This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales

But they took this decision because they saw that the superior quality of their product(which having owned older Thinkpads I can say it's true) wasn't profitable enough when competing with lower cost "good enough" alternatives.

Quite a few companies refuse to offer discounts at all, or tie their discounts to some logical system (like discounting for volume). Over time this supports their own story about how valuable their product or service is. This is why you almost never see current-gen Apple products sold for less than MSRP.

For the engineers reading this: yes, it's pure marketing. But to survive, a company needs sales, and marketing helps achieve sales because humans are emotional, irrational creatures.

Another nice aspect of avoiding discounting is that customers who demand big discounts up front often tend to be pains in the butt when it comes to support. Being willing to let a few of those folks "get away" might be beneficial in the long run.

Why can't you offer your services any cheaper? Because our competition sucks and we're different.

How, specifically, is your service better than your competitors? Because we say it is, and since the problem you're trying to solve is a high money multiplier, if you believe that we're even a tiny little bit better than the competitor, the gains you'll get by chosing us will greatly outweight the marginal cost you have to pay us over our competitors.

The difference? I was honest enough to recognize I was going to approach sales as an engineer. I got help in the form of experienced non-engineer sales people tutoring me by going on sales calls with me and doing review sessions after every sales call.

The first two quarters sucked. It took me about three months to truly stop thinking as an engineer and another three to optimize my style, delivery and approach. We closed the third quarter with over $600K in sales, most of which I was responsible for.

I would eventually hire sales and marketing people so I could devote more time to engineering. I felt it was important to understand the sales process by becoming a sales and marketing person myself (for about two years on and off) before staffing thise positions. I have always been glad I took that approach. We engineers are great about building products but absolutely suck at selling.

The letter that is the subject of this thread isn't fantastic. That said, it achieved several things all the engineers on HN are ignoring:

- Made a sale! Do not underestimate the importance and power of cash in the bank!

- It deprived a competitor of revenue. Every dollar you take away from your competition is a dollar that goes towards potentially taking them out of the race, particularly with low price sellers.

- It was compelling enough to take someone who was on the fence and flip him to the point of having him write a blog post about the experience

- It probably created a long term believer and evangelist for their brand, product and price model

- It confirmed that this tactic works. They can use it with new potential customers, evolve and fine tune it. They might also consider integrating aspects of this message in other marketing efforts.

- It revealed that the competitor's low price position is tenuous at best

- It started a relationship with a new customer in a very positive tone. If nurtured this could lead to more sales from word of mouth

- Because of some of the above their cost of customer aquisition is likely to reduce over time

I could probably add to this. The point is that most of the criticism here is misplaced. This letter isn't genius. It doesn't have to be. It only has to be effective. That, it is.

I don't expect everyone to get this. In typical engineer/HN fashion this will be sliced, diced and down-voted from a million of irrelevant angles. That's OK. I get it. The interesting thing is, regardless of what is said here, that letter still made a sale and accomplished all I have highlighted and more.