
Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option? - vmception
I already know that if I have to inquire about the price or ask for a login that the service is going to be some antiquated 90&#x27;s bs.<p>But occasionally I experience this for something I didn&#x27;t expect, like cloud computing.<p>I encountered a cloud service that had obscure hardware I was looking for, and unlike Amazon, Google, Azure, DigitalOcean etc <i>this</i> service needed for you to email them to get signed up!<p>&quot;Thank you for your interest! Where are you located and what does your work involve?&quot;<p>Okay &quot;Sales Engineers&quot;, why is that relevant. Why is a human even answering this email?<p>&quot;I&#x27;m experimenting with deployments but latency isn&#x27;t a big issue for me so any data center will be fine&quot;. You know, like you would say with Amazon, except in a dropdown.<p>I jump through the hoops. Finally, I get to see what the interface is like, I&#x27;m poking around with no surprise that graphic design is an afterthought when suddenly<p><i>You&#x27;ve got mail!</i><p>My email client doesn&#x27;t say that but his probably does.<p>&quot;I wanted to do a quick check-in and..&quot;<p>Aw that&#x27;s nice and I also would have been totally fine contacting support whenever I got around to it!<p>I checked out the interface, got my fill, decided it wasn&#x27;t for me and moved on!<p>All in all in one week it took:<p>10 emails to get signed up<p>1 email to tell me that &quot;the system&quot; should send me an email about my new account login<p>2 emails to get the account login and confirmation<p>4 emails to troubleshoot the broken account login system<p>1 automated onboarding email<p>3 checkin emails<p>1 automated 1 week anniversary onboarding email<p>What&#x27;s the way to tell people I want a self serve option? Reducing this email chain down to 3 emails. Why is that person employed? This was during the best market in the history of mankind and I was questioning that, and <i>now</i> everyone with a talent more relevant than customer &quot;retention&quot; should be just as annoyed, given how coveted a continual flow of oxygen is now. xx
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wheels
I find these things horribly annoying too, but here’s what they’re for:

They’re there so that the sales person can extract a variable amount of
revenue from you based on how much value you’re getting from their system, and
how much you can afford to pay.

Utility pricing assumes that service volume is high and can mostly be recouped
at slightly above infrastructure costs. In that case, utility pricing is a win
for most parties.

But in smaller services, where R&D costs are almost certainly more relevant
than infrastructure, sales must recoup R&D. You may have a customer with 500
instances, but extracting low value per instance, paying the same as a
customer with one instance, for whom the service is business critical. From
the point of the provider, both are probably a win. But if they charged the
customer with one instance 1/500th of the larger customer, their service might
be unsustainable.

~~~
tbrock
Does this actually work?

Usually when this happens to me I write off the service and never interact
with them again unless I absolutely have to. If I have a gun to my head I’ll
make peace with it but otherwise I’m not going to talk to your sales rep to
try your product. Period.

I had this happen with loggly when we first started out and the first sales
rep was pleasant enough. I even felt like I got a deal because he customized a
plan and was working with us to help our little company succeed. Nice work!

Time passed and they changed who our rep was 3x in one year. Each time it
happened they wanted to have a 30 minute call to “get to know me”. I did that
twice then told them to get lost and cancelled my contract. Get the notes from
the previous sales rep!

I hope that the economics studying folks account for lost sales while trying
to maximize their profits because I bet they lose a lot of business this way.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Yes. Many customers feel calls with the sales rep are valuable, and would be
unsatisfied if a new one didn't offer an introductory call. In my experience,
the highest value customers of most SaaS apps want these kinds of calls at
least once a quarter.

~~~
rekabis
> the highest value customers of most SaaS apps want these kinds of calls at
> least once a quarter.

Seriously? Why?? The point of a sales rep is to know me and my needs, and if
they can’t get that from the notes on my file, then the company’s internal
processes are exceptionally ill suited for sales.

And if I am that high value, repeat/continuous calls like that are a bloody
waste of my time. Fine, touch bases with me occasionally to see if things have
changed, but if nothing has, that phone call had better be over and done with
inside of 120 seconds. I’ve got better things to do than shoot the shit with a
sales person.

------
cubecul
Here's what a salesperson would say:

Sales is a process. If I (as the salesperson) control the process, then I am
more likely to win the deal. On average, my company has shown that doing these
3-5 touchpoints in this order leads to the greatest success, so I want people
to follow this order as much as possible, and so does the rest of my team.

I'm glad to meet someone who is very capable of working with new software.
They're smart and they pick up on things very quickly. Not many people are
like this. If they can evaluate and sign an order form without me doing
anything, I call that a big win.

But, given an average prospect, if I let them kick around and then they tell
me "Nah this isn't it." do I assume that they actually evaluated the way that
maximizes my likelihood of winning (or, put another way, that maximizes their
chance of finding something valuable)? If I didn't talk to them, then I'm not
sure if they saw X feature or could see the Y value that I typically can tell
a story around. So I'd rather work through the gated process. Heck, it's even
better for them because they have a higher chance of solving their problem.

Now, if you're really insistent, then I'll notice that and find a way to make
the process fit your style. But on average it's better for both you and me if
we do it my way.

------
ohazi
By not using their service.

You're basically asking for them to create a special case for you when they've
already designed their company around not doing things that way.

You might get lucky and get through the onboarding process successfully, but
you're going to be disappointed every time you need to have another
interaction with the company.

------
jcrawfordor
While I'm pretty lukewarm on the Airtable product to begin with, what made me
hate it is the almost daily emails I received from my "account representative"
in response to registering an account. When looking at such commodity-priced
SaaS I am not in a mood to be the end of "high touch sales" that gets touched.
I find it annoying when it's a five-figure contract, when it's a free-to-$20
service it's absolutely ridiculous.

