With on demand pricing and instant sign up, your lead may already be your competitor's customer before their first phone call.
I view Adwords more as a marketplace than a service. Its pitting customers against each other for what is naturally a finite inventory. There is some more opaque custom pricing going on in the background that nullifies some of the true market dynamics, but I wouldn't quite call it shill bidding on Google's behalf.
The did create a very fluid and dynamic market by (mostly) removing the sales people from the process. They need no applause for this, because it makes it waaaaaay easier to buy massive quantities of advertising from them successfully over a long period of time.
> With on demand pricing and instant sign up, your lead may already be your competitor's customer before their first phone call.
Sorry, but it just doesn't work this way. My company was bought by one of those companies that doesn't list pricing up front. There's never been a case where a single person could unilaterally decide to purchase their services.
What "Call us" means is "Send us an RFP (Request for Proposal) and we'll submit a bid". Why does this work? Shareholder or government policies usually require due diligence in the form of several competing bids. That means the potential customer has an incentive to contact as many providers as they can find and send them an RFP.
Ultimately the submitted bid is deliberated on by committee and several presentations might be required before a decision is made. You might think that I'm talking about massive deals for something like contracts for infrastructure or fighter jets, but no, I'm talking about simple SaaS.
It costs a lot to sell to these companies/organizations. The bids are usually hundreds of pages long, stating everything from features to datacenter security. Companies like Rackspace helpfully provide well written documents for this purpose, but you still have to write a lot on your own. The upshot is that thanks to the sales process the prices are inflated and frankly I see more money change hands over a month than I ever did in a whole year as a startup (a startup that was profitable and growing, no less).
I view Adwords more as a marketplace than a service. Its pitting customers against each other for what is naturally a finite inventory. There is some more opaque custom pricing going on in the background that nullifies some of the true market dynamics, but I wouldn't quite call it shill bidding on Google's behalf.
The did create a very fluid and dynamic market by (mostly) removing the sales people from the process. They need no applause for this, because it makes it waaaaaay easier to buy massive quantities of advertising from them successfully over a long period of time.