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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 Optimiz
by 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 agoI 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 agoRight, 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 agoPro 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.