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No Calls

(keygen.sh)
1603 points ezekg | 7 comments | 16 Jan 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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focusedone ◴[16 Jan 25 15:16 UTC] No.42726381[source]▶
Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what the enterprise license costs on the homepage.

Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.

I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.

I wish I could use what this guy is selling.

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RobinL ◴[16 Jan 25 17:39 UTC] No.42728337[source]▶
Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because:

- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)

- it usually obscures what the product actually does

Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more

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1. wil421 ◴[16 Jan 25 18:18 UTC] No.42728838[source]▶
Have you ever done enterprise contracts? A lot of huge companies won’t touch smaller products because they can’t guarantee what they want. These are complex negotiations with a lot of a la cart options.

What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?

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2. sim7c00 ◴[16 Jan 25 18:34 UTC] No.42729056[source]▶
you are right. an enterprise products can never be ready for any enterprise customer. they need custom solutions to work with what they already invested millions in. each customer is different there. most enterprise products are ever expanding 'app platforms' or frameworks ultimately, in order to be able to adapt to new customer environments and needs quickly and efficiently. if they arent, most environments will spit them out quickly and harshly. bad for business on either side.
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3. wil421 ◴[16 Jan 25 18:47 UTC] No.42729221[source]▶
The things I hate about this with SAAS products is they usually gate keep things like sso behind the enterprise plans.
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4. frereubu ◴[16 Jan 25 20:26 UTC] No.42730452[source]▶
Totally OT, but I love your typo "a la cart". It makes me think of an early 20th century greengrocer with a cart of vegetables and fruit trying to appear more sophisticated by saying he's selling things "a la cart".
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5. necovek ◴[16 Jan 25 20:27 UTC] No.42730463[source]▶
> quickly and efficiently

Are we considering products like Salesforce or SAP "enterprise app platforms" here?

Look for any of a million news reports on multi-year "integrations" (sometimes even failed ones but always over budget).

6. wil421 ◴[16 Jan 25 21:09 UTC] No.42730938[source]▶
Doh! Siri isn’t the best for commenting.

Enterprise sales wishes they could have customer fill up carts.

7. physicsguy ◴[17 Jan 25 14:36 UTC] No.42737921{3}[source]▶
From the other side, have you ever tried to deal with corporate customers with SSO?

What normally happens: * Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.

* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT

* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID

* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration

* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.

* You wait for a response for a month

* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed

* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.

* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.

* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.

* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.