10 ms·

Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me

• DriftRegion 2y ago
  I've had a couple of experiences in the past month where I do respond to the enthusiastic sales engineer's check-in with a genuine product question, only to receive an immediate, lengthy, and subtly wrong LLM generated response. It feels gross.
  • noman-land 2y ago
    Please consider responding and telling them how you feel and providing feedback in whatever feedback forms that accompany the ticket. Every company on Earth is exploring this tech and if we don't give them strong signals when they fuck it up we are just dooming our future selves to this garbage.
    • david38 2y ago
      Anyone who doesn’t have their head up their ass would realize this. Better to not tell them and just boycott them. Those companies who don’t push the boundaries on how bad they can treat their (potential) customers deserve to be rewarded.
    • robocat 2y ago
      > providing feedback > ticket Where do you work that this is an effective strategy? In my experience telling a vendor something is broken wastes my time and has no effect on the vendor. I don't know whether sales don't care or sales can't make dev changes. The only exception is when I can contact the devs and I know the devs have a history of fixing problems.
      • kelvinjps10 2y ago
        I used to work in customer service in a big tech company, what you are told to do is to reply with a sorry message and to fill a ticket but the ticket is not actually handled, it's just there to be recorded and maybe they will lookup it up by the end of the quarter.
        • cookiengineer 2y ago
          Pay me so I'll provide feedback. Otherwise stop wasting my time with unwanted spam. You are wasting my time, not yours, because you automated your spam workflow. The only strategical response is to flag your emails as spam ans to block your emails in the future. Everything else is a losing game strategy because there are more spam emails per day than available time already.
          • noman-land 2y ago
            You want to be paid for your feedback meanwhile you're here providing that exact feedback but into the void and for free.
            • cookiengineer 2y ago
              I have to admit my failure. I got ragebaited and fell for it.
      • collingreen 2y ago
        Seconded. Also imagine not just shouting feedback at a person who doesn't care but that function being replaced by an llm that literally can't care.
        • noman-land 2y ago
          You misunderstand. Think of it from a data standpoint. What they have. Ticket. Feedback. If they see tickets with certain feedback scores, some rep's score will go down and some manager's score will go down and if enough people do this (it literally takes a 1-2 digit amount of people in most cases), someone will raise an eyebrow and ask some questions and read the <99 responses that came in about this topic. Since so few people actually respond to feedback, anyone who does has a massively outsized impact on the numbers that get reported inside the company, and the messages that get passed around inside the company. I should clarify that when I say "Feedback" it does not mean yelling at a support rep, it means responding with a low score or a frowny face or whatever metric in their system that indicates quantitative disapproval.
          • tremon 2y ago
            That's a lot of assumptions on how a company you don't know internally handles tickets and/or feedback.
      • noman-land 2y ago
        I'm not talking about telling them that something is broken, but moreso telling them that you are disappointed. They only care that something is broken insofar as it affects their sales. A soured customer or potential customer, or famous person, or professional, or anyone else, is a long term drag on the reputation of a company. Much more than a silent customer that does nothing. Just do something instead of nothing. Mark as spam. Post a negative thing. Email them. Post on social media. Just do something instead of nothing. Show your disapproval out loud to everyone instead of silently accepting it and moving on. Please.
        • robocat 2y ago
          1) There are too many broken things in the world. 2) Why should the victim be expected to waste their time. If I posted a small complaint about every broken interaction, it would be a firehose. Imagine complaining about every website popover or pothole...
          • noman-land 2y ago
            Imagine complaining about none of them. Also, being a victim is by definition a waste of time because you didn't ask to be a victim. You can be a victim and quietly take it, letting it perpetuate and condemning both your future self and those you care about, or you can be a victim and fight back, refuse to take it, and defend your future self and those you care about. This behavior is that of a bully and abuser. Bullies and abusers will only listen to a slap in the face, not to quiet submission.
            • robocat 2y ago
              I think you are saying we should blame the victim. Bullies want you to fight back because now you're playing their game according to their rules which they know how to win and you implicitly authorise them to hurt you and often you have handed them a moral highground excuse they can spit back at you later. Bullies don't "listen" to a slap in the face, instead they escalate further: good luck! Fighting is high risk. I do believe in fighting when necessary and here is a fantastic article that perhaps supports your view: https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/escalation-theory-compliance-violence-and-overachievement-in-society https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/escalation-theor... To win against a bully often requires changing the game so that you can win by other rules. However not everyone has the ability/practice to handle conflict - a friend talking back with a female bully recently had a panic attack which was a horrific side effect for them.
    • duggan 2y ago
      The only universal feedback for business is money – don't give them any and you're giving all the feedback you need to. Anything else is wasting your time.
