1. It gets added to a list of marketing website leads, which is owned by SDRs/BDRs who are there to filter and qualify leads. These are usually early-career people, with a base salary + quota for qualifying leads. The website is many times their least preferred channel of leads due to the quality, but they can't ignore it because sometimes good customers do come through there.
2. The SDR will either work over email or on a call; their goal is to identify if you're a real potential customer (vs shopping for prices, vs confused about what we sell), write up notes, and identify which customer segment you belong to (geography + business type + business size).
3. You will then speak to a salesperson (with varying titles "Account Executive", "Sales Director", "Regional VP of Enterprise Sales", or whatever inflated title makes sense for that sales organization). Their goal is to confirm they're speaking to the right person in your organization (or wasting their time), if your use case is meaningful enough for the "enterprise plan" (they can't sign too small deals), what your budget is, what your usage will be like, etc.
4. Pricing could be made up by guessing your price point, but it's rare. It is difficult to consistently make up pricing that works over time and doesn't have many lowball deals that harm the company's revenue long-term, and salespeople often don't understand the technical details well enough to make things up that make sense. Usually, there will be a pricing framework and an internal calculator (very often, a spreadsheet with formulae and VLOOKUPs) that will give them a range. They can then choose what number within that range to offer, based on who they think you are and how far off they are from their quarterly quota.
5. They can then negotiate the number, or the included features, or the payment terms (upfront payment, multi-year contract, exit clauses, etc.) which can be translated into discounts if they're favorable to the seller.
Usually it's because too much is hidden.
Not a SAS, but I once tapped an ad for redoing my shower. No prices, no way to know even approximately what it should cost.
I wanted more information, but I didn't want a phone call. I filled out the form asking for some high-level information on pricing, and that I didn't want a phone call.
Needless to say, the rep never responded to my inquiry.
But, put yourself in my situation: I don't want calls at random times of the day that are convenient to a salesman. I want to talk on the phone at a time that's convenient to ME, and only if I know the (ballpark) range of what you're selling costs. If a new shower costs $5k, and I won't be in a position to spend that for 18 months, I want to know that I should pick up the phone then, not now.
If a VP clicks on the button, that's a different story.
The only possible way I can imagine someone with the title "VP" going to a vendor's website and clicking a "get quote" button to get a sales call at a random time from some junior salesperson is if we're talking about one of those companies where they give inflated titles and anyone who isn't an intern is a VP-of-something-or-other.
Which predictably often lead to vendors losing out because their sales people ghosted team leads.
Enterprise pays more due to volume , but generally pay less on a per user or whatever the unit that constitutes the seas is
Enterprise much more expensive and filled with features you can't even buy as addons in the lower tiers. An E5 license is sometimes almost three times more expensive than the self service license, but includes all the crap Microsoft can stuff in the license in return (some of it useful, like P2 AAD, MDM etc).
No, you can get idiots who are trying to sell you crap, random confused job seekers (who may or may not also be spammers), etc.
1. Someone who wants only one feature that's not in self-service but doesn't have the budget to pay more. 2. Someone willing to pay more but not enough more. 3. Someone who's just trying to compare prices between vendors but isn't a serious buyer (especially when not an existing customer). 4. Various non-obvious spam (affiliate resellers, etc.). 5. Someone who's interested but can't get a sale to happen given their role: has no budget and their manager doesn't have budget, has no authority on technical decisions. 6. Someone who's only curious. 7. Etc. etc. etc.
The level of effort required to press that button is very low, so it isn't that great of a filter. Again, they take those calls because the lack of filtering doesn't mean it's never a quality lead.
Or, it's someone who the SaaS vendor forced to click that button by putting OIDC ("Sign in with..." or "Continue with...") behind that, using "SSO" as a price discriminator.
“I am a jerk trying to annoy you”
“I am a bot scraping your web site”
“The people setting up the website are incompetent and a blank entry was just added to the database”
“I am a dishonest salesperson with a harebrained scheme to pad my metrics”
I do think we just found the poster who has not worked in sales, though. Please, be sure to count your blessings!
