No Calls

>you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay

It should be based on the email address used. If, for example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and you get a discount.

My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.

You know it might be also priced on “this guy feels like a pain to work with after the way he asks questions, let’s put the price up”. There is no way to objectively explain that without having person offended - so I am going to put a price I think will cover me dealing with BS questions or attitude of the customer and if he walks it is still a good deal for me.

We might think that companies need every single sale - well no sometimes you want to fire a customer or not take one on.

>just making the price up based on what you think I can pay

It's called supply and demand, and it's the way things have been priced since the dawn of commerce. The only time the price is based on cost is when the market is competitive enough to drive that price down, and the cost acts as the floor. Even then, if you can get your costs below those of your competitors then it's your competitors cost that can act as the floor.

The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.

>When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay.

That is how 99% of sellers do business. The upper end of the price range is what the buyer can pay, the lower end is what their competitors are asking for. Some sellers are lucky to have few competitors, so they can waste more of the buyers' time trying to narrow down exactly how much they can or are willing to pay.

I'm confused by this, why would sales team know in detail the vRAM contribution to sales price, and how is it relevant to your purchase decision? I've never heard of enterprise/SAAS pricing to be based primarily using cost plus pricing.

I've always agreed with this take but now as a B2B founder doing sales, I think it can honestly be interpreted a lot more charitably.

I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things, like:

* How much will it cost us to support you based on what you're using our platform for?

* How expensive is this problem for you today?

* From there, how much money could we save you?

My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing together. It seems pretty reasonable.

Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for, instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own time.

I was just thinking about this today. Basically replacing my price list or prefacing it with something like : "We've designed the pricing and services to be affordable by bootstrapped startups with just one investing founder. Additionally prices are comparable to a FT SWE on a quarterly basis."

Because the truth is that the contracts are almost always different, so while price tables are good to get an idea, words are just better at conveying the ballpark, and they lack the illusion of price rigidness.

The price is set by the market. It never was and never will relate to the seats/resources used/etc.

Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/

I don’t think this is true anymore. Firebase, auth0, AWS, figma and many more SaaS obliterated this dichotomy

You can go to the SpaceX website and see the price of rockets. You can literally enter your credit card numbers to pay for it.

As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch things into space. Your software situations are more complex?

It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)

The worst part is that the sales person has to go back and pitch their team on whether it’s worth their time to get back to you.

Yes, seriously. When a sales call is scheduled 30 minutes but 5 minutes in we have a conclusion, you get a lot of good will points from me if you thank me for my time, ask me if there's any other questions I have, and then conclude the call. You can even make this explicit with a quip like, "I'll give everybody 20 minutes back!" then it's clear you are being courteous with our time.

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.

> And how a call will make it simpler?

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.

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.

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.

> I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution

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.

A 100K car is a commodity product with very limited customization.

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.

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.

Show me the high price on a web page so I can go "that's too much for this stingy old grump" rather than making me talk to one of your sales minions.

I agree with you on three things:

1) I agree that there are markets where "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." (However, I think those are extremely rare, and don't believe Enterprise software, even expensive enterprise software, is usually one of those markets.)

2) I agree that "cheap" people who are unwilling to buy expensive software are likely going to "hate calls."

3) I also believe it is true that, "If a potential buyer is willing to go through the time and effort to schedule a call, even before they know if the product will work, and even before they know what it costs, they are MUCH more likely to be able to afford it than someone unwilling to do that."

But that doesn't mean that potential buyers who "hate calls" and prefer to know what something costs before-hand are "cheap." Many very expensive products list the price (or at least the maximum price, right on the website): [Luxury cars](https://www.mbusa.com/en/vehicles/build/g-class/suv), [Mansions](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1900-Spindrift-Dr-La-Joll...)...

I don't think Tesla customers are "cheap". Not only is the price is right on the website, you can [buy it in a few clicks](https://www.tesla.com/models/design#overview). That's not because their target market is "cheap people who hate calls". (Also, have you ever spoken to a Tesla buyer who wishes they could have had a call with a car salesman first?)

I don't think people who buy multi-million dollar homes are "cheap". The starting (maximum) price is listed right there. I can't imagine that someone thinking, "I wonder how much are they asking for that 20 room mansion?" is a signal that they are "cheap."

I can see the value in not wasting a seller's time with cheap people who will be crappy customers. I think you could do it just as easily by clearly stating ballpark prices and/or the components of prices up front, rather than gating it solely based on whether someone is willing to schedule a call.

This is exactly what mediocre salespeople tell their bosses to keep their jobs.

