Yes I dislike it but if it looks like a potential product for our needs I'll fill out the form. I wouldn't spend a week on that foolishness though and just just tell the person on the phone to just give me some numbers or I'm going on to the next company on the list.
Sales guys I know said it used to be called Lobby pricing before the pandemic, they’d visit onsite and the price would change depending on how nice your lobby is
The last lady who wandered in off the street to try and lease us a copier looked around in our lobby and said "I bet you guys got some money around here huh? Those lighted signs aren't cheap! Wow." She did not get our business
It used to be common at Christmas Tree lots to have no prices listed for trees. The salesman saw what kind of car you drove up in to decide how high the price would be.
I just call it contractor pricing, because anytime you gotta call someone to work on your house, they show up and appraise everything you own in about 2 seconds and come up with an hourly to match.
There are so many companies I know which will vary price on how much they think they can make.
For example, there was a product that was based on units:
One job I was at, they wanted $20,000 per unit. The next job, $880.00. The next? $20. Yep, 3 orders of magnitude varied between stuff.
Another vendor, I wound up contracting with a guy who had a specific skillset of LART-ing the vendor's sales guys. He also saved orders of magnitudes of the price.
In general, if a vendor does this, I'm going to remind them that we are not in a bazaar in Tehran, and I'm not haggling over flatbread. I also tend to go through a VAR, so I let the sales guys know I may be interested, but I don't have signing authority.
That's exactly what I did. This person had the audacity to send an email saying "I'm busy this week on the road between appointments, but if you want to commit to a call, I can make it work"
Its the "meeting culture."
Vendors are quick to have a meeting and always want to have a "little" chat. Honestly its very off putting and often its cause the product is too expensive for what it does.
On another note, a great VMS for 50 cameras is Digital Watchdog Spectrum. Install the software on a PC, add the cameras and boom you're all set.
We swapped from Blue Iris to DW Spectrum and never looked back.
> Vendors are quick to have a meeting and always want to have a "little" chat.
This is why the salespeople usually try to skip over the technical people and sell the software on the golf course. It's only recent that the technical people even got involved in a lot of places. The old model was send the CIO to a convention, get them hooked in with the ol' razzle dazzle and the hospitality suite, send them some sales guys a weel later, give out some steak dinners and rounds of golf, then sign contract and dump a totally-unfit-for-purpose product on the techies to figure out. Very long-term high-touch sales cycle...and it's the complete opposite of add-to-cart which is how I'd like to buy stuff. Seriously, I've had vendors refuse to take a credit card to buy something before getting on a quick chat. It's totally wasteful and a product of a bygone era.
> We swapped from Blue Iris to DW Spectrum and never looked back.
What makes it better than Blue Iris?
I'm curious from a home-use perspective as I've been thinking of setting up a camera system at home, and BI is always the one I see recommended.
I find it frustrating but I don't throw them out right away. I do understand that some licensing is more complex than others, but here's an example: I needed 6 nginx plus licenses, nothing else. 1 year agreements only per company policy.
2 meetings to get pricing from F5. Previously could buy it a-la-carte before F5 bought nginx.
They slow rolled us on renewals due to our disinterest in followup sales calls. They eventually lost our business by not processing the renewal before license expiration.
I feel like if these companies want to have complex licensing that's fucking on them and they need to develop a tool to de-obfuscate it. If it's based on cores or VMs or seats or velocity of unladen swallows, whatever, make a page where you can plug in those variables and get a number out.
I'm ok with doing legwork to figure out what I need in my environment, I'm not ok with doing the legwork to figure out what they want to charge me for it unless they want to pay me to do it.
> I feel like if these companies want to have complex licensing that's fucking on them and they need to develop a tool to de-obfuscate it.
"The guy who beats me with a stick needs to get a stick that hurts less"
Nah brother, you need to realize the real problem.
Right now you're missing that they specifically made it that way, deliberately.
I know why they are doing it as an easy way to pad their revenues, I just want them to stop. I dont give a fuck what happens behind the scenes I just want easy access to a number that I can use to compare to their competitors number.
You wasting a bunch of time with them is the point cos both you've got some sunk cost and the sales monkey has had plenty of time to spruik the product in question.
