Simplivity - anyone use them?
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@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
Frankly, I haven't seen anyone say they don't want the product after seeing whet we do and understanding the architecture.
This is a major, and common, sales mistake. You don't see them. Right, of course you don't. Most of us have talked about this at length before... you don't see them because the moment that you don't have pricing info many of them are already gone and you never get their contact info or ever realize that they might have been customers.
I've seen HR do this with new hires - tell people things so bad about a company via anonymous "pre-contact" information that the company never gets metrics on how many people they've turned away that never moved past the anonymous phase because the candidate turns them down for the job before they even have an interview.
Think about the presentation in Chicago. Every single person had the same concern. Only ONE of them put something online to complain, the others... walked away. You just got lucky that someone cared enough to inform you... and only because another vendor asked a question about you. If Nic hadn't wondered if anyone was using Simplivity, this would never have come up in a public channel (we'd already heard complaints in private ones days before this, and live during the presentation there were messages going around about how pricing was being refused) you would never have had this conversation.
So sure, you don't see the people you are turning away. That's how bad the situation is, you aren't even aware that it is happening.
And it's FAR more than you think. Before this thread, at least a dozen market influencers had a private conversation, none of whom had been at the Chicago event, about what a waste of time talking to Simplivity would be because pricing was being held back. You didn't just risk turning away a room full of people that you talked to directly - but that those people were then actively telling other people that there was no pricing info so to avoid you. You have no idea the degree to which you got the word out that you didn't have pricing.
You never see the people who turn your product down immediately. Never use that as a metric.
I completely agree with you, and I'm a CTO based in Italy (so, I suppose, no cultural background involved). I wouldn't even CONSIDER a company that isn't clear in THAT way, in a time where the cloud providers offer bill-explorer tools.
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@Francesco-Provino in doing product discovery, it's often where we start, rather than where we finish. We need to know what solutions are within a price range or how we should be thinking about a product when looking at the technology. And what keeps just from looking at products that are a total waste of time. You need pricing up front to know which products to include in the list of things to research.
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@scottalanmiller I cannot argue, ill simply excuse myself, with you being the victor, Ill up vote your post, but keep in mind I gave pricing in my first interaction with you. I'm the engineer, not the sales rep. This is an issue and you are right on every point.
However, being dismissive of a technology due to a non-negotiated price, without conversation is a questionable practice from my perspective. Are you doing your business a favor?
As an architect and customer I would shop features first, based on business objectives, then if the bill is too high, start having the conversation with the business to set expectations, and discuss alternatives. Not fighting you, just my personal perspective.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller I cannot argue, ill simply excuse myself, with you being the victor, Ill up vote your post, but keep in mind I gave pricing in my first interaction with you. I'm the engineer, not the sales rep. This is an issue and you are right on every point.
However, being dismissive of a technology due to a non-negotiated price, without conversation is a questionable practice from my perspective. Are you doing your business a favor?
As an architect and customer I would shop features first, based on business objectives, then if the bill is too high, start having the conversation with the business to set expectations, and discuss alternatives. Not fighting you, just my personal perspective.
When you're shopping for a mid-range new car do you go test drive a Rolls Royce or a Lamborghini? No, because you know they are way out of your price range and there's no point wasting your time or setting your expectations too high. All we're asking for is a general indication of what price category we're looking at. Are you a Yugo, a Corolla or a Rolls Royce solution?
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@Nic Well said.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller I cannot argue, ill simply excuse myself, with you being the victor, Ill up vote your post, but keep in mind I gave pricing in my first interaction with you. I'm the engineer, not the sales rep. This is an issue and you are right on every point.
However, being dismissive of a technology due to a non-negotiated price, without conversation is a questionable practice from my perspective. Are you doing your business a favor?
As an architect and customer I would shop features first, based on business objectives, then if the bill is too high, start having the conversation with the business to set expectations, and discuss alternatives. Not fighting you, just my personal perspective.
Most IT folk don't want to fight a sales dick for pricing just to see if their solution is in the ballpark. What @scottalanmiller said about instantly dismissing your product/company over you not providing pricing is spot on. That's how we do things. For me no pricing = no sale. Suggesting that technique isn't "doing our business a favor" makes you sound like you're actually in sales and doesn't make your company/product/etc. any more appealing (kinda has the opposite effect when you try to attack the methodology of the solution seeker).
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
However, being dismissive of a technology due to a non-negotiated price, without conversation is a questionable practice from my perspective. Are you doing your business a favor?
Yup, I'm protecting them from...
- Costly and pointless technology discovery for technologies that are non-applicable or unaffordable. If someone can't afford a product, they certainly can't afford to waste resources researching it.
