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A few possible reasons for this: - You aren't their target audience. I come from enterprise SaaS, where we often force people to talk to someone, and working w

A few possible reasons for this: - You aren't their target audience. I come from enterprise SaaS, where we often force people to talk to someone, and working with sales is not a problem for the people we care about. I know that someone who has your reaction (calling it a "sales dance" and assuming you'll be spammed) is unlikely to be a real buyer, since real buyers are accustomed to the sales process. They also appreciate that sales reps for this type of product can be really valuable. Maybe you're the exception here, but it's worth losing your business to filter out bad leads. - They've done the math and realized that when they get someone on the phone, they are better able to build a long term relationship and have a substantially greater customer LTV. They lose some customers, but the ones they retain end up being higher enough in value to offset the loss. - The product can't be sold as a standalone item - it requires setup and integration, and without understanding what you have in place already, they can't give you a quote. Of course, this seems less likely for a hardware solution. - Related to the above, it's possible that it's a complex product to set up, and they've found that if they don't get you on the phone, you're likely to screw up the setup and get mad at them and/or return it. Better to scare you away up front if you're ultimately just going to take up time and end up getting a refund. Ultimately, the answer to this question and any like it is that if they're competent, they do this because they've done the research and determined that it is better for them (typically in terms of revenue generation, but really better is defined as they see fit).

