No Calls

This only works if your sales strategy is all about inbound sales, i.e. content marketing (like this article)/ads.

But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.

It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.

But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.

Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.

It also only works if your product is quite good. I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution for the quality of products where the vast majority are neither very good or bad. An average company with average products will be more inclined to try aggressive sales and marketing tactics because they don't have a great product to help motivate sales.

"But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do."

And how a call will make it simpler? Or why a telephone call becomes part of the service provided for the additional (higher) price (instead of other alternatives)?

Mostly fair, but I disagree about the need for outbound for rapid growth, based on some recent experience. Good PMF and you'll be drowning in inbound. Still need a call and white glove for bigger deals though.

People buy 100k cars online nowadays, why wouldn’t a great online presence also work?

We're primarily an enterprise b2b company, so definitely couldn't get away with the "no calls" culture. BUT the "why do calls happen" section is applicable to anyone really.

We need to hop on calls to close customers, but honestly we could probably cut 1/3 of those calls by following some of those suggestions.

i.e. better documentation, ready to go pricing proposals, pre-filled security questionnaires, etc.

A 100K car is a commodity product with very limited customization.

If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.

A large SaaS customer is the opposite.

The more that people spend the more they want to talk to an actual human to make sure their product and psychological needs are taken care of, in terms of being comfortable with the sale mentally too.

But I guess 100k cars are bought are bought more in person than 10k cars. For most people, the more money you spend, the more you'd like to talk to a real human being.

I haven't found this to be true, and I've done some pretty large enterprise deals 100% over email.

People usually want a call because they don't know something, not 'just because.'

Depends at what level the company is at, especially if they're non-technical. I've found that non-tech VPs and executives definitely want a call, they'd never approve an email-only deal.

Fair enough. I sell to modern B2B tech companies so am obviously biased towards that.

> I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution

Sturgeons law applies more to enterprise software and products than any other space

"ninety percent of everything is crap" is just insufficient in describing how bad the solutions in this space are.

You can go to the Porsche configurator website and design a personally customized globally unique $300K+ car, and it shows you not only the price but also what it'll look like. So there's obviously nothing _technical_ preventing them from letting people just order online, like with Tesla. Frustratingly, you have to still go into a dealer for them to click the submit order button, and they might add a markup for this privilege despite them adding negative value to the experience. It is just as frustrating as B2B sales. I'm sure some buyers want to speak to a human, but enthusiasts tend to know exactly what they want and they dread having to "build a relationship" and wonder if they got screwed because they didn't negotiate hard enough / aren't good-looking enough / etc.

As for B2B sales, if AWS can show their pricing online, which has to be among the most complex pricing in existence - then so can every other SaaS company.

> If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.

Yes, they will. I recall watching a whole kind of documentary of it somewhere on Youtube. Essentially, luxury brands will fully customize cars for customers and have calls/meetings with them to discuss how the car will be customized. It costs $$$$$ but they'll do it.

I think, too, that more important than income is the fact that these rich people should be driving their cars. It's a way to keep the brand positioned in that market.

I think you and the parent comment are talking about different scales. A large SaaS company deal could be $300k per month per customer, and the sales process for a company like that can involve changing the software to meet the needs of the customer. A very early lesson is that what the customer says they need is not always the same as what they actually need.

One of the many reasons calls happen is that customers say "I need XYZ feature in order to do this deal," and the salesperson then needs to ask why they need XYZ feature, and what they want to accomplish, and maybe existing ABC feature actually meets their need, or maybe the company needs to develop XYZ feature to secure the contract. Once you get into a complex domain, that is not happening over email.

The article contains good advice to many businesses out there, but it's worth considering the situations where it doesn't apply, too.

Five nines?

That’s not the case actually, if you consider that 10k cars are mostly used ones. Those are usually test driven, and haggled over first. And often taken in to a dealership to check the internals.

I'd disagree - at the ends of the curve, there are a lot of products that are effectively identical, at which point it's a race to the bottom on price (often meaning a slow decline in features until things are "cost-optimised") unless they can bring another value-add to the table which is where salespeople come in. Some of the best companies with the best products have extensive sales teams because they don't race to the bottom on price - they outcompete on getting first to market of features that they only get to because they understand their customer pain points deeply and find out when the value add is.

