I regretfully have years of anecdata on the close rate of doing things the geek-approved way versus the close rate when I get on the phone with somebody and it, ahem, is not a close call.
For me, the stage after finding out a standard price is to perhaps have a call and determine if my requirements match up to the product.
I guess it also depends on the size of the company, type of software etc. If the company has trial versions then it's more likely the person buying knows what it can do etc.
As a hard example, I go to jprofiler's website[1] and can order there and then, no messing around. I go to neotys[2] and it's the sales induced hell I mentioned above.
[1] https://www.ej-technologies.com/buy/jprofiler/select [2] http://www.neotys.com/product/neoload-licenses.html
The next time you find yourself in the situation of wanting a quick number, try it this way and you might get better results. When you make contact with the sales organization, communicate:
1. You have no idea what these things really cost.
2. You need just a non-binding, ballpark budgetary figure to the nearest $10K (or nearest $1K, or nearest $100) to find out if you can put it up for the budget.
3. You are not the purchasing decision maker, but do have influence (see below for variations).
4. A general idea of scope: how many users, seats, whether you are a DIY shop or you want to retain professional services for those things that need to be deployed, or whatever else you think will help the sales rep give you a rough sizing.
The vast majority of participants at HN do not have budgetary signing authority in the $50K+ USD range for a single purchase, and are not familiar with how the sales process works at this level. Indeed, many simply have no purchasing authority whatsoever, but do have influence ("my boss generally buys whatever I tell him to buy"). No offense, but the sales people don't want to really deal with you; they want to work with the people who can make a purchase decision. If you really do have purchasing authority, spell it out ("I can sign for the purchase", or "I sign for departmental purchases but it has to be approved by my division manager if it is above $X thousand", etc.).
Please don't lie about it if you don't have purchasing decision making power. In these days of ever-improving CRM systems, that simply hurts your co-workers when/if they contact the vendor again. The sales teams everywhere are getting increasingly better at remembering (with the help of CRM) companies who pull this stunt, and some are even remembering who told them; they might not drag their feet helping you, but you can be damn sure they're not going to bust their nuts digging through announcement lists and databases to find promotions or push special consideration to give you the best discount possible.
But it depends on the business and the product, of course.
Most salespeople spend countless hours of time with potential customers who don't purchase - it is certainly worth their time if there is even a slight chance that you will consider the product in the distant future. You are definitely NOT wasting their time.
From a customer perspective, ideally that call will help you to save time by: a) figuring out faster if this software is right for you or not b) helping you to learn how to use it the best way possible c) setting this up so you make the most out of your trial.
I'd rather take objection with bad sales calls, not with the fact that they call on the same day.
I presume "The company and the customer have different ideas of 'special requirements'" can also be a factor?
Your mileage may vary though, my brain may be addled by too much extremely high touch B2B work. :)
Atlassian's whole sales system is to display the prices upfront and have no rebate. Last time I checked, their competitors (resp. IBM Rational and Microsoft Sharepoint) didn't grow by 35% every year for 10 years in a row.
I needed an office for 2 people. With Regus you need to plan a call. I ended up at a coworking space, mildly satisfied with the noise, with a bill 70% higher, but at least I don't have a 90-days commitment and I didn't sit with a salesman.
There are number of situations when you dodge providers who are just a dead weight.
Full disclosure: I make my living on SharePoint, and (perhaps ironically in some reader's view) use Confluence and other Atlassian products to manage my business.
Converting, or just ending up with both? I've worked for two companies with both and neither product was ever going to replace the other. As your disclosure suggests, the Atlassian suite fulfills a different set of needs than SharePoint.
But your point is well taken. To that point: many of our customers bring up migrating their content from Confluence and the like to SharePoint once they begin using SharePoint as a platform for other apps.
But then most people are not me, and there must be a reason why businesses continue to do this (better results I would guess).
If you are buying from someone like AR who _does_ have pricing on the website (https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing), then you must have a special requirement, and as such you should have the call or you're wasting his time and yours.
