This is a good way to tell old companies from startups.
IMHO startups are much more sophisticated in marketing. It's pretty common marketing knowledge that you want to reduce friction as much as possible. A phone call is a lot of friction for most technical people who want to be as efficient as possible.
No pricing model should be this complicated. If you have to make a form for the customer to fill out to calculate their cost, fine. To be honest even a live chat wouldn't be terrible.
I understand the people here who defend the enterprise sales cycle. I get it, I participated in that world as a startup for years. But you have to admit there's something fundamentally broken about the whole idea.
I think it comes down to this: if your product is good enough that people can use it and want it, you shouldn't have to hide your pricing or require time to use sales tactics to justify the price to customers.
> I think it comes down to this: if your product is good enough that people can use it and want it, you shouldn't have to hide your pricing or require time to use sales tactics to justify the price to customers.
I think this is naive. I've found that at the enterprise level those involved with purchasing often aren't those using the services being purchased. I spent a signifiant portion of the day yesterday on the phone with an extremely large company (~140k employees) explaining why the process they wanted to implement with our software couldn't happen as it would not be compliant with federal law and they could risk losing their billions of dollars in federal contracts. There was only one person on the phone actually involved in daily management of their process and everyone else was part of purchasing.
IMHO startups are much more sophisticated in marketing. It's pretty common marketing knowledge that you want to reduce friction as much as possible. A phone call is a lot of friction for most technical people who want to be as efficient as possible.
No pricing model should be this complicated. If you have to make a form for the customer to fill out to calculate their cost, fine. To be honest even a live chat wouldn't be terrible.
I understand the people here who defend the enterprise sales cycle. I get it, I participated in that world as a startup for years. But you have to admit there's something fundamentally broken about the whole idea.
I think it comes down to this: if your product is good enough that people can use it and want it, you shouldn't have to hide your pricing or require time to use sales tactics to justify the price to customers.