
How to price a product, sell it to customers, and build a sales team - petethomas
https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/ama-steli-efti
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philipodonnell
> ... You want paid pilots. When it comes to enterprise, you want to uncover
> real buying intent as fast as possible. ... In the enterprise world, if
> you’re not putting a price tag on your product, it’s not going to be valued.

I disagree with the idea that you should never offer free pilots to enterprise
customers. Some pilots do not demonstrate buying intent: they are qualifiers.

Often times pilots are necessary to get enough information to justify the
purchasing decision. Salespeople always claim a product will solve 100% of my
needs. The reality is that it is actually somewhere between 20% and 80%. Where
it is on the spectrum will determine whether I should be a customer. I need
the pilot to know where that level is.

Just because you are not asking for money does not mean the pilot is "free". I
have to justify the time I'm spending on this pilot, I have to set aside other
priorities potentially disappointing stakeholders. I have to request resources
and people. I carry the reputation risk since I am the one driving it
internally.

If you are asking me to pay an even higher price than that, by forcing my
reputation risk to also include a budgetary impact, or force me to slog
through procurement, I am going to skip your company, even in favor of a
higher ticket-price competitor. There should be greatly asymmetrical costs
incurred by you compared to me to justify that.

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yread
I disagree. Quite often people drag their feet with actually trying the
product during free pilot. If they have already paid for it there will be more
urgency to integrate it.

Edit: if you dedicate resources to a pilot then it might as well be free but
lots of companies don't automatically do that is my point

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paulie_a
I love this article. Never give your service away for free. The user has no
skin in the game so won't use it. You are not selling if you do all the
talking. 90 percent of the conversation on your end should be questions. I am
not a sales guy buy I've seen it done right and the wrong way. The wrong way
is someone doing all the talking. The right way simply asks open ended
questions and listens.

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Rainymood
>Charge more

Agreed. There is this weird psychological trick where if you charge people
more they start to value your service more or at least delude themselves into
thinking so exactly because they are spending more money, it's a beautiful
thing. If it fails, you can always reduce your price again!

>Never give your service away for free.*

* Except if your business model depends on capturing a large enough audience to feed them ads and generate revenue from that (Facebook, Google, Reddit).

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codetrotter
You quote them as saying “charge more”, but I don’t see them say that. Did
they edit their comment while/after you responded?

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ryanbertrand
It is in the 'Do you have any advice for founders trying to price their
product?' section as a hyperlink.

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codetrotter
Ah, so that part of the comment is in reply to the original post. Confusing
but I see.

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lostmsu
Any particular suggestions on how much exactly a typical software engineer
would underestimate its enterprise product?