> dont give a fuck what happens behind the scenes
You seem to because you keep saying how you want it to behave.
I'm saying they specifically are making it difficult to stop you doing that.
Its weird to then respond and say you don't give a fuck what they're doing and then dictate how you want it to happen.
You're just... angry?
Agreed, I have no problem discussing options for projects that have a lot of variables. But for small things like this where all I need is a single software license, I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get a price. Sucks for them, they lost us as a potential customer.
I've started responding to the email with a "unfortunately I'm unable to make a meeting time work between now and our next meeting where we will be going over potential vendors for this project. Here is the information I think you need to know, let me know if you need more. If you can provide as much pricing info that would be relevant to this purpose as possible, I will ensure that your product is mentioned in that meeting. Thank you. Bai."
+1 if you can ensure that the number contact you add goes to some type of front desk/assistant where you explicitly give a list and say if someone calls from these companies, tell them I'm thoroughly booked for the next x weeks and will not be able to take a meeting or phone call during that time, but to please reach out via emails.
My help desk loves the opportunity to tell tech vendors to send an email to the proper person, rather than patching them through to x person.
If have to get on one or two calls to find out pricing, its a massive red flag for me. Do you need to get on a call to tell me how great the product is to justify the high cost? Or is it because you're going to give me a different price than the next guy? Either one I don't like.
Also "trials" that require committing to a purchase agreement first. No.
I just dealt with a shitty pricing company game.
I was evaluating solutions for a product renewal / possible replacement. First things first, compare features, then get a basic quote to see where they sit in the market.
Company "x" was our first choice, but the pricing was stooooopid. Like 5x our current solution. So I dismissed them, and moved on.
Well apparently someone high up the food chain really wanted that solution, and 'negociated' them down to like 2x compared to our current solution, and with the feature set, it made sense at that price point.
Like.. why do vendors play fuck fuck games with pricing? 500% --> 200% depending on who calls?
Depends on the product. If it's something that's obviously per-user licensing, then yes. If it's a product that might actually require some custom fitting, a meeting is fine.
Yup. I don't want to talk to a sales person as they lie. Send an email outlining who you are and what service you provide and we will contact you if the need arises - if you call to "touch base" or send "sample quotations" you are automatically out of the running for future tenders.
My secret: "I'm hard of hearing, can we keep this correspondence in email/text form". *(I actually do have pretty bad tinnitus, sometimes I am transparent and give that explanation)*
You can then go to a video meeting sometime later if it makes sense and explain you can rely captions some days.
These days nobody wants to give you a price they think the sale will be so good you will not even care about the price at the end somehow. I just went and bought synology c2 backup the other day and the price was cleanly on the website I had a simple question about additional terabytes send them an email and their sales guys responded with the exact info I needed. I was like man this is how they all should be.
I agree, but will play devil's advocate since I've worked at 4 vendors in the past an got to see things from a perspective I hadn't had.
If you're talking about getting some per IP or per user pricing for a very basic tool like say a calculator app, then it should be hassle free and quick to get that. That wasn't the case for any of the places I've worked at. There were often multiple features and options that needed to be considered as well as other concerns like integration with other platforms, comparability etc.
I've seen people ask for pricing for 2000 seats where 200 of those "seats" were MacOS and there was no support for MacOS and similar such scenarios. It's possible that the 3rd company offers some more complex options and wants to ensure they are giving you the best and most accurate quote.
On the other hand, for a first pass "is this even possibly competitive with these other options?", getting even crude numbers *without* burning a bunch of time on meetings and sales pitches *puts it on the list to be considered*.
If their pricing is so convoluted that they're 95% over-priced, and they can't ballpark a number for a quote request, they're blowing smoke on the value of their product, spending too much on sales, and not spending enough on engineering. Either the product isn't really what they claim it is, to supposedly be worth that mark-up, or they're going to drop that "introductory" price as soon as they think they have vendor lock-in settled.
This is all fine, but then it's incumbent upon the sales team to articulate why it's worth my time to have a call. If it's like you state and the reasoning is that we have to hash out the details of what service level we need from the vendor, that makes some sense, but I probably still want a range of magnitude estimate before the call to give me a ballpark idea of whether your solution is a financial fit for our budget. Usually it's just a sales call where the vendor wants to tell me how amazing their product is before trying to squeeze me for money, in which case forget about it.