  • jlund-molfese 2y ago
    Two comically bad lines in an AI-generated spam email I recently received: "Saw on LinkedIn that you spoke Spanish. I've heard that the way "¡Qué chévere!" brings such energy and brightness to a conversation is uniquely charming. Have you had a chance to practice it recently?" "Develop a compliance automation tool that adapitates to changing regulations, reducing overhead costs while ensuring secure and efficient investment programs." No human would ever see my "limited working proficiency" of Spanish on LinkedIn and say something like the first line! And the second? "Adapitates" is not a real word, it's a hallucination. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1d8gc6x/did_chatgpt_spread_this_fake_word_adapitates https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1d8gc6x/did_chatgp... Sales isn't the problem, and most people are tolerant of some level of sales. I've gotten unpersonalized cold outreach from a data replication company that actually made me interested in the product, because it was short, to the point, and (as far as spam emails can be), authentic.
    • Aloha 2y ago
      Maybe adapitates should be a word! ;-)
      • fuzzfactor 2y ago
        After all, LLM is not supposed to regurgitate things verbatim :) Just regurgitate things . . .
    • AznHisoka 2y ago
      Was the main reason you were interested in it because you actually could see yourself using the product? Rather than because it was short and to the point?
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      How is AI hallucinating words now? I thought that would have been the easiest thing to restrict with a sufficient dictionary. Or maybe it's an ancient dictionary. I was kind of surprised at the sizes of ]dictionaries I could find while trying to test out a personal project.
• randall 2y ago
  pretty accurate. sales teams are kind of the worst, but buying from the company founders are fun. i wonder if there’s a world coming where the oss and the company become the same person.
• thexumaker 2y ago
  This is why I stopped working at companies that build dev tools. Building sales/marketing tools because they love having anything built for them lol
  • mhx1138 2y ago
    The sales person does not have any incentive for that. They need their name to be associated with the purchase.
• deleted 2y ago
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• kylehotchkiss 2y ago
  Salesforce has entered the chat.
• dole 2y ago
  We’re doing SOMETHING LIFE-CHANGING with AI and you’re GOING to show up to this gmeet in 15 minutes! Love, Oracle
• deleted 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• grepLeigh 2y ago
  Maybe I'm the outlier here, but 15 minutes to chat with a human about my use case and pricing is way more efficient than donking around in docs/trial product. The only product I really want to punch in credit card info and GO is commodity software (e.g. AWS EC2 or a domain registration service. I think wires sometimes get crossed in pricing/sales models, where an enterprise product gets priced like commodity software ... but that's usually a sign the company is immature. There shouldn't be a sales team for software that costs 2-3 figures. Software costing 5-6+ figures absolutely requires people in the sales/onboarding process, because a big part of what I'm paying for is support.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    I don't really disagree. The problem is outreach when you're clearly mostly researching something whether to do with computers or something else. One travel company is particular was pretty aggressively reaching out because I downloaded a couple brochures.
  • scarab92 2y ago
    Maybe I’m not asking the right questions, but I consistently find that I get “Yes” answers in these calls, that turn out to actually be “No” in practice. I think the problem is that we rarely want to know “can you meet this use case”, but rather “how well can you meet this use case”, and that’s hard to assess without putting your hands on the software.
    • bruce511 2y ago
      Which is to say that the quality of the sales person matters. If your sales department is staffed by people who got hired on Monday, and are on the phone by Friday, then frankly they're not worth much. I've seen the opposite though where sales folk know more about the software than support folk. They're equipped to help you with choices, but also understand limits and high-cost areas. Yes you absolutely can get Custom Reports, but we absolutely charge for that. And the data you're looking for is on this built-in report.... Dealing with a good salesperson, who knows their stuff, and understands that truth and trust are important, is an amazing thing.
• Scotrix 2y ago
  This story is for me a real painful death I have experienced way too many times, absolutely nuts. But then you find an open source solution which is in general better and can do everything you want (simply tested already with just a docker compose up) but for deployment you get hit hard by compliance who just checks the SOC2 certifications and wants a in-depth due diligence of the code since everyone in the world can theoretically change it. Then your manager asks how it can be so good if it's for free and open source. And of course, last but not least, your overloaded team in general not happy to support just another unpredictable piece of software... So it's the question to rather burn money and nerves with an awful SaaS offering and their endless and useless sales cycles and terrible and super expensive vendor-lock-ins or burn some money and nerves by utilising and running open source inhouse... So typically I prefer to chose for the open source option and especially if the SaaS option isn't allowing me easy and fast self-onboarding, meaningful testing periods and a predictable and transparent pricing. And then, if it get's widely adopted, I allocate some budget to support the authors and/or get some support plan (for more complex open source software) in place even though you most likely never need it...
• bityard 2y ago
  Oof. If I never have to endure another hard-selling enterprise vendor salescritter, it'll be too soon. Mat has really nailed the agony of the experience here.
• tptacek 2y ago
  You have to pay extra to get 12- (or 4-) hour support SLAs and SSO access because if you didn't, the entry level of the product would cost integer multiples more. The people that want those product features --- regardless of how much they cost (support: a fortune; a SOC-2 report: zero) --- subsidize the people who don't. If it helps: just look at the "bells-and-whistles" package with SSO and an SLA as the true price of the product. Nothing in technology is really cost-based pricing to begin with.