So whenever a site has hidden the pricing, I'll submit a few requests to make sure it costs them just as much time as it cost me.
... what?
That seems exceedingly unlikely. When I'm shopping for a new vendor I have no idea who I'll use until I talk to a few to see how the offerings vary and which ones fit my budget.
The ridiculous part is how much time is wasted getting to the price. Then it turns out it is above my budget, so it's all wasted time on both sides. I don't expect a final price on first contact because I know enterprise contacts have variables, but give me a ballpark figure in the first 30 seconds to see if it's worth continuing to talk for three weeks or just end it there.
Just recently had a vendor (named similar to this site but "One" instead of "News"!) who gave me an approximate quote on day 1. Sounded perfect, fit my budget. So we continue talking about the details for many weeks. Only after a lot of time they reveal that quote is just for the core service we need, but there's also several other mandatory fees so the actual quote was like 3x higher. Far above my budget. Many weeks wasted. Maddening.
This quote reminds me of an eye-opening speech I attended way back about the things you learn about when you run a business.
One of the lessons was that hiring the wrong salesperson can put you out of business. When you're hiring the first time, you think they're going to maximize their commissions. In reality, a lot of people are satisfied getting half the income they could by only taking the easy money. They might have to work five or ten times as hard to make the second half of sales, so they let those customers know they're disinterested and they go elsewhere.
The tougher half of sales are maybe 90% of the potential customers, or maybe more than that. You lose 90% of your customer base initially, then people talk to others about their experience, you've lost half of the rest, and suddenly you're no longer a viable business.
I'm curious about how they know.
I'm actually in that exact process, and have absolutely no idea if half of the providers I'm looking at have a decent product.
There's no free tier so I can't just create random accounts and see for myself. To your point, I'm also not the last decision point, but will be the poor soul explaining why we should choose X or Y to get someone up the chain to approve the money.
Your point probably stands for companies that will blindly buy the overpriced market leader anyway, and do whatever it takes to make it work whatever the proposition. But that's not even half of the market I think, very few companies actually require the top of the line service, by definition.
At my company, we sell deals between $25k and $1.2m/y. You obviously get very different salespeople taking those calls.
Super junior salespeople promoted from SDRs train on the $25k-$40k; most salespeople handle midmarket deals up to maybe $200k; and the very best salespeople get the enterprise leads.
Then depending how formal the customer is the reply can be a text email with a quote, a formal quote that looks almost like an invoice (PDF), or even a 10 page draft document for further discussion.
This might sound like a lot of extra work, something that can't easily be automated, but those companies are used to long sales processes. The product manager needs to liaison with their legal department, then with their accounting department. "Request for quote" and "contact sales" are essentially the same.
Pricing is usually the same only scaled higher. We have an Excel spreadsheet that's an extension of the public pricing page. Then we look if something is complicating the contract (but we might only insist on minimum contract length, not higher price) or making it easier (they need less features which actually cost us less money and we can give discounts).
That's for an established SaaS. I assume any new SaaS only few months old will just make prices up on-the-fly (we did!).
I get that it's for differentiation between plans, but as a customer it feels weird to walk into this pricing black hole just for SSO. Maybe you have some experience with that?
Storing ClientID and ClientSecret for OpenID, or some keys for SAML per customer is much easier, and a lot less risky.
After all, I'm in the business of solving (insert SaaS problem), not in the business of solving authentication.
Some customers use Okta; great! But some of those customers have Okta configured in ways that don't work with your auth service. Some customers use Okta as a downstream to their _actual_ IdP, which could be Keycloak (a million different ways to configure that) or, god forbid, some custom thing they wrote. You've gotta support that.
Some customers (the ones that will pay the REALLY big bucks) use Active Directory Federated Services and SAML-based auth. SAML is XML/SOAP. Gigantic pain. Gotta support it.
Some customers want LDAP/LDAP-S based auth. Gotta support that.
Given all this, it makes much more financial sense to lock that behind customers who are willing to pay the big dollars for enterprise-y features AND support instead of dealing with infinitely long support tickets.
[0] There is no such thing as a happy OAuth2 flow.
