It's pretty funny doing it the other way, where your customers expect a huge sales process and you built out self-serve first.<p>You hear things like: "We'd like to set up a meeting to plan a trial in Q1 and a full deployment in Q3"<p>Well, how I would do it is go to the form on the front page, add a credit card and do the trial. When Q3 comes I'd go the plan page and slide it all the way to the right.<p>Of course, that's not how their purchasing works, so you hold extra meetings and add extra cost. But it's funny when someone tries to jump through hoops and you have to hold them up for them.
Some good points here, but doesn't help the frustration as a potential customer.<p>The old adage when the price listed says '$ call us', it's a big number. For a certain class of application (ERPs, CMS, etc), sure does make sense, because pricing is very complex. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I would be baffled by a company that tells me the cost is tens or hundreds of dollars, but this doesn't exist.<p>The middle ground is products that are in the low hundreds to several thousands of dollars. There's a number of times where I have come across something that appears to fulfill a need I have, but that I could also do myself (whether by spending a week or because there's an open-source version that does 80% to base on).<p>Keep in mind there's always extra friction and admin overhead to dealing with commercial software, which has to be considered as part of purchasing: does it need a license to run on my build server? Does it have any kind of per-user charge, requiring extra system work to track? Are there redistribution licensing problems? Is there some stupid DRM that's going to cause me grief? Are you capable of dealing with a separate technical user (me) and paying user (my accounting department)? Am I going to have to deal with annual renewals? etc..<p>So if it turns out the direct cost is less than building it myself, it's a much easier decision. If it's significantly higher, now I have to really weigh the above against the opportunity cost and risk.<p>When I can't even see where in the spectrum the software lies, but I'm going to have to spend at least 30 minutes on the phone with some sales person to figure that out (plus probably deal with them periodically harassing me for the next year), the whole thing is that much less appealing.<p>I tend to move on to the next one, and only come back if there are no remotely similar options. It makes me sad a bit because there's no way this company can know they lost me as a customer merely by putting '$ call us' (even if the price would have been acceptable).
No. The reason you have to talk to a sales person is so they can size you up and figure out how much they can charge. It's called price discrimination.
I think this article misses the biggest reason Sales exists as a profession: because customers need help understanding what they're buying!<p>It costs money to hire Sales people, and if a company were able to sell its products entirely as a self-service option, that would help them improve margins. So people in the Sales profession have to justify their existence every single day - what have you done for me lately etc.<p>The only way to succeed in the profession is to show results, to help customers understand and extract the value of what they're buying so they can come back to buy more and tell their friends.<p>You might see Sales people succeed in the short-term by lying or cheating their customers but that doesn't last. Your reputation catches up to you. Depending on the industry, every one knows everyone else, and the only way to truly succeed in the long term is to make sure you create a win-win for both the customer and your employer, every time, on every sale.
One thing to note is most people, often especially those with purchasing authority in a company, are not technical and don't care about software in itself. They need solutions to their problems first and foremost. Often, the best way of educating them is through a sales process that breaks down the discovery and identification of the problem and mapping that to solutions that currently exist or can be made to exist with the product offering of a company. The stereotype of an overly pushy car salesperson is a caricature; the best sales people are good at educating potential buyers and thinking through problems they face...not aggressively ramming excessive products down your throat. That being said, there are plenty of terrible sales people out there, to be certain, but it is not useless or misguided as many other folks are alluding to in this thread. I am not aware of any software company doing north of a billion in revenue without a sales function.
Not only do they make you talk to a salesperson before buying their software... a lot of these places make you talk to a "salesperson" (i.e. an internal recruiter) before even referring your resume to someone who can actually evaluate it. Which is sad because I find these "buffer" discussions to be a waste of time, and all-around drag coefficient in the process, generally.<p>(Though I understand also what secondary functions they serve -- or at least appear to serve -- for some companies).
Salespeople are most effective in situations where convincing one person or one committee within a large prospective company to buy your product will unleash tens or better yet hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to you, the seller. Most other situations should probably be handled with a great web page that shows reasonable pricing.
"Call us" is an instant no sale for me.<p>I also don't buy from companies that don't publish their manuals online. I nearly always read the manual before buying, because 99% of the time the marketing copy or "specifications" page is inadequate to properly evaluate the product. If the manuals aren't published, they might have something to hide or they might be in the habit of making documentation conditional on support contracts. Either way it makes it impossible for me to evaluate the product.
It's a fun fact that lots of companies require that you call them for the price of their very simple and standardized-products, but I know exactly how much it costs to send my stuff to mars.<p><a href="http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities" rel="nofollow">http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities</a>
yep. You know how much effort engineering takes? Sales takes the same effort, from people of similarly specialised actual talents.<p>Respect your sales people - they need to be as good at their gig as you are at yours.
What if companies listed the mean, median, and mode pricing for their solutions?<p>"Here are the mean, median, and mode prices for the solutions we offer to our customers:" ?
Talking to a salesperson is a good way to get a tremendous discount. Wait until you're near the end of quarter and they're desperate to fill their quota.