  • jwr 2y ago
    This. And to expand on the above: few people consider how much it actually costs to provide 12- or 4- hour support with a strict SLA. This pretty much means that the business needs to bear the full loaded cost of at least one additional employee. Now go divide that fully loaded cost (take the salary and multiply it by 2x, roughly, and I'm not quoting any numbers here to avoid stupid discussions about "but it costs less to hire a person in my area") by the number of customers that require these SLAs and see how much this needs to cost.
    • tptacek 2y ago
      Support is an example of an "enterprise" feature with a high cost basis. SSO is an example of an "enterprise" feature with almost zero cost basis. But in both cases, the cost is a sideshow. The real driver for the pricing of these features is market segmentation: the customers with high expectations of support, or a requirement to have SSO, strongly tend to be less price sensitive than the rest of customers. The fundamental goal of product pricing is to find ways to charge price-insensitive customers more than price-sensitive customers. Like, yes, you'd lose money offering 4-hour-SLA support to customers paying the entry-level price. But you could make that decision, and have part of your business model be subsidizing those customers. It depends on everything else in your model; how you acquire customers, what their lifetime value is, &c.
      • kuschku 2y ago
        Making SSO a premium feature isn't any different from the paid SSL of the 2000s. You'll reduce security and safety just to segment the market. And in my experience, SSO doesn't need to be expensive. SAML and Kerberos should be expensive, sure. But OIDC with standard seevices such as Google, GitHub, Okta or Keycloak should absolutely be part of the base package. Personally, I'll just build the open core version from source and add all the "enterprise" features like SSO, S3 and Prometheus metrics myself.
• SteveVeilStream 2y ago
  Against all of the advice in the world, I'm trying to set things up to avoid basically everything described in the article. It's tricky because the truth is that a lot of the tactics work and that is why companies implement them. A lot of investors also consider that process to be best-in-class and look for it as a sign of maturity. The counter approach is: - Make complete information available as transparently as possible and don't gate it. - Be forthcoming about weaknesses. Don't force prospects and customers to find them. - Ensure that when a prospect or customer does want to talk to someone, they immediately reach someone who can handle the problem or answer the question (no need for escalations.) - Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that and be sure that all AI agents immediately disclose that they are AI. - Offer flexible e-mail list subscription options (monthly, quarterly, annually, only release notes, etc.) - If the product is not a fit, try to offer something useful anyway such as a suggestion of another product that might be a better match for their needs. Value based pricing is one of the reasons why a lot of companies end up in these situations. Rather than setting a standard price, the company does a detailed investigation of the customer to try to find out how much value they will gain from using the product and then they set the price based on that determination. Although it maximizes revenue in theory, it is slow and invasive.
  • portaouflop 2y ago
    More power to you but in my experience - people don’t read your documentation - if they find one edge-case that is not covered by your product they concentrate all their energy on it even though the competitor product doesn’t even work for the happy path (but ofc they won’t learn that until too late) - you will have a person on the free tier who is not able to the simplest programming take up all the time of your technical support if you let them The rest (disclose usage of AI, offer multiple newsletters (imo unnecessary work), be upfront if it’s not a good fit) is very sensible and works in my experience. The first three will break your product - but maybe I’m just cynical and was holding it wrong all this time edit: I’m assuming you want to build some kind of investor fuelled unicorn - your approach probably will work for a single person slow but steady growth while you have other side income
    • 2y ago
• duxup 2y ago
  >I will then endure a series of demos showcasing functionality I’ll never use because I’m only here for one or two specific features. I've sat on a lot of sales calls and I get these feels. But when it comes to selling to people who are NOT the author, managers, execs, decision making architecture astronauts ... that long list of features and functionality really do seem to sell the product. Not that they'll use them...
• bhouston 2y ago
  I've been on both sides of this and it is so true.
• brudgers 2y ago
  The right person for the author’s role is a person who enjoys the process the author describes. Someone who wishes procurement reduced to online documentation and credit cards is going to hate their job if it requires engaging with high touch sales processes. Maybe they need a purchase team partner - the analog of the salesperson in a salesperson-sales engineer team.
  • Hizonner 2y ago
    ... because it's unthinkable that the "high touch sales processes", which add zero value and suck for everybody other than whoever's taking home the huge commission, should change.
    • Rastonbury 2y ago
      The author describes the unhappy flow when there is nothing he wants to buy, he should have just stonewalled them or removed himself from the mailing list when the feature he needed is not there. If the feature is there and he want it, the story goes totally differently. But both cases are going to start with a call. The big mistake here is taking the call or giving sales a whiff of your interest given the volume/commission model, a smart salesperson (unfortunately somewhat rare) is going to simply move on, saving time on both sides. A more happy flow exists, author signs up for trial, he can't find or is unsure if feature exists during trial or reading docs, he asks sales/sales engineer where it is, salespeople show him or speak to PM to get him a timeline, later the feature he needs goes into beta and sales reconnects and demos, starts trial using beta. Sales helps draft the internal proposal/implementation plan to convince his boss and the hundreds of others needed for the sale. They buy when it goes GA.
