10 ms·

Tell HN: Please let me just buy stuff without having to “Contact Sales”

132 points by robbie-c 4y ago

Context: I'm trying to buy an API for Text-To-Speech. There's a few that look promising but I can't really try them out without going through a sales guy first. All I'm going to tell them is that we want a short trial where I can check out the quality for myself in our specific use case. It's frustrating that I need to wait for our calendars to align and to sit on a call to do this. I don't need the sales pitch, it's an extremely straightforward concept, and I'm likely to choose whichever one lets me build an MVP the fastest.

taubek 4y ago
They probably want to sell you the highest possible package.
- aliqot 4y ago
  There it is right there. I'm not saying it's correct to do this, but this is the long and short of what's going on here. To get the big fish you have to sometimes sell at cost, because their name draws in the small orbiter fish who want to be big fish some day. If every small fish started demanding big fish rates, the entire thing stops. In a way this is emblematic of class privilege and wealth disparity issues at the moment.
- sammyoos 4y ago
  Many of these want to know your revenue and then make a sales proposal based on your total revenue. This is frustrating for companies where software is a tiny proportion of the products/services. Example: recently tried to license software that wanted 1% of our sales when software makes up 0.003% of our sales by volume. I now don't even try to negotiate with these types of folks.
runjake 4y ago
Why is this a bad thing? It serves as a litmus test for the kind of service you can expect after the purchase. I'm grateful for these companies putting it out there ahead of time.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  OP said: > It's frustrating that I need to wait for our calendars to align and to sit on a call to do this. It is 2023, there should be a self serve tier for all SaaS products. A call sales only service smells like an MVP to me.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    A "call sales only" service can reflect that the company hasn't had time to build a signup flow, or it can reflect a reasoned decision that a large number of low-usage customers won't be helpful for the bottom line. Depending on your infrastructure and the level of support you want to offer, it's easy for small customers to cost more money than you'll ever make from them.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      You could charge more if that's the concern
      - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
        B2B pricing models are typically artifical constructs only weakly related to the costs of providing the service. If you're targeting medium to large clients processing sensitive data, for example, you might start off by just provisioning a VM for each customer while still charging per API call. The price that you want to charge your target audience (or at least your starting point for negotiations with them) will end up much lower than what you'd need to make money off the hobbyist making 20 calls a month. I wouldn't say this is an unsolvable problem. Sometimes you can build the product in a way that better aligns with your desired pricing model, and other times you can set up some implicit price discrimination in a way that feels more honest than scammy. But is that where your company's limited time and effort is best spent? Often the answer is no.
  - ozim 4y ago
    Who is paying for that? Providing self service tier is not free for the company. You still get support tickets from free tier users. It is also not only building self service flow but maintaining it updating code/documentation. Let alone that it is common knowledge that free users are the worst.
phphphphp 4y ago
There are different sales models, each optimising for different outcomes: self-serve is the easiest way to get the first dollar, but it has trade-offs. If you're unwilling to talk to sales upfront, you're probably not going to go on to be a high value customer, and the platforms you're interested in have probably determined that self-serve customers are not their target audience (because of the trade-offs). A big challenge with self-serve is the ability to accurately price without any prior context: there's a dance between service providers and service customers, where the service provider is trying to maximise revenue and the customer wants to pay the least possible. Selling to a human, after discussing their needs and budget, makes it much easier maximise revenue from that customer. A good lesson to take from this experience is that just because you want a service, does not mean you're the target customer of every company selling that service. If you're unable to find the experience you need from one service provider, you should absolutely move on to the next -- nobody is going to take offence :)
- ravagat 4y ago
  That's a good way to frame this interaction. You write well, cheers
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Mandatum 4y ago
No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone. Because it’s not usually engineers I’m taking to, it’s directors and managers. If you’re a startup and I have enterprise pricing, I likely don’t prioritize you.
- throwawaysalome 4y ago
  No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone. I like how this response unapologetically lays bare a coarse reality of software. Programmers only see steady paychecks; they don't appreciate where the money comes from.
  - sircastor 4y ago
    I understand what you mean here, but in the case of companies that are selling a service the money is coming in because of the product. Marketing and Sales get customers in the door. It’s the price and its reliability that keep them handing over the money. That said, obviously we’re all in this together, and the paychecks come because we’re all doing the work.
    - mstipetic 4y ago
      I'd take a 10x sales or marketer over a 10x programmer any time.
- ulrashida 4y ago
  True, but... product managers also like to research and try things. There have been a few packages out there that I wanted my team to try, but I gave up on because I wasn't able to play with it first. I also then proceeded to share my negative view within my own org in favor of the option that did. It's absolutely valid that you can focus your attention towards the juicy targets, but there are likely more apples than expected that will hit the ground.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Would you get a commission if you had a self serve platform?
gitgud 4y ago
