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I'm a SaaS buyer, and you correctly made Pricing the #1 thing. You don't even need to put the price, just the ballpark helps understand if a solution makes sens

I'm a SaaS buyer, and you correctly made Pricing the #1 thing. You don't even need to put the price, just the ballpark helps understand if a solution makes sense, especially for smaller companies with tight budgets. So much time I've wasted on demos and at the end the price is so far apart from expectation we could have saved the time. Even if something is too expensive, knowing the general price tag allows you to keep the project in your back pocket in case there's a cash/budget surplus and you get asked to put those dollars to work quickly.

wildpeaks 6y ago
I agree that lack of clear pricing is a huge red flag. Sometimes it's not even because of budget: if an employee can't experiment with the service using some free tier (not time limited, because other projects can urgently get in the way), they can't request whoever has the company credit card to subscribe even to the lowest paid tier, so they'll just try one of your competitors because blindly recommending a service that might be a bad fit is too high a risk for the employee's career.
PeterisP 6y ago
That's kind the whole point, there are B2B providers who simply intentionally don't want to talk with smaller companies with tight budgets. Are you willing to discuss an eight figure custom offer? The company will fly out a sales team to you next week to negotiate the details. Do you want to haggle about details since mere 100k/year is stretching your budget? Nope, this is not worth the time and effort of the high-touch sales process. You could get a free trial, but if and only if you're likely to buy something significantly large in the end, if the person wanting the trial has the influence and authority to sign off a multimillion purchase instead of someone just looking for a service for their department of a couple dozen employees. Such companies don't want to talk with potential users, because the end users themselves generally don't get a vote or veto or choice of what the enterprise (i.e. not a small company with a tight budget) will buy, they want to talk with high-level managers who have the authority to buy something on behalf of thousands of users. To that regard, the analysis performed by the OP is probably irrelevant, as it's about "online searches of thousands of B2B SaaS buyers", but come on, the target audience of high-touch B2B companies does not go out making online searches for such services; those decisionmakers either choose from one of the companies whose sales teams have been courting them for years before the sale, or perhaps they look up the Gartner report for "category leaders", or perhaps they ask their consulting partners for recommendations, they don't just go on google to start researching from scratch - and if they needed that research, they would not visit the site personally, they'd get a team of assistants to gather such info and get quotes tailored for their specific needs; if there was standard pricing listed on the site, that would/should get ignored anyway, they'd expect custom discounts for their volume. Of course, there are many B2B SaaS "buyers" who do such online searches, but they're all the the small scale non-enterprise people with tight budgets, the kind of people to whom the company does not want to talk in the first place.

wildpeaks 6y ago

I agree that lack of clear pricing is a huge red flag. Sometimes it's not even because of budget: if an employee can't experiment with the service using some free tier (not time limited, because other projects can urgently get in the way), they can't request whoever has the company credit card to subscribe even to the lowest paid tier, so they'll just try one of your competitors because blindly recommending a service that might be a bad fit is too high a risk for the employee's career.

PeterisP 6y ago

That's kind the whole point, there are B2B providers who simply intentionally don't want to talk with smaller companies with tight budgets. Are you willing to discuss an eight figure custom offer? The company will fly out a sales team to you next week to negotiate the details. Do you want to haggle about details since mere 100k/year is stretching your budget? Nope, this is not worth the time and effort of the high-touch sales process. You could get a free trial, but if and only if you're likely to buy something significantly large in the end, if the person wanting the trial has the influence and authority to sign off a multimillion purchase instead of someone just looking for a service for their department of a couple dozen employees. Such companies don't want to talk with potential users, because the end users themselves generally don't get a vote or veto or choice of what the enterprise (i.e. not a small company with a tight budget) will buy, they want to talk with high-level managers who have the authority to buy something on behalf of thousands of users. To that regard, the analysis performed by the OP is probably irrelevant, as it's about "online searches of thousands of B2B SaaS buyers", but come on, the target audience of high-touch B2B companies does not go out making online searches for such services; those decisionmakers either choose from one of the companies whose sales teams have been courting them for years before the sale, or perhaps they look up the Gartner report for "category leaders", or perhaps they ask their consulting partners for recommendations, they don't just go on google to start researching from scratch - and if they needed that research, they would not visit the site personally, they'd get a team of assistants to gather such info and get quotes tailored for their specific needs; if there was standard pricing listed on the site, that would/should get ignored anyway, they'd expect custom discounts for their volume. Of course, there are many B2B SaaS "buyers" who do such online searches, but they're all the the small scale non-enterprise people with tight budgets, the kind of people to whom the company does not want to talk in the first place.