I work in the semiconductor industry. A new chip might be designed to run 500+ different protocols, if not more. Coincidentally I had a meeting with one of our senior fellow lead architects the other day, who said a good 60% of those protocols came from suggestions by the sales team. These were requests by customers with super niche requirements you couldn't even imagine, even if you had an army of postgraduate architects who spend all day reading papers (which would be prohibitively expensive). Sure, a chip designer might know to put the latest USB standard on it. They might not know about some obscure broadcast protocol used by only 4 or 5 companies but is the backbone for almost every Premier League football game you watch on TV.

Good products are often only good because the sales team was out there trying their hardest to start a dialogue with a customer to win business, and in doing so listened to them and acted on that.

It certainly makes sense for a deep dive sales interaction if you're actually going to your product or engineering team to make changes.

But if you're selling what's already on the truck, as most of these companies are, then there is no reason for the "call for pricing" for a standard enterprise plan. Pricing pages should have a separate column for custom/bespoke solutions, where it makes sense to have "schedule a call".

Love this anecdote. Having a really capable sales team that actually listens to customers unique needs, and feeds that back into a better product can be such a huge asset. Your sales team is usually a huge repository of unique customer pain and problems (opportunities!)

Maybe that's true for some people. But there's a lot of frustration being shown here and elsewhere that proves there is a demographic of people who really don't want this.

Cars are similar I think. Sure maybe some people need help. But there's is huge demand for a one-click, no-negotiation car buying "experience" (or lack of experience rather).

My conspiracy theory is that this has more to do with Salespeople and established sales channels (dealers) not being able to understand this both because their job depends on it and because they are naturally people-persons. So it feels intuitive to them and they have trouble understanding/accepting that many other are not.

That’s what makes this approach interesting to share. By now everybody is familiar with the enterprise software sales process and it’s nice to see how other companies are doing it.

So you agree that when companies want to truly give a customized experience to their customers, they would get on a call with them? I guess we are on the same page then.

Funny that you picked Porsche as an example. Their sales process is much like the terrible B2B experience. They won't even sell you many of their cars if you haven't purchased something cheaper from them in the past. Walk into a dealer, tell them you want to purchase a GT3 RS, and they'll laugh you out the door.

Power law. Only a few deals constitute the majority of the revenue of most B2B enterprise companies, whose customers will not approve a deal by email only, with no (and often an extended) face to face process. This article is talking about B2B, not consumer behavior. And anyway, cars are unique in that their sales are enshrined in law to be done through an intermediary rather than directly by the manufacturer.

> whose customers will not approve a deal by email only

That's kind of begging the question. Part of the point of the thread here is that it seems B2B is leaving some money on the table by refusing to do deals with less interaction. For example, this CTO's comment [1].

A good comparison I think is AWS and other cloud offerings. Of course, past a certain spend, you will start getting calls and have the opportunity to negotiate better rates, SLA's, etc. But, you can just go and spend 5-6 figures per month without any human interaction.

Another good example I think is 5 figure (or maybe even 6 figure) equipment purchases. You can definitely go ham buying most professional equipment without having to talk to someone over the phone. Think servers, GPU's, storage, cameras, etc.

It'd be great if more services offered this.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728008

HN is just such an anomaly that taking people's individual preferences here to heart is a bad strategy.

We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.

The most important deals that make up the vast majority of our revenue took lots of meetings, pilots, review meetings, etc, because those deals are in the 6/7 figure range.

> We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.

That's awesome. And, I think that's what a lot of people here are talking about: options.

If your customers largely wants sales calls and sales engineers, that's great. But don't ignore the (smaller) population that does prefer no-calls.

> And how a call will make it simpler?

Person buying the product has an idea of what they need. The information available within someone's head is naturally going to be much, much greater than any website.

Not to mention, that information can be accessed randomly and immediately. Searching if a product has feature Z is time consuming and you'll probably read about features A-Y. But asking a person can reveal the answer immediately.

I disagree, almost all products are intentionally bad and only continue to get worse. Ironically, it's due to the free market.

There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.

But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?

Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.

There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.