fjsolwmv 7y ago
You left out the #1 reason: so you can suss out their spending power and level of need so you can charge value-based pricing instead of cost-based pricing. Nothing you wrote is relevant to OP's concern about "call for price".
- davidivadavid 7y ago
  Most SaaS that is intelligently priced is value-based, even if the price is public. What you mean is that you want to do price discrimination. That's possible but somewhat risky as people will ask for references, and references will sometimes disclose how much they pay, etc. So no, overall the OP has the main reasons right.
hash872 7y ago
Another potential reason- especially for a reseller- is that they don't want to get commoditized. If they're just reselling x product and every reseller puts their price on the website, then one party will cut the price a bit, then another party will cut it more, and pretty soon it's a race to the bottom. Opaque pricing and an air of mystery helps them preserve margins. Just like healthcare, come to think of it. Good luck finding out what the cost of procedures are at each hospital or provider
- solarkraft 7y ago
  I have never gone through the sales dance, but couldn't you try to provoke this by asking all potential suppliers, keeping them aware you're considering all options?
Silhouette 7y ago
Those are all reasonable positions, though I sometimes wonder whether the assumptions underlying them are correct, particularly the foundational assumption that the sales lost aren't worth it compared to the presumably higher-valued sales retained. May I ask whether you ever collected hard data, at least internally, from trying this multiple ways, perhaps earlier in the growth of your business if you're well established today? Or did you just hire sales people who know that this is "how things are done" in your industry? In my experience working with businesses aiming for enterprise sales who operate this sort of policy, it is almost always the latter, and there are often principal-agent problems as well because of the compensation arrangements for the sales staff. In my experience working with both smaller businesses or within larger ones, this definitely does cost a lot of money in lost sales sometimes. However, enterprise sales isn't really my field, and I don't have any frame of reference to know how many such failed transactions happen compared to how much extra those same suppliers might be squeezing out of juicier targets. Edit: As an example of the sort of deal I'm thinking of here, suppose a business with a headcount in the 10K range didn't pursue a SaaS solution to something that they expected to cost on the order of $1M/year, because the decision-makers lost patience with being given the run-around and instead decided to commission an in-house solution. Is that likely to have been a significant loss to a large SaaS business, or is that kind of customer just too small to worry about in the world of enterprise sales?
- awillen 7y ago
  I've seen both. I've worked at early stage (seed/A) enterprise startups and have seen the pricing strategy evolve (including moving from publicly listed prices to making people talk to sales). In those cases, we were still really finding out who the right buyers were, so there was a lot of analysis of pipeline and conversions. There was also a lot of analysis of churn, and for one company that was the big driver of the change - companies that engaged with sales took up measurably less time from customer success post-sale and were much less likely to churn. That said, I've also come in later and seen the talk to sales culture already there, clearly driven by experience at the VP/C-level. That said, what I have found to be pretty much universally true is that for enterprise SaaS deals over a certain figure (typically something like 100kish, though it can differ by customer industry/type of software), the buyer expects to talk to someone and won't consider a company that doesn't have a sales team.
noir_lord 7y ago
> is unlikely to be a real buyer, since real buyers are accustomed to the sales process. Reasonable but as you are probably aware you are potentially leaving some sales on the table. I'm the sole tech buyer for my entire company (SME) (because I'm the only techie on staff so it naturally fell to me) and I loathe "Contact us for pricing" enough that given two equal(ish) options I'll pick the one with the "Foo costs X"/"Bar costs Y" pricing. Also heavy after sales contact (Dell are buggers for this) puts me right off as well, if I buy a product from someone I maybe want one email a quarter with similar products and that is it, if we are in the market for a new product I'll go do the research at that point and buy it. My time is critical to me because I wear lots of hats and want to get the none-core part of my role done quickly and smoothly.
- edmundsauto 7y ago
  It's really important for many companies to know what sales they want to leave on the table. You can't be all things to all people, and if you don't know who you want as a customer, it's frequently a bad experience that sucks time, energy, and attention from building the core business. I totally understand why people don't want to build a relationship with a sales person. However, I don't want transactional customers, which is how I perceive them. Again, reasonable from both sides. You shouldn't try to sell to everyone.
- awillen 7y ago
  Yeah, you're the collateral damage - a good buyer but one whose profile looks like a bad buyer. If you know of any good ways to screen for folks like yourself while still keeping out the chaff, let me know :)
  - commentzorro 7y ago
    I do. Post your prices online. Make these prices be the non-discounted prices. The chaff will balk at the price and move on. The wheat will call you to find out what more you can do. I hate calling only to find out you're selling for triple the price of comparables because of "magic beans" reasons.
closeparen 7y ago
How much can it cost to process a payment via web form and drop a box in the mail? If anything it should be the phone sales interactions which have a high cost and are sometimes not worth it.
fphhotchips 7y ago
I work around enterprise SaaS sales also and the other reason is that we don't want to give our pricing strategy to our competitors.
- h1d 7y ago
  Does it mean your pricing isn't competitive against competitors? Otherwise, wouldn't showing the pricing just upset your competitors? Also, can't one of your competitor ask you for a quote and figure that out as a fake customer?
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    Possibly, but not necessarily. You might want to lead with your value before price, especially in an industry where it's difficult to see at first look what the differentiators are. Alternatively, public pricing could start price wars, leading both companies to unsustainable pricing. Or maybe you want to be able to give strategic customers specific discounts. These aren't pricing strategies to make sure your customers get the best price possible -- they are designed to allow me, as the creator of some value, better control over how that value is perceived and deployed. For a business, you want to build relationships, not just have transactional customers. The more custom or integrated your solution is, the more important this is. (Also, it's the best way to make sure your customers are deriving the most value from your product, which is a win-win.) Yes, competitors can do that, but that additional friction means they won't stay up to date, and you have a chance to discover what's going on.
    - gesman 7y ago
      As a customer - in this case I don't want to build "relationship" with some random middleman reseller. I know exactly what i want and rather avoid wasting time on upsells thrown at me. I understand that sales departments strongly prefer "bait and pimp" vs. "sell and forget" strategy - but some customers and often significant ones will give business to competitors if former is the only strategy to generate revenues.
  - badpun 7y ago
duxup 7y ago
>- The product can't be sold as a standalone item - it requires setup and integration, and without understanding what you have in place already, they can't give you a quote. Of course, this seems less likely for a hardware solution. >- Related to the above, it's possible that it's a complex product to set up, and they've found that if they don't get you on the phone, you're likely to screw up the setup and get mad at them and/or return it. Better to scare you away up front if you're ultimately just going to take up time and end up getting a refund Oh man I've run into this and you make an exception for someone, give them pricing and it is just confusion and a mess because they don't need integration.... except for all the integration they need...
- awillen 7y ago
  Yep - on a related note, those experiences have also led more than one company I've worked at to require that you sign a services contract for implementation when you buy the product. When it's optional, the people who opt out of it are often the people who need it most, and they end up taking up dozens of hours of your support team's time instead of the ten hours they should have spent with your implementation team up front.

