Ask HN: How do you tell SaaS sales people you want a self-serve option?

53 points by vmception 6 years ago | 37 comments

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's bs.

But occasionally I experience this for something I didn't expect, like cloud computing.

I encountered a cloud service that had obscure hardware I was looking for, and unlike Amazon, Google, Azure, DigitalOcean etc this service needed for you to email them to get signed up!

"Thank you for your interest! Where are you located and what does your work involve?"

Okay "Sales Engineers", why is that relevant. Why is a human even answering this email?

"I'm experimenting with deployments but latency isn't a big issue for me so any data center will be fine". You know, like you would say with Amazon, except in a dropdown.

I jump through the hoops. Finally, I get to see what the interface is like, I'm poking around with no surprise that graphic design is an afterthought when suddenly

You've got mail!

My email client doesn't say that but his probably does.

"I wanted to do a quick check-in and.."

Aw that's nice and I also would have been totally fine contacting support whenever I got around to it!

I checked out the interface, got my fill, decided it wasn't for me and moved on!

All in all in one week it took:

10 emails to get signed up

1 email to tell me that "the system" should send me an email about my new account login

2 emails to get the account login and confirmation

4 emails to troubleshoot the broken account login system

1 automated onboarding email

3 checkin emails

1 automated 1 week anniversary onboarding email

What'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 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. xx

wheels 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago | | |

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.

codegeek 6 years ago | | |

Yes this works, for the right customers.

We sell a B2B platform for our business and our price point starts at $499/Month (even though we are considering adding cheaper options but that is a whole diff. discussion). Whenever a trial customer signs up, our sales rep. reaches out and tries to talk to them to understand how we can help them and if we are the right fit. It is not necessarily about maximizing profits but ensuring that we are the right fit for them and vice versa because they will otherwise leave anyway. Our platform is complex which means we also need to ask a lot of questions to ensure the prospect sees and understands the value proposition. It is not one of those dead simple SAAS where you signup and can start using it with just 2-3 features (even though if I could, I would love to be running such business, lol).

Btw, this is something our company battles with all the time on whether to try and reduce some of the touchpoints but for that, we need to do a hell of a lot more work on automated onboarding etc which is difficult for smaller companies with low volumes of leads.

bdibs 6 years ago | | |

Of course it works, otherwise they wouldn’t continue using it.

It’s a simple way to extract the most value from a customer, as well as filter out customers they don’t deem viable for their business.

lefstathiou 6 years ago | | |

It’s called MSFT Azure. It works and people want it.

cubecul 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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.

duxup 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago | | |

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 ;)

jcrawfordor 6 years ago |

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.

def8cefe 6 years ago |

>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 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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 6 years ago | | |

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

soared 6 years ago | | |

It’s based off your email, so student@apple.com will get a response. CTO@randomTechStartup.com will not though.

I did a project where I looked at the accounts we didn’t support and found their revenue would not be worth the effort. Biggest account I worked on was $70MM/yr with a team of 10ish. Small accounts were probably <$250k/yr and 1 or two people would have like 100 of those.

clairity 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

> 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 6 years ago | |

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.

closeparen 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago |

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

classics2 6 years ago |

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

nickphx 6 years ago |

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

yingw787 6 years ago |

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.

Jugurtha 6 years ago |

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.

zip1234 6 years ago |

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.

QueensGambit 6 years ago |

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 6 years ago | |

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.

jariel 6 years ago |

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

ta1771 6 years ago |

What software are you buying, OP?