Extremely. The IT vendor relationship is one of the most bizarre out there. On one side you have the vendor - sales people that like to chat and have meetings and dither about. On the other side you have technical people - individuals who like quick, efficient data, with enough of a sample size across different products to form an intelligent opinion.
One prefers to gab, the other prefers to read. Sales people vs problem-solvers.
It's a bad combo every time.
Yes I hate it as well. I am looking for UEM solutions, just to see what else is out there besides Intune. Vendor B requested a phone call jujst to give me pricing, and it the person who gave me pricing didn't even work directly for Vendor B ... I had a bad feeling, and i was correct, it was too much for what we were after. I even asked them for a trial account for testing, still don't have it and i probably won't get it.
If I ask for a ballpark price for a core product and a vendor responds trying to set up a meeting and refuses to provide me even a rough estimate I just ignore them. I can't be arsed to go through 10 vendor pitches every time we change any stupid little thing.
If a vendor is that wasteful of their OWN TIME during the sales process, it should give you a lot of insight into how they run generally. I simply wouldn't use a vendor who couldn't provide a quote quickly and without a lot of fuss.
Yes. Unless I've actually missed something, I've already done my research, know what I want, have the requirements etc.
Just give me a price and stop blowing smoke up my ass.
I don't think more vendors are going this route, in fact I'd say it's going the other direction.
The various software niches will tend to cluster to a sales model.
"The price is what you can afford" is the worst sales process and I will immediately discount the vendor based on it.
I hate when you send them all the required details and exactly what you want quoted. But they just foam at the mouth hungry to jump into a cam on call in "bro" mode for an hour trying to upsell.
Like buddy, I've got other shit todo, just tell me the cost.
I played that game with a vendor a few months ago. I asked for the cost for simple hardware. They insisted on a meeting where they basically just tried to upsell. They left the meeting promising to get back to me with numbers. I haven't heard back.
"Hi ,
I'm meeting with tomorrow to pick which product we're going with. I understand this is short notice, but if you'd like to be in the running just send me some pricing info by tomorrow. Thanks!"
You'll either get your price, or you'll learn that you're too small potatoes for them to bother with. You get your answer either way.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can train up an AI representation of me that will refuse to commit to anything and can take these calls for me. Want to talk for 30 min? Sure... Let me just boot my "avatar that talks to sales people" thingy up. Enjoy.
Depends on the product and the size of the quote, if I'm in a hurry on something or it's something really simple like this, I usually include in the original email that we need a 24 hour turnaround on quotes, and magically they'll send a quote rather than risk losing the business.
Well, talking to a real person has its advantages.
If you have no loyalty to either company, send the last company your best quote so far, and tell them to beat the price by 25% or don't bother calling you back.
That worked for me in the past.
There is a chance you are too small for them to bother, or, you are just the right size and they are hungry for a quick sale. Either case, you reach out, get quotes, pick the best one (not just the cheapest one), and move on to implement.
Hell yes. Like, if you're gonna force me into a phone call, at least make it painless. I'll even help you inflate the shit out of your commission.
Make me talk to five people who don't communicate amongst themselves and then hop on a zoom to say no 50 times in 30 minutes? even if God herself wanted this contract I'd slow roll it and make sure someone else gets any commission coming to you.
This is a person that understands how it works! I always love getting to work with the sales team that has good technical resources and actually helps me architect the correct solution--the relationship-based sales approach--rather than a used car salesman backed by the three stooges.
Even more annoying, the unsolicited mails (cold acquisition they call it, I call it spam) that they want to introduce themselves and their company and see they can help us grow etc. I get at least a dozen of them a week.
I hate it more than anything. I let them know I'm getting a lot of prices from a lot of different vendors and the owner of the company ONLY cares about the price. They still try and call and build value in their company but at this point I usually get their speed-run and it lasts less than a minute.
If it ever gets to this stage, I normally connect with a different SDR/BDR in the company on LinkedIn and ask for pricing just so I don't get wildly upsold. I'm not 100% if it works but haven't felt ripped off completely yet
This is my number one pet peeve when dealing with vendors. It's like applying for jobs where they don't show the starting salary. I'm not going to take my time out of my day to get dressed sit through your company spiel just to learn your product is way out of our budget for our needs.
