If L1 can solve things for you, a call sometimes can work, but really, if they can't, it meant multiple calls with L1 and multiple calls with L2 (in one recent example, it took 4 months for an issue to be resolved by internal support at BigCo where I was repeatedly asked for the same screenshot, including them recording me get to it a number of times, until I pinged their manager's manager via email pointing how they have the solution in there if they only read my emails, and got it resolved 2h later).
This only works if your sales strategy is all about inbound sales, i.e. content marketing (like this article)/ads.
But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.
It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.
But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.
Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.
It also only works if your product is quite good. I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution for the quality of products where the vast majority are neither very good or bad. An average company with average products will be more inclined to try aggressive sales and marketing tactics because they don't have a great product to help motivate sales.
I'd disagree - at the ends of the curve, there are a lot of products that are effectively identical, at which point it's a race to the bottom on price (often meaning a slow decline in features until things are "cost-optimised") unless they can bring another value-add to the table which is where salespeople come in. Some of the best companies with the best products have extensive sales teams because they don't race to the bottom on price - they outcompete on getting first to market of features that they only get to because they understand their customer pain points deeply and find out when the value add is.
I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.
Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.
Love this anecdote. Having a really capable sales team that actually listens to customers unique needs, and feeds that back into a better product can be such a huge asset. Your sales team is usually a huge repository of unique customer pain and problems (opportunities!)
I disagree, almost all products are intentionally bad and only continue to get worse. Ironically, it's due to the free market.
There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.
But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?
Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.
There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.
"But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do."
And how a call will make it simpler? Or why a telephone call becomes part of the service provided for the additional (higher) price (instead of other alternatives)?
The more that people spend the more they want to talk to an actual human to make sure their product and psychological needs are taken care of, in terms of being comfortable with the sale mentally too.
Depends at what level the company is at, especially if they're non-technical. I've found that non-tech VPs and executives definitely want a call, they'd never approve an email-only deal.
Maybe that's true for some people. But there's a lot of frustration being shown here and elsewhere that proves there is a demographic of people who really don't want this.
Cars are similar I think. Sure maybe some people need help. But there's is huge demand for a one-click, no-negotiation car buying "experience" (or lack of experience rather).
My conspiracy theory is that this has more to do with Salespeople and established sales channels (dealers) not being able to understand this both because their job depends on it and because they are naturally people-persons. So it feels intuitive to them and they have trouble understanding/accepting that many other are not.
Power law. Only a few deals constitute the majority of the revenue of most B2B enterprise companies, whose customers will not approve a deal by email only, with no (and often an extended) face to face process. This article is talking about B2B, not consumer behavior. And anyway, cars are unique in that their sales are enshrined in law to be done through an intermediary rather than directly by the manufacturer.
> whose customers will not approve a deal by email only
That's kind of begging the question. Part of the point of the thread here is that it seems B2B is leaving some money on the table by refusing to do deals with less interaction. For example, this CTO's comment [1].
A good comparison I think is AWS and other cloud offerings. Of course, past a certain spend, you will start getting calls and have the opportunity to negotiate better rates, SLA's, etc. But, you can just go and spend 5-6 figures per month without any human interaction.
Another good example I think is 5 figure (or maybe even 6 figure) equipment purchases. You can definitely go ham buying most professional equipment without having to talk to someone over the phone. Think servers, GPU's, storage, cameras, etc.
HN is just such an anomaly that taking people's individual preferences here to heart is a bad strategy.
We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.
The most important deals that make up the vast majority of our revenue took lots of meetings, pilots, review meetings, etc, because those deals are in the 6/7 figure range.
Person buying the product has an idea of what they need. The information available within someone's head is naturally going to be much, much greater than any website.
Not to mention, that information can be accessed randomly and immediately. Searching if a product has feature Z is time consuming and you'll probably read about features A-Y. But asking a person can reveal the answer immediately.
Mostly fair, but I disagree about the need for outbound for rapid growth, based on some recent experience. Good PMF and you'll be drowning in inbound. Still need a call and white glove for bigger deals though.
You can go to the Porsche configurator website and design a personally customized globally unique $300K+ car, and it shows you not only the price but also what it'll look like. So there's obviously nothing _technical_ preventing them from letting people just order online, like with Tesla. Frustratingly, you have to still go into a dealer for them to click the submit order button, and they might add a markup for this privilege despite them adding negative value to the experience. It is just as frustrating as B2B sales. I'm sure some buyers want to speak to a human, but enthusiasts tend to know exactly what they want and they dread having to "build a relationship" and wonder if they got screwed because they didn't negotiate hard enough / aren't good-looking enough / etc.
