Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me

More power to you but in my experience

- people don’t read your documentation - if they find one edge-case that is not covered by your product they concentrate all their energy on it even though the competitor product doesn’t even work for the happy path (but ofc they won’t learn that until too late) - you will have a person on the free tier who is not able to the simplest programming take up all the time of your technical support if you let them

The rest (disclose usage of AI, offer multiple newsletters (imo unnecessary work), be upfront if it’s not a good fit) is very sensible and works in my experience.

The first three will break your product - but maybe I’m just cynical and was holding it wrong all this time

edit: I’m assuming you want to build some kind of investor fuelled unicorn - your approach probably will work for a single person slow but steady growth while you have other side income

> Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that [...]

Are there real humans / customers who ask, "yes, have an AI call me?"

Good advice.

I created and sold software (and services) for over a decade, and could never have lived with myself if I'd treated customers the way the original article describes.

The counter approach is better for everyone, less work for the company and a nicer experience for the user, but only in a vacuum.

Unregulated competition is a race to the bottom, so the most unethical, invasive, borderline illegal, and manipulative tactics come out on top. Not the best product, but the best marketing. Not the most customer friendly, but the most customer-converting through coercion. Not pricing products and services what they're worth, but the most anyone will be wiling to pay for them.

Your list isn't rendered as a list

> The counter approach is: - Make complete information available as transparently as possible and don't gate it. - Be forthcoming about weaknesses. Don't force prospects and customers to find them. - Ensure that when a prospect or customer does want to talk to someone, they immediately reach someone who can handle the problem or answer the question (no need for escalations.) - Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that and be sure that all AI agents immediately disclose that they are AI. - Offer flexible e-mail list subscription options (monthly, quarterly, annually, only release notes, etc.) - If the product is not a fit, try to offer something useful anyway such as a suggestion of another product that might be a better match for their needs.

From the perspective of designing a sales org to do this it is, roughly, a sales-engineer focused sales organization with the sales engineers on a minimal commission plan (i.e., a pooled 80% base/20% commission plan instead of something like an individual 70/30 plan.)

I never saw it in practice, but it would probably have something like a 2:1 ratio of sales engineers to account managers. On the plus side, sales engineers are less costly to employ than account managers. On the down side, this will almost certainly result in lower revenue.

> Value based pricing is one of the reasons why a lot of companies end up in these situations. Rather than setting a standard price, the company does a detailed investigation of the customer to try to find out how much value they will gain from using the product and then they set the price based on that determination. Although it maximizes revenue in theory, it is slow and invasive.

In my experience (working in tech sales for a few large manufacturers,) this is almost never a routine practice of the sales team. It is sometimes discussed in sales training, and very, very occasionally put into practice, but the Achilles heel is your last comment: it is slow and invasive. Sales people are a diverse group, but they are united by the belief that time kills all deals.

Product teams do large scale market segmentation and price sensitivity studies -- that's where you get all of the packaging options. Sales teams? If they have a large existing customer, that customer will already have a standard discount level. That's the starting point for any given negotiation. For new customers or smaller customers, the sales team will try to sell at the 'standard' price, where by 'standard', I mean the prevailing discount level in their region. Variables that will ultimately cause the price paid to change: fiscal year-end/quarter-end, competition, bundling, "incentives" / customer "budget." I put those roughly in terms of how powerful a lever they are to move the price, on average.

Fiscal year-end/quarter-end. One challenge with trying to root out traditional sales/purchasing behavior is that customers are trained to reinforce the behavior. While it doesn't always work (a sales rep might be significantly under or over goal and might want a deal to slip into the next quarter/year,) if a customer can force a deal to get done around the end of the vendor's fiscal periods, they have significant leverage to negotiate a lower price if the vendor believes the deal might slip.

Competition - this one is pretty obvious, but adding a competitor to your purchase evaluation and letting the vendor you want to buy from know that you are seriously considering their competitor will likely result in a lower price. Bonus points for the purchasing team telling the vendor their engineers like the competitor's product better, but the purchasing team really wants to buy from you because they love you so much. Double bonus points for telling both vendors that.

Bundling -- if a manufacturer has multiple products, they often will voluntarily increase their discount level to induce the customer to buy a product 'suite'. The sales reps are often under immense pressure to sell the newer and flakier products on their price lists, and this is usually the only way it gets done. On the plus side, the customer gets more product for the same price. On the down side, the extra products included often aren't worth using, and come renewal time, the true total cost of ownership becomes apparent.

"Incentives" / "customer budget" - these are both, typically, BS in that the vendor doesn't usually have a magic "incentive" to offer a one-time discount. The sales rep just got (or thinks they can get) approval for a lower price. Similarly, while customers most certainly do have budgets, they often lie and say they can't buy x because it exceeds their budget, when their internal sales people (the purchasing team) just wants a lower price. I refer to the purchasing team as "internal sales people" because they often-times have a commission incentive just like the vendor sales rep: it isn't uncommon for them to have a personal, individual bonus tied to driving vendor contracts down in price. In some cases, it is a direct commission -- i.e., the purchasing agent (or sometimes budget owner) gets 10% of any monies saved.

I wish you the best of luck, but other than taking people completely out of the equation, I think it is really hard to eliminate this behavior in practice because 1) it is so thoroughly ingrained amongst both vendors and customers and 2) it works.

This is why we have a flat "we won't fill in your forms" rule and only take card payments. We've lost some clients because of it sure, but we're a small team so it's fine.

I think being up front about what you will and won't do really helps. They still ask for procurement forms and stuff but we can at least deny it and set an expectation.

https://help.timetastic.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003288769...

And that's for selling a fixed off-the-shelf solution.

