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Tell HN: Please let me just buy stuff without having to “Contact Sales”

by robbie-c on 2/13/23, 7:21 PM with 82 comments

• by phphphphp on 2/13/23, 8:39 PM

  There are different sales models, each optimising for different outcomes: self-serve is the easiest way to get the first dollar, but it has trade-offs. If you're unwilling to talk to sales upfront, you're probably not going to go on to be a high value customer, and the platforms you're interested in have probably determined that self-serve customers are not their target audience (because of the trade-offs).

  A big challenge with self-serve is the ability to accurately price without any prior context: there's a dance between service providers and service customers, where the service provider is trying to maximise revenue and the customer wants to pay the least possible. Selling to a human, after discussing their needs and budget, makes it much easier maximise revenue from that customer.

  A good lesson to take from this experience is that just because you want a service, does not mean you're the target customer of every company selling that service. If you're unable to find the experience you need from one service provider, you should absolutely move on to the next -- nobody is going to take offence :)

• by Mandatum on 2/13/23, 9:17 PM

  No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone.

  Because it’s not usually engineers I’m taking to, it’s directors and managers.

  If you’re a startup and I have enterprise pricing, I likely don’t prioritize you.

• by rgovostes on 2/13/23, 11:20 PM

  In my (limited) experience the sales team often can’t answer the questions I have about their product anyway. So the first call is a reiteration of my needs that I specified in email. Then we schedule a second call with a more senior salesperson who also can’t answer it. So we have a third call with an engineer to talk about one part of my use case, where I start my explanation over from scratch.

  With GitLab, the sales team kept trying to show me demos of their product I already know. For months they kept trying to steer the conversation towards CI/CD when I had a completely different topic I wanted to focus on.

• by precommunicator on 2/13/23, 9:54 PM

  I'm sometimes responsible for comparing and choosing a service we gonna implement in a software we develop (let's say an API to do something). Top reasons why I reject a prospective service includes "contact sales" pricing, API documentation not being public or not in English and no EU data residency nor EU hosting provider.

  Sure, if I eliminate other choices for this thing and you're the only one left I'm gonna ask a non-technical person in my company to cut through the bullshit and contact sales, to get me what I want, but otherwise, if there are other good choices, you are gonna miss my business.

• by LinkLink on 2/14/23, 12:25 AM

  How to ruin a SaaS company

  > Sell "one size fits all" usage scaled billing

  > Don't hire a sales team

  > Large companies won't do business with you since they cant negotiate or engage with a sales team to make sure the product fits for them

  > A thousand small users sign up and pay 1$ per month before credit card and merchant fees, misuse the product and want a refund, and throw tens of thousands of support requests at you

  You now have a less than worthless sales model.

• by sloaken on 2/14/23, 12:12 PM

  Whenever I run into 'Contact Sales', I translate that into 'We have hired unemployed used car salesmen. They assure us they can con you out of more money if they get a chance to talk to you.'

  I realize it might not be a fair assessment, but it is always where my brain goes. And then I move on, to a competitor. I only contact sales if you are literally the ONLY one with what I need. But that is rare.

• by gitgud on 2/13/23, 9:41 PM

  "Contact Sales" is annoying to see, but for a small company I think it's a good sign. It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales. They'd rather talk directly to interested customers, rather than scale and automate the sales pipeline for "mass-adoption".

  Think of the alternative, a startup focuses on scaling their signup/payment flow, and have to sacrifice time-to-market and reduce the amount of time they're actually talking to customers and working on the product...

• by runjake on 2/13/23, 8:30 PM

  Why is this a bad thing? It serves as a litmus test for the kind of service you can expect after the purchase.

  I'm grateful for these companies putting it out there ahead of time.

• by AlexITC on 2/14/23, 4:11 AM

  I understand your concern and I share your frustration. I have send emails a few times where I'm clear about my budget and sales people tend to share the minimum commitment they expect, there isn't much lost by trying.

  Being on the other side of the table (running a SaaS requiring a call scheduled), I have do this because my SaaS its in an early stage, the call allows me to understand the customer needs and make a proposal when we are a good fit. In this particular case, it is hard to get a quote when I don't know the necessary customization that could be required.

  The call is a friction point that I'm trying to avoid by communicating example integrations and its prices in the landing page, still, making everything clear hasn't been simple.

  In short, asking by email could be a good idea.

• by more_corn on 2/13/23, 10:21 PM

  When I’m qualifying a new product and I see “contact for pricing” that company goes to the bottom of my list. I literally allow their competitors to win before I even look at them.

  We don’t need to beg people to behave properly. We simply ignore them when they don’t. They can go flail and fail all day.

• by nshm on 2/13/23, 10:43 PM

  In such an actively developed area like TTS/ASR there is high chance that custom solution would fit your needs much better. The feature set of TTS is actually pretty large and hard to combine in a single ML model. No free lunch you know.

  For example if you look for singing voice, they might suggest you an adapted model that is good specifically for singing.

  The testing process is also not very straight, you need to understand what to test and how to test properly. For example, some of their voices might be better for questions, some for news.

  You'd better talk to them.

• by skmurphy on 2/14/23, 2:19 AM

  It's a mature market; Capterra lists 53 solutions and has pricing on many of them. https://www.capterra.com/text-to-speech-software/

  What is your budget? It's likely a situation of "if you have to ask, you cannot afford it."

  The opportunity cost for a larger firm to serve a startup may exceed the likely three year revenue you can offer.

• by carlosjobim on 2/14/23, 12:34 PM

  It's strange to see the venomous and outright hostile responses OP is getting, when he is completely right.

  "Contact sales" is a practice seen everywhere, not only from those serving large enterprises. A lot of small time and B2C websites do the "Contact sales" thing, so all the arguments here that OP is unimportant as a customer falls completely flat. There are only two reasons to not post any price:

  1. You don't understand your own business and have to bring out the calculator and spreadsheet in order to know what price to offer a customer.

  2. You're trying to rip off the customer.

  If huge companies like Stripe can list a price, then you can too. But one of the reasons above stop you. I've seen exactly how these "Contact sales" people operate in their in-person meetings and it's always the same: A lot of sales tricks to try to sell an underperforming product for an extremely bloated price. Which of course can work if the person responsible for the purchase is not the business owner and can be convinced by wining and dining, getting a prostitute or getting a bribe. But those times are rapidly coming to an end.

  Putting a price out there means any potential customer can know your price range before entering in contact to discuss special solutions. In my field of work most competitors advertise in the vein of "We can make the perfect solution for you, just contact sales" and have no price published. We have several ready made solutions with clear pricing as well as invitations to contact sales for special solutions. Guess which model actually works?

  I also believe this is an age thing. People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies.

• by ravagat on 2/15/23, 10:59 AM

  In the case of software and other anything digital, I'm in favour of not using this practice. If it were something physical/analog, like bespoke furniture made in Maine or hand crafted leather works then it would make sense to use this practice. I'm disappointed whenever practices that had reasoning are blindly practiced like this.

• by vermaden on 2/13/23, 10:40 PM

  That is good first 'sign' of companies to avoid.

  Either they have plain and simple pricing or its just a bullshit dance with sales team.

  Choose wisely.

  Often the product is not worth the dance ...

• by badpun on 2/15/23, 8:04 AM

  The whole point of "Contact sales" is for the sales team to figure out how much you're willing to spend on their service, and to extract that amount from you. It is frustrating for you, but that's how their business is making majority of their money, so they won't give it up.

• by lukasfischer on 2/15/23, 9:04 AM

  I recently had this issue multiple times. I’m certainly not against Contact Sales as an option, because of course there can be a special case/need which needs discussion. However, it would have saved me and the SaaS provider multiple calls just to find out where the price is. Is it less than 100$, 500$ or 5k+ a month. If I knew, that even a basic package is 5k+ it would not be a fit. If I knew, it’s less that 500$ I’d be interested to start talking as it’s in a reasonable budget. In this specific case, it was even more frustrating, as I already started to use the product through a free account with 3 credits - when I used them, I was not able to buy new credit but had to start talking to sales…

• by bdcravens on 2/13/23, 10:44 PM

  It's not just a profit maximization strategy; there are many reasons why a business may want to vet their customers. (compliance, fraud prevention, reputation management, etc)

• by FrontierPsych on 2/18/23, 10:05 AM

  If there's a simple product that costs $35/month and does one single function, then it is stupid to contact sales.

  However, if it is a complex sale with multiple optional parts that require custom solutions, then you need to talk to a salesperson.

  I totally agree with you if it is a simple product.

• by rmorey on 2/14/23, 12:14 AM

  it would be funny if in this case the sales call happened and at the end you were like “alright, can i hear a demo” and they go “this WAS the demo”

• by vmc_7645 on 2/14/23, 2:53 PM

  Or at least put a price range. There are so many companies I outright blocked because they refused to tell me the price of their product until after their lackluster showcase.

  We ended up remaking our own solution for one of them and open sourcing the code because development was 10x (maybe even 100x) cheaper than purchasing at their predatory pricing schemas.

• by nunez on 2/14/23, 2:18 AM

  The reason for that isn't so much that they are running a "if you have to ask..." strategy (though it's definitely one of the reasons)

  it's more that every sale is a complex sale that makes it difficult or lossy to advertise a flat rate.

  That or the price is a competitive advantage and they are trying to mitigate a race to the bottom

• by VoodooJuJu on 2/14/23, 10:52 AM

  You are not the target market. The target market expects to and does not hesitate to contact sales.

• by LinkLink on 2/14/23, 12:28 AM

  Nobody is obligated or even likely to profit from giving you their software because you as a complete unqualified and unaffiliated stranger "just want to try it out"

• by 7402 on 2/14/23, 1:50 AM

  Does the MVP require high quality TTS? I wonder how good the numerous free TTS packages are, at least for getting started. (eSpeak, Festival, Mozilla TTS, etc.)

• by talebuilder on 2/13/23, 10:16 PM

  I'd love to know which service you settle with, facing the same topic (tts)

• by taubek on 2/13/23, 7:24 PM

  They probably want to sell you the highest possible package.