As for B2B sales, if AWS can show their pricing online, which has to be among the most complex pricing in existence - then so can every other SaaS company.
I think you and the parent comment are talking about different scales. A large SaaS company deal could be $300k per month per customer, and the sales process for a company like that can involve changing the software to meet the needs of the customer. A very early lesson is that what the customer says they need is not always the same as what they actually need.
One of the many reasons calls happen is that customers say "I need XYZ feature in order to do this deal," and the salesperson then needs to ask why they need XYZ feature, and what they want to accomplish, and maybe existing ABC feature actually meets their need, or maybe the company needs to develop XYZ feature to secure the contract. Once you get into a complex domain, that is not happening over email.
The article contains good advice to many businesses out there, but it's worth considering the situations where it doesn't apply, too.
It certainly makes sense for a deep dive sales interaction if you're actually going to your product or engineering team to make changes.
But if you're selling what's already on the truck, as most of these companies are, then there is no reason for the "call for pricing" for a standard enterprise plan. Pricing pages should have a separate column for custom/bespoke solutions, where it makes sense to have "schedule a call".
Funny that you picked Porsche as an example. Their sales process is much like the terrible B2B experience. They won't even sell you many of their cars if you haven't purchased something cheaper from them in the past. Walk into a dealer, tell them you want to purchase a GT3 RS, and they'll laugh you out the door.
> If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.
Yes, they will. I recall watching a whole kind of documentary of it somewhere on Youtube. Essentially, luxury brands will fully customize cars for customers and have calls/meetings with them to discuss how the car will be customized. It costs $$$$$ but they'll do it.
I think, too, that more important than income is the fact that these rich people should be driving their cars. It's a way to keep the brand positioned in that market.
So you agree that when companies want to truly give a customized experience to their customers, they would get on a call with them? I guess we are on the same page then.
But I guess 100k cars are bought are bought more in person than 10k cars. For most people, the more money you spend, the more you'd like to talk to a real human being.
That’s not the case actually, if you consider that 10k cars are mostly used ones. Those are usually test driven, and haggled over first. And often taken in to a dealership to check the internals.
We're primarily an enterprise b2b company, so definitely couldn't get away with the "no calls" culture. BUT the "why do calls happen" section is applicable to anyone really.
We need to hop on calls to close customers, but honestly we could probably cut 1/3 of those calls by following some of those suggestions.
i.e. better documentation, ready to go pricing proposals, pre-filled security questionnaires, etc.
That’s what makes this approach interesting to share. By now everybody is familiar with the enterprise software sales process and it’s nice to see how other companies are doing it.
I hate "let's just have a quick call" people. It's never quick, it's always manipulative, and always a waste of time.
I have a client who tries to use calls to weasel out of paying for things. Finally I refused to talk to him on the phone any more. Some invoices remain outstanding but I'm not willing to waste more time listening to BS. I can spend my time making money from responsible people and meanwhile continue to have my invoice system pester him.
Re: sales, there is no such thing as a quick sales call.
I love this aspiration and it's something I wanted to do, but unfortunately if you get into a situation where you're wanting to sell to larger more old-school enterprise or government customers it's going to be hard to impossible to execute. Unless your product is low cost and has no higher-level enterprise offerings, you're going to have to have sales.
Sounds like he ran up against the snails pace of enterprise sales. It takes patience. When I cofounded a company selling a KYC solution to global banks, I did a survey of 30 FinTech founders on how long it took to get ink on paper with a global bank. 18 months was the usual answer, and it took even longer to get an actual check. If demand for your product is from large enterprises and you don't plan for this up front you simply can't survive. SaaS and "no meetings" are a great alternative... if the demand is there and it scales to a real opportunity. A lot of startups get lured into dealing with calls because a huge company with a potential $1M+ sale looms and they could raise their next round now if they close it. It is hard to say no.
For my business (micro-SaaS EdTech), the value of building trust with my customers cannot be understated. Further, I don’t believe i can effectively build trust with my customers in the way the author describes; without meetings.
I have a small B2C app that requires no calls or interactions in general to get customers, just support afterwards. Currently have a few hundred subscriptions. It's not much but makes me pretty happy.
I'm glad you are having success, but B2C is wildly different than B2B. I can't think of any B2C company that could do calls with customers. The economics don't make sense. Instead they use large advertising buys to communicate, one way, with current and prospective customers
If you learn how to do SEO you can get lots of free volume. You need PMF though. The support is only needed if your product doesn't work well or is hard to understand.