LDAP is harder, but IMO you dont need it unless you operate in a very specific industry.
Offering SSO as part of an enterprise SKU offering implies there is a high-touch relationship out of the gate, and that there is a higher chance of success and adoption, including getting SSO set up right.
Furthermore many large behemoth corporations have strange SSO configurations and it's not unusual to require bespoke configuration let alone debugging time.
But "Sign in with..." or "Continue with..." M365 and Google gets you almost all SMB, and with Apple gets you individuals who spend money.
Add a domain check and you have the quick and dirty equivalent of SAML SSO without any touch at all.
"Price discrimination" is a pricing strategy where very similar products are sold at different prices in different market segments.
Imagine you've invented an amazing silver bullet that makes software developers 30% more productive.
For the likes of Google who pay developers $200k/year, getting 30% more productivity would be a great deal even if you were charging them $10k per user per year, because that productivity boost is worth $60k.
For unpaid students, casual users, open source projects and cash-strapped micro-businesses - a 30% improvement in $0 is still $0 so they can't afford much. Maybe $50/user/year, and they'll still complain like hell about it. But it'll help your tool spread and build word-of-mouth.
So how do you price your product - $50 or $10,000?
With "price discrimination" you can do both. Offer a cheap tier for home users and micro-businesses, and an enterprise tier with features Google desperately wants, at a much higher price.
By having prospective customers call for pricing, your sales folk can research each customer and figures out whether they're the kind of place that pays their developers $200k/year or more like $30k/year - allowing them to figure out how much the product is worth to that particular customer.
Unpopular opinion - you may like to call it an SSO tax, but I think it's perfectly reasonable from both sides. The reality is - if you're a 10 person startup and the "SSO tax" is annoying, then simply don't do the SSO version...you have 10 people in your company, you can get them all to use a password manager with MFA. If you're worried about security then fine, don't you think it's worth paying a little more?
If people's issue with the "SSO tax" is that the SaaS software provider is making incremental money for very little effort/investment, then I would love to explain how the economics of most SaaS tenancy models work with regards to infrastructure spend...
It's a bunch of handwaving to try to get price discrimination for a "how the Internet is supposed to work" standard everyone, even a single dev client of the SaaS, should be using.
And that the SaaS provider should be pushing so they don't have the liability of subscriber credential database protection ...
It's in the launch HN instructions we give YC founders, which are here if anyone wants to see them: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html. All the advice is valid for HN generally, though the logistical aspects are specific to YC.
Edit: I even keep a list of examples to scare people:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40237070 (May 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40170609 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39787870 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39513573 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31840885 (June 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31659066 (June 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31655259 (June 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630736 (March 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29554111 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552753 (Dec 2021)
* Since we sell mainly to Enterprise they all have procurement people who get measured on how much money they save - with some getting crazy bonuses if they can "save" 50%. So we needed to keep the price inflated by 50% until it gets to them so they can "twist our arm" down to the real price to show their value.
* And if a procurement person can get that 50% off our competitor such that the deal with them makes them look better they'll pick them instead.
* And when we used to put that 2X the real price price on our website some people wouldn't know to twist our arm for the discount and instead just thought we were too expensive. It was also abused by our competitors who were all "Contact Us" to make out they were cheaper than us without giving us the chance to compete.
So instead we do this stupid dance that I hate where we can't even tell the real price to the people in the early meetings (keeping that for procurement at the end of the process) - and we have to do all this fishing to find out who else they are looking at and what their price is that we have to beat before giving them our price. The entire purpose of our Sales Execs is to do this dance to decide whether to give a price and which price they tell to various people at the various stages as far as I can tell - though they actually are pretty good at it...
I came from Amazon where the price was public as were the mechanisms to lower it through various types of commitment so I found the whole thing ridiculous. I have since learned that everybody does it this way and this seems to be the reason. I argued "maybe if we are the one who doesn't in our space then we'll get more business for being the easiest one to deal with?" but I was assured that was not the case and it would just mean procurement people would want 50% off our best price instead...