- Spending time being woo'd by sales people who are using the opportunity to bypass engineering to talk to management and talk them into products and services that they cannot afford or may fail to compare wisely.
This is exactly what every IT decision maker's job is and entertaining products that are non-applicable or unaffordable would be very bad for the business. So yes, doing them a huge favour.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
As an architect and customer I would shop features first, based on business objectives, then if the bill is too high, start having the conversation with the business to set expectations, and discuss alternatives. Not fighting you, just my personal perspective.
That seems like a costly and wasteful process. Why shop for features you can't afford, why look at products you can't consider? It only takes a second to know who can be considered by price, it takes a lot of education and often a lot of discovery to know what features would be applicable.
One process is costly and reckless, one is cheap and safe. My business and customers don't want to pay me to waste their time. So doing things that get them to useful answers quickly is critical.
Did this just last week. Customer insisting on shopping features first. It cost them a week of discovery, tons of wasted labour because they through in vendors that were totally off the table price wise, ten times the price of other options.
We had this exact conversation with that vendor. Except they were more forceful and were willing to call the engineer a liar on the conference call for not knowing the ballpark price. Eventually the engineer admitted it was ten times the competition and totally out of the price range that was being considered. Call ended. Time was wasted. Vendor won't be considered next time, I assume, even though the features and such were great.
They asked for the price info up front but it was refused. We should have stopped the conversation right there, but went ahead and found out why it was refused.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
. Not fighting you, just my personal perspective.
Sure, that's the enterprise experience that @nic was talking about. SMBs don't work that way. Enterprises do. If you come from the enterprise space I totally agree. When I worked in the Fortune 100 we totally worked that way - partially because we could press for whatever price we needed. Partially because features could pay for themselves over time if they were good enough. SMB can't do that. The best product or the worst are not so dramatically far apart in value. They don't have the leverage to change the prices (and if they did, the vendor would lead with the good price, so it's all the same) and they don't have the time to waste talking to everyone about their solutions, they have to weed through the field extremely quickly.
So I totally see why you feel that way, but understand that in saying so, you are agreeing with @nic's assessment (to us) that the product is gauged for the enterprise and working its way to the SMB, at least in mindset.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller I cannot argue, ill simply excuse myself, with you being the victor, Ill up vote your post, but keep in mind I gave pricing in my first interaction with you. I'm the engineer, not the sales rep. This is an issue and you are right on every point.
Yup, and I totally appreciate that. For me, I got the pricing straight away. At least the big ballpark numbers. Although I agree that more details would be good, it's a decent ballpark.
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JUst giving you guys the information that you need to go back to management and explain that to the IT community, this is a conversation that has been had over and over again and we expect all vendors to have done their homework and totally accept that not having pricing up front and clear as day is the same as snubbing the SMB market. That's nothing to do with any specific vendor and is years old discussions. But it is really important for anyone working at a vendor to understand that that is public information and they should take it to heart before opening any SMB conversation. Use this thread as a means of going to management and pressuring them to rethink their approach to the SMB.
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Part of the issue with private pricing is that we have to assume that we are the ones paying full price and bigger shops are negotiating 50% discounts. So if the pricing isn't public, as the SMB, we simply assume that we can't get the average pricing deals. Nor can we afford to put in the time to fight for good deals. And it makes it impossible to compare solutions when we have to spend a fortune (of our time) to get every vendor to tell us a price. If it takes, say twenty hours with a vendor just to get a price, how do you do that with, say, ten vendors? That's a month of IT time. In the enterprise, that's nothing. For the SMB, that's enough to shut down the company or make a project take so long that the pricing will change and the process will start over.
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@scottalanmiller I cannot help but feel a bit like I'm being attacked. {salesdick?}
I will assure you the conversation will be moved to our leadership around pricing disclosure to end users. Was here being friendly, I think I'm better off to leave this to the bloggers/marketing folks, but I feel responsible as I should have done the event. Sorry all. Didn't mean to stir up the hornets.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller I cannot help but feel a bit like I'm being attacked. {salesdick?}
I will assure you the conversation will be moved to our leadership around pricing disclosure to end users. Was here being friendly, I think I'm better off to leave this to the bloggers/marketing folks, but I feel responsible as I should have done the event. Sorry all. Didn't mean to stir up the hornets.
Don't take it as being attacked, take it as getting informed. This is an enormous issue in the SMB space, which is why it is discussed so often and why it is made so public and why SMB IT expects all vendors to take the time to understand this before engaging the market. But this is how you learn.