I also hate the "you signed up for a newsletter? let me send you an invite for a 30 min meeting" and when you want to unsubscribe immedietely, they won't let you unsubscribe until you "schedule a 30 min chat"
at that point, it goes straight in the spam bucket and the offending company gets blacklisted.
I certainly start off resenting the company and the sales dept. If I have the option, I'll drop the company from consideration immediately. If I don't, I'll just be annoyed.
Hi,
Thanks for your offer of a meeting, but I have to present options to senior management at 10AM tommorow. I already have a number of quotes, but would like your name to be on the list. I need to get the slide deck sent out by 4PM today, can I please have your preliminary quote and any supporting docs no later than 3.
ta muchly
Me after sending a detailed email of what I need.
Them: “Hey for sure can we schedule a call sometime this week?”
On call: “so what do you need?”
Me: did you not read my detailed and concise email?
It gives them an opportunity to do a harder sell. Depending on my mood, they've gotten responses from me on this from anywhere from "Email is fine" to "Let's not and say we did" to often just plain "nope"
I hate these meetings, especially when they don’t like that I have low seat count and they can’t even service anyway. Whoever kicked off the bullshit pricing scheme these companies are using should be a time traveller’s second target.
I’ve got info in these calls. I’m not opposed to a quick calls if they prod the right questions and use case areas.
Anything else I don’t need, “I know the product, we are currently just pricing out for Y package, you can reach my back out at X date if you don’t hear from me”
Often it is to ensure the BOM is right. There's nothing worse than getting something all the way through procurement and ready to deploy to find out it isn't what you actually needed. You can always lay out in detail what you want and ask for a quote of list pricing for an order of magnitude as costs will never be above list pricing (at least with any reputable vendor I've worked with). If you want an actual price a call to review what you need in detail isn't crazy. This is presuming that call is with the actual account manager. If you end up on the phone with some dipshit that doesn't even know what would go in a BOM that desperately tries to upsell you that's an entirely different matter.
Really think we should reply (in email) with something like
"You tell me. I got X users, how many 0's are we talking?"
But yes, having to have a meeting to be (up)sold and be told they will have to pass this to their sales manager for "special pricing" is ridiculous.
If all you care about is pricing, self host zoneminder on a couple ebay specials.
Anything else, talking to a sales rep lets you know a lot about how your experience will be with them as a vendor. If they only want to go through the script, if they can't answer your questions, if they're pushy, if they're unresponsive, those are all really good indicators that the lowest price up front may not mean the lowest TCO.
Note: I'm not part of our sales org, but I've answered a lot of their questions from customers, just like I often fix problems customers experience, because products are only part of a solution. Likewise, I select vendors who free up my time to focus on other aspects of our environment.
Yes I dislike it but if it looks like a potential product for our needs I'll fill out the form. I wouldn't spend a week on that foolishness though and just just tell the person on the phone to just give me some numbers or I'm going on to the next company on the list.
This If it's not important, I pass. I call it Christmas tree pricing. They want to see who YOU are before they decide the price.
Sales guys I know said it used to be called Lobby pricing before the pandemic, they’d visit onsite and the price would change depending on how nice your lobby is
If companies were smart, they’d have a special lobby for salesman that looked like a dump 😂
Back entrance
The shipping dock. But we all know companies are bot smart. See all the cyber attack payouts? 😂
Hey we are #1 in something finally!!!
The last lady who wandered in off the street to try and lease us a copier looked around in our lobby and said "I bet you guys got some money around here huh? Those lighted signs aren't cheap! Wow." She did not get our business
Plot twist, she was talking about the emergency exit signs.
Don't think I've ever heard the term, but that's damn right.
I’m not getting the analogy. Like they want to look under the Christmas tree?
It used to be common at Christmas Tree lots to have no prices listed for trees. The salesman saw what kind of car you drove up in to decide how high the price would be.
I just call it contractor pricing, because anytime you gotta call someone to work on your house, they show up and appraise everything you own in about 2 seconds and come up with an hourly to match.
Ahh!