Generally when people tell you "it depends on what you need" they really do mean it depends on what you need. If you're going to run AR in a hospital for 1000 emergency surgeons, vs your run a 3 person beauty salon. If you're the former, patio11 sending you an email saying "it'll be $x/mo" is meaningless.
As you state earlier, there's some kind of bracketing going that matches certain service providers (saas or otherwise) to businesses. A 3 person beauty salon won't buy Oracle, but a hospital with 1000 emergency surgeons* would. How can AR fit both audiences then? Even if at its core it's the same service, all the other "layers" make it a completely different business.
[*] are there any hospitals that big??
There is certainly some bracketing going on. When we're doing dogfights for true Enterprise accounts, we're doing them against publicly traded companies whose annual reports filed with the SEC says that > 60% of their annual revenue comes from less than 100 firms. Do the math on what that means their average account size must be for those 100 firms. It's nuts.
There are things you can say to me which will, quickly, get me to say "Look, I'll be honest: we'd love to have your business, but we're not the right fit for your organization. Can I give you the phone number of our #1 competitor? They're widely regarded as pretty trustworthy in the industry, and they're focused on helping customers who, broadly speaking, look like your organization." (Here's an example: "Does it integrate with SAP? Because we would need that." Ack, that will never happen, nope nope nope.)
That said, how can e.g. St. Jude Hospital (not a client, but representative of a few clients we have) use AR at the same time that Bugs Be Gone Exterminators (a 2 man firm) uses AR? Well, both of them also use Excel, right? Very different use cases, but same core need, and the sales model for Excel lets Microsoft offer it to both companies for an amount which is, for the exterminators, a trivial amount of money and for an amount which is, for St. Jude, so far below the noise floor it barely registers.
AR sells the same way, except it is a much narrower product than Excel is. To the extent that "It sure would be great if someone got a call from me" is the same problem for those two firms, we're equally capable of servicing it. (They have different needs, particularly with regards to privacy and compliance, which is why the hospital pays "rather more money than any of my published pricing suggests", but at the end of the day it is the same for loops executing the same state machine talking to the same Twilio APIs from the same hardware overseen by the same geek.)
You need to have a certain mass to be able to sell six figure a year deals to a true Enterprise. I'd ballpark that mass as 90 lbs or so. They'd hire a software engineer who was 110 lbs soaking wet for $100k a year though, right? So clearly that engineer succeeded in an enterprise sales process at least once.
People tell me that that's different, but it is and it isn't. I closed my first (small) enterprise deal for AR, for a consortium of over a dozen hospitals (we got a tiny sliver of their appointments business), back when our run rate was below $2k a month. I felt pretty terrified about being on the phone with a VP they had around just to talk about HIPAA compliance, but no part of that conversation was a blocker to them doing the deal. (Long story short: I had done my homework on HIPAA and demonstrated that I understood what I was promising them. I then delivered it. The end.)
Once you get into the realm where a quote is needed though (due to complexity of the deal, level of customization, very high price points, legal work, etc.), then Patrick's advice is especially golden.
"Boss, these idiots from <insert vendor> don't even know what their product does!"
Someone like IBM/Oracle will refuse to tell you boo, because they're planning to tailor the quote to match the value delivered. Just kidding, they need to measure your pockets first ;_)
(I'm pretty sure there are people who look at (say) a satnav device and think "It should be able to find me the quickest route between all these 50 points in the city" is not a special requirement.)
I get this all the time when looking for vendors for various things and have to say I usually do an internal eye-roll when it comes up - sometimes I just want a rough quote in an email that I can look at when I get the chance. Most recently we were looking at some load testing tool and I had to sit through a sales call only to find out the cost was ten times what we were prepared to pay. I had zero special requirements so why that price couldn't have been emailed is beyond me.
I understand in some cases like this it might be useful to have a call, I just feel I'm getting the sales BS when it happens to me.