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I'll tell you how not to do it. Require me to give you my contact information just to download something. Have sales people blow up my phone and/or email and i

I'll tell you how not to do it. Require me to give you my contact information just to download something. Have sales people blow up my phone and/or email and ignore polite brush-offs. Keep reaching out to me periodically with requests to have a meeting about how you product can help me. I don't have buying power, but I do have bitching power and your product will wind up getting bad-mouthed by the whole team eventually. And when the engineer asks us for recommendations, guess what we tell him? Lookin' at you, Veeam, AWS, and Keyence.

whstl 1y ago
Adding Auth0/Okta to the list. Funny enough I had buying power and budget for it, and was gonna ask a Senior engineer to look into it, but the calls got so crazy that I just soured on it.
- vipa123 1y ago
  Same experience
  - chairmansteve 1y ago
    Same. Very annoying and manipulative.
thewebguyd 1y ago
IT Manager here, and deal with this almost weekly at this point. I'll add to your list of how not to do it - ignore my brush-offs and start email blasting others on my team or within the company to get around me. Quick way to get your domain blocked all together. Also please don't make me sit through a demo just to get a quote. If I want a full demo I'll ask for it, and I need to know pricing first before even considering going any further. I've probably already researched your product, maybe even did a trial if available - I don't need to sit through any number of sales pitches, just give me the numbers.
- mnhnthrow34 1y ago
  I fairly recently got to switch sides on this. I never take sales calls or want to get on demos as a developer ... but I moved roles a bit and needed to join some calls with the reps at my company for a product I now manage. It has no public pricing. I was surprised by how much the people who show up for demos seemed to like them and have good relationships with their reps. They thank us for saving them a lot of time they would have spent reading docs and marketing materials to learn the specific things that applied to them, or for us talking about roadmap stuff they don't get to see in the public materials. Sometimes the price is a surprise to them and it needs a bit of context. Customers who are used to buying software this way seem to read between the lines really well and ask suitable questions about discounts or whatever, when they are surprised by pricing. Often we are able to make something work at a different price than the typical quote, or we can connect the dots so that the rationale is more clear, or the value requires some customization to be done. My reps tell me this sorta thing is difficult over email, that nobody makes $10k+ purchases without talking to somebody, so if we can't get you on a call the deal falls over. So I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the requirement for calls really, but I can understand why reps don't just throw quotes around without some conversation.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    Appreciate the other perspective. I'll even admit there's been cases where the demos have been useful and sparked other questions, but in those cases I hadn't heard of the product before or was coming in blind. Most of my cases now (and I may be an outlier), I'm looking at something because I both have a need and someone I know recommended it or uses it so I'm already familiar, but at that point it's not so much a sales process and more so "I already know I want this, and I already have the budget and approval, let's get this buying process over with as quick as possible."
  - chairmansteve 1y ago
    Are you selling to developers? In my experience, non developer audiences like demos. Developers tend to like to try things out on their own, maybe with a little tech support.
mooreds 1y ago
Love the idea of "bitching power"; basically anti-"word of mouth". Even if you make something freely available, your sales/marketing/GTM folks can hurt your company's name by being too aggressive. You should contact to people how they want to be contacted, not how you'd want to be contacted. It's a difficult incentive design problem though.
neilv 1y ago
I've seen some insanely obnoxious email saturation bombing from some SaaS marketing teams. One was emailing me every 5-15 minutes. Sometimes it could just be a rogue sales/marketing person. But other times it looks like it's probably blessed from the top, if not the startup-CEO personally setting the email marketing tool slider controls to maximum trashy level.
fijiaarone 1y ago
You're clearly not the type of person who makes buying decisions at a large company.
- spauldo 1y ago
  Found the Keyence sales rep! No, I'm the lead integrator at a small-to-medium-sized company. Which means when an engineer brings me in on a project, I have a decent amount of influence on the software and controls hardware we use. The customer may specify a PLC manufacturer or a particular SCADA system, but unless we're expanding an existing system we usually have a lot of leeway. I know this stuff better than the engineer does (that's my job, after all), so my recommendations are usually accepted.
arkh 1y ago
Add Microsoft products to the list. Requires a "professional account" just to register. And tend to refuse gmail accounts to create said microsoft professional account. So the 30 day trial period you could use to check what's possible and see if you can integrate their shit with your IT infrastructure? Not happening. And if it's a bother just to get to try your shit, I can't fathom how bad the rest of the experience can be so you can keep your AI enhanced CRM, ERP, Dataverse etc.
deleted 1y ago
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whstl 1y ago

