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Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

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Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#31

Post by awb »

vasco wrote: post #11

Most of the times you can get rough pricing from them before taking a call if you describe your needs / number of seats, or at most a 20min call. Just make it clear you have many vendors to assess in a first pass and the more calls the less likely you are to subscribe in your opening contact. I'd also recommend only engaging with the top 3 better products before you go through such a big list.

From someone who’s done a lot of sales, I agree with this. If they dodge the question, asking something direct like: “how many figures are we talking about, 5, 6, 7?” can help.

Most of the time sales folks don’t want to quote you a ballpark right off the bat because they know that you’ll be expecting something like that number on the final proposal.

If they dodge giving you a price range then try approaching from a different angle, asking what’s the smallest implementation they’ve done (tell them it’s to make sure you’re not too small a project for them). Then ask them about their biggest client (they might start chatting your ear off so be ready to cut them off). Then ask them directly what they would charge for those exact same implementations.

You’ll end up with a huge 10k foot view, but you might be able to get that in a few days, then you can drill down into a few of the more suitable vendors.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#33

Post by lazide »

supernova87a wrote: post #14
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #3

Unlikely you'll find any good source. "contact us" pricing revolves around understanding the customer's use case deeply enough so that you can demonstrate maximum product value to them and then extract the most possible money. I despise it.

Sometimes I ask sales people of these companies, "why is it that SpaceX can give me a price for launching something into space, with detailed manuals about how to prepare all my interfaces, but you have to take 2 weeks to think about how much to charge me?" Yes I know the comparison isn't quite right, but sometimes you just have to put some pressure on bro salespeople coming in, making shit up, and trying to test how…

Most of them do already think it’s reasonable!

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#34

Post by jabroni_salad »

wwkeyboard wrote: post #19
gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-…

That's a much more generous take than I had. I always assumed "contact us" pricing meant "tell us who you work for so we can google their funding level before suggesting a price to you".

That's definitely true... I mainly service financial institutions and their asset size is part of the calculation.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#36

Post by brookst »

bilekas wrote: post #23
gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-…

Yeah maybe I'm a bit more cynical than you but the idea of contact us pricing for me has always been "dependa how much money you have and how much we can squeeze" also the idea of guaging how "critical" the service is for you. It seems so sleezy in the way that sales generally gets a bad reputation. There shouldn't be any problem with having the pricing on the site if it's all above board. That way you're actually re…

Depends on the product. If it's off-the-shelf and every customer just does DIY deployment, 100% agree.

But many of these products have lots of different modules, and customers don't always know which ones they need. And some nearly require assistance/consulting with deployment, the complexity of which varies depending on environment.

So from the company's point of view, they don't want to put "$200k" on the website if the actual price is between $100k and $1m depending on customer specifics. It will scare off smaller customers and upset bigger customers.

But yeah if it's just one-size-fits-all, download-and-install SW, pricing should be listed.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#37

Post by lazide »

PaulHoule wrote: post #6
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #3

Unlikely you'll find any good source. "contact us" pricing revolves around understanding the customer's use case deeply enough so that you can demonstrate maximum product value to them and then extract the most possible money. I despise it.

I'd love to have a way to scare salespeople straight by showing them how many sales they are losing because of this bad practice.

For the sales people, it rarely results in missed sales they care about. The ones who are super into this are almost always commission. If the company does less overall revenue (due to fewer overall sales), that is not a problem as long as they get more overall revenue (commission) due to the sales they land being ‘richer’. It’s a pretty classic owner/agent issue.

The company should care, probably, but there are also reasons for some companies to prefer high touch interactions - it gives huge insight from a product perspective, and can provide insights to tackle other verticals they might otherwise struggle to even know existed.

Going in volume does make good numbers though, if you’re setup in a way that you can keep it going. Toyota, Honda, etc. have very solid fleet and ‘pay the flat rate and go’ markets they serve.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#38

Post by barbariangrunge »

I use the "if you have to ask the price in order to check whether you can afford it or not, you can't afford it, so don't ask" strategy.

The price-hiding tactic is a little rude: jewlery stores helped pioneer it, the idea being to get the customer hooked on the item before they think about price, and to imagine the largest number they might be okay with paying ahead of time, while simultaneously making them unsure whether it's too low or not.

I don't like dealing with companies who do that sort of thing and I worry what other curve balls they have in store later on. So I opt out.

The reason that you can use this on enterprise sales is that you are theoretically offering something that the enterprise needs, no matter how painful the process is -- and there are typically few competitors for them to turn to. Many of the competitors use the same tactic. Hence, we see it all over in that world.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#39

Post by macspoofing »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-…

>However, an obvious counterpoint is that Atlassian built a multi-billion-dollar business around up-front pricing, and even seem to still offer that up-front pricing today.

Not quite .. their "Enterprise" package only has a "Contact us" option (no pricing details).

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#40

Post by maccard »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-…

> As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k, generally annually, (usually for a fully-loaded site license on the high end)

I'm working at a VC funded startup and fielding calls with "contact us" pricing, and while I've certainly seen some of those numbers floated, I saw just as many reasonably priced options that wanted to get on a sales call to try and upsell/make the case for going with them.

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