"Contact Sales" is annoying to see, but for a small company I think it's a good sign. It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales. They'd rather talk directly to interested customers, rather than scale and automate the sales pipeline for "mass-adoption". Think of the alternative, a startup focuses on scaling their signup/payment flow, and have to sacrifice time-to-market and reduce the amount of time they're actually talking to customers and working on the product...
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  > It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales. To me it means they don't understand their own product or customers, since they can't list a price for the typical use case.
  - jlbooker 4y ago
    I'm the CTO of a bootstrapped SaaS product targeting the higher education market. We don't list a price on the website because there are many variables that affect the final price. Every school has their single-sign-on system, for example. There are obviously several popular options, but there's also a whole host of obscure options. Every university IT department has their own preferences about how the integration will go. That very much changes how time-consuming the implementation will be for our company, and thus affects the price. There's no way to know this until we talk about what kind of integration the school wants. We also vary the price based on school size. Huge research-1 level schools pay more than tiny public liberal arts schools -- and rightly so. The big schools have more funding and more spare cash. They also have bigger, more complicated implementations since they have 50+ thousand students and hundreds of faculty. The size of the school also feeds into how expensive the customer is going to be to service, and thus affects our pricing. How do I put all that into a single price on the website?
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      > The big schools have more funding and more spare cash. There you go. Honest businesses don't make their prices with regards to how much "spare cash" their client might have. > How do I put all that into a single price on the website? You divide it into parts that can be priced. If there is a bespoke part you put an hourly rate for that implementation, or daily rate, or any way of counting the rate that suits you. You can use the projects you have finished to publish examples for future potential clients, where they can compare a little bit and get a rough idea of what it would cost them. Just getting any kind of price information out there is much better than nothing, because then a potential client knows if it's within their range. You also avoid people who cannot afford your product.
precommunicator 4y ago
I'm sometimes responsible for comparing and choosing a service we gonna implement in a software we develop (let's say an API to do something). Top reasons why I reject a prospective service includes "contact sales" pricing, API documentation not being public or not in English and no EU data residency nor EU hosting provider. Sure, if I eliminate other choices for this thing and you're the only one left I'm gonna ask a non-technical person in my company to cut through the bullshit and contact sales, to get me what I want, but otherwise, if there are other good choices, you are gonna miss my business.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
talebuilder 4y ago
I'd love to know which service you settle with, facing the same topic (tts)
more_corn 4y ago
When I’m qualifying a new product and I see “contact for pricing” that company goes to the bottom of my list. I literally allow their competitors to win before I even look at them. We don’t need to beg people to behave properly. We simply ignore them when they don’t. They can go flail and fail all day.
- unstatusthequo 4y ago
  100% Sometimes I need a solution in hours. And when I “contact sales” it’s days or more before I get and email or call back. My time is worth more than your product in almost every case.
vermaden 4y ago
That is good first 'sign' of companies to avoid. Either they have plain and simple pricing or its just a bullshit dance with sales team. Choose wisely. Often the product is not worth the dance ...
nshm 4y ago
In such an actively developed area like TTS/ASR there is high chance that custom solution would fit your needs much better. The feature set of TTS is actually pretty large and hard to combine in a single ML model. No free lunch you know. For example if you look for singing voice, they might suggest you an adapted model that is good specifically for singing. The testing process is also not very straight, you need to understand what to test and how to test properly. For example, some of their voices might be better for questions, some for news. You'd better talk to them.
bdcravens 4y ago
It's not just a profit maximization strategy; there are many reasons why a business may want to vet their customers. (compliance, fraud prevention, reputation management, etc)
rgovostes 4y ago
In my (limited) experience the sales team often can’t answer the questions I have about their product anyway. So the first call is a reiteration of my needs that I specified in email. Then we schedule a second call with a more senior salesperson who also can’t answer it. So we have a third call with an engineer to talk about one part of my use case, where I start my explanation over from scratch. With GitLab, the sales team kept trying to show me demos of their product I already know. For months they kept trying to steer the conversation towards CI/CD when I had a completely different topic I wanted to focus on.
- joegahona 4y ago
  I went through a similar byzantine process years ago when vetting a customer-data platform. Our CEO was an acquaintance of someone at Blueconic, so they had to be in the running. They were super-opaque -- unwilling to even give me a range of prices after multiple calls, even after giving them reams of data that represented the traffic/usage we could expect. They were constantly angling to get more senior executives roped into calls and to show demos of features we'd never use. They were also super-reluctant to give us names of references and wanted to moderate such a call. We asked for 3 references and they gave us 1, like David Brent in The UK Office, when his boss asked him for 5 things he did to cut costs and he said "I'll give you 3, and if you want 2 more I'll do that." The other companies were better but still took real effort to extract information. We ended up going with Segment.
rmorey 4y ago
it would be funny if in this case the sales call happened and at the end you were like “alright, can i hear a demo” and they go “this WAS the demo”
LinkLink 4y ago
