Yes. It's like visiting the websites of two competing software vendors. One has a plain-as-day pricing table with a $100 / month plan and a big blue "Buy now" button. The other company's Pricing page just reads: "Call us for a quote". Given the choice, who would ever go with the company that makes you talk to an enterprise salesman?
Somehow car dealers in the U.S. have managed to enshrine this sleazy sales model into state laws, which is certainly an amazing feat of lobbying.
Pro-tip: if you're calling them, they don't have a $100 / month plan to sell you. There aren't many companies that sell most of their business at $5,000 / month through the website. And for those that do, talking to a sales rep gets you a discount just for picking up the phone.
Also, having moved from programming to sales/marketing, I'm a bit more sympathetic towards the "call me" model of selling. There's a lot of companies (like mine) that aren't deliberately withholding information, but instead are training and enabling reps to walk you through a process that can't be navigated with blog posts and product pages alone. We do monitoring, and most of our customers treat our sales reps and pre-sales engineers as free consultants. Nothing magical about it, but talking to a human is valuable for problems like "how to a unify monitoring for my 1,000 servers are 24 teams which runs apps that are a result of 17 acquisitions".
I imagine the car salesmen also think of buying a car as a "process that can't be navigated with blog posts and product pages alone". Probably your business has a more valid claim to that.
There are areas where it's reasonable to ask people to call. Where it gets suspicious and tricky is when some businesses state prices up-front, and others ask you to call. When the nature of the thing requires contact, they'll (almost?) all say you should call. For example, plumbers typically won't advertised fixed rates for jobs, and in the rare cases they do that's a warning sign.
Right. The conversion rate is better for some products after a salesperson walks the customer through.
Of course, you're cutting off the cohort of people who just don't want to talk to a salesperson - so you'll never convert those - but you're converting at a far higher rate with people who need explanations and a salesperson to help them navigate the internal blockers at the company.
There is a good joel-on-software post about this - essentially once the price goes above a set level - maybe $2000 all in - then the price has to jump because enterprise-y sales means that the buyer has to justify it to their purchasing, which means needing a salesperson to do all the grunt work to help.
A lot of people in the no-touch SaaS model think this is nuts - but the fact is different models work for different people. Just because two companies have similar-sounding products, it doesn't mean they are in the same market. Gmail and Exchange server essentially do the same thing, but the markets are mostly different, with only a small overlap.
There's a lot of companies (like mine) that aren't deliberately withholding information, but instead are training and enabling reps to walk you through a process that can't be navigated with blog posts and product pages alone.
I've designed complex electronic devices via product pages (data sheets) and other online information sources, and sold them to the Federal government through GSA procurement. I'm pretty sure I can "navigate" your "process" without wasting time schmoozing your sales guys on the telephone.
If you have a competitor who doesn't make me do that, they have a strong advantage over your company, right out of the gate. Just saying.
I'm not questioning your intelligence! I'm sure you could do it.
The more common scenario is that there are a ton of people involved, and it's not easy / worthwhile for the person who kicked this off to convince them all. Where the sales rep provides value there is they can help the you sell. You make an intro, they'll pull together a bunch of materials and demos and other crap to convince your coworkers that it's important.
We do have a self-serve path which is about as easy as anybody else's, and our prices are stated up front. Most people can navigate that technically, but the larger organizations almost never take that route because of organizational / political concerns.
> Somehow car dealers in the U.S. have managed to enshrine this sleazy sales model into state laws, which is certainly an amazing feat of lobbying.
It's a perversion of originally customer-friendly laws. The regulations were from an era where being able to be sure you have a local presence to service your car was very, very important.
It's like I heard a collective "bitch please" come from the banks, food wholesalers, defense contractors, insurance companies, immigration lawyers, patent attorneys, entertainment industry, telcos, etc. etc.
okay, this old trope again. anyone who has a $100/month plan has it on their website. it's 2015, saas is a thing now.
nobody is going to make you call them for $100/month. ~$3k/month or ~$10k lump sum is roughly the threshold for enterprise sales that require you to talk to someone.
they do this because anyone who pays anything less than that for an enterprise service or product is going to be a demanding, unreasonable, cheapskate, entitled, caustic asshole because they're not used to spending large amounts and the money is probably coming out of their pocket (small business or soho customer). nobody on earth wants to deal with that kind of customer.
the phone call is designed to filter people out who get annoyed at needing to talk to someone. if you don't want to talk to anyone, you don't want to spend real money, because people who spend real money want to talk to real someones, usually multiple someones, the more someones the better. nobody wants to deal with the 'in between' customer who is too big for their consumer britches but won't step up to spend money for a real solution where real people on the other end of the line give a shit about their problems.
One has a plain-as-day pricing table with a $100 / month plan and a big blue "Buy now" button. The other company's Pricing page has $100/month plan with "Buy now" button and additional text: "Call us if you want to pay less".
Somehow car dealers in the U.S. have managed to enshrine this sleazy sales model into state laws, which is certainly an amazing feat of lobbying.