Our pricing is in general based on a "fixed" monthly per-module price plus max-simultaneous-users price, and then a usage based per-transaction price element in addition.
The "fixed" cost can be somewhat different, typically it's a bit lower for smaller customers which also takes into account smaller customers typically have fewer custom integration needs (ie less custom maintenance/support).
The transaction pricing has a volume discount "ladder" with many steps. So smaller customers pays a lot more per transaction than larger customers. The transaction-based "price ladder" is otherwise quite fixed between customers.
This transaction-based element allows us to have reasonable overall prices for small as well as large, as it scales with our customers' activity. If they have a good month they pay more but also have more income.
This model is used for all our customers, from single-employee shops to the largest ones we have (many hundreds of simultaneous users). Our CEO has been clear he doesn't want to be cheapest, but deliver a superior product that justifies the price.
In the 10 years I've been here we've gone from #5 of a group of vendors to a dominating position. I think our pricing model has been one of the factors that has facilitated this.
Year 1 - Form posts into slack. Someone calls you and reads the price off a pdf.
Year 2 or 3 - form posts into CRM. Someone calls you and reads the price off a pdf.
Year 4+ - form posts into CRM. Someone calls you and maybe enters some details into a Google sheet.
Think very hard before using something not upfront about pricing.
It's not extortion. A good salesperson is looking for a good customer that actually needs the product. They want to make sure that the product is a good fit for the customer. Selling to a business that doesn't need the product is not only a waste of time, but it actually costs the business, as the customer will quickly cancel and all the work the account executive put in to learning the business ends up in a net loss
I had one large, famous call center vendor who were running on a monolithic Java backend in their own data center, with a six-week implementation time for a completely vanilla configuration, and for which the simplest change required a professional services engagement. There is no technical reason the entire thing couldn’t have been done with self-service signup and configuration, and indeed that’s how their smaller, younger competitors do it.
But even assuming updated systems, how could you give an accurate quote without understanding the customer's needs? Make someone fill out a big form providing estimates of their usage? Now you're just putting the customer on the hook for generating the quote. The sales rep can translate their requirements into an accurate quote without putting the burden on the customer to understand the product more than they need to. Also, the customer may need the quote to land a contract.
The complexity of the software's pricing is a reflection of the complexity of the customer's needs.
The pricing will be basically the same rate for everyone, with discounts based on actual scale, but there will be a minimum commitment which will be calculated to be substantially less than your likely bill -- this is to encourage you to actually start using the service, rather than sitting on it for another year while you wonder if the conversion will be worth the trouble.
(It is. Clients love us after they actually start using us. One of our big sales drivers is employees of clients going to work at other companies and noting how much worse things are without us.)
Then the client will have due diligence and security questionaires and want to negotiate some fine details of the contract. Will they require special setup services? More or less training than usual? Sometimes this will require a one-time fee.
you'll get a list price (the price that the company needs to sell at with lots of margin added on top), and, depending on how serious you are and your actual needs, you'll get a "real" price after a sales person/sales engineer qualifies you.
there are a million ways big-money SaaS licenses can be discounted, but it always depends on the buyer, the relationship, how "sticky" they'll be (i.e. will they use it for a year and bounce, or could they be a multi-year loyal customer), sales targets and how much other stuff they might purchase.
also, like a previous poster said earlier, there are lots and lots and LOTS of ways that enterprise software can be purchased. "request for quote" sales flows covers that.
SaaS companies do this because so much of B2B pricing is a function of value and willingness to pay for that value.
SOC2 reports, SLA monitoring dashboards, 5% annual increase limits, they can put literally anything as a requirement.
Once I was cooling my heels in the lobby of Oracle and, looking around realized I’d had a stupid brain fart. So I opened my laptop and doubled the price of every line item in the quote (felt very high tech in ~1994). They complained about the cost, but paid. They would have complained about the original quote: complaining about the cost is the first step of negotiation.
I’m surprised there isn’t a service that takes the requestor’s email address (if it’s something generic like @gmail.com, DWIM-searches LinkedIn), looks them up in an in-house proprietary database, and sends you a score (a multiplier).