How to ruin a SaaS company > Sell "one size fits all" usage scaled billing > Don't hire a sales team > Large companies won't do business with you since they cant negotiate or engage with a sales team to make sure the product fits for them > A thousand small users sign up and pay 1$ per month before credit card and merchant fees, misuse the product and want a refund, and throw tens of thousands of support requests at you You now have a less than worthless sales model.
LinkLink 4y ago
Nobody is obligated or even likely to profit from giving you their software because you as a complete unqualified and unaffiliated stranger "just want to try it out"
7402 4y ago
Does the MVP require high quality TTS? I wonder how good the numerous free TTS packages are, at least for getting started. (eSpeak, Festival, Mozilla TTS, etc.)
nunez 4y ago
The reason for that isn't so much that they are running a "if you have to ask..." strategy (though it's definitely one of the reasons) it's more that every sale is a complex sale that makes it difficult or lossy to advertise a flat rate. That or the price is a competitive advantage and they are trying to mitigate a race to the bottom
skmurphy 4y ago
It's a mature market; Capterra lists 53 solutions and has pricing on many of them. https://www.capterra.com/text-to-speech-software/ https://www.capterra.com/text-to-speech-software/ What is your budget? It's likely a situation of "if you have to ask, you cannot afford it." The opportunity cost for a larger firm to serve a startup may exceed the likely three year revenue you can offer.
AlexITC 4y ago
I understand your concern and I share your frustration. I have send emails a few times where I'm clear about my budget and sales people tend to share the minimum commitment they expect, there isn't much lost by trying. Being on the other side of the table (running a SaaS requiring a call scheduled), I have do this because my SaaS its in an early stage, the call allows me to understand the customer needs and make a proposal when we are a good fit. In this particular case, it is hard to get a quote when I don't know the necessary customization that could be required. The call is a friction point that I'm trying to avoid by communicating example integrations and its prices in the landing page, still, making everything clear hasn't been simple. In short, asking by email could be a good idea.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
You are not the target market. The target market expects to and does not hesitate to contact sales.
sloaken 4y ago
Whenever I run into 'Contact Sales', I translate that into 'We have hired unemployed used car salesmen. They assure us they can con you out of more money if they get a chance to talk to you.' I realize it might not be a fair assessment, but it is always where my brain goes. And then I move on, to a competitor. I only contact sales if you are literally the ONLY one with what I need. But that is rare.
carlosjobim 4y ago
It's strange to see the venomous and outright hostile responses OP is getting, when he is completely right. "Contact sales" is a practice seen everywhere, not only from those serving large enterprises. A lot of small time and B2C websites do the "Contact sales" thing, so all the arguments here that OP is unimportant as a customer falls completely flat. There are only two reasons to not post any price: 1. You don't understand your own business and have to bring out the calculator and spreadsheet in order to know what price to offer a customer. 2. You're trying to rip off the customer. If huge companies like Stripe can list a price, then you can too. But one of the reasons above stop you. I've seen exactly how these "Contact sales" people operate in their in-person meetings and it's always the same: A lot of sales tricks to try to sell an underperforming product for an extremely bloated price. Which of course can work if the person responsible for the purchase is not the business owner and can be convinced by wining and dining, getting a prostitute or getting a bribe. But those times are rapidly coming to an end. Putting a price out there means any potential customer can know your price range before entering in contact to discuss special solutions. In my field of work most competitors advertise in the vein of "We can make the perfect solution for you, just contact sales" and have no price published. We have several ready made solutions with clear pricing as well as invitations to contact sales for special solutions. Guess which model actually works? I also believe this is an age thing. People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies. I'm a graybeard, and I think this way as well. Or, even if it's not a fraud, having no listed price means, at the very least, that I'll have to talk to a salesperson -- which is to be avoided as much as possible.
vmc_7645 4y ago
Or at least put a price range. There are so many companies I outright blocked because they refused to tell me the price of their product until after their lackluster showcase. We ended up remaking our own solution for one of them and open sourcing the code because development was 10x (maybe even 100x) cheaper than purchasing at their predatory pricing schemas.
badpun 4y ago
The whole point of "Contact sales" is for the sales team to figure out how much you're willing to spend on their service, and to extract that amount from you. It is frustrating for you, but that's how their business is making majority of their money, so they won't give it up.
lukasfischer 4y ago
I recently had this issue multiple times. I’m certainly not against Contact Sales as an option, because of course there can be a special case/need which needs discussion. However, it would have saved me and the SaaS provider multiple calls just to find out where the price is. Is it less than 100$, 500$ or 5k+ a month. If I knew, that even a basic package is 5k+ it would not be a fit. If I knew, it’s less that 500$ I’d be interested to start talking as it’s in a reasonable budget. In this specific case, it was even more frustrating, as I already started to use the product through a free account with 3 credits - when I used them, I was not able to buy new credit but had to start talking to sales…
ravagat 4y ago
In the case of software and other anything digital, I'm in favour of not using this practice. If it were something physical/analog, like bespoke furniture made in Maine or hand crafted leather works then it would make sense to use this practice. I'm disappointed whenever practices that had reasoning are blindly practiced like this.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
If there's a simple product that costs $35/month and does one single function, then it is stupid to contact sales. However, if it is a complex sale with multiple optional parts that require custom solutions, then you need to talk to a salesperson. I totally agree with you if it is a simple product.