> we have a security page that outlines all of this, and essentially answers the questions that are in most security questionnaires we've seen.
And yet, you still have to fill them in, because the people who ask you for them don't actually care to read them or do the data entry, and generally don't even understand them. It's often clear that they're the people who are supposed to be filing them out, when you get questions like "is the data stored according to our internal "level 3" designation described on this intranet page". I find it so frustrating. They say they have questions. They don't have questions, and they don't care about the answers. They care about whether their spreadsheet automatically highlights and cells in red.
"But hey, you want that sale don't you? So do my homework"
I notice that when I started my software career everything was mostly emails and some text messaging. Then 10 years later, even before the pandemic, everything was a call. These weren't even sales people, but other developers. Its like everybody suddenly became allergic to putting things in writing and when pressed to do so they couldn't.
Yes, there are some advantages to sharing screens. But, being able to communicate with both precision and brevity in writing has its advantages. I strongly believe this skill is what prioritized me for promotion over my peers. It certainly wasn't my work ethic. Hard work is not well valued when somebody who works less hard delivers more.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 424 ms ] threadIn a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
You also have no time to formulate a thoughtful answer to complex questions, though, which is one my issues. Calls are fine for some things, but 90% of calls could be an email because they contain discussion that needs more than 15 minutes of thinking. And a lot of the time, these calls need a summary email to even keep track of what was said!
I think the gap issue in async communication is a feature, not a bug.
If it's a straightforward product that might not happen. If it's a product with lots of subtle complications and I need to ask lots of questions whose answers depend on their answers to previous questions it will definitely happen.
That's one reason calls can be superior in some situations.
As someone on the Autistic spectrum... yes, yes you most certainly can. When you're speaking I'm (not necessarily voluntarily-)daydreaming about my current hyperfocus/obsession. I'm tuned-in just enough to not reply with something so far out of left field that it gives away that my attention is elsewhere, but I'm definitely not listening to you. Your words are going in one ear and right out the other. I'll shoot you an e-mail for "clarification" later.
I hate this about myself and I've worked very hard to overcome it, but after thirty-seven years I've learned to accept that it's my baseline. I'll have to actively work against it for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, this applies to meetings and lectures as well. In school and, later, university I had to go to class and teach myself the material each night.
I like to think I can "read the room". I particularly try to send email, versus a call, when the recipient will need to take time to prepare a thoughtful reply.
I've had several calls, sparked after a detailed email, where I end up reading my message literally word-for-word only to be met with the response: "Yeah-- we I'll need to respond to that offline".
Just. Read. My. Damned. Email.
I think very little of people who won't take the time to read anything longer than a couple sentences. It's especially galling because I work hard to write terse, bottom-line-up-front style-emails.
Hot take: W/ LLMs being used to summarize text, and robust text-to-speech, maybe I won't have as time-wasting calls. The kind of person who can't be bothered to read probably likes those kinds of things.
I am so tired of someone at work saying "Hey, we're thinking of using X" (or "going to use X"), and I go to their web page, and what is X? Why, it's a tool that will unlock the value of my business and allow unparalleled visibility into my business to connect with my customers and brings highly-available best-of-breed services to us to secure and empower our business, which has up to this point just been businessin' along without the full power of businessy business that we could have been businessing if we just businessed this business product earlier.
But...
.. what is it?
Is it a hosted database? Is it a plugin to Salesforce CRM? Is it a training program? Is it a deployable appliance or VM image? Is it a desktop application? Is it a cloud service? Is it an API? Is it some sort of 3rd party agency meant to replace some bit of my business? Who is meant to use it? Developers? Business? Finance? Ops?
These are all very basic questions that are only the very beginning of understanding of what the product actually is, and I frequently can't even guess based on the home page. I have more than once been told we're using one of these products and linked to the homepage in question, and still had to come back and ask the person "Yes, but what is it?"
The best thing you can do is hit the developer docs page, if there is one, but even then it's fairly rare for there to be a clear answer. You have to poke through frequently disorganized, task-based documents with no clear progression as to "here's where to start with our product" and frankly some products have defeated me even so. I can get as far as "Ah, you have some sort of web interface" and probably some clue about what it actually is, but that hardly nails it down. You'd think I could juts derive the answer almost immediately.
So glad it's not my job to poke through these things. I have to imagine there's a lot of people who would equally find it a breath of fresh air to hit a website and have some sort of idea what it is in 30 seconds or less.