fjsolwmv 7y ago

You left out the #1 reason: so you can suss out their spending power and level of need so you can charge value-based pricing instead of cost-based pricing. Nothing you wrote is relevant to OP's concern about "call for price".

davidivadavid 7y ago
Most SaaS that is intelligently priced is value-based, even if the price is public. What you mean is that you want to do price discrimination. That's possible but somewhat risky as people will ask for references, and references will sometimes disclose how much they pay, etc. So no, overall the OP has the main reasons right.

hash872 7y ago

Another potential reason- especially for a reseller- is that they don't want to get commoditized. If they're just reselling x product and every reseller puts their price on the website, then one party will cut the price a bit, then another party will cut it more, and pretty soon it's a race to the bottom. Opaque pricing and an air of mystery helps them preserve margins. Just like healthcare, come to think of it. Good luck finding out what the cost of procedures are at each hospital or provider

solarkraft 7y ago
I have never gone through the sales dance, but couldn't you try to provoke this by asking all potential suppliers, keeping them aware you're considering all options?

Silhouette 7y ago

Those are all reasonable positions, though I sometimes wonder whether the assumptions underlying them are correct, particularly the foundational assumption that the sales lost aren't worth it compared to the presumably higher-valued sales retained. May I ask whether you ever collected hard data, at least internally, from trying this multiple ways, perhaps earlier in the growth of your business if you're well established today? Or did you just hire sales people who know that this is "how things are done" in your industry? In my experience working with businesses aiming for enterprise sales who operate this sort of policy, it is almost always the latter, and there are often principal-agent problems as well because of the compensation arrangements for the sales staff. In my experience working with both smaller businesses or within larger ones, this definitely does cost a lot of money in lost sales sometimes. However, enterprise sales isn't really my field, and I don't have any frame of reference to know how many such failed transactions happen compared to how much extra those same suppliers might be squeezing out of juicier targets. Edit: As an example of the sort of deal I'm thinking of here, suppose a business with a headcount in the 10K range didn't pursue a SaaS solution to something that they expected to cost on the order of $1M/year, because the decision-makers lost patience with being given the run-around and instead decided to commission an in-house solution. Is that likely to have been a significant loss to a large SaaS business, or is that kind of customer just too small to worry about in the world of enterprise sales?

awillen 7y ago
I've seen both. I've worked at early stage (seed/A) enterprise startups and have seen the pricing strategy evolve (including moving from publicly listed prices to making people talk to sales). In those cases, we were still really finding out who the right buyers were, so there was a lot of analysis of pipeline and conversions. There was also a lot of analysis of churn, and for one company that was the big driver of the change - companies that engaged with sales took up measurably less time from customer success post-sale and were much less likely to churn. That said, I've also come in later and seen the talk to sales culture already there, clearly driven by experience at the VP/C-level. That said, what I have found to be pretty much universally true is that for enterprise SaaS deals over a certain figure (typically something like 100kish, though it can differ by customer industry/type of software), the buyer expects to talk to someone and won't consider a company that doesn't have a sales team.

