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Do not talk about pricing

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Re: Do not talk about pricing

#71

Post by estefan »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #39

This quote sums it up "When The Times introduced a paywall, the number of people looking at their digital service dropped by 98.7% (from 22m to around 300,000), yet the switch was a huge financial success." Now that some of the crazyness of Internet Advertising has fallen by the wayside (lower CPCs == less crazyness), it becomes important to pay people who will research things, write eloquently about them, and convey…

It can't have worked out that well because they've taken down the paywall for The Sun...

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#72

Post by gedrap »

nitwit005 wrote: post #27

If you try to buy things, it's sometimes desperately frustrating that no one will just quote you a simple price. They have different pricing tiers, and want a salesperson to talk to you so they can pretend to give you a "special" discount, and all sorts of BS. I'm sure these things work, but they also alienate customers sometimes. People have founded entire businesses on offering clearer pricing schemes.

It just depends, there's no rule of thumb for it (although there are obviously wrong cases).

For example,you provide SaaS which is applicable to a wide audience, from personal account and tiny teams, to large companies. It's totally fine then to have public pricing for smaller use cases but need to get in touch with sales person to get a larger plan. In this case, your needs probably don't match typical plans (you need a lot of X, and no Y), and the amount of money is big enough to be negotiable. That's cool, since you don't buy these things willie nillie every few days.

Speaking of salesmen themselves, it varies a lot from my experience. Some will send you 10 emails during 14 days trial with live demos and trying to arrange a call and shit I don' care about. They do nothing at all to make the sale happen, just annoy a lot. While others just ask for your needs, ask a few questions for clarifications and about potentials needs and give a quote, not trying to arrange pointless calls. I have no problem with this kind of salesmen.

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#73

Post by majewsky »

newjersey wrote: post #20
orangecat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it's not overdone (as in, customer expecting continual discounts) I'm still surprised that Steam has so many discounts; they've basically trained me to never pay full price. But I feel no need to play new games right when they're released; maybe there are enough people that do.

I wouldn't see myself as a game buyer at all. So, for me the $5 I paid for skyrim or however much I didn't on other several games I bought is money I wouldn't have spent. Now the $10 I spent on limbo of different. I didn't wait for a sale. I just bought it. I think steam optimized the revenue from me pretty well. And it all started with them giving me portal (one) for free.

> And it all started with them giving me portal (one) for free.

Heh, same for me. I was quite surprised when my library recently hit the 100 games mark.

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#75

Post by creshal »

lmm wrote: post #65
desdiv wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a funny world when Elon Musk will openly display "$90M to send 6.4mT of your shit into geosynchronous orbit"[0] and yet millions of businesses selling things that are far less expensive and far more fungible want you to "contact our sales team for a quote". [0] http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

Putting x tonnes into geosynchronous orbit is about as fungible as it gets. There wouldn't necessarily be any custom work at all (in practice there's integration work but if you're using a standard satellite bus that can be pretty standard).

That's already more known unknowns than most software vendors have. 95% really boils down to "x licenses of package y, options z and w, additional support at n dollars/hour", which you can put on your website just fine. The "sales teams" are often glorified speech-to-text lackeys that just feed your numbers to an excel sheet, read back the result and then make you believe you're getting special treatment.

It's different for software that actually needs integration of some sort (SAP, most of the IBM portfolio, …) but SaaS startups doing this shit are just deluding themselves.

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#76

Post by cmdkeen »

nitwit005 wrote: post #27

If you try to buy things, it's sometimes desperately frustrating that no one will just quote you a simple price. They have different pricing tiers, and want a salesperson to talk to you so they can pretend to give you a "special" discount, and all sorts of BS. I'm sure these things work, but they also alienate customers sometimes. People have founded entire businesses on offering clearer pricing schemes.

Good luck getting legal to approve the contract that comes with the simple price, or billing to pay the simple price without a purchase order being raised etc etc.

I agree with you on the small end of the spectrum - but there is a reason many "Enterprise" level plans are "call us" because the level of hassle involved can be directly tied into the cost you can charge.

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#77

Post by gtufano »

lucaspiller wrote: post #31
nitwit005 wrote: post #27

If you try to buy things, it's sometimes desperately frustrating that no one will just quote you a simple price. They have different pricing tiers, and want a salesperson to talk to you so they can pretend to give you a "special" discount, and all sorts of BS. I'm sure these things work, but they also alienate customers sometimes. People have founded entire businesses on offering clearer pricing schemes.

They do alienate customers, and for a lot of companies this is on purpose. Try finding a price for one of Oracle's or IBM's enterprise products on their website - you won't - their products aren't designed for the casual browser, they are designed for directors who have budgets in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars range (where strangely the price ends up pretty similar to the budget). This is the type…

Or try with Microsoft... if you're in Italy it's impossible to know (as a final user) any price for anything else than a single copy of Office or Windows...

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#78

Post by Manishearth »

josephjrobison wrote: post #2

The most surprising thing I learned from this is that even juxtaposing two options will help you get higher pricing. When thinking of product and service pricing, for me it's difficult to invent three different options sometimes, so it's relieving to know that I could create just two and it will get me most of the way there. It is also crazy to think how relational it all is. I don't really need that extra $7 beer at…

You may also enjoy reading about how airline pricing works. It doesn't have an emotional component, but they get away with charging wildly different prices for the same service by having prices fluctuate on a day-to-day basis and some other tricks. It's sort of a "people who can pay, will pay" model, where they can gather from a larger chunk of the demand curve.

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#79

Post by gizmo »

desdiv wrote: post #30
nitwit005 wrote: post #27

If you try to buy things, it's sometimes desperately frustrating that no one will just quote you a simple price. They have different pricing tiers, and want a salesperson to talk to you so they can pretend to give you a "special" discount, and all sorts of BS. I'm sure these things work, but they also alienate customers sometimes. People have founded entire businesses on offering clearer pricing schemes.

It's a funny world when Elon Musk will openly display "$90M to send 6.4mT of your shit into geosynchronous orbit"[0] and yet millions of businesses selling things that are far less expensive and far more fungible want you to "contact our sales team for a quote". [0] http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

Elon Musk is transparent about SpaceX prices because they are much cheaper than the competition. There is no similar clarity of pricing with Tesla Motors or SolarCity. With Tesla Musk has a habit of advertising the price of the base model after tax credits have been subtracted, which is kind of misleading.

The rule is to be clear about pricing when it works in your advantage and to obfuscate otherwise.

Re: Do not talk about pricing

#80

Post by wccrawford »

creshal wrote: post #58

"Contact our sales team for a quote" == "Our prices are non-competitive and we know it" in my experience.

Yeah, and in addition, "We're going to need time and persuasion to convince you to pay that much."

I really don't have time for that crap. And salesmen generally give me the creeps. I think it's because so many of them are just there for the paycheck, but need to pretend to be interested in what they're selling. Ugh.

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