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 b

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).