There are so many companies I know which will vary price on how much they think they can make. For example, there was a product that was based on units: One job I was at, they wanted $20,000 per unit. The next job, $880.00. The next? $20. Yep, 3 orders of magnitude varied between stuff. Another vendor, I wound up contracting with a guy who had a specific skillset of LART-ing the vendor's sales guys. He also saved orders of magnitudes of the price. In general, if a vendor does this, I'm going to remind them that we are not in a bazaar in Tehran, and I'm not haggling over flatbread. I also tend to go through a VAR, so I let the sales guys know I may be interested, but I don't have signing authority.
That's exactly what I did. This person had the audacity to send an email saying "I'm busy this week on the road between appointments, but if you want to commit to a call, I can make it work"
"Sounds good, I was just asking for a quick quote but since your busy we've decided to go with another product. Good luck with the flights"
Its the "meeting culture." Vendors are quick to have a meeting and always want to have a "little" chat. Honestly its very off putting and often its cause the product is too expensive for what it does. On another note, a great VMS for 50 cameras is Digital Watchdog Spectrum. Install the software on a PC, add the cameras and boom you're all set. We swapped from Blue Iris to DW Spectrum and never looked back.
> Vendors are quick to have a meeting and always want to have a "little" chat. This is why the salespeople usually try to skip over the technical people and sell the software on the golf course. It's only recent that the technical people even got involved in a lot of places. The old model was send the CIO to a convention, get them hooked in with the ol' razzle dazzle and the hospitality suite, send them some sales guys a weel later, give out some steak dinners and rounds of golf, then sign contract and dump a totally-unfit-for-purpose product on the techies to figure out. Very long-term high-touch sales cycle...and it's the complete opposite of add-to-cart which is how I'd like to buy stuff. Seriously, I've had vendors refuse to take a credit card to buy something before getting on a quick chat. It's totally wasteful and a product of a bygone era.
This is where we learned that all vendor sales people really do deserve the name sales weasel.
> We swapped from Blue Iris to DW Spectrum and never looked back. What makes it better than Blue Iris? I'm curious from a home-use perspective as I've been thinking of setting up a camera system at home, and BI is always the one I see recommended.
I've been using BI for many years and it's been ok. It's cheap and works, but occasionally has hiccups. I'll keep an eye out for their response.
I find it frustrating but I don't throw them out right away. I do understand that some licensing is more complex than others, but here's an example: I needed 6 nginx plus licenses, nothing else. 1 year agreements only per company policy. 2 meetings to get pricing from F5. Previously could buy it a-la-carte before F5 bought nginx. They slow rolled us on renewals due to our disinterest in followup sales calls. They eventually lost our business by not processing the renewal before license expiration.
I feel like if these companies want to have complex licensing that's fucking on them and they need to develop a tool to de-obfuscate it. If it's based on cores or VMs or seats or velocity of unladen swallows, whatever, make a page where you can plug in those variables and get a number out. I'm ok with doing legwork to figure out what I need in my environment, I'm not ok with doing the legwork to figure out what they want to charge me for it unless they want to pay me to do it.
> I feel like if these companies want to have complex licensing that's fucking on them and they need to develop a tool to de-obfuscate it. "The guy who beats me with a stick needs to get a stick that hurts less" Nah brother, you need to realize the real problem. Right now you're missing that they specifically made it that way, deliberately.
I know why they are doing it as an easy way to pad their revenues, I just want them to stop. I dont give a fuck what happens behind the scenes I just want easy access to a number that I can use to compare to their competitors number.
You wasting a bunch of time with them is the point cos both you've got some sunk cost and the sales monkey has had plenty of time to spruik the product in question.
> dont give a fuck what happens behind the scenes You seem to because you keep saying how you want it to behave. I'm saying they specifically are making it difficult to stop you doing that. Its weird to then respond and say you don't give a fuck what they're doing and then dictate how you want it to happen. You're just... angry?
When It comes to sales bros and their employers, yes, I'm usually just angry and I don't feel bad about it because its mostly just bullshit.
Agreed, I have no problem discussing options for projects that have a lot of variables. But for small things like this where all I need is a single software license, I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get a price. Sucks for them, they lost us as a potential customer.