I understand, even if it's not my personal philosophy, still being vague on price so you have to call about that. I don't understand the idea behind hiding what your product even is behind such a thick layer of vague buzzwords that a professional in the field is still left virtually clueless about what it actually is even after a careful read.
How about we circle back to put a fork in it?
But seriously, when I see such nebulous companies, I immediately look elsewhere. They are either trying to sell snake oil or are just too clueless to understand what’s actually important.
Either way - a waste of time and effort.
You just want a single-sign-on thingamajig with 2FA, but the website is selling ultimate trustworthiness and compliance in an everchanging regulatory environment for dynamic and growing digital natives with federated AI. Hmm.
Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.
I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.
I wish I could use what this guy is selling.
But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now.
I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.'
Tip for unmarried people: You can still use the trick above, no one would know or even care :)
The stress and all the negatives people are posting about here is the point.
Before you demonize any company doing this... Know just about every company with a product has a sales team of some kind and they are all operating with similar models. You are being annoyed by some sales people while the sales people at your company are annoying someone else.
But in general I would say, both can generate misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle down.
The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available.
This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.
And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical).
So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?".
Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats.
Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and still no idea what the product is or how it's differentiated.
Yeah, I don't understand why the standard advice is what it is. Are most adults that stupidly naive to not realize that benefits are just lies? No company is actually able to predict how and how much their product can benefit their customers. Only customers themselves can predict that, and to do it, they need to know the actual things the product does, i.e. the features, which also happen to be the only objective things the company can say.
And yes, in many cases, the buyer may not know enough to correctly evaluate the features - but such buyer should be aware that, in such situation, they're even less able to tell if the benefits listed are realistic, or just blatant lies. Buying by benefits is stupid - the smart thing is to find someone who understands the features and ask them for advice.
Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.
Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.
The biggest driver to make a sale is the commission. The second biggest is fear of getting sacked because you’re not making as many sales as the other guy.
Sales seems to attract folks who are highly 'coin operated'. The large majority (yes...always with the exceptions) really, deep down, don't care about how cool the tech is, or how it's going to change the world...they care about the game of sales and you keep score in the game by how much commission you earn. You really want the salesthing that comes in with "Forget about the salary or draw, I want a 100% commission comp plan" because that's someone who is confident enough in their ability to sell that they aren't worried about paying the mortgage or buying groceries.
Tangentially, one of the worst things I've seen a sales org do is cap commissions. All that incentivizes is "I hit my cap...ima gonna go hang out on my boat until next quarter because why work for sales I'm not going to get comp'ed on".
>> That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
I don't know what the name for that other thing is, but it's indeed distinct from "selling" that salespeople do, which boils down to begging, cajoling, tricking or coercing you to buy their shit, no matter how useless or downright harmful to you is, because that's what commissions combined with competition incentivize. Not surprisingly, the bottom-feeder telemarketing sweatshops are where this model is present in its purest form - extreme competition, frequent bonuses for top performers, and quick firing for not being a top performer.
If I have a choice, I never want to "buy" whatever someone's "selling" - I only want to do the whatever is the "buying" equivalent for the not-selling thing I don't have the name for.
It's not a B2B-specific phenomenon either. The B2C equivalent of those salespeople are car salesmen (which have meme status at this point), telemarketers, and those people doing the Amway model, trying to sell some Tupperware knockoffs[0] or barely working vacuum cleaners or whatnot at 3-10x inflated prices, making you feel like you had a good time instead of having just been scammed.
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[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.
Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in, and the idea that they say some magic words and then the customer suddenly wants to buy is childish. They identify and address needs and pain points.
That's called exploitation, not stewardship.
It is what it is, but let's not pretend that the relationship here is anything but adversarial. The incentives are such that dishonesty and malice brings in more sales, so honest salespeople get quickly outcompeted by their dishonest co-workers, and companies with honest business models get outcompeted by those with dishonest ones. Buyers are in no position to change this, but that doesn't mean they have to pretend it's fine, or play along.
Except as we can see in this thread, it's not objective fact. They chase many customers away with such tactics and are blissfully unaware.
This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which you are informed that some important feature is out of the question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a bunch of people with nothing to show for it.
Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.
To me, it's refusing to show up with a knife to a gun fight. The company needs a thing. The "things person" stands no chance in direct confrontation with a "people's person" and they know it, so they to avoid calls (direct or otherwise) to level the playing field. A "people's person" could fare much better against the seller's "people's persons", but then a "people's person" is in much worse position to understand the thing the company needs in the first place.
