←back to thread

No Calls

(keygen.sh)
1603 points ezekg | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
focusedone ◴[] 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.

replies(15): >>42726524 #>>42726658 #>>42727027 #>>42727075 #>>42727352 #>>42727520 #>>42727614 #>>42727630 #>>42727775 #>>42728038 #>>42728094 #>>42728337 #>>42728885 #>>42730021 #>>42735830 #
RobinL ◴[] 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

replies(6): >>42728575 #>>42728838 #>>42729353 #>>42729603 #>>42730386 #>>42731927 #
srveale ◴[] No.42729353[source]
What if you sell a product where it's easy to determine the cost for one user signing up by themselves, so you figure out the required markup and publish that on your site. But large organizations wanting licenses for each user will want a discount, will want finer details about contracts, and often some kind of unique adaptations to the product for their use case. The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort, in which case you have requirements gathering and negotiations. Of course there will be differential pricing depending on what the buyer company wants (cost goes up) and if it's a whale of a deal that the seller really wants (cost goes down) So... schedule a call?
replies(2): >>42729734 #>>42730102 #
jimbokun ◴[] No.42729734{3}[source]
> The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort

It's not worth the effort.

It's killing your ability to scale your sales process. Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product development, as now you have a bunch of one off deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you want for various tiers of user count.

If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you scale are critical.

replies(2): >>42729914 #>>42730116 #
1. precommunicator ◴[] No.42729914{4}[source]
Nah, what you do is you add this feature for everyone, unless it doesn't make sense
replies(2): >>42730607 #>>42733714 #
2. jimbokun ◴[] No.42730607[source]
> for everyone

YES!

Adding features just for single customers doesn't scale, adding features useful to many customers does.

3. srveale ◴[] No.42733714[source]
This is what I meant in my comment. The seller needs to know what the buyer wants, maybe its a big bulk discount or an extra feature. If the seller decides the discount is too steep, or the extra feature doesn't fit with the road map, then no deal. Or maybe the deal really is that big, and it's worth catering to some one-off demands.

None of this means "hiding" information, but you can't put something like "We'll do X hrs of extra work if you buy Y licenses". Just like the any store might have a 10% discount if you buy a dozen, but if you want 50,000 then there will probably be a conversation involved.