  • kuschku 2y ago
    On the one hand, business majors are always talking efficiency, optimizing the placement of soap dispensers to shave every possible second off the bathroom break of workers. Yet at the same time, when faced with a complaint about excessive unnecessary sales processes, the solution is to add more people.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  > I start to wonder if I should’ve just reverse-engineered your tool myself. Ever since I started taking this advice instead of going through a sales process (I really only need this inflicted on me a single time in my life), I have been a lot happier. We also stick the counter at around $50k saved per year for applications that are essentially fancy crud forms. The best part is it bypasses all the complicance requirements, since if it’s written in your company it can’t possibly be bad.
• efitz 2y ago
  This article rings so true. There are lots of ways to make a lot of money selling a service. The best way IMO is to build a service that is easy to integrate and customize, delights your customers, and has a simple pricing model. There should be no surprises in any of these traits. Customers will be loyal because you’ve made their lives easier - you didn’t just “solve their problem”, you solved their problem in a way that doesn’t require them to change anything else about their business to adapt to you. The other way involves minimum viable products, basic features only available at top tier pricing, only have a single way to integrate and no meaningful customization. You make your product a black box that your customers can only escape with Herculean effort and lots of begging on many time consuming phone calls. It seems like startup culture somehow funnels everyone into the second category.
  • tptacek 2y ago
    If you're not deeply steeped in startup business model lore, the search query you want here is [product led growth], the very-fashionable trend of go-to-market and business models that admit your preferred way of marketing products. Tailscale, Slack, Notion, and Dropbox (at least, early Dropbox) are all big examples of PLG startups. This model works especially well when your early (pre-series-B go-to-market) is not big companies (say, 1000+ employees).
  • dilyevsky 2y ago
    Your first model works for some products/industries doesn’t work with others where second model works better. Generally, medium/large businesses have long, drawn out processes for buying things coupled with politics and limited pool of folks with purchasing power so your first model will almost never work if you’re selling to those
• jwr 2y ago
  What is amazing for me is that these sales tactics actually work, because many people want to be sold to in this way. Do the direct approach with no bullsh*t, instant demo, meaningful trial period, easy onboarding, etc and lose those customers that expect the usual sales ride. Source: I do the direct approach.
  • tptacek 2y ago
    Right; the thing here is: the author obviously knows the game (because they wink knowingly at it repeatedly). Given that: why are they ever getting on the phone with a sales engineer? You can just delete the emails.
    • kassner 2y ago
      If you don’t, eventually your VP will hear that you are lacking such tool that they will tell you to deal with vendors X and Y, even if they don’t fix your problem. At least by proactively going after it, you can pick vendor Z, which despite having the same terrible process, at least it addresses your problems (until the imaginary limits apply).
  • makeitdouble 2y ago
    These tactics work when the sales get access to the manager or director first, close the deal, and have low level people manage the aftermath. In the case described where a technical person is shielding the final decision makers, it's more of a gamble and will often fail.
    • fuzzfactor 2y ago
      So true. At the same time you can make a career out of being persuasive enough in person to close deals that could not be done any other way. These are not always mutually exclusive.
• UltraSane 2y ago
  At its core sales = harassment
• nraynaud 2y ago
  10 years after I left a company, new relic still calls me twice a year in the hope of selling something there.
• pram 2y ago
  Recently my team was doing a PoC on some new software and we connected it to one of our hosted databases. Not even an hour later the vendor for that database pinged me on Slack and was like “hey we saw you connected that thing, you know we have stuff that does that too would LOVE to set up a call” I know thats their job but goddamn, this kind of competitive spying is scummy af lol
  • m463 2y ago
    Years ago my friend put me as a reference on his resume. I got a call asking about him, but then ending with... are you looking at other opportunities? ...and I realized it was the recruiter, probably not interested in my friend so much as recruiting off the reference list. it's everywhere.
    • akudha 2y ago
      I once got a call to recruit me to the company that I was working for! Recruiters are worse than used car salesmen, it is just volume and quantity for them. And I am not even some hot shot engineer, just mediocre run of the mill dev
• smashah 2y ago
  I scream into the void after reading this post: "Please give even a 10th of that money you wasted on that SaaS to the maintainer(s) of the OSS alternative, even while you're trialing it internally!"
  • Nezghul 2y ago
    Would never happen. I was working for a company which for C++ projects used open source CMake package manager called Hunter. Thousands of packages (ours and third-party) for multiple platforms were causing building and linking problems constantly. Literally every day devops would waste hours on those issues. Many of the problems come from our not-understanding of the build processes and some were Hunter bugs so we were happy to jump to every new release. And one day the Hunter maintainer make announcement that he will abandon the project if someone would not help him financially. I pointed this out to my manager. He said that it's very unfortunate but he would need to talk to his manager who would need to talk to next manager and so on, some finance department would need to allocate funds for that but they would not do that without the approval of some other department and so on. So my manager said we must wait, see what Hunter maintainer would do and if he really abandon the project then we will think what next. Ruslo (Hunter maintaner) abandoned the project so I told my manager that we should simply contact Ruslo and try to hire him as he clearly would be the right person to solve all our building problems. Guess what... My manager would need to contact his manager and so on, and so on, so nothing was done.