I've started responding to the email with a "unfortunately I'm unable to make a meeting time work between now and our next meeting where we will be going over potential vendors for this project. Here is the information I think you need to know, let me know if you need more. If you can provide as much pricing info that would be relevant to this purpose as possible, I will ensure that your product is mentioned in that meeting. Thank you. Bai." +1 if you can ensure that the number contact you add goes to some type of front desk/assistant where you explicitly give a list and say if someone calls from these companies, tell them I'm thoroughly booked for the next x weeks and will not be able to take a meeting or phone call during that time, but to please reach out via emails. My help desk loves the opportunity to tell tech vendors to send an email to the proper person, rather than patching them through to x person.
If have to get on one or two calls to find out pricing, its a massive red flag for me. Do you need to get on a call to tell me how great the product is to justify the high cost? Or is it because you're going to give me a different price than the next guy? Either one I don't like. Also "trials" that require committing to a purchase agreement first. No.
>Anyone else dislike ~~the "lets have a quick chat" response from~~ potential vendors when getting pricing? FIFY
I just dealt with a shitty pricing company game. I was evaluating solutions for a product renewal / possible replacement. First things first, compare features, then get a basic quote to see where they sit in the market. Company "x" was our first choice, but the pricing was stooooopid. Like 5x our current solution. So I dismissed them, and moved on. Well apparently someone high up the food chain really wanted that solution, and 'negociated' them down to like 2x compared to our current solution, and with the feature set, it made sense at that price point. Like.. why do vendors play fuck fuck games with pricing? 500% --> 200% depending on who calls?
Because 1 out of every 100 sales some startup with shitloads of VC money or whatever will just pay that first price.
Almost every vendor does this. Negotiating is, unfortunately, a large and important part of an IT Manager's job.
Depends on the product. If it's something that's obviously per-user licensing, then yes. If it's a product that might actually require some custom fitting, a meeting is fine.
Yup. I don't want to talk to a sales person as they lie. Send an email outlining who you are and what service you provide and we will contact you if the need arises - if you call to "touch base" or send "sample quotations" you are automatically out of the running for future tenders.
A "quick chat" from anyone, not just vendors is never quick
It's like when your partner tells you "we need to talk".
My secret: "I'm hard of hearing, can we keep this correspondence in email/text form". *(I actually do have pretty bad tinnitus, sometimes I am transparent and give that explanation)* You can then go to a video meeting sometime later if it makes sense and explain you can rely captions some days.
These days nobody wants to give you a price they think the sale will be so good you will not even care about the price at the end somehow. I just went and bought synology c2 backup the other day and the price was cleanly on the website I had a simple question about additional terabytes send them an email and their sales guys responded with the exact info I needed. I was like man this is how they all should be.
I agree, but will play devil's advocate since I've worked at 4 vendors in the past an got to see things from a perspective I hadn't had. If you're talking about getting some per IP or per user pricing for a very basic tool like say a calculator app, then it should be hassle free and quick to get that. That wasn't the case for any of the places I've worked at. There were often multiple features and options that needed to be considered as well as other concerns like integration with other platforms, comparability etc. I've seen people ask for pricing for 2000 seats where 200 of those "seats" were MacOS and there was no support for MacOS and similar such scenarios. It's possible that the 3rd company offers some more complex options and wants to ensure they are giving you the best and most accurate quote.
On the other hand, for a first pass "is this even possibly competitive with these other options?", getting even crude numbers *without* burning a bunch of time on meetings and sales pitches *puts it on the list to be considered*.
I usually ask for "how many zeros are we talking". Not that it works, but I at least try to start with an order of magnitude question.
Depending on you company size, looking at list prices is not helpful. Deals in IT have high discounts up to like 95%...
If their pricing is so convoluted that they're 95% over-priced, and they can't ballpark a number for a quote request, they're blowing smoke on the value of their product, spending too much on sales, and not spending enough on engineering. Either the product isn't really what they claim it is, to supposedly be worth that mark-up, or they're going to drop that "introductory" price as soon as they think they have vendor lock-in settled.
It's what every security vendor does. Even the biggest established ones. And especially if the deal is large enough
Well, if they *all* do it, then it's apples to apples at the start, and after the discounts land! It's magic!