For buying things, a win-win outcome can occur only when people on both both buyer and seller side are "things persons".
It's basically a Prisoner's dilemma, with "people's person" and "things person" in place of "defect" and "cooperate".
The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
I agreed until here. Obviously, lying isn't the only way to make money. I make furniture and fix windows in old houses for a living. Am I grifting?
When you stretch into hyperbole, you lose the ability to convince people in the middle.
Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on folks like you? No.
Are you sure?
If you ignore human constructs such as companies and organisations and quantify based on classifications that make more sense for aggregates of workers, you might be surprised how little of the economy is built on the F500 let alone venture capital unicorns.
It’s very obvious when people straight up lie in these industries because the physical thing never materializes.
/crying-in-UK
One of many stories about HS2 -- they managed to not document procurement though, so the judges didn't turn find evidence of corruption in that aspect (different story) -- https://www.railtech.com/all/2023/10/23/british-high-speed-r...
Sort of. The trick in these industries is to instead cheat on quality of materials and workmanship. Which is how we're drowning in physical products to buy, and yet most of them are barely functioning garbage - they've all been "value engineered" to near breaking point.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-gdp-by-indu...
I think it's fair to say that a large component of the top two industries (professional services and real estate) are shady. OTOH, there are a lot of industries that seem less prone to corruption and more likely to reward people for honest work.
That's just my POV, though.
That said...thank gawd there's still room for biz like yours.
I don't think you quite understand how VC works.
People who got the free shiny scummy garbage? They don't matter, their only role is to grow a counter on financial reports, and to serve as a backup plan - because when the potential buyers realize too soon what they were about to buy, the people holding the previously free garbage can be squeezed for some money to hopefully make the investors whole.
How dare companies do market research with potential buyers to know what to build before they start building it! If only we could setup massive factories that pump out hot garbage that nobody wants and build roads to nowhere like the soviets did.
I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
As the documentation is all public, though, it's easy enough to see what they're offering.
I mean, isn't that what Zombocom was created for? I always assumed it existed to parody those firms.
You can do anything at Zombocom[tm].
The font is "Owners XXWide" and the font designer's various mentions in publications suggest Elder Millennial at the latest. I don't think we can blame the kids for this one.
(I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)
1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from every enterprise client 2. we don't actually know our own economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest effort to quote it within a magnitude
A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal answers, more complex than just a formula...
Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more companies think they have that problem than actually have that problem.
Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.
- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)
- it usually obscures what the product actually does
Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top.
If you can't figure that out either, well...
How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with.
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[0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?
What normally happens: * Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.
* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT
* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID
* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration
* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.
* You wait for a response for a month
* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed
* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.
* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.
* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.
* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.
Are we considering products like Salesforce or SAP "enterprise app platforms" here?
Look for any of a million news reports on multi-year "integrations" (sometimes even failed ones but always over budget).
Enterprise sales wishes they could have customer fill up carts.
It's not worth the effort.
It's killing your ability to scale your sales process. Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product development, as now you have a bunch of one off deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you want for various tiers of user count.
If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you scale are critical.
YES!
Adding features just for single customers doesn't scale, adding features useful to many customers does.
None of this means "hiding" information, but you can't put something like "We'll do X hrs of extra work if you buy Y licenses". Just like the any store might have a 10% discount if you buy a dozen, but if you want 50,000 then there will probably be a conversation involved.
Then someone at a large organization can multiply this number by the expected number of licenses they'll need, and get a ballpark estimate for the (upper bound of the) costs of the service, which is a critical input in determining whether it's even worthwhile to consider talking to the vendor. Having that information, the organization can then schedule a call to negotiate whatever extra adaptations and discounts they need, or realize signing up is unlikely to have positive ROI and skip it, which also saves the seller from wasting their time on a deal that won't come through.
Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
That or they have "customers" who are knowingly or unknowingly incentivized to have the vendor succeed.
People in marketing, often even those in higher levels, know Google analytics. They have demonstrated experience with it. They want to keep using it. They want their employees to keep using it. Google Analytics plus or whatever it is called iirc does not have a pricing page publicly available.
Why does Google not have pricing available publicly? Why do customers put up with Google? Is there any other reason?
PS for those curious, I think this is one of the limitations we hit with Google Analytics free
> Custom dimensions: 20 custom dimensions
Worse than that, calls aren't usually tracked. They will forget they told you "oh we won't increase the price next year," but they'll damn well remember the green engineer you invited to sit the call who blurted out that the $75k/yr license fee was "within budget".