Adding Auth0/Okta to the list. Funny enough I had buying power and budget for it, and was gonna ask a Senior engineer to look into it, but the calls got so crazy that I just soured on it.

vipa123 1y ago
Same experience
- chairmansteve 1y ago
  Same. Very annoying and manipulative.

thewebguyd 1y ago

IT Manager here, and deal with this almost weekly at this point. I'll add to your list of how not to do it - ignore my brush-offs and start email blasting others on my team or within the company to get around me. Quick way to get your domain blocked all together. Also please don't make me sit through a demo just to get a quote. If I want a full demo I'll ask for it, and I need to know pricing first before even considering going any further. I've probably already researched your product, maybe even did a trial if available - I don't need to sit through any number of sales pitches, just give me the numbers.

mnhnthrow34 1y ago
I fairly recently got to switch sides on this. I never take sales calls or want to get on demos as a developer ... but I moved roles a bit and needed to join some calls with the reps at my company for a product I now manage. It has no public pricing. I was surprised by how much the people who show up for demos seemed to like them and have good relationships with their reps. They thank us for saving them a lot of time they would have spent reading docs and marketing materials to learn the specific things that applied to them, or for us talking about roadmap stuff they don't get to see in the public materials. Sometimes the price is a surprise to them and it needs a bit of context. Customers who are used to buying software this way seem to read between the lines really well and ask suitable questions about discounts or whatever, when they are surprised by pricing. Often we are able to make something work at a different price than the typical quote, or we can connect the dots so that the rationale is more clear, or the value requires some customization to be done. My reps tell me this sorta thing is difficult over email, that nobody makes $10k+ purchases without talking to somebody, so if we can't get you on a call the deal falls over. So I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the requirement for calls really, but I can understand why reps don't just throw quotes around without some conversation.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  Appreciate the other perspective. I'll even admit there's been cases where the demos have been useful and sparked other questions, but in those cases I hadn't heard of the product before or was coming in blind. Most of my cases now (and I may be an outlier), I'm looking at something because I both have a need and someone I know recommended it or uses it so I'm already familiar, but at that point it's not so much a sales process and more so "I already know I want this, and I already have the budget and approval, let's get this buying process over with as quick as possible."
- chairmansteve 1y ago
  Are you selling to developers? In my experience, non developer audiences like demos. Developers tend to like to try things out on their own, maybe with a little tech support.

mooreds 1y ago

Love the idea of "bitching power"; basically anti-"word of mouth". Even if you make something freely available, your sales/marketing/GTM folks can hurt your company's name by being too aggressive. You should contact to people how they want to be contacted, not how you'd want to be contacted. It's a difficult incentive design problem though.

neilv 1y ago

I've seen some insanely obnoxious email saturation bombing from some SaaS marketing teams. One was emailing me every 5-15 minutes. Sometimes it could just be a rogue sales/marketing person. But other times it looks like it's probably blessed from the top, if not the startup-CEO personally setting the email marketing tool slider controls to maximum trashy level.

fijiaarone 1y ago

You're clearly not the type of person who makes buying decisions at a large company.

spauldo 1y ago
Found the Keyence sales rep! No, I'm the lead integrator at a small-to-medium-sized company. Which means when an engineer brings me in on a project, I have a decent amount of influence on the software and controls hardware we use. The customer may specify a PLC manufacturer or a particular SCADA system, but unless we're expanding an existing system we usually have a lot of leeway. I know this stuff better than the engineer does (that's my job, after all), so my recommendations are usually accepted.

arkh 1y ago

Add Microsoft products to the list. Requires a "professional account" just to register. And tend to refuse gmail accounts to create said microsoft professional account. So the 30 day trial period you could use to check what's possible and see if you can integrate their shit with your IT infrastructure? Not happening. And if it's a bother just to get to try your shit, I can't fathom how bad the rest of the experience can be so you can keep your AI enhanced CRM, ERP, Dataverse etc.

deleted 1y ago

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