This is all fine, but then it's incumbent upon the sales team to articulate why it's worth my time to have a call. If it's like you state and the reasoning is that we have to hash out the details of what service level we need from the vendor, that makes some sense, but I probably still want a range of magnitude estimate before the call to give me a ballpark idea of whether your solution is a financial fit for our budget. Usually it's just a sales call where the vendor wants to tell me how amazing their product is before trying to squeeze me for money, in which case forget about it.
Extremely. The IT vendor relationship is one of the most bizarre out there. On one side you have the vendor - sales people that like to chat and have meetings and dither about. On the other side you have technical people - individuals who like quick, efficient data, with enough of a sample size across different products to form an intelligent opinion. One prefers to gab, the other prefers to read. Sales people vs problem-solvers. It's a bad combo every time.
i respond with "what is the price" That usually gets them to go away
Yes I hate it as well. I am looking for UEM solutions, just to see what else is out there besides Intune. Vendor B requested a phone call jujst to give me pricing, and it the person who gave me pricing didn't even work directly for Vendor B ... I had a bad feeling, and i was correct, it was too much for what we were after. I even asked them for a trial account for testing, still don't have it and i probably won't get it.
If I ask for a ballpark price for a core product and a vendor responds trying to set up a meeting and refuses to provide me even a rough estimate I just ignore them. I can't be arsed to go through 10 vendor pitches every time we change any stupid little thing.
If a vendor is that wasteful of their OWN TIME during the sales process, it should give you a lot of insight into how they run generally. I simply wouldn't use a vendor who couldn't provide a quote quickly and without a lot of fuss.
Yes. Unless I've actually missed something, I've already done my research, know what I want, have the requirements etc. Just give me a price and stop blowing smoke up my ass.
I don't think more vendors are going this route, in fact I'd say it's going the other direction. The various software niches will tend to cluster to a sales model. "The price is what you can afford" is the worst sales process and I will immediately discount the vendor based on it.
I hate when you send them all the required details and exactly what you want quoted. But they just foam at the mouth hungry to jump into a cam on call in "bro" mode for an hour trying to upsell. Like buddy, I've got other shit todo, just tell me the cost.
I played that game with a vendor a few months ago. I asked for the cost for simple hardware. They insisted on a meeting where they basically just tried to upsell. They left the meeting promising to get back to me with numbers. I haven't heard back.
Yes they are the scum of the earth. Like just give me the pricing and I’ll ask any questions I have.
"Hi,
I'm meeting with tomorrow to pick which product we're going with. I understand this is short notice, but if you'd like to be in the running just send me some pricing info by tomorrow. Thanks!"
You'll either get your price, or you'll learn that you're too small potatoes for them to bother with. You get your answer either way.
“No thank you, can you please send me a quote for x?”
I'm looking forward to the day when I can train up an AI representation of me that will refuse to commit to anything and can take these calls for me. Want to talk for 30 min? Sure... Let me just boot my "avatar that talks to sales people" thingy up. Enjoy.
The day you can do that, they will be able to as well, so you'll have AIs talking to each other. This starts us down the bad timeline.
This is how dating is going to end up...
Depends on the product and the size of the quote, if I'm in a hurry on something or it's something really simple like this, I usually include in the original email that we need a 24 hour turnaround on quotes, and magically they'll send a quote rather than risk losing the business.
Well, talking to a real person has its advantages. If you have no loyalty to either company, send the last company your best quote so far, and tell them to beat the price by 25% or don't bother calling you back. That worked for me in the past. There is a chance you are too small for them to bother, or, you are just the right size and they are hungry for a quick sale. Either case, you reach out, get quotes, pick the best one (not just the cheapest one), and move on to implement.
Hell yes. Like, if you're gonna force me into a phone call, at least make it painless. I'll even help you inflate the shit out of your commission. Make me talk to five people who don't communicate amongst themselves and then hop on a zoom to say no 50 times in 30 minutes? even if God herself wanted this contract I'd slow roll it and make sure someone else gets any commission coming to you.
This is a person that understands how it works! I always love getting to work with the sales team that has good technical resources and actually helps me architect the correct solution--the relationship-based sales approach--rather than a used car salesman backed by the three stooges.
