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You just know that when the pricing page says "Call us" that they are going to try and rip you off. This is a classis sales technique for expensive products, th

You just know that when the pricing page says "Call us" that they are going to try and rip you off. This is a classis sales technique for expensive products, they ascertain how much you can probably afford and then that becomes the price. Very off putting.

trjordan 11y ago
Optimizely ain't cheap, dude, and scaling doesn't work the way you want it to at a lot of volumes. I worked at a company where we paid $400 / month for Optimizely, based on having ~20k uniques. That seemed fair. If you take that up by 100x, $40k / month might not sound fair. You can cut the pricing at that point and say it's $10k / month, but there's a world of difference between a B2B site and an ecommerce site. The usage patterns are different, so the value received and load put on Optimizely are different. It bears different pricing. Beyond that, sales reps aren't all bad. If you're going to lay out $200k for a product like this for a year, you probably don't want something that you just email out a bunch of logins and say "hey team, try it out, let me know what you think." Talking to a human being can help an exec figure out the way their organization can use it the best and help them get that implemented. Yeah, they're biased, but people who deal with sales reps know how to mitigate that bias, and a good rep can be the difference between a successful implementation and a failed one.
- shostack 11y ago
  I am an ex customer of theirs in one of the highest tiers. Their sales reps were better than most, but in general I'd agree with parent poster. I'm the target of a lot of analytics and ad tech/network sales people and at this point in my career I loathe talking to them. Many try to blow smoke up my ass, try to mask deficiencies about their product instead of just being honest about shortcomings and trying to explain why the value is still worth it, and the list goes on. Hell, I've had some ad tech sales people flat out lie to me and then had their executive boss get mad at me when I called them on it because I was lied to. They tried to say the sales guy made a mistake and couldn't offer what they had offered. Oops! As soon as someone comes up with a way to cut out sales people from enterprise sales I will shower them with money.
  - trjordan 11y ago
    Right, I totally agree. Putting "Director" in my LinkedIn title made my corporate voicemail useless. I think you've got the right of it though: "As soon as someone comes up with a way to cut out sales people from enterprise sales." We haven't figured it out yet, so we all get to deal with bad behavior and absurdly annoying appointment-setting tactics.
    - shostack 11y ago
      Pro tip: have a phone not connected to any directory and give instructions to not connect anyone to your line if they call the receptionist. If someone needs to call me, I'll have given them my number myself. Anyone else just wants to sell me. Now I just get a cluttered inbox, not voicemail as well.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
they ascertain how much you can probably afford and then that becomes the price How else would you do pricing? That's how its done.
- PhilWright 11y ago
  This is a great strategy for the seller. A no-name company calls and they get a quote for $10k. IBM call with exactly the same requirements and they get quoted $15k. Just because the salesperson thinks that IBM can afford more. I do not doubt this is typical for enterprise sales but as a customer it is very frustrating and leaves you with a constant feeling that you are probably being done-over. Not to mention that because every sale is a high-touch process starting with sales it means that a significant portion of the cost is the employment of all these non-scalable sales people. I hate the 'call us' pricing model. But I don't deny it probably works well for them.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Except it's a core concept of economics and is done everyday for basically everything that can be purchased. In your head you have a maximum you will pay for some good or service based on the marginal value it would give you compared to the marginal cost. The goal for a seller is to find this number for each customer and sell to them at that price. In such a case, both parties are better off in total even though there may be a very wide delta between COGS and income. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

trjordan 11y ago

Optimizely ain't cheap, dude, and scaling doesn't work the way you want it to at a lot of volumes. I worked at a company where we paid $400 / month for Optimizely, based on having ~20k uniques. That seemed fair. If you take that up by 100x, $40k / month might not sound fair. You can cut the pricing at that point and say it's $10k / month, but there's a world of difference between a B2B site and an ecommerce site. The usage patterns are different, so the value received and load put on Optimizely are different. It bears different pricing. Beyond that, sales reps aren't all bad. If you're going to lay out $200k for a product like this for a year, you probably don't want something that you just email out a bunch of logins and say "hey team, try it out, let me know what you think." Talking to a human being can help an exec figure out the way their organization can use it the best and help them get that implemented. Yeah, they're biased, but people who deal with sales reps know how to mitigate that bias, and a good rep can be the difference between a successful implementation and a failed one.

shostack 11y ago
I am an ex customer of theirs in one of the highest tiers. Their sales reps were better than most, but in general I'd agree with parent poster. I'm the target of a lot of analytics and ad tech/network sales people and at this point in my career I loathe talking to them. Many try to blow smoke up my ass, try to mask deficiencies about their product instead of just being honest about shortcomings and trying to explain why the value is still worth it, and the list goes on. Hell, I've had some ad tech sales people flat out lie to me and then had their executive boss get mad at me when I called them on it because I was lied to. They tried to say the sales guy made a mistake and couldn't offer what they had offered. Oops! As soon as someone comes up with a way to cut out sales people from enterprise sales I will shower them with money.
- trjordan 11y ago
  Right, I totally agree. Putting "Director" in my LinkedIn title made my corporate voicemail useless. I think you've got the right of it though: "As soon as someone comes up with a way to cut out sales people from enterprise sales." We haven't figured it out yet, so we all get to deal with bad behavior and absurdly annoying appointment-setting tactics.
  - shostack 11y ago
    Pro tip: have a phone not connected to any directory and give instructions to not connect anyone to your line if they call the receptionist. If someone needs to call me, I'll have given them my number myself. Anyone else just wants to sell me. Now I just get a cluttered inbox, not voicemail as well.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

they ascertain how much you can probably afford and then that becomes the price How else would you do pricing? That's how its done.

PhilWright 11y ago
This is a great strategy for the seller. A no-name company calls and they get a quote for $10k. IBM call with exactly the same requirements and they get quoted $15k. Just because the salesperson thinks that IBM can afford more. I do not doubt this is typical for enterprise sales but as a customer it is very frustrating and leaves you with a constant feeling that you are probably being done-over. Not to mention that because every sale is a high-touch process starting with sales it means that a significant portion of the cost is the employment of all these non-scalable sales people. I hate the 'call us' pricing model. But I don't deny it probably works well for them.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Except it's a core concept of economics and is done everyday for basically everything that can be purchased. In your head you have a maximum you will pay for some good or service based on the marginal value it would give you compared to the marginal cost. The goal for a seller is to find this number for each customer and sell to them at that price. In such a case, both parties are better off in total even though there may be a very wide delta between COGS and income. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility