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Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#21

Post by cubecul »

tbrock wrote: post #19
wheels wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've known more companies start with utility pricing and move to "high touch" sales than companies move the other way. Companies don't want to have that kind of sales process. They usually have to . Some of the mechanics of that is that if you're doing very large contracts, a lot of the software buyers expect things to be that way. For a lot of businesses, a couple expensive accounts are worth more than all of the sm…

For the higher level tiers absolutely, for a trial just take my credit card and get out of my way. I’ll call you when I want to upgrade my plan. You aren’t “selling” me anything. The product sold itself. At that point let’s have a steak dinner and figure out the details.

Depends on the product. Not all products are built for these types of trials. If a product needs more heavy lifting to show value then you are more likely to have a sales team. And just because you can evaluate that complex product by yourself doesn't mean that happens for everyone else.

Selling, by the way, is not just demo'ing the product. It's also navigating legal, finance, security, end users who don't know as much as you do, etc. As a buyer, it's sometimes easier to have your rep help you identify what the quickest path is. Lets me move faster, anyway.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#22

Post by clairity »

is this (title) a trick question? the answer seems self-evident: you email them back with "is there a self-serve option where i can sign up online and try it out for myself? if not, why not?" maybe not so curt, but something to that effect.

outside of a startup or a new product where handholding might be needed for other reasons, having sales folks typically tips off the pricing a bit. it's generally too expensive to employ inside sales people for deals that average less than about high four figures, and the same for outside sales people less than about mid five figures.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#24

Post by lefstathiou »

tbrock wrote: post #12
wheels wrote: post #9

I find these things horribly annoying too, but here’s what they’re for: They’re there so that the sales person can extract a variable amount of revenue from you based on how much value you’re getting from their system, and how much you can afford to pay. Utility pricing assumes that service volume is high and can mostly be recouped at slightly above infrastructure costs. In that case, utility pricing is a win for mos…

Does this actually work? Usually when this happens to me I write off the service and never interact with them again unless I absolutely have to. If I have a gun to my head I’ll make peace with it but otherwise I’m not going to talk to your sales rep to try your product. Period. I had this happen with loggly when we first started out and the first sales rep was pleasant enough. I even felt like I got a deal because he…

It’s called MSFT Azure. It works and people want it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#25

Post by duxup »

It depends on the product.

I work on a highly customizable SaaS product and onboarding and setup is the real cost.

The guy who says "I can do it myself."...is pretty much the worst customer ever, because he probably doesn't know what he wants and doesn't know his own business process.

For a lot of our customers just the implementation is an exploration of their own current processes "Well I guess we do that...".

Now having said that... clearly that isn't you, but I do wonder how much self service can be created for a niche cloud product?

Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#26

Post by jcrawfordor »

While I'm pretty lukewarm on the Airtable product to begin with, what made me hate it is the almost daily emails I received from my "account representative" in response to registering an account. When looking at such commodity-priced SaaS I am not in a mood to be the end of "high touch sales" that gets touched. I find it annoying when it's a five-figure contract, when it's a free-to-$20 service it's absolutely ridiculous.

It's even worse because, at Airtable's rate of onboarding new customers, they can't afford to actually have high touch sales. So at least the marketroids from, say, Cisco that email me to "follow up on my needs" actually integrate some knowledge of my business and past deals. Airtable tries to replicate a "relationship" with a series of scheduled mass emails and it rings so incredibly hollow.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#27

Post by yingw787 »

This might or might not be relevant, but I had an idea for a Typeform-based way you can deploy services. You would fill out an online form on what you want, and a service would automatically provision an instance of that service for you.

Services as a service. I found people make a lot of great tech but without the ability to ship it easily it doesn't mean a lot. Provisioning is a hassle even most devops engineers don't want to do in their spare time. So, make it easy.

...would you use this? I might build it regardless, I want to deploy my own video conferencing solution for two hours at a time and then tear it down after a meeting for security and cost reasons.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#28

Post by closeparen »

You'll never get self service out of a company that works this way. But it's not all bad.

Behind the salespereson is an engineer who knows the product well and is paid to impress you. Use that to your advantage. Tell them what you want and let them put on a show! They are very likely willing to invest multiple engineer-weeks in helping you build a POC in their environment, fielding your questions, etc.

The initial contact may start from the assumption that you're a bureaucrat but once it's clear what you're interested in and what kind of evidence is going to be persuasive to you, a good sales process will play ball.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

#29

Post by def8cefe »

>Why is that person employed? This was during the best market in the history of mankind and I was questioning that, and now everyone with a talent more relevant than customer "retention" should be just as annoyed, given how coveted a continual flow of oxygen is now.

Is your talent that much more relevant? What do you really contribute to society as a dev this person does not? Check yourself bud.

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