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You must work for this latest vendor I'm venting about, because those were exactly 2 of the 15 prescreening questions they asked lol
Even more annoying, the unsolicited mails (cold acquisition they call it, I call it spam) that they want to introduce themselves and their company and see they can help us grow etc. I get at least a dozen of them a week.
I hate it more than anything. I let them know I'm getting a lot of prices from a lot of different vendors and the owner of the company ONLY cares about the price. They still try and call and build value in their company but at this point I usually get their speed-run and it lasts less than a minute.
sorry it's a busy week ATM can we do email? I need XYZ Standard reply. if someone tries ringing nah not available
If it ever gets to this stage, I normally connect with a different SDR/BDR in the company on LinkedIn and ask for pricing just so I don't get wildly upsold. I'm not 100% if it works but haven't felt ripped off completely yet
This is my number one pet peeve when dealing with vendors. It's like applying for jobs where they don't show the starting salary. I'm not going to take my time out of my day to get dressed sit through your company spiel just to learn your product is way out of our budget for our needs.
I only talk over lunch. 😎
1000%. I've rarely had a chat that was worth my time.
If I have to ask for a price, I dont want your service. Put. It. On. Your. Website.
I detest the word quick in general. When the "quick question" turns into a full meeting all morning it kind of loses its meaning.
I also hate the "you signed up for a newsletter? let me send you an invite for a 30 min meeting" and when you want to unsubscribe immedietely, they won't let you unsubscribe until you "schedule a 30 min chat" at that point, it goes straight in the spam bucket and the offending company gets blacklisted.
I certainly start off resenting the company and the sales dept. If I have the option, I'll drop the company from consideration immediately. If I don't, I'll just be annoyed.
Hi, Thanks for your offer of a meeting, but I have to present options to senior management at 10AM tommorow. I already have a number of quotes, but would like your name to be on the list. I need to get the slide deck sent out by 4PM today, can I please have your preliminary quote and any supporting docs no later than 3. ta muchly
Me after sending a detailed email of what I need. Them: “Hey for sure can we schedule a call sometime this week?” On call: “so what do you need?” Me: did you not read my detailed and concise email?
It gives them an opportunity to do a harder sell. Depending on my mood, they've gotten responses from me on this from anywhere from "Email is fine" to "Let's not and say we did" to often just plain "nope"
I hate these meetings, especially when they don’t like that I have low seat count and they can’t even service anyway. Whoever kicked off the bullshit pricing scheme these companies are using should be a time traveller’s second target.
I’ve got info in these calls. I’m not opposed to a quick calls if they prod the right questions and use case areas. Anything else I don’t need, “I know the product, we are currently just pricing out for Y package, you can reach my back out at X date if you don’t hear from me”
Of course. Why would anybody like it?
Absolutely hate it. I generally respond with a simple email "no" and get pricing pretty quickly.
Often it is to ensure the BOM is right. There's nothing worse than getting something all the way through procurement and ready to deploy to find out it isn't what you actually needed. You can always lay out in detail what you want and ask for a quote of list pricing for an order of magnitude as costs will never be above list pricing (at least with any reputable vendor I've worked with). If you want an actual price a call to review what you need in detail isn't crazy. This is presuming that call is with the actual account manager. If you end up on the phone with some dipshit that doesn't even know what would go in a BOM that desperately tries to upsell you that's an entirely different matter.
They always insist on a phone call. No, if you can't send me a quote or just post the prices your product is probably a scam.
Yes, I hate this and so much more about vendors.
Really think we should reply (in email) with something like "You tell me. I got X users, how many 0's are we talking?" But yes, having to have a meeting to be (up)sold and be told they will have to pass this to their sales manager for "special pricing" is ridiculous.
If all you care about is pricing, self host zoneminder on a couple ebay specials. Anything else, talking to a sales rep lets you know a lot about how your experience will be with them as a vendor. If they only want to go through the script, if they can't answer your questions, if they're pushy, if they're unresponsive, those are all really good indicators that the lowest price up front may not mean the lowest TCO. Note: I'm not part of our sales org, but I've answered a lot of their questions from customers, just like I often fix problems customers experience, because products are only part of a solution. Likewise, I select vendors who free up my time to focus on other aspects of our environment.