noir_lord 7y ago

> is unlikely to be a real buyer, since real buyers are accustomed to the sales process. Reasonable but as you are probably aware you are potentially leaving some sales on the table. I'm the sole tech buyer for my entire company (SME) (because I'm the only techie on staff so it naturally fell to me) and I loathe "Contact us for pricing" enough that given two equal(ish) options I'll pick the one with the "Foo costs X"/"Bar costs Y" pricing. Also heavy after sales contact (Dell are buggers for this) puts me right off as well, if I buy a product from someone I maybe want one email a quarter with similar products and that is it, if we are in the market for a new product I'll go do the research at that point and buy it. My time is critical to me because I wear lots of hats and want to get the none-core part of my role done quickly and smoothly.

edmundsauto 7y ago
It's really important for many companies to know what sales they want to leave on the table. You can't be all things to all people, and if you don't know who you want as a customer, it's frequently a bad experience that sucks time, energy, and attention from building the core business. I totally understand why people don't want to build a relationship with a sales person. However, I don't want transactional customers, which is how I perceive them. Again, reasonable from both sides. You shouldn't try to sell to everyone.
awillen 7y ago
Yeah, you're the collateral damage - a good buyer but one whose profile looks like a bad buyer. If you know of any good ways to screen for folks like yourself while still keeping out the chaff, let me know :)
- commentzorro 7y ago
  I do. Post your prices online. Make these prices be the non-discounted prices. The chaff will balk at the price and move on. The wheat will call you to find out what more you can do. I hate calling only to find out you're selling for triple the price of comparables because of "magic beans" reasons.

closeparen 7y ago

How much can it cost to process a payment via web form and drop a box in the mail? If anything it should be the phone sales interactions which have a high cost and are sometimes not worth it.

fphhotchips 7y ago

I work around enterprise SaaS sales also and the other reason is that we don't want to give our pricing strategy to our competitors.

h1d 7y ago
Does it mean your pricing isn't competitive against competitors? Otherwise, wouldn't showing the pricing just upset your competitors? Also, can't one of your competitor ask you for a quote and figure that out as a fake customer?
- edmundsauto 7y ago
  Possibly, but not necessarily. You might want to lead with your value before price, especially in an industry where it's difficult to see at first look what the differentiators are. Alternatively, public pricing could start price wars, leading both companies to unsustainable pricing. Or maybe you want to be able to give strategic customers specific discounts. These aren't pricing strategies to make sure your customers get the best price possible -- they are designed to allow me, as the creator of some value, better control over how that value is perceived and deployed. For a business, you want to build relationships, not just have transactional customers. The more custom or integrated your solution is, the more important this is. (Also, it's the best way to make sure your customers are deriving the most value from your product, which is a win-win.) Yes, competitors can do that, but that additional friction means they won't stay up to date, and you have a chance to discover what's going on.
  - gesman 7y ago
    As a customer - in this case I don't want to build "relationship" with some random middleman reseller. I know exactly what i want and rather avoid wasting time on upsells thrown at me. I understand that sales departments strongly prefer "bait and pimp" vs. "sell and forget" strategy - but some customers and often significant ones will give business to competitors if former is the only strategy to generate revenues.
- badpun 7y ago

duxup 7y ago

>- The product can't be sold as a standalone item - it requires setup and integration, and without understanding what you have in place already, they can't give you a quote. Of course, this seems less likely for a hardware solution. >- Related to the above, it's possible that it's a complex product to set up, and they've found that if they don't get you on the phone, you're likely to screw up the setup and get mad at them and/or return it. Better to scare you away up front if you're ultimately just going to take up time and end up getting a refund Oh man I've run into this and you make an exception for someone, give them pricing and it is just confusion and a mess because they don't need integration.... except for all the integration they need...

awillen 7y ago
Yep - on a related note, those experiences have also led more than one company I've worked at to require that you sign a services contract for implementation when you buy the product. When it's optional, the people who opt out of it are often the people who need it most, and they end up taking up dozens of hours of your support team's time instead of the ten hours they should have spent with your implementation team up front.