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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What software are you buying, OP?