A super valuable solution to your problem is pernicious because...checks notes...a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
I can't scratch my head hard enough.
That's just an euphemism for "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the value their product creates for you".
A real head scratcher. Perhaps has something to do with there being no point of buying if all (or even most) of the value flows back to the seller? Unless you're a nail wholesaler and are happy with 0.1% margins because you sell by truckloads anyway.
Even worse, your tier may have 10 options but still not capture the 5 they need.
So you negotiate, and they provide you the 5 you need at a reasonable price.
This is standard.
Oh, and negotiating a trial period is almost always a must. Perhaps a 2 week free trial is not enough for the customer. If you could bump it to 4 weeks, it could lead to a lucrative sale.
The thing I want to desperately avoid is wasting time dancing around the salesmen trying to overhype their product while staying vague on the details, in hopes to get me to buy (and pay as much as I can) regardless of whether I get any value from it.
And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL providers all trying to capture the full value of the solution they provide. With infinite time, markets essentially adjust themselves towards this goal. As long as that number is 99.99% (meaning the buyer creates an additional 0.01% of economical value) it's still valuable for BOTH parties.
FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
Of course, if they're a monopoly provider and the buyer really needs it, they have to cough up. But generally there are substitute products. So the buyer would do well to look for an alternative that doesn't do differential pricing to capture more surplus for themselves.
Because:
1) In efficient markets, all users also try to capture full value they get from the they bought. Efficient competition is purely adversarial.
2) You say, "As long as that number is 99.99% (...) it's still valuable for BOTH parties". Unfortunately, incomplete information and information asymmetry makes it more than likely that the "is trying to align their pricing" so that this number is more than 100%. That is, if you're not careful, they'll scam you.
The two above are arguments why this is a problem for the buyer, in practice. The next one is more general:
3) Everything that's good and nice and human happens inside economic inefficiencies. For human beings, a truly efficient market is a literal definition of hell - everyone's suffering as much as possible, spending all their energy to earn exactly enough to barely survive.
> FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
As it should be.
I'll say here what I say to people who talk about stopping to post anything publicly, lest it ends up in LLM training data:
Trying to capture for yourself 100% of the economic value you're producing is an extreme form of greed. When companies try to do that, they get called evil and used as examples of everything that's wrong with late-stage capitalism and such. Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
All of us who produce, we also consume. Society and its markets form an ecosystem, which needs some inefficiency to evolve, be resilient and thrive.
(See also: running any system at 100% capacity is "efficient" up until some random event causes the load to grow ever so slightly, even for a tiny moment, at which point the system suffers a cascade of failures and dies.)
And all of us engineers get paid REALLY WELL because people sell software for us. Software is cheap relative to its value. Stop complaining that you're getting ripped off.
> Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
You have no evidence to support this.
That's not at all clear, an it's its own can of worms.
A lot of software, even widely-used software, may as well have negative real value, because its perceived value is just an accounting trick. Any time you see software allowing someone to do something that required a specialist before, particularly in company setting, it's more than likely that the value is negative. Think e.g. everyone doing their own expenses. A company used to have a bunch of moderately paid jobs dedicated to doing that. Naturally, people doing those jobs quickly got very efficient at it. In comes software, those jobs get eliminated, and now you're having everyone - including all the absurdly highly paid engineers (software or otherwise) - having to semi-regularly (not regularly enough to get efficient at it) drop what they're doing and spend half a day or more on doing expenses. Productivity goes down across the board for obvious reasons. But, what the business sees, is a) legible savings on eliminated finance jobs, and b) mysterious "costs disease" that seems to be affecting the company (and market at large), keeping productivity below expectations.
Mysterious my ass.
Then, a lot of software is directly or indirectly serving adtech. This is where most of the high salaries in tech come from. Software is cheap and programmers are paid well because it's all funded by scamming everyday people and ruining their lives. That's a nearly inexhaustible money source. The actual value of all that software provides people, integrated over the entire society? Deeply in the negative.
Then, there's plenty of SaaS businesses that would be more ergonomic and efficient if replaced by an Excel spreadsheet. Those deliver negative value to customers almost by definition.
Etc.
Sure, there's some software that's delivering way more value than it costs. But there's much less of such software than people think.
9 times out of 10 even when you get on a call with them they just tell you the product does everything but their "consulting" or "support" will work to "configure" the product for you to do it. Meaning, it doesn't do that and they are going to sell you high priced consulting to ram their square peg into your round hole until you either beg them to stop or become stockholmed and invested enough that you are persuading your own stakeholders that it really does what it was supposed to.