    • smashah 2y ago
      Truly a sad state of affairs. Please check out thanks.dev to possibly get your company to start paying OSS Devs that they rely on. (No affiliation)
• selcuka 2y ago
  I agree with most of this, except the last part. It is true that CodeSquish probably works better than the paid product, but it only solves 20% of the problems that the paid product does. You are in the lucky group of 5-10% of all people that the paid product targets whose requirements are fully covered with that 20%. For the remaining 90%, it's either the paid product, or another free/open source product which may or may not exist. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but in general, commercial products are bloated for a reason. People really need 20% of the functionality as the saying goes, but everybody needs a different 20%.
  • munchler 2y ago
    I'm currently looking at purchasing a commercial product because CodeSquish has a fatal error and hasn't been updated in two years because the guy who maintains it has vanished off the face of the earth.
    • Symbiote 2y ago
      Have you considered paying a developer to fix the bug? It might be less hassle.
      • selcuka 2y ago
        > the guy who maintains it has vanished off the face of the earth How would you pay such a person?
        • Symbiote 2y ago
          It's open source — many developers would be willing to take on the work. Start by asking those who have contributed before, and any that use the software (if there's a forum, mailing list, Reddit sub etc). If it's on GitHub look at any forks.
      • jagged-chisel 2y ago
        That sounds like Software Product Management and how many businesses can handle that?
• Suppafly 2y ago
  >“Hey, I saw you were checking out our service. Let me know if you have any questions!” I had this happen for a service we already had implemented at my company. I created a new account just to make sure it was working because we had a few say the site or login was being blocked by our security software. Even after I deleted the new account I was getting emails from them.
• stackghost 2y ago
  I pride myself on never having paid for, recommended, or endorsed any product or service with "Contact Us For a Quote"-pricing. I have no desire to be in your fucking sales funnel.
  • datavirtue 2y ago
    You aren't the customer.
    • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      I'm in the same boat as the GP, and while I'm clearly also not the customer, that's not necessarily reflective of how much money is being forgone by missing out on my business. Oh well, their loss and the competition's gain.
      • staticautomatic 2y ago
        I am the customer I refuse to engage with 99.9% of companies who have a pricing page that says “contact us” for every tier.
        • satvikpendem 2y ago
          Then...you are not the customer. The customer for Contact Us is vastly different than the customer that can enter their credit card details and gain immediate access.
          • staticautomatic 2y ago
            I honestly don’t understand what you mean. Is it that I don’t have the money or that I’m not dumb enough to “Contact Us”?
            • dpkirchner 2y ago
              As far as I can tell it's tautological: you're not the customer because you're not clicking the link because you're not the customer, etc.
• ninju 2y ago
  I just learned that CodeSquish is a real product https://www.codesquish.com/ https://www.codesquish.com/
  • tjpnz 2y ago
    Book a call!
• benjaminwootton 2y ago
  This is very true and funny. I’d make a few points though: 1) It may turn out that a lot of this is necessary in order to sell B2B and keep half of the software industry going. The business on the sell side might need to reach out multiple times, engage a sales engineer, help you align all the decision makers etc otherwise it simply wouldn’t get done. Buyers are so busy and selling to a big company is so complex that some of this is just a necessary evil for B2B commerce to continue. 2) Imagine if companies were actually better at buying. They spend $millions on enterprise bloatware when startups can literally produce something 10x better at a 10th of the cost. If they were easier to sell to then we could all have nice things without this madness. I agree that the OPs experience is soul destroying, but clients could help themselves a little and end up with more money in their pockets and better tech.
  • tossandthrow 2y ago
    > something 10x better at a 10th of the cost SLAs and contractual assurances are very hard to deliver at 1% cost. Enterprise products is just another class, and it has nothing to do with the product.
    • leoedin 2y ago
      Having had the misfortune of navigating a particularly ineffective large corporate purchasing machine, this resonates. Nobody in the chain is interested in outcomes, they’re interested in completed process. The value of something to the business is totally uninteresting to a purchasing person. They care about contractual arrangements, compliance with all sorts of poorly thought out ethics agreements, and making sure that all the process has been followed. The result is far more money spent for far less outcome than if we’d just got a credit card and bought something. There’s a whole ecosystem of companies which are terrible at actually solving problems, but know exactly how to meet all the requirements of a large corporate purchasing department. It’s depressing.
      • Plasmoid 2y ago
        I once had a small discussion with senior leadership that it was easier for me to spend $100k worth of engineering time on a project than to purchase a $1000 license.
