Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me

The counter approach is: - Make complete information available as transparently as possible and don't gate it. - Be forthcoming about weaknesses. Don't force prospects and customers to find them. - Ensure that when a prospect or customer does want to talk to someone, they immediately reach someone who can handle the problem or answer the question (no need for escalations.) - Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that and be sure that all AI agents immediately disclose that they are AI. - Offer flexible e-mail list subscription options (monthly, quarterly, annually, only release notes, etc.) - If the product is not a fit, try to offer something useful anyway such as a suggestion of another product that might be a better match for their needs.

Value based pricing is one of the reasons why a lot of companies end up in these situations. Rather than setting a standard price, the company does a detailed investigation of the customer to try to find out how much value they will gain from using the product and then they set the price based on that determination. Although it maximizes revenue in theory, it is slow and invasive.

- Beeing asked for demos when they could have tried your free tier/trial and you have decent doc (They always prefer that you waste your time then asking someone on thier side to review)

- Being used a price/feature comparison with your enterprise competitor just so they can get a better deal on their renewal (no stupid they never intended to change)

- Having to fill endless security questionnaire without being sure you can even sell to them (what you dont love filling 100+ questions at 11PM on a Friday???).

- Having to deal 3-6 months with procurement, often with one or two third party software resellers which only cares if he can make its margin (hello there CDW, no I wont lower my price 15% so you can make money)

- Receiving the money 60-90 days after the deal close while you struggle with cashflow and you had to provide the service (and receiving a call from my bank rep to see why my margin and CC is full).

I am sure I can think of more things. That is why I will absolutely charge an arm and leg to big businesses.

There's a worse angle I've seen on the same story: A different engineer, who was already running the good open source solution successfully with their team, heard the other engineer had an enterprise sales assault dumped on them, for some load of trash, and so tried to sound the alarm, but it was already out of the other engineer's hands, because upper subtrees of the org chart had already signed on with political capital (and in a couple cases, it's somehow become an express personal performance metric that they spend the company's money on this specific product). So all alternatives are blocked, everyone has to wait the next couple months for the sale to finalize, and then another month for IT to set up the SSO and databases, and forced to migrate from working solutions to garbage. Then eventually the contract doesn't get renewed, with appropriate face-saving for those who pushed it through, but half the people upon whom it was inflicted have already found jobs in better companies, a quarter got PIP'd or stalled careers for being sabotaged by the trash, and the remaining quarter will mostly be laid off next year.

Just say NO to enterprise sales.

The only thing worse than having to do enterprise sales to sell your own product, is being the employees forced to use the likely bad purchasing decisions of other enterprise sales.

But then you find an open source solution which is in general better and can do everything you want (simply tested already with just a docker compose up) but for deployment you get hit hard by compliance who just checks the SOC2 certifications and wants a in-depth due diligence of the code since everyone in the world can theoretically change it. Then your manager asks how it can be so good if it's for free and open source. And of course, last but not least, your overloaded team in general not happy to support just another unpredictable piece of software...

So it's the question to rather burn money and nerves with an awful SaaS offering and their endless and useless sales cycles and terrible and super expensive vendor-lock-ins or burn some money and nerves by utilising and running open source inhouse...

So typically I prefer to chose for the open source option and especially if the SaaS option isn't allowing me easy and fast self-onboarding, meaningful testing periods and a predictable and transparent pricing.

And then, if it get's widely adopted, I allocate some budget to support the authors and/or get some support plan (for more complex open source software) in place even though you most likely never need it...

"[...] I'll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it's maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo."

The poor, single recluse discovers one Tuesday afternoon that your company makes 100 million dollars a year with "CodeSquish", while not contributing anything back. He silently questions his life choices—or, shall we say, licensing choices—while feeding chickens on his Vermont farm.

1) It may turn out that a lot of this is necessary in order to sell B2B and keep half of the software industry going. The business on the sell side might need to reach out multiple times, engage a sales engineer, help you align all the decision makers etc otherwise it simply wouldn’t get done. Buyers are so busy and selling to a big company is so complex that some of this is just a necessary evil for B2B commerce to continue.

2) Imagine if companies were actually better at buying. They spend $millions on enterprise bloatware when startups can literally produce something 10x better at a 10th of the cost. If they were easier to sell to then we could all have nice things without this madness.

I agree that the OPs experience is soul destroying, but clients could help themselves a little and end up with more money in their pockets and better tech.

Do the direct approach with no bullsh*t, instant demo, meaningful trial period, easy onboarding, etc and lose those customers that expect the usual sales ride.

Source: I do the direct approach.

The only product I really want to punch in credit card info and GO is commodity software (e.g. AWS EC2 or a domain registration service.

I think wires sometimes get crossed in pricing/sales models, where an enterprise product gets priced like commodity software ... but that's usually a sign the company is immature. There shouldn't be a sales team for software that costs 2-3 figures. Software costing 5-6+ figures absolutely requires people in the sales/onboarding process, because a big part of what I'm paying for is support.

This pretty much chimes with my experiences getting anything that costs more than my boss can readily expense. Purchase agreements in large companies are pure hell.

