alt Hacker NewsI have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things.
I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.
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My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind.
Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote.
My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.
> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer
You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.
Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it.
Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.
You are also a developer though, and developers are notorious for wanting self serve.
Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.
> sales people
> talk to people
There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that.
As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.
That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a <$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on the product, of course.
If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and go is self preservation.
It depends on the environment.
If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well.
If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.
Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free" source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused until you put massive gates on account creation.
> use their sales skills
Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.
You're not the target customer.
The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field:
1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.