• cco 2y ago
  I tell people selling devtools that if you find yourself on a sales call with a single software engineer, something has probably gone wrong (as described in this article). However if you're on a call with two EMs, a couple engineers, a security engineer, and a product manager, you're on the right call. A single engineer very likely wants a PLG (product led growth) experience, sign up, read some docs, make a few API calls, and then punch in a credit card when they're ready. But you don't sell a $500k deal (usually) without some phone calls and a deck.
• EGreg 2y ago
  And now, I’m stuck on your mailing list forever. I get notifications about all your new releases and launches, which forces me to make a choice every time: • “Obviously, I don’t care about this anymore.” • “But what if they’ve finally added the feature I wanted?” This gives me an idea... how about reaching out to developers and ask them what their experience was, which features they'd like the most, and/or subscribe to when they will be launched, to be the first to try them and give feedback? Even this guy would go for that.
• EGreg 2y ago
  Not wanting to admit ignorance, I’ll make up a reason on the spot. Later, in the bathroom, I’ll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it’s maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo. I've built this exact open source platform, for "nearly everything you'll ever need" for full-stack web apps (from profiles, to access, control, notifications, payments, credits, even videoconferencing and livestreaming). You can build your own Facebook or Twitter pretty quickly. Here it is: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform But I haven't really marketed it, at all. Almost no one on HN has heard of it. Only if someone takes the time to poke around will they be impressed, start to use it, etc. Even more than that, I started a new GitHub project recently as I plan to release v2.0 after many years. So all the stars on the original project are not even on the new one. (The old one is still on my github.) And here is the documentation: https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide So this is the extreme opposite ... I haven't started trying to market it or sell it to the world or even attract developers to it. But it's there if someone bothers to look.
• caseydm 2y ago
  "Hey I got some great news. Got 20 minutes for a call later today?"
• icameron 2y ago
  Everyone has their price, and mine is a minimum $50 gift card if you want me to have an introductory call with your team. Also accept basketball tickets, steak dinner, or an Apple Watch. I’ll always say we’re considering your product. I am the technical decision maker and report to the CIO. Thank you for the introduction, I’ll reply one more time yo follow up with a reason why we can’t move forward (most of the time)
• datavirtue 2y ago
  OMG, this is us.
• system2 2y ago
  We are an IT company providing services such as VoIP. RingCentral is our preferred VoIP service, they are great but I am about to switch to another provider very soon unless they stop calling me with their Filipino call centers asking for super long calls. I can't even hang up they are extremely aggressive. I told them nearly 20 times not to call me, I know their services, and I can call them if help is needed. No, they must have a call and must find a time. If anyone is reading from RingCentral: you are seriously pushing your customers away with these shitty calls. Just stop harassing your own customers.
• tpoacher 2y ago
  > After wasting precious moments of my life with an LLM that links me to the same useless documentation, I’ll finally be allowed to email a real person This too is already rapidly becoming utopia-land.
• oefrha 2y ago
  A big company assigns me a new account rep every ~six months, each time resulting in an email from the new account rep introducing themself and trying to schedule a call to “learn more about me needs” (read: upsell me). Not sure if they intentionally rotate account reps without interactions just to have a reason to email. These emails usually promptly go to trash, but the one I got this week grabbed my attention because they somehow invented a new name for me. Took me a while to realize my email on file is <their-company-abbrevation>@<mydomain> and they picked a name similar to <their-company-abbreviation>. But every previous account rep at least knew my name. What the actual fuck.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• mongol 2y ago
  Pretty hilarious. Both accurate and entertaining. Now I also want to use CodeSquish.
• riiii 2y ago
  > And now, I’m stuck on your mailing list forever. Companies, don't do this. After I've attempted unsubscription, I flag every single email from you as spam.
• rednafi 2y ago
  This is true in general, and despite not being in a position to make big sales happen, I still get at least 3–4 requests per week for these kinds of calls. I understand that in a world dominated by noise, you have to create more noise to get attention, but my time is limited. Plus, when salespeople ask how I’m using their product, I need to prepare because, most of the time, I don’t remember how I was using it. That project isn’t the center of my world. That said, I still accept calls from people I know in the field. I recently had two calls with Glauber Costa, the founder of Turso, and in the process of scheduling another one with the Pydantic Logfire folks. But none of them are sales reps, and they’re usually fun to talk to, so I’m happy to do it.
• solatic 2y ago
  > Chances are, I signed up to see if your tool can do one specific thing. If it doesn’t, I’ve already mentally moved on and forgotten about it. So, when you email me, I’m either actively evaluating whether to buy your product, or I have no idea why you’re reaching out. Let me get this straight: author clicks around on B2B SaaS with un-focused sales models (both the heavy account rep / sales engineer sales-driven process, and the free trial product-driven process) because they want One Small Feature that's too big to build themselves (but still small enough for someone else to build and open-source, sustainably), knowing that expressing interest to purchase will result in an Enterprise Sales Cycle yet being pissed off that it resulted in an Enterprise Sales Cycle? Methinks the author doth protest too much to cover up their own misaligned expectations. If you want One Small Feature then it's either covered by the product-led pricing (i.e. credit card based, no Enterprise Sales Cycle) or it's not. And if it's not, if you have to click a "Contact Us" button, which, being an industry veteran, you know will launch an Enterprise Sales Cycle, then maybe what you're asking for isn't really One Small Feature, because you're going to pay Enterprise Pricing for your One Small Feature, and so maybe this isn't the vendor to get it from. The Enterprise Sales Cycle exists because the number of people who can put Enterprise Pricing (~$25+k/year) on a corporate credit card, without any internal checks, is close to zero. The Enterprise Sales Cycle exists precisely to align the many stakeholders whose alignment is necessary to sign larger deals. If you have a corporate card, are looking for a solution that you can buy independently, then you are not in the vendor's market and you're doing everybody a huge disservice by trying to force a deal anyway. Go find a vendor that actually targets your market segment.