It is, to put it politely, horseshit.

It's worth noting that prior to SpaceX every single rocket was hand crafted, and often varied in key details based on the payload. Certain when it came to (people-intensive) integration tests and launch prep work. There's partly a legitimate reason ULA needed customer details before providing a quote.

But mostly it was so they could charge NRO more for their birds, by not having a price on their website.

Not just that, they also plain tell you how much it costs to buy an entire rocket launch for yourself.

https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

To save a click, that PDF at this moment says clearly:

STANDARD PAYMENT PLAN [for Falcon 9] (through 2024) $69.75 M Up to 5.5 mT TO GTO

If they can put a specific base price on their website, so can any SaaS.

This is true! And frankly, it's the most likely explanation. Even then, I'd appreciate a "starting/maximum" price (which is what car dealerships and home listings do). "This is the price, unless you want to spend the time trying to negotiate it down..."

If the pricing is made up of a number of complicated usage components, it would be great to give both a ballpark for a given description of usage, and a brief explanation as to what goes into the price.

I think sellers either forget how much more information they have than the buyer, or know, and try to take advantage of it.

One of the best conference talks I ever saw was from a pool contractor explaining that it is indeed hard to answer the question, "How much does a pool cost?" because it can vary SO MUCH. But he found that explaining the components of pricing, along with examples and ballparks, was more than sufficient, and that his business took off as a result of publishing that information, rather than hiding it behind a sales call. (Looked it up - this is not the exact talk I saw, but it was this guy: https://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/uattr/marcus-sheridan-hubsp...)

We needed to test the integration into the company CI pipeline. One of the requirements was to fully run it in a private cloud environment, maybe even without internet access (this was required for some projects for security reasons).

PS: but that's not the point. We needed an evaluation license, but the sales person just kept bugging us with questions. Like how our environments were set up, what products we want to integrate it with, how our teams are build, how much team growth was planned, and so on.

A lot of internal things that you don't want to share, especially if you are not part of the purchasing department. They probably have some guidelines what they are willing to share and what not. Even when putting aside the security risks by sharing internal information, it could also hurt the purchasing departments negotiation strategies, if the sales person already knows more than they shared with them.

PPS: We didn't want to have SonarQube at all, we didn't like the reports at all, mostly false positives in our case to work through (but I can see that some teams could benefit from it). The requirement came from some check boxes to be ticked for an audit.

It depends on the evaluation needed. Maybe they wanted to verify that SonarQube would be able to handle their code structure, but they also had requirements that it has to work locally only and they couldn’t send proprietary code to a SaaS. You can’t evaluate that using SonarCloud, but a couple days with an evaluation license are exactly what you need.

I had a similar buying experience recently, where a SaaS had a cloud option and a local option, which varied slightly. The cloud option kind of told us what we needed to know, but a trial license of the local option let us actually verify that it would work with our use case.

> it implies differential pricing

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".

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?

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?

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.

> 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.

I can't scratch my head hard enough.

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.

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...

> 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.

>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.

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.

The irony of HN discovering how capitalism works when they're on the receiving end of it.

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.

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.

Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).

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.

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.

Same with some projects' readme.md: it will have a change log and a few random details, but it doesn't tell me what it does.

Yeah, product websites have turned into pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about Blogprexa!"

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.

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.

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.

Most colleagues in the same role in the same industry are good friends or friends of friends.

We have lunch or dinner now and then and meet at sector events. We share a lot of what are our challenges, what works, what doesn’t, who is good and who is not and how much we are paying our suppliers

If a sales person took the info across the street, chances are a) they already known about it or b) the person across the street will ring me to let me know.

Again, I don’t meet the sales rank and file, in many cases the Senior Partner across the table also knows me well (past clients, suppliers or colleagues).

Yeah, that doesn’t work unless you’re in the C-suite generally. Every time I’ve tried to throw up that sort of firm wall, the sales people just reach out above me - and ultimately usually end up forcing the sale even if the product doesn’t meet our needs, because they’re able to convince the higher-ups that it actually does and that their Engineers (i.e., me and my team) are mistaken.

Right now, unless you’re some sort of 10x rockstar extrovert, you’ve gotta play the game by the existing rules. It’s why I applaud this particular company’s position, since it means I don’t have to worry about being undermined by some outside salesperson with a quota to meet and a gift budget they haven’t emptied.

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.

> 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.

4 hours is a perfectly reasonable response time for an email. It’s not IM

> In a call you can't be ignored

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.

What was the biggest contract you inked this way? I can’t imagine a company is willing to pay 6-7 figures without at least talking to one human on the other side.