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You generally get sent through a predatory sales pipeline and extorted. Think very hard before using something not upfront about pricing.

• freedomben 2y ago
  Indeed, this is the correct answer for 85% or more of SaaS businesses. As a CTO who makes buying decisions, the worst thing you can do if you want my business is bury the pricing behind one of these. I know the game, I despise the game, and I don't have time or willingness to "do the enterprise dance" unless I am already a happy customer. Even then, I've migrated to competing services to avoid that, so consider that when designing your "sales pipeline"
  • wrs 2y ago
    The trouble is, if you pick a winner, they get acquired and implement a traditional sales pipeline that bites you on your next renewal.
    • DANmode 2y ago
      Name and shame? That's egregious.
      • freedomben 2y ago
        I'm not sure there's a big enough hard drive to store that list. (joking about the hard drive space) If you start with a list of every SaaS company, and then delete 10% of them at random, you probably have a good approximation of the offenders though.
  • baetylus 2y ago
    You may be among a growing number, but for now, this stance is the exception -- especially in other executive positions.
• cush 2y ago
  I think this is a common misconception around sales. The prices aren't upfront because there's too many variables. Price is determined by more than just number of employees. There's also individual SKUs for each employee, usage tiers, etc. Once there's more than one variable it's probably too complex and you need a quote. It's not extortion. A good salesperson is looking for a good customer that actually needs the product. They want to make sure that the product is a good fit for the customer. Selling to a business that doesn't need the product is not only a waste of time, but it actually costs the business, as the customer will quickly cancel and all the work the account executive put in to learning the business ends up in a net loss
  • wrs 2y ago
    This could occasionally be true, but in my experience it’s much more common that this is a signal that either the vendor’s internal processes are stuck in the early 2000s, or they are indeed going to run an arbitrary negotiation process to drive up prices. I had one large, famous call center vendor who were running on a monolithic Java backend in their own data center, with a six-week implementation time for a completely vanilla configuration, and for which the simplest change required a professional services engagement. There is no technical reason the entire thing couldn’t have been done with self-service signup and configuration, and indeed that’s how their smaller, younger competitors do it.
    • Rastonbury 2y ago
      If you are selling software to enterprise that's 100k a year and multiple SKUs, buyer will want to negotiate and not just discounts, its volumes, payment terms, contract length all of which affect price. If only it were so simple
    • cush 2y ago
      Whether the vendor's internal processes are stuck in the early 2000s or not doesn't negate anything I said. The quotes are multi-variate and it's not extortion. But even assuming updated systems, how could you give an accurate quote without understanding the customer's needs? Make someone fill out a big form providing estimates of their usage? Now you're just putting the customer on the hook for generating the quote. The sales rep can translate their requirements into an accurate quote without putting the burden on the customer to understand the product more than they need to. Also, the customer may need the quote to land a contract. The complexity of the software's pricing is a reflection of the complexity of the customer's needs.