132 points by robbie-c 4y ago

taubek 4y ago

They probably want to sell you the highest possible package.

aliqot 4y ago
There it is right there. I'm not saying it's correct to do this, but this is the long and short of what's going on here. To get the big fish you have to sometimes sell at cost, because their name draws in the small orbiter fish who want to be big fish some day. If every small fish started demanding big fish rates, the entire thing stops. In a way this is emblematic of class privilege and wealth disparity issues at the moment.
sammyoos 4y ago
Many of these want to know your revenue and then make a sales proposal based on your total revenue. This is frustrating for companies where software is a tiny proportion of the products/services. Example: recently tried to license software that wanted 1% of our sales when software makes up 0.003% of our sales by volume. I now don't even try to negotiate with these types of folks.

runjake 4y ago

Why is this a bad thing? It serves as a litmus test for the kind of service you can expect after the purchase. I'm grateful for these companies putting it out there ahead of time.

quickthrower2 4y ago
OP said: > It's frustrating that I need to wait for our calendars to align and to sit on a call to do this. It is 2023, there should be a self serve tier for all SaaS products. A call sales only service smells like an MVP to me.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  A "call sales only" service can reflect that the company hasn't had time to build a signup flow, or it can reflect a reasoned decision that a large number of low-usage customers won't be helpful for the bottom line. Depending on your infrastructure and the level of support you want to offer, it's easy for small customers to cost more money than you'll ever make from them.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    You could charge more if that's the concern
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      B2B pricing models are typically artifical constructs only weakly related to the costs of providing the service. If you're targeting medium to large clients processing sensitive data, for example, you might start off by just provisioning a VM for each customer while still charging per API call. The price that you want to charge your target audience (or at least your starting point for negotiations with them) will end up much lower than what you'd need to make money off the hobbyist making 20 calls a month. I wouldn't say this is an unsolvable problem. Sometimes you can build the product in a way that better aligns with your desired pricing model, and other times you can set up some implicit price discrimination in a way that feels more honest than scammy. But is that where your company's limited time and effort is best spent? Often the answer is no.
- ozim 4y ago
  Who is paying for that? Providing self service tier is not free for the company. You still get support tickets from free tier users. It is also not only building self service flow but maintaining it updating code/documentation. Let alone that it is common knowledge that free users are the worst.