It's even worse because, at Airtable's rate of onboarding new customers, they
can't afford to _actually_ have high touch sales. So at least the marketroids
from, say, Cisco that email me to "follow up on my needs" actually integrate
some knowledge of my business and past deals. Airtable tries to replicate a
"relationship" with a series of scheduled mass emails and it rings so
incredibly hollow.

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duxup
It depends on the product.

I work on a highly customizable SaaS product and onboarding and setup is the
real cost.

The guy who says "I can do it myself."...is pretty much the worst customer
ever, because he probably doesn't know what he wants and doesn't know his own
business process.

For a lot of our customers just the implementation is an exploration of their
own current processes "Well I guess we do that...".

Now having said that... clearly that isn't you, but I do wonder how much self
service can be created for a niche cloud product?

~~~
sarora27
Hey @duxup what does the onboarding process look like for your product today?
Does your sales team bake onboarding into the sales process so that certain
elements of onboarding are being done as a deal progresses?

~~~
duxup
Onboarding as I think of it is pretty late in the game for us.

Sales basically takes the initial call(s) with the customer, gets a feel for
what that customer does and what their processes look like. Then they do some
some rough estimates to give the customer a feel for the costs involved and
ways of handling those processes.

True onboarding happens after we've gone a ways into actual implementation
(contracts signed) and then they start "testing" and really using our systems.

The reason for it being so late is that the system / and our customers all
involve such heavily customized processes that ... there's not much use out of
the box for most customers / they wouldn't want to use it that way.

I don't know if anyone is really onboarded until the rubber hits the road ;)

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def8cefe
>Why is that person employed? This was during the best market in the history
of mankind and I was questioning that, and now everyone with a talent more
relevant than customer "retention" should be just as annoyed, given how
coveted a continual flow of oxygen is now.

Is your talent that much more relevant? What do you really contribute to
society as a dev this person does not? Check yourself bud.

------
soared
If you aren’t willing to go through this process, you’re not worth their time.

At oracle we didn’t even respond to like ~50% of emails because if we didn’t
know who you were, your budget wasn’t big enough.

~~~
tastroder
Sounds like a great way to ignore that student intern / junior in the team
doing a vendor review for that person you know that doesn't have time to do it
themselves. The intersection of people oracle sales folks in my circle know
and those that are actually involved in a larger vendor selection has
historically been relatively small.

edit: good point, fair enough

~~~
ashtonkem
Of all the things one can accuse Oracle of, an ineffective sales process is
not one of them.

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clairity
is this (title) a trick question? the answer seems self-evident: you email
them back with "is there a self-serve option where i can sign up online and
try it out for myself? if not, why not?" maybe not so curt, but something to
that effect.

outside of a startup or a new product where handholding might be needed for
other reasons, having sales folks typically tips off the pricing a bit. it's
generally too expensive to employ inside sales people for deals that average
less than about high four figures, and the same for outside sales people less
than about mid five figures.

------
lowan12
> Why is that person employed? This was during the best market in the history
> of mankind and I was questioning that, and now everyone with a talent more
> relevant than customer "retention" should be just as annoyed, given how
> coveted a continual flow of oxygen is now

This right here, ladies and gentlemen, is _peak_ software developer
entitlement.

~~~
bdcravens
I have no doubt many in the industry will experience a serious reality check,
as companies start cutting back and looking at the value proposition of each
developer.

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closeparen
You'll never get self service out of a company that works this way. But it's
not all bad.

Behind the salespereson is an engineer who knows the product well and is paid
to impress you. Use that to your advantage. Tell them what you want and let
them put on a show! They are very likely willing to invest multiple engineer-
weeks in helping you build a POC in their environment, fielding your
questions, etc.

The initial contact may start from the assumption that you're a bureaucrat but
once it's clear what you're interested in and what kind of evidence is going
to be persuasive to you, a good sales process will play ball.

------
mattchamb
I know of one situation where self service signup was actively argued against
because sales wouldn't get a commission on those signups.

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nickphx
You don't fit their "ideal customer profile".

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yingw787
This might or might not be relevant, but I had an idea for a Typeform-based
way you can deploy services. You would fill out an online form on what you
want, and a service would automatically provision an instance of that service
for you.

Services as a service. I found people make a lot of great tech but without the
ability to ship it easily it doesn't mean a lot. Provisioning is a hassle even
most devops engineers don't want to do in their spare time. So, make it easy.

...would you use this? I might build it regardless, I want to deploy my own
video conferencing solution for two hours at a time and then tear it down
after a meeting for security and cost reasons.

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classics2
Not every business wants you as a customer. Shocking right? You were kinda
getting the hint but pressed on anyway.

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Jugurtha
We have an internal platform we plan to open at some point. We can't open
registration because several critical features are lacking. This is why we
give credentials to a handful of people to play with it.

There are many reasons one would do that.

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zip1234
Anything into 'Enterprise' or government and this is what happens. High touch
SAAS is the term. I think it happens because that the way it has been done
with the people that control the money for a long time.

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QueensGambit
It usually means that this vendor gets very small number of leads.

1\. They could be in customer validation phase, where they are trying to "talk
to users" to understand your need and build the product.

(or)

2\. They want to handhold you to make you successful and covert the small
number of leads like you into customers.

~~~
treyfitty
No. As a purchaser of enterprise software, they (Even big SaaS vendors) do
this so:

1) Onboarding at large companies can get unique and they start the convo right
from the beginning. Having a real person pays dividends later, especially for
up selling services.

2) Sales teams need to eat. Attribution becomes easier this way. Companies
with dedicated sales teams aren’t small.

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jariel
Maybe have the sales teamwork on larger or more comprehensive accounts.

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ta1771
What software are you buying, OP?