However if you're on a call with two EMs, a couple engineers, a security engineer, and a product manager, you're on the right call.

A single engineer very likely wants a PLG (product led growth) experience, sign up, read some docs, make a few API calls, and then punch in a credit card when they're ready. But you don't sell a $500k deal (usually) without some phone calls and a deck.

I have no desire to be in your fucking sales funnel.

Ever since I started taking this advice instead of going through a sales process (I really only need this inflicted on me a single time in my life), I have been a lot happier. We also stick the counter at around $50k saved per year for applications that are essentially fancy crud forms.

The best part is it bypasses all the complicance requirements, since if it’s written in your company it can’t possibly be bad.

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.

If anyone is reading from RingCentral: you are seriously pushing your customers away with these shitty calls. Just stop harassing your own customers.

Love, Oracle

There are lots of ways to make a lot of money selling a service. The best way IMO is to build a service that is easy to integrate and customize, delights your customers, and has a simple pricing model. There should be no surprises in any of these traits. Customers will be loyal because you’ve made their lives easier - you didn’t just “solve their problem”, you solved their problem in a way that doesn’t require them to change anything else about their business to adapt to you.

The other way involves minimum viable products, basic features only available at top tier pricing, only have a single way to integrate and no meaningful customization. You make your product a black box that your customers can only escape with Herculean effort and lots of begging on many time consuming phone calls.

It seems like startup culture somehow funnels everyone into the second category.

i wonder if there’s a world coming where the oss and the company become the same person.

It is true that CodeSquish probably works better than the paid product, but it only solves 20% of the problems that the paid product does. You are in the lucky group of 5-10% of all people that the paid product targets whose requirements are fully covered with that 20%.

For the remaining 90%, it's either the paid product, or another free/open source product which may or may not exist.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, but in general, commercial products are bloated for a reason. People really need 20% of the functionality as the saying goes, but everybody needs a different 20%.

This too is already rapidly becoming utopia-land.

I've built this exact open source platform, for "nearly everything you'll ever need" for full-stack web apps (from profiles, to access, control, notifications, payments, credits, even videoconferencing and livestreaming). You can build your own Facebook or Twitter pretty quickly.

Here it is: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

But I haven't really marketed it, at all. Almost no one on HN has heard of it. Only if someone takes the time to poke around will they be impressed, start to use it, etc.

Even more than that, I started a new GitHub project recently as I plan to release v2.0 after many years. So all the stars on the original project are not even on the new one. (The old one is still on my github.)

And here is the documentation: https://qbix.com/platform/guide

So this is the extreme opposite ... I haven't started trying to market it or sell it to the world or even attract developers to it. But it's there if someone bothers to look.

Very easy to deactivate an address when I decide I don't want to hear from them anymore.

Someone who wishes procurement reduced to online documentation and credit cards is going to hate their job if it requires engaging with high touch sales processes.

Maybe they need a purchase team partner - the analog of the salesperson in a salesperson-sales engineer team.

Plus, when salespeople ask how I’m using their product, I need to prepare because, most of the time, I don’t remember how I was using it. That project isn’t the center of my world.

That said, I still accept calls from people I know in the field. I recently had two calls with Glauber Costa, the founder of Turso, and in the process of scheduling another one with the Pydantic Logfire folks. But none of them are sales reps, and they’re usually fun to talk to, so I’m happy to do it.

• “But what if they’ve finally added the feature I wanted?”

This gives me an idea... how about reaching out to developers and ask them what their experience was, which features they'd like the most, and/or subscribe to when they will be launched, to be the first to try them and give feedback? Even this guy would go for that.

I've sat on a lot of sales calls and I get these feels. But when it comes to selling to people who are NOT the author, managers, execs, decision making architecture astronauts ... that long list of features and functionality really do seem to sell the product. Not that they'll use them...

I had this happen for a service we already had implemented at my company. I created a new account just to make sure it was working because we had a few say the site or login was being blocked by our security software. Even after I deleted the new account I was getting emails from them.

They called me after the 30 days and I even told them I didn't use it. Yet they still insist on emailing me every 3 weeks about some security policy junk.

Won’t work for every product, but I’m pushing through with my prototype and that (i.e. release notes) is something to consider.

I know thats their job but goddamn, this kind of competitive spying is scummy af lol

The choice is to be deferential and poor, or bold and reach.

So far I am poor.

https://www.codesquish.com/

The senior technical person from the customer would ask me a couple hard questions and I would be pretty honest in my responses. Afterwards our Sales Success Customer Account Manager would be unhappy with me, but at least I wouldn't have to go to another one of those meetings for a while.

The deal would go ahead anyway because our management had convinced their management to make the purchase even though what we were offering didn't really meet their needs. They would only need to pay us if we actually delivered so they weren't taking a lot of risk, other than wasting their time, and we got to make a multi-million dollar "booking."

In the end I would either get along with their senior technical person pretty well because we could be honest with each other, or else they would despise me for being unable to deliver what my sales people had promised (Hi Sven!).

What. The. Actual. $&%#?

Companies, don't do this. After I've attempted unsubscription, I flag every single email from you as spam.

"I'm a European citizen. Please erase me from your list as per the GDPR"