Comment by focusedone
2 days ago
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.
I wish I could use what this guy is selling.
Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because:
- 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
> 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?
> 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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
> 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.
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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.
When you don't how valuable it's going to be, you at least know how expensive is it to make.
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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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.
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[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.
>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".
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.
> Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in
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.
> 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.
The irony of HN discovering how capitalism works when they're on the receiving end of it.
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.
> ... post that stuff online.
> 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.
Ironically, I also actually can't figure out what this company does from its website.
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.
It seems reasonably clear to me, yes - although "distribution" could mean a lot of things.
As the documentation is all public, though, it's easy enough to see what they're offering.
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.
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.
Did you find ChatGPT responses accurate for queries like this?
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> Especially for consulting firms, they really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating what they actually do.
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].
People who behave this way are spammers and I mark their emails as spam. It's a small gesture, but it feels good to help identify the spammers.
> Please explain clearly what your product does
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.
sure, features vs benefits
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.
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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.
This is the worst, especially when it's a library! Like, show me the code!
Yeah, product websites have turned into pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about Blogprexa!"
Burt. This bloke won't haggle!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8
You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
> you seem to be communication-averse
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.
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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
They're maybe the same managers who love the RTO for the sake of RTO.
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".
> 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.
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.
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 agree about everything you wrote except the misunderstandings. Written communication absolutely can and do give rise to misunderstandings.
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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.
But they say what they do on their product page. They provide a solution.
Its difficult because lying about "implementation details" is a marketing detail.
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.
Indeed. This is basically enterprise sales, and sales guys will not be happy with anything else.
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.
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.
> The economy is built on grifting, at this point
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.
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> 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.
"...like you do" Is this a typo or a personal attack to the parent?
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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
A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-funded forum: scummy garbage makes money.
I don't think you quite understand how VC works.
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