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> 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 ema

> 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.
- solatic 2y ago
  Of course, and you're free to ignore the emails from whoever they assign to you as an account exec. Half the time, the account exec didn't even write the cold email themselves, it was some service that blasts the cold emails for them.

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.

solatic 2y ago
Of course, and you're free to ignore the emails from whoever they assign to you as an account exec. Half the time, the account exec didn't even write the cold email themselves, it was some service that blasts the cold emails for them.