wowbagger's Journal: Stupid Marketing/Sales types

OK, suppose you are in Marketing or Sales.

And suppose you are an idiot.

But I repeat myself.

(with apologies to Mark Twain.)

Let me preface this by saying that I work closely with several marketing and sales types every day - and I do not assert that ALL marketing or sales types are stupid.

Just the ones I am talking about (with apologies to 2 Live Jews).

One of my pet peeves with any sales web site (i.e. any web site which has as its primary purpose trying to convince you to buy produce or services) is when they do not list some form of price - be it a firm price or just a Manufacturer's Recommended Sale Price.

I do capital equipment for a living - gear costing over US$20,000. Now, for such gear there is rarely a single, firm, Saturn Motors-style price - the price can vary depending upon number of units purchased (and over what time frame they are purchased), the existence of other contracts (government purchase contracts and the like), the options ordered, and how many drinks you bought the sales guy. I understand why you cannot always give a firm price.

However, when you are on the other side of the screen, and you are trying to put together a basic proposal to purchase something, you want a ballpark price, just to weed out the "If you have to ask, you cannot afford it" entries - a guy who has at most US$8000 for a service monitor is NOT in the market for a US$30,000 monitor, and you really don't want to waste your sales guys' time or his time when there is no friggin' chance of a sale.

There's also the predatory way some sales guys behave - you want a rough price, and they attack like a shark smelling blood - and then you cannot beat them away with a stick until you buy, or convince them you died.

OK, so, what motivated me to write this JE?

I live out in the country - not incredibly far, but enough that my choices for an ISP were pretty limited - I have my phone company, or my phone company, or my phone company. Sure, I could go for some oversubscribed dial-up service (PeoplePC? NetZero?), but then I'd be paying long distance charges to the phone company to access the Point of Presence.

Nor is my phone company such a bad choice - they offer DSL in my area, they understand that the world is not all Windows, and they offer pretty good service. But for US$44/month I get 384K/128K - not the fastest in the world.

Now, they've been offering DSL for many years (I was one of their first customers), and over the years they have brought the price down a bit. But unlike in Wichita proper (where you have competition between cable, DSL, and wireless), there has been no price pressure on them.

Until now. Now there are some point-to-point wireless companies offering service where I live.

OK, so first, I want to check my ISP's web pages to see if I can bump my existing service.

But they have no price list ANYWHERE on the site.

So I bring this to their attention via email, and the sales person does The Right Thing (almost)- they email me back, giving me the price for the next service level up and the one-time charge. The only thing they didn't do right was say "Oh, and thanks for pointing out the deficiency in the web site - we will look into fixing that."

OK, so I have a rough idea for one option - US$10 a month more for 512K/256K. Not an order of magnitude increase, but respectable.

So, I check out the wireless company, Pixius. I am in the service area - good. They give good info on the way it works, even giving the rain fade attenuation and link budget (which means a communications guy like myself can compute how likely losing comms due to rain would be). They give a list of "authorized resellers" in the area. They list the specs on their residential service plans and business service plans - bandwidth, IP addresses, mail data, domain hosting, and several other pieces of information.

What they don't list is (see if you can guess):

Price.

OK, so maybe the price is on the "authorized reseller" web sites.

Nope - in fact, not one of the authorized resellers even MENTIONS Pixius on their web site.

Now, I know that were that to happen to us - were OUR authorized resellers to not list us on their site - they would be hell to pay when our marketing director found out.

So, I send an email to the Pixius sales contact address. I did *NOT* include any contact data other than my email (which was my work email address, simply because that's where I was when I looked this up over lunch). I pointed out the absence of price data, and the absence of mention of Pixius on the authorized resellers' web pages. I stated my goal was simply to gather information on possible residential service options.

I expected much the same sort of response as I got from my ISP - an email saying "here's our basic prices, if you want a more detailed quote please contact me."

Instead, this joker shows up at my place of work and tries to get a hold of me there - he leaves his business card with the receptionist (as I was out to lunch at the time) and says to her "It's too complicated to explain our offerings in an email."

BZZZT! Wrong answer. This is a request for a simple residential account - that should be a fairly simple list of prices and options. If your price structure is not well enough defined to supply this, I don't want to do business with you.

Also, when you are contacted by email, you respond by email unless otherwise directed.

So, guess what - Pixius isn't going to be getting a sale from me any time soon.

I had a smiilar thing happen

[WhiteDragon]

I was looking for a CD/DVD duplicator to replace our current one that doesn't quite do what we need. I found a few promising sites (no price listed) and called two of them up (and actually talked to sales staff) and asked for a quote via email. Three days later I finally get a response from one vendor with more product info (basically the brochure) but no quote. Then I reply to the email asking for a quote and finally get one. The other vendor sends me an email a week or so later asking if I got his quo

Here's a question for you...

[Interrobang]

I have a marketing website for my technical writing business. Do you think I should put my fee schedule on it? Right now I don't, because my rates are a little bit on the negotiable side (I'm apt to charge a microbusiness less, and a larger company more, for instance), and I offer several different services (or combinations of services) at several different rates.

It's not so much that I don't have a price structure, it's basically that I have a few general guidelines for cost, and I do an estimate (and

Re:Here's a question for you...

[wowbagger]

That's a tricky question - for a service oriented site, especially when the "service" isn't so cut and dried, it might get tricky to give the potential customer a good enough idea that you aren't

1. scaring them away when you could have met their needs or
2. giving them a false hope when you won't be able to meet their needs

Yes, I guess I'd suggest putting up the guidelines you use, and then urging anybody interested to call (and noting that the prices are negotiable). That way, if you get somebody who is loo

Thanks.

[Interrobang]

I'll consider what you've said, and probably ask a few other people as well. One of the hardest challenges I had when I was developing my business plan as part of the programme I'm in (an entrepreneurship programme through the Canadian federal HRSDC) was figuring out my competitors' pricing, as I was a bit loath to call them and say, "Hey, I'm one of your (in?)direct competitors, and I want to know how much you charge"; very few technical writers/editors list rate schedules on their sites (although some of