phphphphp 4y ago

There are different sales models, each optimising for different outcomes: self-serve is the easiest way to get the first dollar, but it has trade-offs. If you're unwilling to talk to sales upfront, you're probably not going to go on to be a high value customer, and the platforms you're interested in have probably determined that self-serve customers are not their target audience (because of the trade-offs). A big challenge with self-serve is the ability to accurately price without any prior context: there's a dance between service providers and service customers, where the service provider is trying to maximise revenue and the customer wants to pay the least possible. Selling to a human, after discussing their needs and budget, makes it much easier maximise revenue from that customer. A good lesson to take from this experience is that just because you want a service, does not mean you're the target customer of every company selling that service. If you're unable to find the experience you need from one service provider, you should absolutely move on to the next -- nobody is going to take offence :)

ravagat 4y ago
That's a good way to frame this interaction. You write well, cheers

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Mandatum 4y ago

No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone. Because it’s not usually engineers I’m taking to, it’s directors and managers. If you’re a startup and I have enterprise pricing, I likely don’t prioritize you.

throwawaysalome 4y ago
No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone. I like how this response unapologetically lays bare a coarse reality of software. Programmers only see steady paychecks; they don't appreciate where the money comes from.
- sircastor 4y ago
  I understand what you mean here, but in the case of companies that are selling a service the money is coming in because of the product. Marketing and Sales get customers in the door. It’s the price and its reliability that keep them handing over the money. That said, obviously we’re all in this together, and the paychecks come because we’re all doing the work.
  - mstipetic 4y ago
    I'd take a 10x sales or marketer over a 10x programmer any time.
ulrashida 4y ago
True, but... product managers also like to research and try things. There have been a few packages out there that I wanted my team to try, but I gave up on because I wasn't able to play with it first. I also then proceeded to share my negative view within my own org in favor of the option that did. It's absolutely valid that you can focus your attention towards the juicy targets, but there are likely more apples than expected that will hit the ground.
willcipriano 4y ago
Would you get a commission if you had a self serve platform?

gitgud 4y ago

"Contact Sales" is annoying to see, but for a small company I think it's a good sign. It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales. They'd rather talk directly to interested customers, rather than scale and automate the sales pipeline for "mass-adoption". Think of the alternative, a startup focuses on scaling their signup/payment flow, and have to sacrifice time-to-market and reduce the amount of time they're actually talking to customers and working on the product...

carlosjobim 4y ago
> It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales. To me it means they don't understand their own product or customers, since they can't list a price for the typical use case.
- jlbooker 4y ago
  I'm the CTO of a bootstrapped SaaS product targeting the higher education market. We don't list a price on the website because there are many variables that affect the final price. Every school has their single-sign-on system, for example. There are obviously several popular options, but there's also a whole host of obscure options. Every university IT department has their own preferences about how the integration will go. That very much changes how time-consuming the implementation will be for our company, and thus affects the price. There's no way to know this until we talk about what kind of integration the school wants. We also vary the price based on school size. Huge research-1 level schools pay more than tiny public liberal arts schools -- and rightly so. The big schools have more funding and more spare cash. They also have bigger, more complicated implementations since they have 50+ thousand students and hundreds of faculty. The size of the school also feeds into how expensive the customer is going to be to service, and thus affects our pricing. How do I put all that into a single price on the website?
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    > The big schools have more funding and more spare cash. There you go. Honest businesses don't make their prices with regards to how much "spare cash" their client might have. > How do I put all that into a single price on the website? You divide it into parts that can be priced. If there is a bespoke part you put an hourly rate for that implementation, or daily rate, or any way of counting the rate that suits you. You can use the projects you have finished to publish examples for future potential clients, where they can compare a little bit and get a rough idea of what it would cost them. Just getting any kind of price information out there is much better than nothing, because then a potential client knows if it's within their range. You also avoid people who cannot afford your product.

