Having been on both sides of this, I think this is great advice, but misses something key. If you are selling a relatively high-cost product (>$10k min spend), then there needs to be some acknowledgement of that up front. It's a waste of everyone's time if I'm running a startup that can easily spend $100s/month on a product, but simply have no way to invest tens of thousands in a product. Whereas, when I'm leading an established company that can easily afford tens of thousands of dollars, then I care about the value. In short, know your customer should include, know when your customer is a 2-3 person seed stage startup and either offer some version of the product at a price that they can afford and growth into/with you on, or just be upfront that it's out of range right now. A great example of this would be Looker. Great product (in my opinion) and provided a ton of value to Kiva, but it's a significant investment. I'd love to use it at my small startup but the price is out of range so for now we use Google Data Studio instead. And yet the sales agents come knocking anyways. Understand your customer, know when something would provide value they can afford vs. is way out of current range for current budget/scale.
Well, in enterprise Saas usually the pricing is not shown on the website without contacting a sales rep, so it usually eliminates companies which don't have a lot of money.
But even if a small company is reaching to you, as a salesperson, this is your job to qualify the lead, and to not loose your time on a lead that has low chance of signing
In enterprise sales, the price is not the main decision maker, you will usually only disclose the price at the end of the sales cycle.
Not showing the price on the website is one way to push people to contact you. You don't want people to decide on their own if they should buy your product, you have a big sales team to help them do that.
I just assume if there's no price shown then I (as an individual) cannot afford it, and it's in the tens of thousands. Seems to have worked accurately for me when I'm looking for individual-level use.
However when I'm looking at tools that can help my org, I'm definitely frustrated that there's no pricing mentioned in many offerings - clearly I have three tabs with three solutions open and I have no idea about the costs. I'm NOT emailing you because I as an engineer won't have the same interest in this idea tomorrow when you email me back (probably because tomorrow's Monday and I'm in sprint planning). These ideas just fizz out and I never get a chance to follow up because of this
Good case study. If it was more burning, you'd email.
Enterprise sales at 100k+/yr levels can take a lot of work by both sides to get to the finish line, at least until everything else is smooth, screening out inquiries like this saves everyone time.
An even better business would have a way to make you succeed early as a single dev with low interest, and grow to enterprise level.
But that is now building 2 products and a fancier business. Hard to do both at same time, esp. initially. Sometimes you are lucky -- Concept, $$$, etc. -- but probably not.
If "that's going to be quite expensive" is a downer for you, that's fine because you aren't the target audience. If you saw the actual price you'd probably think "no way am I paying that", so showing the price doesn't help the seller.
The target audience is companies that don't really care about the price, as long as it's in some vague order of magnitude they are used to paying for other things.
Also the price is usually not fixed if it's not listed. The answer to "how much is it" is implicitly "who's asking and what can you afford". I.e. it's negotiated, and negotiations are much easier when the buying side doesn't know what everyone else is paying.
We have lots of small companies with 1-3 employees sending a handful of messages a month, to big multi-national corporations sending many thousands of messages a day.
For the big companies we're typically a crucial part of their business and they typically require several integrations and other specialized modules which have upkeep. So we charge a bit more for the software. On the other hand, they typically have a very high message volume so they get a decent message volume discount.
For smaller companies the software is typically a bit cheaper, but with a significantly higher per-message cost.
Then of course there's negotiation for each contract which would make "web prices" rather moot anyway. Maybe a company wants lower fixed cost but can accept a higher per-message cost, as messages are often directly linked to their revenue, or vice versa.
