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How is a lead from the website bad quality? It's litterally a customer saying "I want to subscribe and pay more than the self-service price tag", no?

kroolik 2y ago
Its more like "Im interested in subscribing and paying more"
- anticensor 2y ago
  or, "I'm interested in paying less, in exchange of relieving some of your labour that you'd have to do to support my purchase"
jkingsman 2y ago
Or it's someone who's intrigued by the concept of the product and is curious how much it costs. All it literally can be interpreted as is "a [probable] human is curious how much this costs" — intent to purchase varies from positive to zero.
preetamjinka 2y ago
Depends on who clicks the button. It could be a junior person doing some research for their team, in which case they are not the decision maker nor the one with the budget/writing the check. If a VP clicks on the button, that's a different story.
- fullspectrumdev 2y ago
  At a prior employer usually a team lead (without purchasing authority) would be told to go get a quote, go through all the BS, and only then hand over to “the higher authority” who can actually make the decision. Which predictably often lead to vendors losing out because their sales people ghosted team leads.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  If I’m tasked with finding a price, the VP or whoever I report to will only find out about the services that have meaningful replies. And if a reply ever insinuated I was too low level to communicate with, that’s the last they’d hear from where I work.
- asoneth 2y ago
  At every company I've seen the executive asks a manager to develop a report comparing a up to a dozen options. Then the manager delegates to a few of their directs to actually slog through all the sales discussions and compile the analysis. The only possible way I can imagine someone with the title "VP" going to a vendor's website and clicking a "get quote" button to get a sales call at a random time from some junior salesperson is if we're talking about one of those companies where they give inflated titles and anyone who isn't an intern is a VP-of-something-or-other.
  - 0x457 2y ago
    Yeah, VP clicking that button is <10 people company that has 5 C-Level titles, a few VPs and a few SWEs that do the without fancy titles.
IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
On the contrary. The enterprise always gets a big discount. Or features not available to self service subs such as api access, etc Enterprise pays more due to volume , but generally pay less on a per user or whatever the unit that constitutes the seas is
- DandyDev 2y ago
  That is not my experience at all. I have recently procured or discussed pricing terms for a few SaaS solutions on Enterprise tier and without exception the Enterprise pricing is a multiple per unit of the highest self service tier. Even after negotiating the price down.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    > Enterprise pricing is a multiple per unit of the highest self service tier As it should be. Enterprises are notoriously difficult to support because the decision makers there believe their size allows to them to dictate to the seller anything and everything, including the seller's product roadmap.
    - fishpen0 2y ago
      Unless of course you are a small fish who just needs sso for compliance and for some reason you get to pay like you are a $5B conglomerate despite still very much preferring to just pay an advertised price and not spend a month of people's time in negotiations
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        > a small fish who just needs sso for compliance Unfortunately, a need for SSO is about the only reliable way to gouge a large corporation. As a small fish you may like SSO, want SSO, you may even think you need SSO, but you really can get by without just fine. You're small - you can get around the requirements, or pivot, or whatever. A corporation is big and slow and can easily get themselves into a situation where not adding SSO will become a blocker for deals denominated in double-triple digit millions, but abandoning your product or the whole business segment will cost similar amount of money. In that situation, the vendor can have a field day milking the cash cow.
rsstack 2y ago
It is very often in one of these categories: 1. Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more. 2. Someone willing to pay more but not enough more. 3. Someone who's just trying to compare prices between vendors but isn't a serious buyer (especially when not an existing customer). 4. Various non-obvious spam (affiliate resellers, etc.). 5. Someone who's interested but can't get a sale to happen given their role: has no budget and their manager doesn't have budget, has no authority on technical decisions. 6. Someone who's only curious. 7. Etc. etc. etc. The level of effort required to press that button is very low, so it isn't that great of a filter. Again, they take those calls because the lack of filtering doesn't mean it's never a quality lead.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more. Or, it's someone who the SaaS vendor forced to click that button by putting OIDC ("Sign in with..." or "Continue with...") behind that, using "SSO" as a price discriminator.
  - Systemmanic 2y ago
    https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Right. The phenomenon is real, but the description on that site seems a bit obtuse on purpose: > For organizations with more than a handful of employees, this feature is critical for IT and Security teams (...) In short: SSO is a core security requirement for any company with more than five employees. No, it isn't. They'd like it very much, but the SSO tax is proof positive that this is not a truly critical feature for small customers. In fact, it pretty much measures at which point it becomes critical.
mbesto 2y ago
Oh man, I take it you've never operated this part of a scaled business before. Wouldn't you like to know the absolute crap that comes through those forms...and yes even from those who have the intent of "I want to pay more than the self service price tag".
- tjoff 2y ago
  Feels well deserved though? Treat your customers as shit etc.
  - mbesto 2y ago
    lol what? > Treat your customers as shit etc. They aren't your customers unless they start paying you. That's the point.
    - cratermoon 2y ago
      Treat your potential customers as shit, then.
      - mbesto 2y ago
        If they're shit potential customers then yes that's exactly the point. As you might have read in other comments, the point of the form is to create a filtering mechanism to sift out the shit.
        carlosjobim 2y ago
        Here's how we filter out shit customers at my company: We publish our god damned prices clearly.
        CapcomGo 2y ago
        What companies post the pricing of b2b? Does Apple? Intel? Any major tech company? No, they have salespeople that handle b2b.
Suppafly 2y ago
It depends if it's a real 'request quote' option and not just something that gate-keeps the actual content on the site. I know in my job I've had to click through some of those sorts of things and enter my email just to get past the landing page of a company to get basic details of what their product includes.
mindslight 2y ago
With the classic setup where "request quote" is the only option, it's likely someone who wanted simple straightforward prices. But then they reached the saleswall and relented into entering their contact information based on a faint hope they might still yet get a simple number back. Then by the time your high touch middleman recovers from his coke bender and gets around to sending them a telegram or raising the semaphore flags, they've already long forgotten about you.
Natsu 2y ago
> It's litterally a customer saying "I want to subscribe and pay more than the self-service price tag", no? No, you can get idiots who are trying to sell you crap, random confused job seekers (who may or may not also be spammers), etc.
singleshot_ 2y ago
“I am a competitor looking for information about your service” “I am a jerk trying to annoy you” “I am a bot scraping your web site” “The people setting up the website are incompetent and a blank entry was just added to the database” “I am a dishonest salesperson with a harebrained scheme to pad my metrics” I do think we just found the poster who has not worked in sales, though. Please, be sure to count your blessings!
- kuschku 2y ago
  If you waste my time by hiding the pricing on your website, it's just fair that I'll waste your time in return. So whenever a site has hidden the pricing, I'll submit a few requests to make sure it costs them just as much time as it cost me.
Aeolun 2y ago
“More than the self-service price tag” is not always a reasonable amount though. The reason I fill out those forms is to find out how much I’ll be swindled. It’s unsurprisng you get a lot of bad leads if you make that information invisible up front.