If you have something that needs to be a bit bespoke, or is an early-startup collaboration with a pilot customer as you refine and prove PMF... (and the customer is a real company, not just some other startups in your investors' portfolios)... and it impacts more than one very small team there... even if you already have the ear of their CEO... brace yourself for months of countless meetings with "stakeholders" of numerous departments.

Which, as a nimble early startup, impresses upon you why, in theory, you should have a massive innovation advantage over large, lumbering businesses, who can't seem to do anything.

Except you made the mistake of needing the buy-in of a large, lumbering business who can't seem to do anything. Now most of their barriers to movement are also yours. :)

Realistically it doesn’t work like that often.

Most of OSS or even SaaS stuff is useful in F500 company but not more like convenience and not being able to put value on it. This also you can see in article even SaaS vendors have to make shit up to seem more valuable for big companies and use value based pricing by calling people and trying to push BS on them.

I also don’t see companies running much OSS systems as reselling them because then usually they rather build their crappy one like article mentions because they want to own whole IP.

Amazon pulling it of on Elastic was mostly because Elastic built a brand - they are not pulling this off on a random project. They might use some project to run their infra but attribution of value to a specific lib or project is super hard. Then also Amazon is making money because it is Amazon not because they use Linux kernel. It is hard to wrap head around anyway ;)

Thinking about it, maybe he should start sending invoices to the larger companies. If they're reasonably small and for a product the company does use, finance will just pay them without questioning a thing.

> something 10x better at a 10th of the cost

SLAs and contractual assurances are very hard to deliver at 1% cost.

Enterprise products is just another class, and it has nothing to do with the product.

Two comically bad lines in an AI-generated spam email I recently received:

"Saw on LinkedIn that you spoke Spanish. I've heard that the way "¡Qué chévere!" brings such energy and brightness to a conversation is uniquely charming. Have you had a chance to practice it recently?"

"Develop a compliance automation tool that adapitates to changing regulations, reducing overhead costs while ensuring secure and efficient investment programs."

No human would ever see my "limited working proficiency" of Spanish on LinkedIn and say something like the first line! And the second? "Adapitates" is not a real word, it's a hallucination. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1d8gc6x/did_chatgp...

Sales isn't the problem, and most people are tolerant of some level of sales. I've gotten unpersonalized cold outreach from a data replication company that actually made me interested in the product, because it was short, to the point, and (as far as spam emails can be), authentic.

Please consider responding and telling them how you feel and providing feedback in whatever feedback forms that accompany the ticket.

Every company on Earth is exploring this tech and if we don't give them strong signals when they fuck it up we are just dooming our future selves to this garbage.

This. And to expand on the above: few people consider how much it actually costs to provide 12- or 4- hour support with a strict SLA. This pretty much means that the business needs to bear the full loaded cost of at least one additional employee. Now go divide that fully loaded cost (take the salary and multiply it by 2x, roughly, and I'm not quoting any numbers here to avoid stupid discussions about "but it costs less to hire a person in my area") by the number of customers that require these SLAs and see how much this needs to cost.

I don't think the 4-hour SLA customers subsidize the 72-hour ones. It's more about managing the volume of support. If know you won't get an until 3 days after, you will google obvious things yourself, and only contact support if you can't get the answer otherwise. But shorter SLAs, let alone phone support, encourages a particular kind of customers to just copy-paste any error message they encounter (that may not necessarily come from your product) and expect support to untangle it. Been there, seen that.

> The people that want those product features subsidize the people who don't

Surely any company doing that would be spending profits on less profitable customers which is not economically sensible. See the box on page 2 of https://regulationbodyofknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/201...

Cross-subsidisation can occur due to regulations or a company trying to monopolise a market.

Pricing a product depends on how much you can charge and variable costs, not so much on how much it cost to develop - which as you point out leads to price discrimination - where it looks like one group is subsidising the other but maybe not in reality.

I would like to see a model of the marginal costs and ideal decisions.

Deciding to build features for higher paying clients only makes profits if those features are paid for by those clients. Other clients might get those features but it isn't "subsidisation" - however I'm not sure what a better word is! It isn't free-riding or consumer surplus.

Support is one thing. There is absolutely no excuse for upcharging for SSO. None whatsoever. Any company that does this is a shitty company who deserves to go out of business for abusing their customers.

Right; the thing here is: the author obviously knows the game (because they wink knowingly at it repeatedly). Given that: why are they ever getting on the phone with a sales engineer? You can just delete the emails.

These tactics work when the sales get access to the manager or director first, close the deal, and have low level people manage the aftermath.

In the case described where a technical person is shielding the final decision makers, it's more of a gamble and will often fail.

Maybe I’m not asking the right questions, but I consistently find that I get “Yes” answers in these calls, that turn out to actually be “No” in practice.

I think the problem is that we rarely want to know “can you meet this use case”, but rather “how well can you meet this use case”, and that’s hard to assess without putting your hands on the software.

It's definitely a generational thing. I've been spammed so utterly often that I simply do not answer my phone for a non-contact (or the inevitable interview phone call. But less often with video calls these days). If it's important enough to contact me, it's important enough to leave a voice mail.

I don't really do these sale pitches often, but it's a similar mentality for a different reason. I simply want anything communicated in writing in case they try to say yes to put a foot in the door, but the small details say no.

I don't really disagree. The problem is outreach when you're clearly mostly researching something whether to do with computers or something else. One travel company is particular was pretty aggressively reaching out because I downloaded a couple brochures.

Also sometimes for things that cost amounts I could easily expense

I've been going through a purchase order process for a bunch of patch cables and adapters so cheap I could even expense them without a receipt. It's taking months. They're being delivered by air freight. My heart and soul are aching.