I sympathize with the frustrations here, but all of these rants against high-touch sales processes feel sort of tonedeaf, as if the company is incompetent for not understanding how to sell to regular engineers.
Companies employ these complicated sales processes consciously and strategically because they want huge enterprise customers with complicated procurement processes. They’re looking to close sales that are in dollar amounts way higher than a senior engineer can put on their company credit card. If the buying process feels annoying, it’s probably because you’re not a whale customer.
But the company knows that, and they’re willing to lose 10 customers willing to pay $X/yr if it means that they can land one whale customer willing to pay $100X-$10,000X/yr.
Its also a signal that a mid-tier ‘insert credit card receive product’ sale is feasible - the whales and other big bois should be routed to the high touch process. the trouts should not have to deal with it, they should be easy revenue - otherwise the LTV << CAC.
I don’t take away a message of “the SaaS company would make more money if their sales process was low-touch”. I think Mat doesn’t care (nor should we) about whether a SaaS company with a crappy product and manipulative sales tactics makes a profit.
Manipulative sales tactics do work to land those big deals, but instead we could work in an industry where we build useful, high-quality things that don’t require deception to sell.
For similar reasons I would consider buying a Tesla over any other car brand on the market even though I’m not a big fan of Tesla cars as cars - just so I don’t have to deal with dealers and car salesman.
I just want to read what the product does, do my own research, read some reviews take a look at the price and make a decision. Some channel to ask a question sometimes is nice. No, I don’t want to “contact us to see pricing” BS. That’s a clear “we’re are bunch of scammers that can’t put the price upfront”. Not putting price publicly should be illegal. The reason US healthcare is such a mess is primarily opaque pricing model that allows huge waste, overcharging and other shenanigans. The other one is over-regulation and artificial scarcity, but anyway… .
In a way I don’t understand why all these sales positions even exist. I guess it’s because people that can read and think and make reasonable purchasing decisions are rare, and BS and emotional and psychological trickery actually works on most population and decision makers in companies? Most people want to spend time being spoonfed? Or is it just a big stealth UBI program?
Not sure which part of the world you’re from (I suppose the US) but for a lot of people this sounds unimaginably weird ;) Cars are still physical products and international deals are more of an exception, software and mailing lists usually don’t care about where you’re buying from.
I’m from Germany and if I want a car I just buy one. Car dealerships, like every other “shop” can be good or bad, but starting a crusade because one type of brand doesn’t behave like you want them to sounds very silly. Also, again depending on brand, there are brand-owned dealerships as well.
That’s why I was assuming US, that’s the only country where I heard that this whole dealership thing kinda makes sense and why “I will buy a Tesla because ” exists
Some years back, some of the components at $WORK were having stability problems, and our CTO decided that the solution was “put New Relic in everything”.
One team in particular was overloaded and was stuck maintaining a couple apps written in a language none of them was familiar with (huh, I wonder if that had more to do with their problems than lack of New Relic?) so I got asked to lend them a hand integrating the New Relic APM client into their apps. Which wasn’t any big deal, maybe a dozen lines of code, so I did it, left them a couple of pull requests and a note to get in touch with me if they ran into any snags in the deployment, and went back to whatever I was doing day-to-day back then.
A day or two later I got an email from a couple members of New Relic’s “engineering support” team introducing themselves and saying that they were there to help with the integration process. I let them know that I’d already done the work and it was just waiting for the team that owned the apps to review and deploy it.
That team was constantly fighting fires, and, well, weeks passed and turned into months without the PRs getting merged. New Relic would prod me with ever-more-“helpful” offers of assistance despite my pointing out that the work was already done and out of my hands; I would check in with the other team, and they would say “yup, it’s still on the list, but not this week.” In the end I had over a dozen emails from them.
Eventually the New Relic folks sent me an email letting me know that “your CTO, $NAME, is very interested in seeing this project through to completion”. Which
A) What a load of bullshit. If my CTO wants something done I’m quite sure that they can make that known through channels at my company instead of sending the message through a bunch of used-car salesmen.
B) As of a week or two before that email, $NAME wasn’t CTO anymore. He was gone, out the door, and his opinion was irrelevant.
I got permission from my manager to send New Relic an email telling them that they were out of line and that they weren’t to contact me again under any circumstance. The APM client was never merged. Some time later we did a bit of re-org based on the principle of aligning teams’ responsibilities with their abilities and vice versa, and that subsystem stopped being perpetually broken.
A while after that, New Relic changed their pricing terms in a way that would have made our bill increase a thousandfold at our next contract renewal, and weren’t willing to give an inch (I suppose they were looking for bigger fish, as mtlynch says), and so we stopped using it entirely. I didn’t cry.
This hit too close to home for me. Is this Mat Mad guy secretly staring me through some camera or something? He knows exactly how it feels.
I have been on both sides of these calls. I was a remote employee of a company in SF that had a software that predated AWS Lambdas, it was Lambdas but half-baked. They had customers and promised infinite scalability. Of course, it depended on how much you were paying – infinite load under a limited availability; or infinite load under an infinite availability for a price, you all know the drill. Right?
The standard move was always the same, the customer would open a support request, the “customer success” person would hop on a call and immediately spin an upsell to the customer that thought they were buying one thing, but they were actually buying something just slightly different.
Time flies and the earth spins enough that eventually, one of the external supporting services that propped up that particular product started faltering. So the team operating that service opened a request with their support, guess what? They immediately started an upsell spin.
I sympathize with the frustrations here, but all of these rants against high-touch sales processes feel sort of tonedeaf, as if the company is incompetent for not understanding how to sell to regular engineers.
