Elastic (YC W11) launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople • Hacker News Board

Re: Elastic (YC W11) launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople

#61

Post by jgalt212 » Wed, Jan 30, 2013, 2:33 PM UTC

noahc wrote: post #60

jgalt212 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phil--thanks for your response. I appreciate your offer of phone support. We are bringing in a new head of sales this week in fact. I will put your product in front of this person, and it will be up to them to decide to trial, or not. I am just speaking from my experience on both the selling side, and on the buying side, pricing at a significant premium (be that 1.5X or 6X) to existing players is going to make it ver…

A couple things: 1. Being cheaper doesn't mean more sales. I've often times chosen the more expensive option simply because it is more expensive and it has to be better right? If you're cheaper than salesforce, then I view you as an inferior product to salesforce. If you're the same price as salesforce, than you're a salesforce knock off, why not just get the real deal? If you're more expensive than salesforce, oh? W…

Noah,

1. I follow your logic here, and it makes perfect sense to me, but per my experience in the real world things just don't work that way. If you are trying to crack into an existing market, you have to be better on both service and price.

2. Tell this to Michael Bloomberg. He raises prices every year and is one of the richest people in America. Also, there are other methods of raising prices at a later date other than just moving the sticker price. For example, introduce new/enhanced services at higher price points. For a real world example, our company did that with API access. We kept the original web access product priced low, but priced API access as a premium product.

Re: Elastic (YC W11) launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople

#62

Post by apaprocki » Wed, Jan 30, 2013, 6:17 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #61

noahc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple things: 1. Being cheaper doesn't mean more sales. I've often times chosen the more expensive option simply because it is more expensive and it has to be better right? If you're cheaper than salesforce, then I view you as an inferior product to salesforce. If you're the same price as salesforce, than you're a salesforce knock off, why not just get the real deal? If you're more expensive than salesforce, oh? W…

Noah, 1. I follow your logic here, and it makes perfect sense to me, but per my experience in the real world things just don't work that way. If you are trying to crack into an existing market, you have to be better on both service and price. 2. Tell this to Michael Bloomberg. He raises prices every year and is one of the richest people in America. Also, there are other methods of raising prices at a later date other…

Bloomberg prices increase on a two year schedule (e.g. 2010, 2012, ...) to account for inflation. It is actually a "feature" of the subscription because it has been historically stable and by tracking inflation, companies can very easily plan their costs years in advance without worrying about a rogue increase.

Re: Elastic (YC W11) launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople

#63

Post by philfreo » Wed, Jan 30, 2013, 7:03 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #46

philfreo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@jgalt212 - All of our plans come with a "chat with engineers live" link, but I'm happy to offer you some unofficial phone support if you're serious about considering Close.io. [phil@our domain] As for being 6x more expensive than Salesforce? We've seen massive productivity gains over other CRMs and you need to ask yourself: how many more deals/month would a sales person need to close to make $100/mo? Probably not ve…

Please take note, engineers: this is how a smart sales guy answers a pricing objection.

I'd like to point out I'm an engineer :)

Re: Elastic (YC W11) launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople

#64

Post by noahc » Wed, Jan 30, 2013, 8:15 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #61

noahc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple things: 1. Being cheaper doesn't mean more sales. I've often times chosen the more expensive option simply because it is more expensive and it has to be better right? If you're cheaper than salesforce, then I view you as an inferior product to salesforce. If you're the same price as salesforce, than you're a salesforce knock off, why not just get the real deal? If you're more expensive than salesforce, oh? W…

Noah, 1. I follow your logic here, and it makes perfect sense to me, but per my experience in the real world things just don't work that way. If you are trying to crack into an existing market, you have to be better on both service and price. 2. Tell this to Michael Bloomberg. He raises prices every year and is one of the richest people in America. Also, there are other methods of raising prices at a later date other…

I can't obviously dispute your personal experience, but I think we can both agree that price is a signal.

I agree with you that you can mask your price increase and it isn't something that I'd considered when I originally posted.

However, I would argue that Bloomberg was priced high enough early on to not attract cheapskates. Again, pricing as a signal. If you're charging $15,000 and the person is making $1mm a month off of it the difference between $15,000 and $25,000 isn't very much. However, if you started out charging $150 a month and hope to get to $25,000 you're going to have a very hard time doing so even if your customers are making $1mm a month of the service because you've anchored your price so low. Again, there are probably creative ways to get from $150 to $25,000 like you mentioned, but I'm not sure I'm interested in spending my creative energy moving the needle that much when I could just start out charging a much higher rate.