I fairly recently got to switch sides on this. I never take sales calls or want to get on demos as a developer ... but I moved roles a bit and needed to join some calls with the reps at my company for a product I now manage. It has no public pricing.

I was surprised by how much the people who show up for demos seemed to like them and have good relationships with their reps. They thank us for saving them a lot of time they would have spent reading docs and marketing materials to learn the specific things that applied to them, or for us talking about roadmap stuff they don't get to see in the public materials.

Sometimes the price is a surprise to them and it needs a bit of context. Customers who are used to buying software this way seem to read between the lines really well and ask suitable questions about discounts or whatever, when they are surprised by pricing. Often we are able to make something work at a different price than the typical quote, or we can connect the dots so that the rationale is more clear, or the value requires some customization to be done.

My reps tell me this sorta thing is difficult over email, that nobody makes $10k+ purchases without talking to somebody, so if we can't get you on a call the deal falls over.

So I dunno. I'm not a big fan of the requirement for calls really, but I can understand why reps don't just throw quotes around without some conversation.

I've come to the opinion now that if something in sales doesn't make sense, you're probably not the target market. Sure _I_ don't want to have a demo with no price guarantees, but I'm not the target market - big companies with dedicated purchasing teams and big lists of requirements are. And those companies write big, ongoing cheques. So in some ways the obscure pricing and convoluted sales process is doing it's job which is qualifying good customers and diverting bad customers (people like me)

The goal in sales is to flatter people (with attention) whose job is to spend other people's money.

The problem is that a lot of companies all want to sell those $10k+ purchases but then forgot that their products are actually useable to the "common man".

So they then lack any easy to see price overview or reasonable models for small dev teams or small companies. Demo's are not worth it for somebody going to spend a few hundreds, so you get often ignored.

What they then forgot that if you tie in a customer at the low end, that customer may grow and become a 10k customer down the line.

This is why companies need to get it in their stick skull, that you NEED fixed pricing for the folks that do not want personalized quotes (or the lovely no-response emails if asking for a quote as a single dev or "small" company).

And getting customers early on, even if they are not mass profit generators on their first purchase, are a good source of future money as people really do not change infrastructure or tooling without a good reason.

Seen a lot of good products, that we ignored because they lacked proper simplified pricing on their website. If its "contact us for pricing", its just like advertising "we do not want to deal with your poor ass" advertisement. So those customers go somewhere else, get a product they like and then grow. But then its too late / difficult as changing that customer to your product is 10x harder.

That presumes that it's worth the cost and headache to even serve you. It's called the long tail of small customers for a reason: you have a huge amount more customers to satisfy when combined they might be worth less than a single big customer. A surprising amount of services are held together by duct tape and human hands.

Appreciate the other perspective. I'll even admit there's been cases where the demos have been useful and sparked other questions, but in those cases I hadn't heard of the product before or was coming in blind.

Most of my cases now (and I may be an outlier), I'm looking at something because I both have a need and someone I know recommended it or uses it so I'm already familiar, but at that point it's not so much a sales process and more so "I already know I want this, and I already have the budget and approval, let's get this buying process over with as quick as possible."

Are you selling to developers?

In my experience, non developer audiences like demos. Developers tend to like to try things out on their own, maybe with a little tech support.

Related gripe: Requiring people to sign-up--or worse, to already be a customer--just to view API documentation.

Y'all're crazy if you think your API is so awesome that it needs to be a trade secret, and without it I can't get a good idea if you product is something that would actually solve our problems, or whether it seems like something worth integrating-with.

I totally agree.

A major change in my field over the last few years is the rise of Ignition, a SCADA suite that's taking over everywhere. And sure, it's got simpler and cheaper licensing than it's rivals. But for our projects, licensing cost isn't generally a factor.

What Inductive Automation did was open up their documentation, offer good online training for free, have an endless demo mode that can be reset indefinitely, and a "maker" version that can be used for free. Oh, and it's scripted with Python instead of some janky BASIC knock-off. All features that appeal to integrators but that don't matter to the end users.

I don't think it's a coincidence.

So much this.

Putting these walls up also makes life harder for actual customers, who now have to prove they are such every time they need to access said docs for whatever reason.

As an individual engineer, if I have to jump through hoops just to login and view docs... yeah. I won't be going out of my way to make sure you get considered in trade studies at my next job.

They know their API isn't awesome, they know it's embarrassing. They're trying to protect themselves from technical ridicule and critic.

This just means your pricing is not transparent. Economists have found the returns on fuzzy pricing are poor (see work by Miravete).

This is super interesting, thank you for the reference! Agreed the pricing is not transparent. There are many intangibles related to pricing b2b products that can affect the negotiated price of a specific line item.

Miravete's work still looks interesting though, "Firms engage in foggy pricing when the menu of tariff options aims at profiting from consumer mistakes". I'm not sure the cell phone plan study really translates to this context, but maybe he has other more relevant work. Definitely interested in learning more about pricing.

And now they call from cell phones instead of company phones so it comes up as a plausible real call.

Salespeople are the devil.