precommunicator 4y ago

I'm sometimes responsible for comparing and choosing a service we gonna implement in a software we develop (let's say an API to do something). Top reasons why I reject a prospective service includes "contact sales" pricing, API documentation not being public or not in English and no EU data residency nor EU hosting provider. Sure, if I eliminate other choices for this thing and you're the only one left I'm gonna ask a non-technical person in my company to cut through the bullshit and contact sales, to get me what I want, but otherwise, if there are other good choices, you are gonna miss my business.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

talebuilder 4y ago

I'd love to know which service you settle with, facing the same topic (tts)

more_corn 4y ago

When I’m qualifying a new product and I see “contact for pricing” that company goes to the bottom of my list. I literally allow their competitors to win before I even look at them. We don’t need to beg people to behave properly. We simply ignore them when they don’t. They can go flail and fail all day.

unstatusthequo 4y ago
100% Sometimes I need a solution in hours. And when I “contact sales” it’s days or more before I get and email or call back. My time is worth more than your product in almost every case.

vermaden 4y ago

That is good first 'sign' of companies to avoid. Either they have plain and simple pricing or its just a bullshit dance with sales team. Choose wisely. Often the product is not worth the dance ...

nshm 4y ago

In such an actively developed area like TTS/ASR there is high chance that custom solution would fit your needs much better. The feature set of TTS is actually pretty large and hard to combine in a single ML model. No free lunch you know. For example if you look for singing voice, they might suggest you an adapted model that is good specifically for singing. The testing process is also not very straight, you need to understand what to test and how to test properly. For example, some of their voices might be better for questions, some for news. You'd better talk to them.

bdcravens 4y ago

It's not just a profit maximization strategy; there are many reasons why a business may want to vet their customers. (compliance, fraud prevention, reputation management, etc)

rgovostes 4y ago

In my (limited) experience the sales team often can’t answer the questions I have about their product anyway. So the first call is a reiteration of my needs that I specified in email. Then we schedule a second call with a more senior salesperson who also can’t answer it. So we have a third call with an engineer to talk about one part of my use case, where I start my explanation over from scratch. With GitLab, the sales team kept trying to show me demos of their product I already know. For months they kept trying to steer the conversation towards CI/CD when I had a completely different topic I wanted to focus on.

joegahona 4y ago
I went through a similar byzantine process years ago when vetting a customer-data platform. Our CEO was an acquaintance of someone at Blueconic, so they had to be in the running. They were super-opaque -- unwilling to even give me a range of prices after multiple calls, even after giving them reams of data that represented the traffic/usage we could expect. They were constantly angling to get more senior executives roped into calls and to show demos of features we'd never use. They were also super-reluctant to give us names of references and wanted to moderate such a call. We asked for 3 references and they gave us 1, like David Brent in The UK Office, when his boss asked him for 5 things he did to cut costs and he said "I'll give you 3, and if you want 2 more I'll do that." The other companies were better but still took real effort to extract information. We ended up going with Segment.

rmorey 4y ago

it would be funny if in this case the sales call happened and at the end you were like “alright, can i hear a demo” and they go “this WAS the demo”

LinkLink 4y ago

How to ruin a SaaS company > Sell "one size fits all" usage scaled billing > Don't hire a sales team > Large companies won't do business with you since they cant negotiate or engage with a sales team to make sure the product fits for them > A thousand small users sign up and pay 1$ per month before credit card and merchant fees, misuse the product and want a refund, and throw tens of thousands of support requests at you You now have a less than worthless sales model.

LinkLink 4y ago

Nobody is obligated or even likely to profit from giving you their software because you as a complete unqualified and unaffiliated stranger "just want to try it out"

7402 4y ago

Does the MVP require high quality TTS? I wonder how good the numerous free TTS packages are, at least for getting started. (eSpeak, Festival, Mozilla TTS, etc.)

nunez 4y ago

The reason for that isn't so much that they are running a "if you have to ask..." strategy (though it's definitely one of the reasons) it's more that every sale is a complex sale that makes it difficult or lossy to advertise a flat rate. That or the price is a competitive advantage and they are trying to mitigate a race to the bottom

skmurphy 4y ago

It's a mature market; Capterra lists 53 solutions and has pricing on many of them. https://www.capterra.com/text-to-speech-software/ https://www.capterra.com/text-to-speech-software/ What is your budget? It's likely a situation of "if you have to ask, you cannot afford it." The opportunity cost for a larger firm to serve a startup may exceed the likely three year revenue you can offer.

