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I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay

I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things. I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.

sh34r 11mo ago
> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.
- pooper 11mo ago
  > You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime. Does segmentation also count as dynamic pricing? -- The IT guy at Podunk Lutheran College has no money: Gratis. The IT guy at a medium-sized real estate agency has some money: $500. The IT guy at a Fortune 100 company has tons of money: $50,000. https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/
  - transcriptase 11mo ago
    The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect. The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or research lab has is generally publicly available information that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers and companies that scrape the websites of major granting agencies. All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations. The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.
    - lokar 11mo ago
      A group of research universities should start a non-profit co-op to produce this for them. Getting just the university of California should be enough critical mass.
      - xmcqdpt2 11mo ago
        Depends on the product. Some products just have a single supplier for the whole world over, because they are extremely specialized. It's not uncommon though for eg departments to have common equipment that they negotiate together.
  - Terr_ 11mo ago
    Not parent poster, but I think a more practical approach is to ban secret discriminatory pricing. If everybody can see the prices that would be quoted in other circumstances, that exerts a strong moderating force against abuse. It won't help you if there's a monopoly, but I consider that a separate problem needing separate solutions.
  - sh34r 11mo ago
    While I can certainly think of ways in which ordinary segmentation can be stretched beyond the limits of what’s reasonable, the example you give is categorically different. In your example, you’re paying extra for additional capabilities. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a nonlinear increase in cost with the number of seats. Two companies buy 500 seats and pay the same price. What I object to is some sales bro deciding I should pay 5x more for those same licenses because of who I am, what I look like, where I’m from, etc. It’s absolutely repulsive. Why can’t you simply provide a fair service at a fair price and stop playing these fuck-fuck games? You’re making a profit on this sale either way. Stop trying to steal my profit margin. Instead of trying to scam me by abusing information asymmetry, why not use your sales talents to upsell me on additional or custom services, once you’ve demonstrated value? Honest and reliable vendors generally get continued (and increasing) business. Conversely, these Broadcom/private-equity/mafia tactics generally have me running for the exits ASAP. Spite is one hell of a motivator.
- xboxnolifes 11mo ago
  Pricing tiers are a form of dynamic pricing. Service free tiers basically couldn't exist without dynamic pricing, as they are subsidized by the paying tiers.
- nicbou 11mo ago
  Certain purchases (like health insurance in my country) should be a conversation, because the options are fiendishly complex and the attributes people typically use for comparison are wrong. The consequences are lifelong.
  - Hendrikto 11mo ago
    But not a conversation to a sales rep who will just push whatever gives them the largest commission.
  - sceptic123 11mo ago
    I thought thees things were complex on purpose to make it hard for people to easily understand and compare so you have to speak to a sales person who can do the upselling
    - nicbou 11mo ago
      Nope. I built a calculator for that last year and ooooh boy. Now I pipe half the requests to a human because of all the possible mistakes a person can make. It's crazy complicated. Finding that human is also hard because of the perverse incentives to sell more lucrative products.
      - sceptic123 11mo ago
        That's my point, you need to be a specialist to understand it, but the specialists are incentivised to upsell you. A simpler product would be better for consumers, but won't happen because there are industries (and a lot of lobbying) built up around keeping the money train rolling.
        nicbou 11mo ago
        Not really. Some things are just complex.
  - cortesoft 11mo ago
    Every time I go to a presentation about the health care options I have, it ends up just being the representative reading off a slide with the actual information. All the information I need is in print. I have never received a single piece of valuable information that wasn’t easier to get just reading the docs myself.
AznHisoka 11mo ago
You are also a developer though, and developers are notorious for wanting self serve. Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.
- dpkirchner 11mo ago
  Sure, and they should have that option. But in my experience business-folks ask techies to evaluate services all the time, and ideally we can just start out in the low-/no-touch tier to feel things out. If that tier isn't available, us techs might just try a different service.
  - timr 11mo ago
    The kind of products hidden behind sales calls are generally the sort where the opinion of IC-level tech staff is next to irrelevant. With these kinds of products, the purchase decision is being made at a group level, the contract sizes are large, and budgetary approvals are required. It’s a snowball the size of a house, and it started rolling down the mountain months (or years) before it got to your desk. Literally nobody cares if you buy a single license or not, and if you (personally) refuse to try it because it doesn’t have self-service, you’ll be ignored for being the bad stereotype of an “engineer”, or worse. About the only time you’ll be asked to evaluate such a product as an IC is when someone wants an opinion about API support or something equivalent. And if you refuse to do it, the decision-makers will just find the next guy down the hall who won’t be so cranky.
    - TheTaytay 11mo ago
      I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a “small/medium” startup can easily sign contracts for single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople really do care about commissions at those price points. A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software. Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out of the gate, in spite of also supporting very large orgs. In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and meetings and opaque pricing. It’s true that complicated software needs more talking, but there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a meeting. The sales department won’t stand for it though.
Workaccount2 11mo ago
The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field: 1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.
- the_snooze 11mo ago
  Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with tech...c'mon guys, get on it Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.
    - wlesieutre 11mo ago
      The crappy apps that replaced parking meters are the people who disrupted the existing market with tech
  - prasadjoglekar 11mo ago
    There's also the unfortunate stick of a much larger parking ticket that is even more trouble to contest.
  - CamperBob2 11mo ago
    (Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway. There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.
brightball 11mo ago
It depends on the environment. If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well. If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.
satvikpendem 11mo ago
You're not the target customer.
Arainach 11mo ago
Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free" source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused until you put massive gates on account creation.
- kijin 11mo ago
  Who said anything about free? OP wanted to pay Google $100.
  - Arainach 11mo ago
    OP wanted "instant self signup". That doesn't work when malicious actors are trying to register accounts with stolen credentials. The verification flow is required because of the amount of pressure from malicious actors against both free and newly-created accounts. "Give access now, cancel if validation fails" doesn't work either - so long as attackers can extract more than 0 value in that duration they'll flood you with bad accounts.
    - kijin 11mo ago
      Well, then give me self-signup with a clearly outlined verification flow that I can follow from A to Z. If you give me a form where I can upload my passport or enter a random number from a charge on my card, that counts as "instant" enough. On the other hand, if you really need to make me wait several days while you manually review my info, fine, just tell me upfront so I can stop wasting my time. And be consistent in your UI as to whether I'm verified yet. It's all about managing expectations. Besides, Amazon hands out reasonable quotas to newly created accounts without much hassle, and they seem to be doing okay. I won't believe for a second that trillion-dollar companies like Google don't know how to keep abuse at a manageable level without making people run in circles.
makeitdouble 11mo ago
> sales people > talk to people There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that. As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.
- Hendrikto 11mo ago
  > sales wanting direct contact with clients But what do the clients want? Your business should not be structured to make sales people happy.
arjie 11mo ago
That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a <$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on the product, of course.
biglyburrito 11mo ago
My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind. Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote. My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.
- eitally 11mo ago
  My current employer offers three tiers of licensing with clearly articulated prices & benefits (the lowest of which is free), but also offers a "Custom - let's talk" option because the reality is that sometimes customer situations are complicated and bespoke contracts make sense, but at least the published pricing provides directional guidance heading into a discussion. I think this is reasonable.
SecretDreams 11mo ago
> use their sales skills Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.
pmontra 11mo ago
If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and go is self preservation.
- hrimfaxi 11mo ago
  For enterprise deals.
kldg 11mo ago
Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it. Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.

