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For me, the deal is often lost on the landing page. "Give us your phone number to get the one piece of technical documentation we have prepared." Nope. I do

For me, the deal is often lost on the landing page. "Give us your phone number to get the one piece of technical documentation we have prepared." Nope. I do not want to receive a phone call from you and won't answer it. "Contact sales for pricing." I don't have time. I have more than enough meetings as it is, and I would rather use the time to put together a proof of concept. The next step would be building a consensus internally to get permission to give you the money. Some things I just can't afford, if it's $100k per year, then I'm not interested. If it's $5/month and the product is useful, then I can maybe build a case. I get why people want to funnel everything through sales; their entire day is meetings and if they have an empty slot, they're wasting money. I could, of course, dramatically misunderstand how to use the product and pass on it if I do an unguided evaluation, and that's a risk they want to avoid. But I think that's the nature of selling to developers; they are the types that want to explore on their own. If the docs don't cut it, your company is dead. They can't just issue a purchase order after a 30 minute phone call. ("Contact sales" also works around the "how much should this even cost" problem. I get that companies want to know if they're losing sales because of the price being too high and can't collect that information from a simple web visit. I say, that's kind of too bad. I want to solve a problem, not be a test subject in your A/B test. Start low, and work your way up after you have existing customers. Or start high, and sell to someone other than me.) Finally, if I do reach out, spell my name the same way I typed it into the "contact us" form. Nobody calls me "John" and those letters don't appear in my name in that order. I know you think you know better than I do, but you don't.

Terr_ 4y ago
> But I think that's the nature of selling to developers; they are the types that want to explore on their own. If the docs don't cut it, your company is dead. Amen, if potential-customers must schmooze with sales to get access to the docs or pair-program with a sales-engineer to get Hello World running, then I get worried (reasonably or otherwise) about things like: 1. The product is a tangled mess so a native guide is required to get anything done, and they've given up on making it independently-navigable. 2. The vendor's business-model is to lock you in and then bleed you dry. (Possibly by paying for said native-guides.) 3. The vendor is focused on selling to management rather than making a product that'll work well for engineers.
khuey 4y ago
> the deal is often lost on the landing page In most cases the deal isn't being lost there, you're being qualified out. The products that do this are going to be a lot closer to your $100k/year that you can't afford than your $5/month that you have to build a case for.
- jrockway 4y ago
  Qualifying out makes sense, but I don't think the companies are making the right decision. I was recently looking at a web UI that visualizes the output of your team's Bazel runs. No pricing information. That seems like a product that is going to be $X/developer/month, and when that's a lot of money, sure, invite them to a private Slack channel or whatever and charge an extra $30k/year. Otherwise, it's basically free money. The outcome of the no pricing information is that three options were listed on the Bazel website, so I looked at the other ones instead. They did the hard part of getting me to the website, not to mention typing in code to implement their thing. Now I just want to type in a credit card and use their thing. Not everything is an Oracle database for a Fortune 500 company. The long tail is long, and contains a lot of money.

Terr_ 4y ago

> But I think that's the nature of selling to developers; they are the types that want to explore on their own. If the docs don't cut it, your company is dead. Amen, if potential-customers must schmooze with sales to get access to the docs or pair-program with a sales-engineer to get Hello World running, then I get worried (reasonably or otherwise) about things like: 1. The product is a tangled mess so a native guide is required to get anything done, and they've given up on making it independently-navigable. 2. The vendor's business-model is to lock you in and then bleed you dry. (Possibly by paying for said native-guides.) 3. The vendor is focused on selling to management rather than making a product that'll work well for engineers.

khuey 4y ago

> the deal is often lost on the landing page In most cases the deal isn't being lost there, you're being qualified out. The products that do this are going to be a lot closer to your $100k/year that you can't afford than your $5/month that you have to build a case for.

jrockway 4y ago
Qualifying out makes sense, but I don't think the companies are making the right decision. I was recently looking at a web UI that visualizes the output of your team's Bazel runs. No pricing information. That seems like a product that is going to be $X/developer/month, and when that's a lot of money, sure, invite them to a private Slack channel or whatever and charge an extra $30k/year. Otherwise, it's basically free money. The outcome of the no pricing information is that three options were listed on the Bazel website, so I looked at the other ones instead. They did the hard part of getting me to the website, not to mention typing in code to implement their thing. Now I just want to type in a credit card and use their thing. Not everything is an Oracle database for a Fortune 500 company. The long tail is long, and contains a lot of money.