AlexITC 4y ago

I understand your concern and I share your frustration. I have send emails a few times where I'm clear about my budget and sales people tend to share the minimum commitment they expect, there isn't much lost by trying. Being on the other side of the table (running a SaaS requiring a call scheduled), I have do this because my SaaS its in an early stage, the call allows me to understand the customer needs and make a proposal when we are a good fit. In this particular case, it is hard to get a quote when I don't know the necessary customization that could be required. The call is a friction point that I'm trying to avoid by communicating example integrations and its prices in the landing page, still, making everything clear hasn't been simple. In short, asking by email could be a good idea.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

You are not the target market. The target market expects to and does not hesitate to contact sales.

sloaken 4y ago

Whenever I run into 'Contact Sales', I translate that into 'We have hired unemployed used car salesmen. They assure us they can con you out of more money if they get a chance to talk to you.' I realize it might not be a fair assessment, but it is always where my brain goes. And then I move on, to a competitor. I only contact sales if you are literally the ONLY one with what I need. But that is rare.

carlosjobim 4y ago

It's strange to see the venomous and outright hostile responses OP is getting, when he is completely right. "Contact sales" is a practice seen everywhere, not only from those serving large enterprises. A lot of small time and B2C websites do the "Contact sales" thing, so all the arguments here that OP is unimportant as a customer falls completely flat. There are only two reasons to not post any price: 1. You don't understand your own business and have to bring out the calculator and spreadsheet in order to know what price to offer a customer. 2. You're trying to rip off the customer. If huge companies like Stripe can list a price, then you can too. But one of the reasons above stop you. I've seen exactly how these "Contact sales" people operate in their in-person meetings and it's always the same: A lot of sales tricks to try to sell an underperforming product for an extremely bloated price. Which of course can work if the person responsible for the purchase is not the business owner and can be convinced by wining and dining, getting a prostitute or getting a bribe. But those times are rapidly coming to an end. Putting a price out there means any potential customer can know your price range before entering in contact to discuss special solutions. In my field of work most competitors advertise in the vein of "We can make the perfect solution for you, just contact sales" and have no price published. We have several ready made solutions with clear pricing as well as invitations to contact sales for special solutions. Guess which model actually works? I also believe this is an age thing. People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies.

JohnFen 4y ago
> People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies. I'm a graybeard, and I think this way as well. Or, even if it's not a fraud, having no listed price means, at the very least, that I'll have to talk to a salesperson -- which is to be avoided as much as possible.

vmc_7645 4y ago

Or at least put a price range. There are so many companies I outright blocked because they refused to tell me the price of their product until after their lackluster showcase. We ended up remaking our own solution for one of them and open sourcing the code because development was 10x (maybe even 100x) cheaper than purchasing at their predatory pricing schemas.

badpun 4y ago

The whole point of "Contact sales" is for the sales team to figure out how much you're willing to spend on their service, and to extract that amount from you. It is frustrating for you, but that's how their business is making majority of their money, so they won't give it up.

lukasfischer 4y ago

I recently had this issue multiple times. I’m certainly not against Contact Sales as an option, because of course there can be a special case/need which needs discussion. However, it would have saved me and the SaaS provider multiple calls just to find out where the price is. Is it less than 100$, 500$ or 5k+ a month. If I knew, that even a basic package is 5k+ it would not be a fit. If I knew, it’s less that 500$ I’d be interested to start talking as it’s in a reasonable budget. In this specific case, it was even more frustrating, as I already started to use the product through a free account with 3 credits - when I used them, I was not able to buy new credit but had to start talking to sales…

ravagat 4y ago

In the case of software and other anything digital, I'm in favour of not using this practice. If it were something physical/analog, like bespoke furniture made in Maine or hand crafted leather works then it would make sense to use this practice. I'm disappointed whenever practices that had reasoning are blindly practiced like this.

FrontierPsych 4y ago

If there's a simple product that costs $35/month and does one single function, then it is stupid to contact sales. However, if it is a complex sale with multiple optional parts that require custom solutions, then you need to talk to a salesperson. I totally agree with you if it is a simple product.