> I do not understand why that's difficult
It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me.
After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about.
Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8
It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable. I find none of that comes out very clearly in emails that tend to be bullet point style focused but don't reveal the nature of the issue.
I don't like calls either, but they are useful.
Offering an annual contract though, which presumably comes with a volume discount is a totally normal practice that should benefit both parties assuming it's executed well.
For me, I can find out way more quantifiable information by just doing 15 minutes of OSINT, or even simpler pull up your D&B report.
I do not trust my emotions.
But when it comes to something complex, something someone hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same direction, an email almost never covers it and often enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.
If you don't address / discover those things it is potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.
I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on the call and even asking about basic features, then one department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.
I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there, not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own processes and working it out internally.
In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is explaining or offering solutions.
Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work for some things.
It's not that - or at least not just that. The key insight I feel some comments here are missing is, from the buyer's perspective, the process is risky and (with market economy being what it is), adversarial until proven otherwise. All you're saying is true, but until I know you better, I can't tell whether you have my best interests in mind, or are trying to plain scam me.
To use an analogy, there's a reason people go on dates and gradually open up to a potential partner over extended amount of time, instead of just marrying the first person who promises the right things on the spot.
I mean, you could somehow get access to an entire company's email history and it still won't tell you everything you need to know. Whether people like it not, sometimes direct, high-bandwidth human interaction is required to adequately understand an issue.
Talking to them will? we cannot have it both ways (the entire company's email history is not enough to tell me what I need, but meeting for an hour, say three times with the salesperson will).
I think you _are_ right, but I do not need everything. I just need good enough to make a decision to move forward.
I'd like to trust you and your intentions specifically, but in the general case, this relationship is adversarial, so as the potential buyer, I definitely do not want you to "feel me out", and further disadvantage me in the coming negotiations. I'm fine letting you on the details of my organization, its issues and interdepartmental dynamics, but only at the point when I know enough about you and your product to feel safe you aren't just going to scam me.
When I'm on the consuming end of a service, I would always rather help my self than interact with a sales person or support team.
...But their pricing page actually has a big "Schedule a Call" button when you drag the pricing slider into enterprise territory: https://keygen.sh/pricing/
What am I missing?
Author here. Quoted text is from the conclusion at the end of the post.
I do the occasional 15m 'discovery call.' It's not a sales call, but more of an formality where we intro each other and then move onto email for deeper discussions.
I can confirm as a (largeish) buyer, i despise useless calls and video conferences.
I do not have time, and it costs me money to hop on a 20 minute call just to find out it was a presentation of their slicks that were in PDF, or go through 30 slides that they could have emailed me.
It costs me money for a vendor and internal teams to eat time, and my cost change depending on the time of the day. My rate is highest during mid to late day. If you send me an email with the info and I can read it in my morning quiet time, it (mentally & $$) cost less, and I will be less grouchy.
there are some times when a call works. If the emails are fruitless because the writers lack the ability to be succinct, or cannot articulate what they need.
edit: @spiderfarmer wrote it much better.
Granted, you need to be very responsive to your email, including monitoring it a little on the off hours.
She continues to grow her business territory each year for almost 2 decades and almost never makes sales phone calls. She does do scripted presentations for big deals from time to time but gets some support for those.
tl;dr: some enterprises will bounce if they don't see a 'book a call' button.
You can take it to the extreme, like I did for a long time, or adapt it for yourself.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385#42730669
Really, all one of these discovery calls really are is a short 15 minute call where I intro myself for 30s, they intro themselves, and then I hear about their problem. After that, I tell them yes/no we can solve that with X/Y/Z, thenI tell them I'll follow up via email with additional links and documentation unless there are any further pressing questions. And in that email, I ask that they CC relevant team members onto the email thread for further discussion.
They not only answered in 1 day, but also provided a real solution / workaround for our issue, as well as a technical answer to the questions and a technical analysis of why the bug occurs.
Outstanding support, and I would never have guessed it from their website.
If L1 can solve things for you, a call sometimes can work, but really, if they can't, it meant multiple calls with L1 and multiple calls with L2 (in one recent example, it took 4 months for an issue to be resolved by internal support at BigCo where I was repeatedly asked for the same screenshot, including them recording me get to it a number of times, until I pinged their manager's manager via email pointing how they have the solution in there if they only read my emails, and got it resolved 2h later).
But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.
It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.
But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.
Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.
