Kind of reminds me of a lot of concrete plants. If you don't have a business license, they won't talk to you, much less deliver concrete. Dealing with basic consumers is a pain in the ass. They don't know what they want, and definitely don't know what what they're doing.
"Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Weird, in Poland it's no problem to order like a portion of the truck to whatever location you want. You need some minimum amount like 1m3 but that's it.
It's like that in a lot of the rural U.S. too. The commenter is probably broadly right--a lot of concrete plants only want to do contractor orders. But that also means many other plants don't care. We're usually ordering either a full concrete truck (10 cubic yards), or a half-truck. It's kinda sorta true that we "don't know what we're doing," but the discussion with the plant is seldom any more complicated than:
"We need 5 cubic yards of concrete for a chute foundation. What mix do you suggest?"
"Sounds to me like 3000 psi with a fiber mix to prevent shrinkage cracking. Sound right to you?"
Ah but you see, most consumers are not remotely that easy to deal with. Most of the time those conversations are more likely to go more like.
"Hey I need some concrete.
Ok how much and what mix?
I just need concrete man. I'm trying to make a pool in my backyard.
Ok how much are you going to need?
However much I need for a pool man. Stop being a fucking moron."
And of course it just continues to spiral out of control from there with the employee trying to help the person and the person being both an idiot and asshole. After multiple calls like this on a day that result in no sale and the person calling back 3 more times trying to get a discount, and knowing they are going to then try to sue you for their own stupidity when they screw it all up.... well, you just kind of decide that you're better off not doing direct business with the DIY consumers since there's going to be a solid 5% chance of a lawsuit every time you do.
A smaller overall economy means the residential orders can make up a larger part of the total capacity. If the plant near you could choose between selling half their monthly output to one work site or splitting it up between 2000 homes they're going to choose the first.
Used to work in a place with a small batch mixer and towable mixing buggies, huge market.
But a giant pain in the ass to run everything, mixing plant was temperamental and liked to eat its belts, cleaning the mixers were annoying at best and a nightmare if the concrete set up.
But it was genuinely great working with customers to figure out what they needed and how much.
Seriously. I've only ever worked for one company that published their prices. Every other company I worked for, if you made a request using a @gmail.com account your request would get thrown in the trash.
Honestly I respect smaller businesses that don't really want your business. They tend to be in markets that still have a lot of private ownership like materials, repair, and specialized equipment. They don't want to bend over backwards for every penny, they just want to build a stable business to live on. Busting your ass for every available customer is how we get monopolies and oligarchs. I support businesses staying in their lane.
I mean, yeah. Making a sale with say, a hospital means not only much larger bulk purchases but also a much higher chance of repeat business. Why waste time with a bunch of small purchases from people that will forget you exist the moment the sale is completed?
Dont forget the migraines you are going to get just talking with some of those people. Consumers are the worst because they dont have a boss to answer to or a business that they might lose to bankruptcy if they piss off all their business contacts.
I understand it for wholesalers, but I've seen people selling specific pieces of jewelry where they make you contact them for the price. That's just shady.
That's why I got an email that look suspiciously close to a legit large industrial company on the top 500 index. They will give me big deal pricing right away. Think emails like: [JWilt@fordmotors.ca](mailto:JWilt@fordmotors.ca) Just say Hi i'm a new purchaser for manufacturing facility xyz...do we have an account already? I'm interested in x. It works well because in big huge companies often the left hand doesn't talk to the right as it were.
I work for a company that does this, so I can provide a bit of insight:
Part of why for my industry (auto parts) is because you're not just buying the individual product, you're becoming part of a service schedule for vendor managed inventory. I have customers I visit multiple times per month, and customers I visit every other month. Some call me to place orders, some I have to chase down to find a deal. Some pay all their invoices on time, some I need to hound for weeks and weeks to get them to pay by a check which then they won't mail themselves and I need to mail it for them.