sh34r 11mo ago

> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.

pooper 11mo ago
> You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime. Does segmentation also count as dynamic pricing? -- The IT guy at Podunk Lutheran College has no money: Gratis. The IT guy at a medium-sized real estate agency has some money: $500. The IT guy at a Fortune 100 company has tons of money: $50,000. https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/
- transcriptase 11mo ago
  The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect. The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or research lab has is generally publicly available information that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers and companies that scrape the websites of major granting agencies. All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations. The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.
  - lokar 11mo ago
    A group of research universities should start a non-profit co-op to produce this for them. Getting just the university of California should be enough critical mass.
    - xmcqdpt2 11mo ago
      Depends on the product. Some products just have a single supplier for the whole world over, because they are extremely specialized. It's not uncommon though for eg departments to have common equipment that they negotiate together.
- Terr_ 11mo ago
  Not parent poster, but I think a more practical approach is to ban secret discriminatory pricing. If everybody can see the prices that would be quoted in other circumstances, that exerts a strong moderating force against abuse. It won't help you if there's a monopoly, but I consider that a separate problem needing separate solutions.
- sh34r 11mo ago
  While I can certainly think of ways in which ordinary segmentation can be stretched beyond the limits of what’s reasonable, the example you give is categorically different. In your example, you’re paying extra for additional capabilities. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a nonlinear increase in cost with the number of seats. Two companies buy 500 seats and pay the same price. What I object to is some sales bro deciding I should pay 5x more for those same licenses because of who I am, what I look like, where I’m from, etc. It’s absolutely repulsive. Why can’t you simply provide a fair service at a fair price and stop playing these fuck-fuck games? You’re making a profit on this sale either way. Stop trying to steal my profit margin. Instead of trying to scam me by abusing information asymmetry, why not use your sales talents to upsell me on additional or custom services, once you’ve demonstrated value? Honest and reliable vendors generally get continued (and increasing) business. Conversely, these Broadcom/private-equity/mafia tactics generally have me running for the exits ASAP. Spite is one hell of a motivator.
xboxnolifes 11mo ago
Pricing tiers are a form of dynamic pricing. Service free tiers basically couldn't exist without dynamic pricing, as they are subsidized by the paying tiers.
nicbou 11mo ago
Certain purchases (like health insurance in my country) should be a conversation, because the options are fiendishly complex and the attributes people typically use for comparison are wrong. The consequences are lifelong.
- Hendrikto 11mo ago
  But not a conversation to a sales rep who will just push whatever gives them the largest commission.
- sceptic123 11mo ago
  I thought thees things were complex on purpose to make it hard for people to easily understand and compare so you have to speak to a sales person who can do the upselling
  - nicbou 11mo ago
    Nope. I built a calculator for that last year and ooooh boy. Now I pipe half the requests to a human because of all the possible mistakes a person can make. It's crazy complicated. Finding that human is also hard because of the perverse incentives to sell more lucrative products.
    - sceptic123 11mo ago
      That's my point, you need to be a specialist to understand it, but the specialists are incentivised to upsell you. A simpler product would be better for consumers, but won't happen because there are industries (and a lot of lobbying) built up around keeping the money train rolling.
      - nicbou 11mo ago
        Not really. Some things are just complex.
- cortesoft 11mo ago
  Every time I go to a presentation about the health care options I have, it ends up just being the representative reading off a slide with the actual information. All the information I need is in print. I have never received a single piece of valuable information that wasn’t easier to get just reading the docs myself.