  • staticautomatic 2y ago
    I agree but as a customer it’s still worth asking. I recently asked a salesperson if I could get access to some enterprise features on a PAYG plan because I literally couldn’t go through the procurement motions fast enough for my needs. They said yes and just had an engineer toggle some feature flags on my account.
  • mvdtnz 2y ago
    Have you never interacted with companies like Datadog or LaunchDarkly? If you think signing up for the cheap plan will stop the Enterprise Sales Calls you're dead wrong.
• junto 2y ago
  I can’t help but feel like one of the author’s last experiences was with Okta or Auth0.
• dt3ft 2y ago
  He never considers or mentions donating to that open source tool he went with. Funny.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• kookamamie 2y ago
  This same pattern is replicated in LinkedIn, where depending on your position in a company, you get flooded with connection requests to only sell you stuff. I hate it from the bottom of my heart.
• kashyapc 2y ago
  I know the author says this for humor and effect: "[...] I'll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it's maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo." The poor, single recluse discovers one Tuesday afternoon that your company makes 100 million dollars a year with "CodeSquish", while not contributing anything back. He silently questions his life choices—or, shall we say, licensing choices—while feeding chickens on his Vermont farm.
  • Asooka 2y ago
    Thinking about it, maybe he should start sending invoices to the larger companies. If they're reasonably small and for a product the company does use, finance will just pay them without questioning a thing.
    • kashyapc 2y ago
      "CodeSquish" in this article is a fictional example! Edit: from a quick search, there is a SaaS company called "CodeSquish". I haven't checked if it's also an open source project.
      • fuzzfactor 2y ago
        >there is a SaaS company called "CodeSquish" Sometimes nobody could just make this stufff up . . .
  • ozim 2y ago
    Realistically it doesn’t work like that often. Most of OSS or even SaaS stuff is useful in F500 company but not more like convenience and not being able to put value on it. This also you can see in article even SaaS vendors have to make shit up to seem more valuable for big companies and use value based pricing by calling people and trying to push BS on them. I also don’t see companies running much OSS systems as reselling them because then usually they rather build their crappy one like article mentions because they want to own whole IP. Amazon pulling it of on Elastic was mostly because Elastic built a brand - they are not pulling this off on a random project. They might use some project to run their infra but attribution of value to a specific lib or project is super hard. Then also Amazon is making money because it is Amazon not because they use Linux kernel. It is hard to wrap head around anyway ;)
• xlii 2y ago
  > Since your mailing list is apparently the only place on Earth to find out if Platform A has added Feature X (because putting release notes somewhere accessible is apparently too hard), … Won’t work for every product, but I’m pushing through with my prototype and that (i.e. release notes) is something to consider.
• b800h 2y ago
  Immediately remove yourself from the list with: "I'm a European citizen. Please erase me from your list as per the GDPR"
• keybits 2y ago
  I find Apple's 'Hide My Email' service invaluable for avoiding the first part of this problem: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078 Very easy to deactivate an address when I decide I don't want to hear from them anymore.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Simon_O_Rourke 2y ago
  > If I really, really care about your product, I’ll contact the 300 people I need on my side to get it approved. This process will take at least a month. Why? Who knows—it just always does. If I work for a Fortune 500 company, it’ll take a minimum of three months, assuming everything goes perfectly. This pretty much chimes with my experiences getting anything that costs more than my boss can readily expense. Purchase agreements in large companies are pure hell.
  • bjackman 2y ago
    Also sometimes for things that cost amounts I could easily expense I've been going through a purchase order process for a bunch of patch cables and adapters so cheap I could even expense them without a receipt. It's taking months. They're being delivered by air freight. My heart and soul are aching.
    • einsteinx2 2y ago
      Honest question, why are you going through that purchase order process if you could easily expense them?
      • FireBeyond 2y ago
        Our company has a policy that regardless of expense and approval limits, certain things must always be done a certain way - "libraries that will end up in our software", and other things that the business "may depend on" - not saying that's the case here, but I can see it.
        • einsteinx2 2y ago
          Ah ok yeah makes sense, what a PITA.