Keep in mind that had you guys not come into the community, the only interaction with Simplivity would have been the Chicago meeting and lots and lots of people upset about how they were treated there. You are coming in from a position of having kind of offended a lot of people at that Chicago meeting. So of course, it feels a little like an uphill battle. That meeting went so poorly that scores of companies took you off the "to consider or even talk to" list, including companies that you had no idea your message had reached.
So turning that around is important. In this thread, you guys have done pretty well. But there is still a defense of the private pricing tactics, that means that your team doesn't understand the issue. They might provide the pricing now, and that's great. But we are trying to help you guys understand what kind of message you have been sending and why it's not just necessary to give pricing when we press for it, but why it needs to be public. Clearly your team understands and wants to help get us the info that we need, but we are trying to help you not need to have conversations like this in the future to get that info to other people.
Does that make sense? We are not just trying to help you fix one misstep in Chicago, but to help Simplivity fix what to us is a totally snub of the SMB market. That you found out about it because one community made it public enough for you to notice means that 99% of people are disregarding your company and product without providing you the deep feedback as to why.
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@scottalanmiller Understood. FWIW, my sales rep and I have sold to over 60 SMBs and I can tell you there are times when they negotiate better pricing than the enterprise. I have saved a few spice heads some large amounts that they are happy to discuss. Look at Shane Ladd on spice works. He calls me out by name. We don't want to lose partnerships due to cost so we have been very aggressive in assuring that we work with you guys to get to a solution that works. we work hard to help people, not just get something on the floor. It is unfortunate that because of many sales reps shady practices we have to be so guarded, but I get it.
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@virtualrick something to consider for perspective... this isn't the community that had the meeting in Chicago, that the feedback from Chicago spilled into this community shows how big the ramifications from something as simple as holding back pricing can be. That you found out that people were looking for that information in this community is an artifact of the fact that the conversations here are always public, so you know about them. In other communities, and specifically the one that had the Chicago meeting, a very large percentage of their conversations are totally private and you, as a vendor, cannot see that they even exist let alone see what is said. So these same kinds of conversations could easily be going on where you cannot see them and cannot jump in to provide more insight or pricing.
Consider how many customers or potential customers have these conversations in smaller communities, private communities or over a beer where you can't jump in and "fix" things.
We're just trying to provide some market education here, so that you are better prepared to know what to expect, but also so that we can get better interactions. We want our vendors (we being the SMB market) to understand us and our needs. The SMB is very hard to understand for vendors because you deal with little pinpoints rather than large chunks.
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@scottalanmiller In that case thank you. We do not want to snub SMB, we value your business. I think you'll find that our data protection is great in that space where dr is a major undertaking and often too expensive, and sys admins have to constantly compete with IaaS offerings. Hopefully, you have the time to give us a look at some point, and I will relay th edata to management, However there may be drivers around publishing a pricebook in a competitive space that we are both unaware of.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller Understood. FWIW, my sales rep and I have sold to over 60 SMBs and I can tell you there are times when they negotiate better pricing than the enterprise.
Oh someone can. But I can't. I'm a sucky negotiator. I mean, really awful. I have one tactic that I use every time, I ask for the price. If that price isn't awesome, I never call back. That's it. It's not a trick, I just don't negotiate. I do the same thing in Middle Eastern bazaars. I know it isn't how they do things, but I can't stand the negotiations. If the product isn't the price that I want, the need to negotiate alone is enough to walk away (or hand over to someone skilled at that.)
IT traditionally is very bad at that skill, if you have a purchasing department, then it can work out for you. At least half of us dont have those, though (okay, I do, but I'm one of the lucky ones.)
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
It is unfortunate that because of many sales reps shady practices we have to be so guarded, but I get it.
While that's a factor, I don't think that it's the big one. At least not from my perspective. It's that I need lots of info, all the time, when making decisions and knowing prices and knowing them more or less reliably is critical in being able to compare options. I do option compares all day, every day. Knowing how close different solutions are to one another has to be a ten second thing, it has to be in my head, if I have to ask someone for that info, it's too "costly" in time and effort to make it into a matrix. Most SMB systems design is done "live" without time to request pricing. No matter how great the pricing is or how awesome the sales guy is, it's a workflow concern.
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@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller I cannot help but feel a bit like I'm being attacked. {salesdick?}
That particular line was from @RojoLoco who is not known for mincing words in general. @scottalanmiller also has a tendency to break up his responses into multiple posts. It adds some clarity, but can be overwhelming, and he is also very blunt (although his language is less...colorful in online postings compared to Rojo). It can be a hard pill to swallow, but if you sift the wheat from the chaff you will find some very significant competitive advantages for the SMB market. I fall into the same category as most here. If a vendor doesn't post basic pricing information I will typically walk away unless there is a significant motivator aside from the product itself (peer recommendation being the largest).
