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> I don’t understand the “call to get a quote” sales cycle. It's about maximizing revenue from enterprise clients - when the customer LTV is huge but the volum

> I don’t understand the “call to get a quote” sales cycle. It's about maximizing revenue from enterprise clients - when the customer LTV is huge but the volume is low, it's smart to focus your resources on those dollar amounts. When the volume is high but the dollar amounts are low, it's smart to focus on optimizing the volume funnel.

bunderbunder 8y ago
More specifically, it's about price discrimination. If you publish a price, you need to publish a price that's going to be palatable to your smallest clients. But the moment you do so, your most deep-pocketed clients will demand the same price. This could be disastrous, because those same clients also tend to be more demanding, so a profitable price for one client could be a disastrous money-loser for another. If you're the kind of person who needs to know the price up-front, it's probably safe to interpret this as a way of saying, "If you have to ask, this isn't for you." At the very least, it's probably the case that you have a limited appetite for products where success requires significant assistance from support engineers to help you deal with all the critical details that typically aren't in the documentation for these kinds of products.
- hakfoo 8y ago
  If you're having to hide ALL pricing data, you're doing it wrong. What's the difference between the small-business customer and the enterprise one? I'd expect it boils down to three big things: * Quantities of resources, where you usually expect the per-unit price to go down for the big enterprise customer. The 5-million-request-per-month plan is usually cheaper per-request than the 100k-requests-per-month one. * SLAs, which can be done as tiered add-ons. * Support services tiers, which can be graduated sensibly. I'll grant that there's a place for a "super-whale" tier where you're probably buying custom infrastructure solely to support that client, but there's room for that within a pricing page without scaring off a large number of customers. "For plans over n billion queries per month, please contact sales" means you can still make a reasonable direct sale for everyone else. Even within the context of "we're a galactic enterprise ready to write a blank check", many firms will still want to buy a small off-the-shelf package as part of the validation process. This could be to give the developers a sandbox to ensure it meets their expectations, or just to migrate a small portion of their systems before going head-first.

bunderbunder 8y ago

More specifically, it's about price discrimination. If you publish a price, you need to publish a price that's going to be palatable to your smallest clients. But the moment you do so, your most deep-pocketed clients will demand the same price. This could be disastrous, because those same clients also tend to be more demanding, so a profitable price for one client could be a disastrous money-loser for another. If you're the kind of person who needs to know the price up-front, it's probably safe to interpret this as a way of saying, "If you have to ask, this isn't for you." At the very least, it's probably the case that you have a limited appetite for products where success requires significant assistance from support engineers to help you deal with all the critical details that typically aren't in the documentation for these kinds of products.

hakfoo 8y ago
If you're having to hide ALL pricing data, you're doing it wrong. What's the difference between the small-business customer and the enterprise one? I'd expect it boils down to three big things: * Quantities of resources, where you usually expect the per-unit price to go down for the big enterprise customer. The 5-million-request-per-month plan is usually cheaper per-request than the 100k-requests-per-month one. * SLAs, which can be done as tiered add-ons. * Support services tiers, which can be graduated sensibly. I'll grant that there's a place for a "super-whale" tier where you're probably buying custom infrastructure solely to support that client, but there's room for that within a pricing page without scaring off a large number of customers. "For plans over n billion queries per month, please contact sales" means you can still make a reasonable direct sale for everyone else. Even within the context of "we're a galactic enterprise ready to write a blank check", many firms will still want to buy a small off-the-shelf package as part of the validation process. This could be to give the developers a sandbox to ensure it meets their expectations, or just to migrate a small portion of their systems before going head-first.