Companies employ these complicated sales processes consciously and strategically because they want huge enterprise customers with complicated procurement processes. They’re looking to close sales that are in dollar amounts way higher than a senior engineer can put on their company credit card. If the buying process feels annoying, it’s probably because you’re not a whale customer.
But the company knows that, and they’re willing to lose 10 customers willing to pay $X/yr if it means that they can land one whale customer willing to pay $100X-$10,000X/yr.
Its also a signal that a mid-tier ‘insert credit card receive product’ sale is feasible - the whales and other big bois should be routed to the high touch process. the trouts should not have to deal with it, they should be easy revenue - otherwise the LTV << CAC.
I don’t take away a message of “the SaaS company would make more money if their sales process was low-touch”. I think Mat doesn’t care (nor should we) about whether a SaaS company with a crappy product and manipulative sales tactics makes a profit.
Manipulative sales tactics do work to land those big deals, but instead we could work in an industry where we build useful, high-quality things that don’t require deception to sell.
For similar reasons I would consider buying a Tesla over any other car brand on the market even though I’m not a big fan of Tesla cars as cars - just so I don’t have to deal with dealers and car salesman.
I just want to read what the product does, do my own research, read some reviews take a look at the price and make a decision. Some channel to ask a question sometimes is nice. No, I don’t want to “contact us to see pricing” BS. That’s a clear “we’re are bunch of scammers that can’t put the price upfront”. Not putting price publicly should be illegal. The reason US healthcare is such a mess is primarily opaque pricing model that allows huge waste, overcharging and other shenanigans. The other one is over-regulation and artificial scarcity, but anyway… .
In a way I don’t understand why all these sales positions even exist. I guess it’s because people that can read and think and make reasonable purchasing decisions are rare, and BS and emotional and psychological trickery actually works on most population and decision makers in companies? Most people want to spend time being spoonfed? Or is it just a big stealth UBI program?
Not sure which part of the world you’re from (I suppose the US) but for a lot of people this sounds unimaginably weird ;) Cars are still physical products and international deals are more of an exception, software and mailing lists usually don’t care about where you’re buying from.
Which part exactly? I’m originally from Poland, but last 15 years I’ve been living in the US.
I’m from Germany and if I want a car I just buy one. Car dealerships, like every other “shop” can be good or bad, but starting a crusade because one type of brand doesn’t behave like you want them to sounds very silly. Also, again depending on brand, there are brand-owned dealerships as well.
That’s why I was assuming US, that’s the only country where I heard that this whole dealership thing kinda makes sense and why “I will buy a Tesla because ” exists
Some years back, some of the components at $WORK were having stability problems, and our CTO decided that the solution was “put New Relic in everything”.
One team in particular was overloaded and was stuck maintaining a couple apps written in a language none of them was familiar with (huh, I wonder if that had more to do with their problems than lack of New Relic?) so I got asked to lend them a hand integrating the New Relic APM client into their apps. Which wasn’t any big deal, maybe a dozen lines of code, so I did it, left them a couple of pull requests and a note to get in touch with me if they ran into any snags in the deployment, and went back to whatever I was doing day-to-day back then.
A day or two later I got an email from a couple members of New Relic’s “engineering support” team introducing themselves and saying that they were there to help with the integration process. I let them know that I’d already done the work and it was just waiting for the team that owned the apps to review and deploy it.
That team was constantly fighting fires, and, well, weeks passed and turned into months without the PRs getting merged. New Relic would prod me with ever-more-“helpful” offers of assistance despite my pointing out that the work was already done and out of my hands; I would check in with the other team, and they would say “yup, it’s still on the list, but not this week.” In the end I had over a dozen emails from them.
Eventually the New Relic folks sent me an email letting me know that “your CTO, $NAME, is very interested in seeing this project through to completion”. Which
A) What a load of bullshit. If my CTO wants something done I’m quite sure that they can make that known through channels at my company instead of sending the message through a bunch of used-car salesmen.
B) As of a week or two before that email, $NAME wasn’t CTO anymore. He was gone, out the door, and his opinion was irrelevant.
I got permission from my manager to send New Relic an email telling them that they were out of line and that they weren’t to contact me again under any circumstance. The APM client was never merged. Some time later we did a bit of re-org based on the principle of aligning teams’ responsibilities with their abilities and vice versa, and that subsystem stopped being perpetually broken.
A while after that, New Relic changed their pricing terms in a way that would have made our bill increase a thousandfold at our next contract renewal, and weren’t willing to give an inch (I suppose they were looking for bigger fish, as mtlynch says), and so we stopped using it entirely. I didn’t cry.
This hit too close to home for me. Is this Mat Mad guy secretly staring me through some camera or something? He knows exactly how it feels.
I have been on both sides of these calls. I was a remote employee of a company in SF that had a software that predated AWS Lambdas, it was Lambdas but half-baked. They had customers and promised infinite scalability. Of course, it depended on how much you were paying – infinite load under a limited availability; or infinite load under an infinite availability for a price, you all know the drill. Right?
The standard move was always the same, the customer would open a support request, the “customer success” person would hop on a call and immediately spin an upsell to the customer that thought they were buying one thing, but they were actually buying something just slightly different.
Time flies and the earth spins enough that eventually, one of the external supporting services that propped up that particular product started faltering. So the team operating that service opened a request with their support, guess what? They immediately started an upsell spin.
It was tragicomic.
Very funny and relatable. I also have to fight the urge to defend my decisions as if they are always right.
Is this, uh, satire? Or thinly obfuscated war story.
From where I sit, it’s much, much, much closer to the second.
Painfully accurate.