kroolik 2y ago

Its more like "Im interested in subscribing and paying more"

anticensor 2y ago
or, "I'm interested in paying less, in exchange of relieving some of your labour that you'd have to do to support my purchase"

jkingsman 2y ago

Or it's someone who's intrigued by the concept of the product and is curious how much it costs. All it literally can be interpreted as is "a [probable] human is curious how much this costs" — intent to purchase varies from positive to zero.

preetamjinka 2y ago

Depends on who clicks the button. It could be a junior person doing some research for their team, in which case they are not the decision maker nor the one with the budget/writing the check. If a VP clicks on the button, that's a different story.

fullspectrumdev 2y ago
At a prior employer usually a team lead (without purchasing authority) would be told to go get a quote, go through all the BS, and only then hand over to “the higher authority” who can actually make the decision. Which predictably often lead to vendors losing out because their sales people ghosted team leads.
alkonaut 2y ago
If I’m tasked with finding a price, the VP or whoever I report to will only find out about the services that have meaningful replies. And if a reply ever insinuated I was too low level to communicate with, that’s the last they’d hear from where I work.
asoneth 2y ago
At every company I've seen the executive asks a manager to develop a report comparing a up to a dozen options. Then the manager delegates to a few of their directs to actually slog through all the sales discussions and compile the analysis. The only possible way I can imagine someone with the title "VP" going to a vendor's website and clicking a "get quote" button to get a sales call at a random time from some junior salesperson is if we're talking about one of those companies where they give inflated titles and anyone who isn't an intern is a VP-of-something-or-other.
- 0x457 2y ago
  Yeah, VP clicking that button is <10 people company that has 5 C-Level titles, a few VPs and a few SWEs that do the without fancy titles.

IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago

On the contrary. The enterprise always gets a big discount. Or features not available to self service subs such as api access, etc Enterprise pays more due to volume , but generally pay less on a per user or whatever the unit that constitutes the seas is

DandyDev 2y ago
That is not my experience at all. I have recently procured or discussed pricing terms for a few SaaS solutions on Enterprise tier and without exception the Enterprise pricing is a multiple per unit of the highest self service tier. Even after negotiating the price down.
- cratermoon 2y ago
  > Enterprise pricing is a multiple per unit of the highest self service tier As it should be. Enterprises are notoriously difficult to support because the decision makers there believe their size allows to them to dictate to the seller anything and everything, including the seller's product roadmap.
  - fishpen0 2y ago
    Unless of course you are a small fish who just needs sso for compliance and for some reason you get to pay like you are a $5B conglomerate despite still very much preferring to just pay an advertised price and not spend a month of people's time in negotiations
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > a small fish who just needs sso for compliance Unfortunately, a need for SSO is about the only reliable way to gouge a large corporation. As a small fish you may like SSO, want SSO, you may even think you need SSO, but you really can get by without just fine. You're small - you can get around the requirements, or pivot, or whatever. A corporation is big and slow and can easily get themselves into a situation where not adding SSO will become a blocker for deals denominated in double-triple digit millions, but abandoning your product or the whole business segment will cost similar amount of money. In that situation, the vendor can have a field day milking the cash cow.

rsstack 2y ago

It is very often in one of these categories: 1. Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more. 2. Someone willing to pay more but not enough more. 3. Someone who's just trying to compare prices between vendors but isn't a serious buyer (especially when not an existing customer). 4. Various non-obvious spam (affiliate resellers, etc.). 5. Someone who's interested but can't get a sale to happen given their role: has no budget and their manager doesn't have budget, has no authority on technical decisions. 6. Someone who's only curious. 7. Etc. etc. etc. The level of effort required to press that button is very low, so it isn't that great of a filter. Again, they take those calls because the lack of filtering doesn't mean it's never a quality lead.

Terretta 2y ago
> Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more. Or, it's someone who the SaaS vendor forced to click that button by putting OIDC ("Sign in with..." or "Continue with...") behind that, using "SSO" as a price discriminator.
- Systemmanic 2y ago
  https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Right. The phenomenon is real, but the description on that site seems a bit obtuse on purpose: > For organizations with more than a handful of employees, this feature is critical for IT and Security teams (...) In short: SSO is a core security requirement for any company with more than five employees. No, it isn't. They'd like it very much, but the SSO tax is proof positive that this is not a truly critical feature for small customers. In fact, it pretty much measures at which point it becomes critical.

mbesto 2y ago

Oh man, I take it you've never operated this part of a scaled business before. Wouldn't you like to know the absolute crap that comes through those forms...and yes even from those who have the intent of "I want to pay more than the self service price tag".

tjoff 2y ago
Feels well deserved though? Treat your customers as shit etc.
- mbesto 2y ago
  lol what? > Treat your customers as shit etc. They aren't your customers unless they start paying you. That's the point.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    Treat your potential customers as shit, then.
    - mbesto 2y ago
      If they're shit potential customers then yes that's exactly the point. As you might have read in other comments, the point of the form is to create a filtering mechanism to sift out the shit.
      - carlosjobim 2y ago
        Here's how we filter out shit customers at my company: We publish our god damned prices clearly.
        CapcomGo 2y ago
        What companies post the pricing of b2b? Does Apple? Intel? Any major tech company? No, they have salespeople that handle b2b.

Suppafly 2y ago

It depends if it's a real 'request quote' option and not just something that gate-keeps the actual content on the site. I know in my job I've had to click through some of those sorts of things and enter my email just to get past the landing page of a company to get basic details of what their product includes.

mindslight 2y ago

With the classic setup where "request quote" is the only option, it's likely someone who wanted simple straightforward prices. But then they reached the saleswall and relented into entering their contact information based on a faint hope they might still yet get a simple number back. Then by the time your high touch middleman recovers from his coke bender and gets around to sending them a telegram or raising the semaphore flags, they've already long forgotten about you.

Natsu 2y ago

> It's litterally a customer saying "I want to subscribe and pay more than the self-service price tag", no? No, you can get idiots who are trying to sell you crap, random confused job seekers (who may or may not also be spammers), etc.

singleshot_ 2y ago

“I am a competitor looking for information about your service” “I am a jerk trying to annoy you” “I am a bot scraping your web site” “The people setting up the website are incompetent and a blank entry was just added to the database” “I am a dishonest salesperson with a harebrained scheme to pad my metrics” I do think we just found the poster who has not worked in sales, though. Please, be sure to count your blessings!

kuschku 2y ago
If you waste my time by hiding the pricing on your website, it's just fair that I'll waste your time in return. So whenever a site has hidden the pricing, I'll submit a few requests to make sure it costs them just as much time as it cost me.

Aeolun 2y ago

“More than the self-service price tag” is not always a reasonable amount though. The reason I fill out those forms is to find out how much I’ll be swindled. It’s unsurprisng you get a lot of bad leads if you make that information invisible up front.