Someone should start that — it’s probably a quick flip to Experian.
We'll walk through the problem you're facing that lead you to fill out the meeting form, and you'll either get a solution that day, or it'll be built rapidly.
I started with an "unlimited" plan and very quickly realised this attracts pathological customers for whom $199/mo for unlimited resources is a steal. So now I charge incrementally per resource used (uptime checks, status pages).
I’m guessing you want someone to reach out to you for a video call where they can tell you whether the product works with your Identity Provider, follows your security standards, and has a human who you can negotiate with set starting price per license/head/unit.
What do you put on a features/pricing page to help you start finding out what your enterprise customers might actually want? (Not the generic stuff like SSO and audits, but specific to your product/market).
Just a generic "Don't see the features you need? Email us!"?
When you submit the contact us form I receive a message via Matrix on Element. I also receive an email and the submission is recorded in postgres.
Depending on the request details, I may reach out to you immediately or put you on my task list for 24-48 hours to handle.
I don't sell or do anything with the data. I'm the only person that sees it.
Maybe you are shopping on price.
Maybe you are seeking bespoke services.
In other words, it’s rare to have a huge variation of costs given to customers for the same product, even if they are higher or lower for certain customers.
"Request a quote" is a sign to me that the company is dishonest, with high pressure sales tactics, toxic incentives, and a culture of maximizing profit over providing quality service. I've never seen a counter-example of an awesome, high performing company I loved working with, who went the extra mile, use "Request a quote" or similar tactics.
"Request a quote" is a corporate version of a street busker con, with them needing to get up close and personal, to shuffle the numbers and dazzle you with "here's what we are willing to do, just for you!" as their hand slides into your pocket.
There are always better options that somehow manage to be honest, clear, and upfront with pricing. If a company is hiding the price, it's to get away with something that you'd call out as sketchy if you knew all the information in advance. Even if it's only to force an interaction with a skilled sales agent, it's a despicable tactic.
> be honest, clear, and upfront with pricing
I have seen SaaS sales where the prospect (not the vendor) required contracts to be executed prior to determining requirements. This involved legal on both sides to be involved. Once the trial was started, the prospect required many changes to the app, API, data model, and other fundamental aspects of the SaaS.
In order to account for this, what number would you put on the website's pricing page?
OP is specifically saying this is always a scammy sales tactic. I am asking for a way to arrive at a scalar $ value to put on the website to avoid this tactic of "talking to the customer to determine the price."
Thing is, while we might be able to provide a "sticker price" on our webpage that would fit the smallest customers, it wouldn't for anyone larger.
For example, our product has a lot of modules (over 20), and you pay per module. Unless you've worked with our product before, you have little to no idea which modules you need. Best is to give us a call, explain your daily operation and we can then tell you which modules you need and give you some options on which modules you might benefit from additionally.
Anyone but the smallest customers also has some integration. Largest ones have a lot. Do you require a custom integration or can you use our standard integrations? It doesn't help that you run say SAP on your other system, as no two SAPs are the same. Perhaps our standard integration can cover your needs, perhaps not. Similar for a lot of other systems we integrate with.
We have tons of small customers, including many single-employee shops, up to the biggest fish in our pond. There's some variation in pricing between customers through negotiation, but not a lot. It's just that customers have quite varied needs.
I bet those companies also have a "request a quote" process for their enterprise customers, who do not pay the public prices, you just don't see it.
Why aren't companies honest and upfront about this? Sometimes they are. Slack, for example (https://app.slack.com/plans/T02EPKPG3) is pretty straightforward: you can pay $7.25 if you're a normie company, $12.50 if you have more advanced needs, or you can request a quote if you're a giant enterprise who's going to be expensive to support. The risk is that a company which really ought to be in the "request a quote" tier ends up in a lower one and then has mismatched expectations. I've seen one case where a sticker-price-tier customer was absolutely outraged that nobody would set up a call with engineering for him.
Sometimes the cost of an offer is not linear with some metric or easily predictable.
And sometimes the offering company is not Salesforce and just does not have resources or existing similar customers to model price adequately
