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Those are all reasonable positions, though I sometimes wonder whether the assumptions underlying them are correct, particularly the foundational assumption that

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.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Interesting, thanks. FWIW, in the actual case I was first thinking of, the potential customer did make contact. It wasn't a lack of up-front price specifically that killed that deal, though as things turned out, maybe it was a bad omen. The ultimate cause of the failed deal was the decision-makers becoming frustrated, because after making contact, the sales people just seemed to want ever more information out of them without giving a straight answer on pricing and other basic contractual details.

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.

Silhouette 7y ago
Interesting, thanks. FWIW, in the actual case I was first thinking of, the potential customer did make contact. It wasn't a lack of up-front price specifically that killed that deal, though as things turned out, maybe it was a bad omen. The ultimate cause of the failed deal was the decision-makers becoming frustrated, because after making contact, the sales people just seemed to want ever more information out of them without giving a straight answer on pricing and other basic contractual details.