• nubinetwork 2y ago
  Oracle won't stop emailing me, or give me a place to unsubscribe... all because I wanted to try one of their VPSes on a 30-day trial like 5-10 years ago, that I never even used. They called me after the 30 days and I even told them I didn't use it. Yet they still insist on emailing me every 3 weeks about some security policy junk.
• bilinguliar 2y ago
  Being respectful to your SaaS users attention and time proves to be detrimental to your business. The choice is to be deferential and poor, or bold and reach. So far I am poor.
• gigatexal 2y ago
  I had an argument on LinkedIn about something data engineering related and the guy literally sent me a DM with his calendly and said pick a time for us to continue the debate. What. The. Actual. $&%#?
• neilv 2y ago
  Accurate and nicely written article. There's a worse angle I've seen on the same story: A different engineer, who was already running the good open source solution successfully with their team, heard the other engineer had an enterprise sales assault dumped on them, for some load of trash, and so tried to sound the alarm, but it was already out of the other engineer's hands, because upper subtrees of the org chart had already signed on with political capital (and in a couple cases, it's somehow become an express personal performance metric that they spend the company's money on this specific product). So all alternatives are blocked, everyone has to wait the next couple months for the sale to finalize, and then another month for IT to set up the SSO and databases, and forced to migrate from working solutions to garbage. Then eventually the contract doesn't get renewed, with appropriate face-saving for those who pushed it through, but half the people upon whom it was inflicted have already found jobs in better companies, a quarter got PIP'd or stalled careers for being sabotaged by the trash, and the remaining quarter will mostly be laid off next year. Just say NO to enterprise sales. The only thing worse than having to do enterprise sales to sell your own product, is being the employees forced to use the likely bad purchasing decisions of other enterprise sales.
• LorenDB 2y ago
  To all people providing business services (email security software comes to mind as an example), PLEASE for the love of God provide a self-service portal so I can buy your product without having to talk to your salespeople.
• Sytten 2y ago
  Someone needs to write the other side of the story as a small startup owner having to deal with big businesses. It should feature: - Beeing asked for demos when they could have tried your free tier/trial and you have decent doc (They always prefer that you waste your time then asking someone on thier side to review) - Being used a price/feature comparison with your enterprise competitor just so they can get a better deal on their renewal (no stupid they never intended to change) - Having to fill endless security questionnaire without being sure you can even sell to them (what you dont love filling 100+ questions at 11PM on a Friday???). - Having to deal 3-6 months with procurement, often with one or two third party software resellers which only cares if he can make its margin (hello there CDW, no I wont lower my price 15% so you can make money) - Receiving the money 60-90 days after the deal close while you struggle with cashflow and you had to provide the service (and receiving a call from my bank rep to see why my margin and CC is full). I am sure I can think of more things. That is why I will absolutely charge an arm and leg to big businesses.
  • turkeywelder 2y ago
    This is why we have a flat "we won't fill in your forms" rule and only take card payments. We've lost some clients because of it sure, but we're a small team so it's fine. I think being up front about what you will and won't do really helps. They still ask for procurement forms and stuff but we can at least deny it and set an expectation. https://help.timetastic.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003288769-Supplier-forms-IT-questionnaires https://help.timetastic.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003288769...
  • neilv 2y ago
    And that's for selling a fixed off-the-shelf solution. If you have something that needs to be a bit bespoke, or is an early-startup collaboration with a pilot customer as you refine and prove PMF... (and the customer is a real company, not just some other startups in your investors' portfolios)... and it impacts more than one very small team there... even if you already have the ear of their CEO... brace yourself for months of countless meetings with "stakeholders" of numerous departments. Which, as a nimble early startup, impresses upon you why, in theory, you should have a massive innovation advantage over large, lumbering businesses, who can't seem to do anything. Except you made the mistake of needing the buy-in of a large, lumbering business who can't seem to do anything. Now most of their barriers to movement are also yours. :)
• redsparrow 2y ago
  When working as the head of engineering at a start-up, I would get dragged into this process on the sales side. I would sit there cringing at all of the bonkers crap the Sales Engineer or Solutions Architect was spewing at the customer. The senior technical person from the customer would ask me a couple hard questions and I would be pretty honest in my responses. Afterwards our Sales Success Customer Account Manager would be unhappy with me, but at least I wouldn't have to go to another one of those meetings for a while. The deal would go ahead anyway because our management had convinced their management to make the purchase even though what we were offering didn't really meet their needs. They would only need to pay us if we actually delivered so they weren't taking a lot of risk, other than wasting their time, and we got to make a multi-million dollar "booking." In the end I would either get along with their senior technical person pretty well because we could be honest with each other, or else they would despise me for being unable to deliver what my sales people had promised (Hi Sven!).
• silexia 2y ago
  Side note - working at Google once used to be a sign of competence, but I would never hire anyone but has worked there in the last 6 years as all of the products have degraded significantly.
• fancyfredbot 2y ago
  The frustration of attempting to buy anything in a large organisation is so great for both sides that it prohibits the purchase of cheap tools to help with small jobs. They might have saved time if you can buy them in a few hours but since it will take months nobody will bother.