AznHisoka 11mo ago

You are also a developer though, and developers are notorious for wanting self serve. Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.

dpkirchner 11mo ago
Sure, and they should have that option. But in my experience business-folks ask techies to evaluate services all the time, and ideally we can just start out in the low-/no-touch tier to feel things out. If that tier isn't available, us techs might just try a different service.
- timr 11mo ago
  The kind of products hidden behind sales calls are generally the sort where the opinion of IC-level tech staff is next to irrelevant. With these kinds of products, the purchase decision is being made at a group level, the contract sizes are large, and budgetary approvals are required. It’s a snowball the size of a house, and it started rolling down the mountain months (or years) before it got to your desk. Literally nobody cares if you buy a single license or not, and if you (personally) refuse to try it because it doesn’t have self-service, you’ll be ignored for being the bad stereotype of an “engineer”, or worse. About the only time you’ll be asked to evaluate such a product as an IC is when someone wants an opinion about API support or something equivalent. And if you refuse to do it, the decision-makers will just find the next guy down the hall who won’t be so cranky.
  - TheTaytay 11mo ago
    I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a “small/medium” startup can easily sign contracts for single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople really do care about commissions at those price points. A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software. Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out of the gate, in spite of also supporting very large orgs. In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and meetings and opaque pricing. It’s true that complicated software needs more talking, but there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a meeting. The sales department won’t stand for it though.

Workaccount2 11mo ago

The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field: 1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.

the_snooze 11mo ago
Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with tech...c'mon guys, get on it Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.
  - wlesieutre 11mo ago
    The crappy apps that replaced parking meters are the people who disrupted the existing market with tech
- prasadjoglekar 11mo ago
  There's also the unfortunate stick of a much larger parking ticket that is even more trouble to contest.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  (Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway. There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.

brightball 11mo ago

It depends on the environment. If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well. If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.

satvikpendem 11mo ago

You're not the target customer.

Arainach 11mo ago

Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free" source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused until you put massive gates on account creation.

kijin 11mo ago
Who said anything about free? OP wanted to pay Google $100.
- Arainach 11mo ago
  OP wanted "instant self signup". That doesn't work when malicious actors are trying to register accounts with stolen credentials. The verification flow is required because of the amount of pressure from malicious actors against both free and newly-created accounts. "Give access now, cancel if validation fails" doesn't work either - so long as attackers can extract more than 0 value in that duration they'll flood you with bad accounts.
  - kijin 11mo ago
    Well, then give me self-signup with a clearly outlined verification flow that I can follow from A to Z. If you give me a form where I can upload my passport or enter a random number from a charge on my card, that counts as "instant" enough. On the other hand, if you really need to make me wait several days while you manually review my info, fine, just tell me upfront so I can stop wasting my time. And be consistent in your UI as to whether I'm verified yet. It's all about managing expectations. Besides, Amazon hands out reasonable quotas to newly created accounts without much hassle, and they seem to be doing okay. I won't believe for a second that trillion-dollar companies like Google don't know how to keep abuse at a manageable level without making people run in circles.

makeitdouble 11mo ago

> sales people > talk to people There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that. As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.

Hendrikto 11mo ago
> sales wanting direct contact with clients But what do the clients want? Your business should not be structured to make sales people happy.

arjie 11mo ago

That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a <$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on the product, of course.

biglyburrito 11mo ago

My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind. Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote. My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.

eitally 11mo ago
My current employer offers three tiers of licensing with clearly articulated prices & benefits (the lowest of which is free), but also offers a "Custom - let's talk" option because the reality is that sometimes customer situations are complicated and bespoke contracts make sense, but at least the published pricing provides directional guidance heading into a discussion. I think this is reasonable.

SecretDreams 11mo ago

> use their sales skills Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.

pmontra 11mo ago

If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and go is self preservation.

hrimfaxi 11mo ago
For enterprise deals.

kldg 11mo ago

Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it. Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.