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It works backwards too: If having to call me to get a price makes you move on, you wouldn't afford me anyway.

by reinhardt 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- tdawson 13y ago
  And the point is to appeal to multiple customer segments. You can always offer custom plans over the phone and advertise that option alongside the more affordable plans you display on your page.
pyre 13y ago
Well, I might have $10k - $20k/year to spend, but not have $100k/year to spend. This isn't the difference between someone looking at a $10k product with a $50 budget. Lots of time these Sales Rep Funnels are just there to put you in contact with a sales rep that will try to upsell you on anything that they can, even if you don't need it. [redacted] was such a company. We could not buy (well 'lease' as it's software) the product without agreeing to also purchase training sessions for end-users from them. Even trying to get developers to talk to technical people (so the product could be evaluated) had to be mediated by a sales person so that they could inject their pitches (and up-sells) whenever possible on the conference call. Edit: Pulling the name just to avoid possible issues. I'll just say that it was a company selling a data warehousing / business intelligence product that a company I worked for needed to use a small portion of to fulfill some contractual obligations (i.e. purchased a company, and needed to port their 100% Microsoft stack over to their 100% OSS stack while retaining feature parity for the acquired company's only customer -- a major Hollywood studio).
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  This is how my calls with Akamai usually go. The last one was how they tried to sell us ~$50K in DDOS prevention services that Cloudflare does for $200/month. Insert "Are you fing kidding me" face here during call
fotbr 13y ago
Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line, but they were the rubber-stamp variety once something was seen as necessary for the project. Many of those decisions were based on "here's a handful of options, there's others we can follow up on if none of these are satisfactory" conversations. Anyone that required contacting them for a ballpark estimate ended up in the second group, and as often as not were not even considered.
- lowkeykiwi 13y ago
  6 figure budgets and you'd cull by bullet points without talking to a sales rep? I always thought that online pricing was more for the $50/month/license models rather than the large scale corporates.
raverbashing 13y ago
"you wouldn't afford me anyway" Yes, and included in this price is the Sales person doing a sales pitch in site, the mountains of reports and price proposals, the hours of conference calls, the kickbacks to whoever makes the decisions and a nice margin so that the price can be negotiated And unless you're doing something really, really hard you're overpriced anyway

It works backwards too: If having to call me to get a price makes you move on, you wouldn't afford me anyway.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tdawson 13y ago
And the point is to appeal to multiple customer segments. You can always offer custom plans over the phone and advertise that option alongside the more affordable plans you display on your page.

pyre 13y ago

Well, I might have $10k - $20k/year to spend, but not have $100k/year to spend. This isn't the difference between someone looking at a $10k product with a $50 budget. Lots of time these Sales Rep Funnels are just there to put you in contact with a sales rep that will try to upsell you on anything that they can, even if you don't need it. [redacted] was such a company. We could not buy (well 'lease' as it's software) the product without agreeing to also purchase training sessions for end-users from them. Even trying to get developers to talk to technical people (so the product could be evaluated) had to be mediated by a sales person so that they could inject their pitches (and up-sells) whenever possible on the conference call. Edit: Pulling the name just to avoid possible issues. I'll just say that it was a company selling a data warehousing / business intelligence product that a company I worked for needed to use a small portion of to fulfill some contractual obligations (i.e. purchased a company, and needed to port their 100% Microsoft stack over to their 100% OSS stack while retaining feature parity for the acquired company's only customer -- a major Hollywood studio).

toomuchtodo 13y ago
This is how my calls with Akamai usually go. The last one was how they tried to sell us ~$50K in DDOS prevention services that Cloudflare does for $200/month. Insert "Are you fing kidding me" face here during call

fotbr 13y ago

Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line, but they were the rubber-stamp variety once something was seen as necessary for the project. Many of those decisions were based on "here's a handful of options, there's others we can follow up on if none of these are satisfactory" conversations. Anyone that required contacting them for a ballpark estimate ended up in the second group, and as often as not were not even considered.

lowkeykiwi 13y ago
6 figure budgets and you'd cull by bullet points without talking to a sales rep? I always thought that online pricing was more for the $50/month/license models rather than the large scale corporates.

raverbashing 13y ago

"you wouldn't afford me anyway" Yes, and included in this price is the Sales person doing a sales pitch in site, the mountains of reports and price proposals, the hours of conference calls, the kickbacks to whoever makes the decisions and a nice margin so that the price can be negotiated And unless you're doing something really, really hard you're overpriced anyway