Sturgeons law applies more to enterprise software and products than any other space
"ninety percent of everything is crap" is just insufficient in describing how bad the solutions in this space are.
I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.
Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.
There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.
But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?
Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.
There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.
And how a call will make it simpler? Or why a telephone call becomes part of the service provided for the additional (higher) price (instead of other alternatives)?
People usually want a call because they don't know something, not 'just because.'
Cars are similar I think. Sure maybe some people need help. But there's is huge demand for a one-click, no-negotiation car buying "experience" (or lack of experience rather).
My conspiracy theory is that this has more to do with Salespeople and established sales channels (dealers) not being able to understand this both because their job depends on it and because they are naturally people-persons. So it feels intuitive to them and they have trouble understanding/accepting that many other are not.
That's kind of begging the question. Part of the point of the thread here is that it seems B2B is leaving some money on the table by refusing to do deals with less interaction. For example, this CTO's comment [1].
A good comparison I think is AWS and other cloud offerings. Of course, past a certain spend, you will start getting calls and have the opportunity to negotiate better rates, SLA's, etc. But, you can just go and spend 5-6 figures per month without any human interaction.
Another good example I think is 5 figure (or maybe even 6 figure) equipment purchases. You can definitely go ham buying most professional equipment without having to talk to someone over the phone. Think servers, GPU's, storage, cameras, etc.
It'd be great if more services offered this.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728008
We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.
The most important deals that make up the vast majority of our revenue took lots of meetings, pilots, review meetings, etc, because those deals are in the 6/7 figure range.
That's awesome. And, I think that's what a lot of people here are talking about: options.
If your customers largely wants sales calls and sales engineers, that's great. But don't ignore the (smaller) population that does prefer no-calls.
Person buying the product has an idea of what they need. The information available within someone's head is naturally going to be much, much greater than any website.
Not to mention, that information can be accessed randomly and immediately. Searching if a product has feature Z is time consuming and you'll probably read about features A-Y. But asking a person can reveal the answer immediately.
If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.
A large SaaS customer is the opposite.
As for B2B sales, if AWS can show their pricing online, which has to be among the most complex pricing in existence - then so can every other SaaS company.
One of the many reasons calls happen is that customers say "I need XYZ feature in order to do this deal," and the salesperson then needs to ask why they need XYZ feature, and what they want to accomplish, and maybe existing ABC feature actually meets their need, or maybe the company needs to develop XYZ feature to secure the contract. Once you get into a complex domain, that is not happening over email.
The article contains good advice to many businesses out there, but it's worth considering the situations where it doesn't apply, too.
But if you're selling what's already on the truck, as most of these companies are, then there is no reason for the "call for pricing" for a standard enterprise plan. Pricing pages should have a separate column for custom/bespoke solutions, where it makes sense to have "schedule a call".
Yes, they will. I recall watching a whole kind of documentary of it somewhere on Youtube. Essentially, luxury brands will fully customize cars for customers and have calls/meetings with them to discuss how the car will be customized. It costs $$$$$ but they'll do it.
I think, too, that more important than income is the fact that these rich people should be driving their cars. It's a way to keep the brand positioned in that market.
We need to hop on calls to close customers, but honestly we could probably cut 1/3 of those calls by following some of those suggestions.
i.e. better documentation, ready to go pricing proposals, pre-filled security questionnaires, etc.
I have a client who tries to use calls to weasel out of paying for things. Finally I refused to talk to him on the phone any more. Some invoices remain outstanding but I'm not willing to waste more time listening to BS. I can spend my time making money from responsible people and meanwhile continue to have my invoice system pester him.
Re: sales, there is no such thing as a quick sales call.
For my business (micro-SaaS EdTech), the value of building trust with my customers cannot be understated. Further, I don’t believe i can effectively build trust with my customers in the way the author describes; without meetings.
You either have to find PMF or you're going to die.
And yet, you still have to fill them in, because the people who ask you for them don't actually care to read them or do the data entry, and generally don't even understand them. It's often clear that they're the people who are supposed to be filing them out, when you get questions like "is the data stored according to our internal "level 3" designation described on this intranet page". I find it so frustrating. They say they have questions. They don't have questions, and they don't care about the answers. They care about whether their spreadsheet automatically highlights and cells in red.
"But hey, you want that sale don't you? So do my homework"
Yes, there are some advantages to sharing screens. But, being able to communicate with both precision and brevity in writing has its advantages. I strongly believe this skill is what prioritized me for promotion over my peers. It certainly wasn't my work ethic. Hard work is not well valued when somebody who works less hard delivers more.