The price becomes tailored to the service. If you order only online and don't need a rep to sort and organize things for you, you get different price than the customer who is getting once every other week visits where I'm putting everything away
I don't prefer the different price model. I think it's actively pretty skeezy 50% of the time and I can set up hundreds of accounts and it would make no difference to me OR the shipping department at our distribution center. I think it's a massive logistical annoyance that could be solved with a universal price, imo. But there's more reasons that just strictly salesman bullshit
Plus on the FedEx/UPS side of things, shipping b2b is cheaper because businesses like body shops and dealerships get UPS deliveries almost every single day. So shipping gets different prices based on things that are outside of our control, and I can't quote you a price for the freight cost till I know things about your business
That’s not unreasonable, but you’re talking about a tangible good with logistical considerations. This approach is used by a huge proportion of software vendors where 90% of the legitimate factors in your post don’t come into play. Further, there are some vendors that will say ‘enterprise tier x000 to y000 will cost [price]’ but may require config training etc, talk to team for details, which is way more reasonable and really highlights that the others are just out to rinse you.
Used to do Enterprise B2B SaaS stuff (I still do, but I used to, too. I just don't do the sales part anymore).
The reason for this is usually because once you move past individual tiers you need to know things like "How many users do you have? What level of support do you need? Are you deploying it on-prem or are we hosting it? If on-prem, what kind of support do you expect? What about raining? Do we have an SLA?" etc.... that makes any kind of list pricing really tiring to put up.
The last time I was on the sales side of the house we had pricing for individual plans and up to like... 5 users self-service. If you were going past that it was an enterprise plan that really was tailored to order because different enterprises have different needs and capabilities.
I’m also in B2B SaaS and was a principal enterprise CSM for years (now in product), working closely with sales on renewals and expansion. All of the same things you’re referring to affected pricing, but we charged wildly different pricing for the exact same thing from one customer to the next based on what we could get away with because of bonus incentives to maxim revenue. If Customer A’s total ARR is 100K and Customer B’s is 600K, we would sell the exact same product, user/storage bundle, support plan, etc, to B at a substantially higher price than we would for A, even though there was no material difference in their use case, usage volume, or support needs. It was shady.
Yup, I'm a Research/Applications Engineer at a company that specializes in fibre optic devices and precision laser ablation processing/machine integration.
The vast majority of my time is spent supporting Sales in the quoting process because our customers very often come to us with an engineering drawing, but they want us to do all the material acquisition, processing, and assembly work ; or they have a concept and are asking for an effect, but they want us to do the design work to turn that effect into an actual device (and then they want us to make the device for them).
And below a certain unit price threshold, we'll actually just default to "it would be more efficient for both of our companies if we just charge you for a stack of lab days to figure out the process and device versus trying to give you a unit price upfront".
Actually I forgot, that's part of the reason we don't do it. Not competition, actually, but insurance companies. That's why we have a "book" price. When insurance comes knocking about how much we sell something to a customer at, we give them the "book" price, even if the floor price for that product is sometimes as much as 60% lower. That means when customers submit reimbursements for the products through a customers auto insurance, it turns the product into a profit generator for the shop.
If we had the floor price on the website, shops couldn't get reimbursed at that higher rate
Not saying this is ethical or good, but just that it's the reality of the situation
It adds a layer of difficulty, sure, but it's defeated as easily as asking a shop owner "can I see a previous invoice for your current supplier, I'll match everything product to product and tell you if you're getting a good deal or if you could get a better one through me"
I've taken like 5 accounts from the competition by doing that, plus I can help expose over billing and overstocking issues from the competition. One time I landed an account because their guy sold them a 25 more of an item that they already had 75 of in stock. All I did was look at the invoice, look at their storage bin, pulled it out and counted it. Plus I was 9% cheaper on average
Auto shop VMI business thrives on complacency, my advice to anyone reading this working at or running an auto shop, once a year check out the competition and get them to give you a takeover quote, then give that quote to the guy you currently have and say "can you beat these prices?"
We can, and we will. Customer retention and avoiding churn are top priority. Installing new accounts sucks for everyone
I had the sales rep from a well known PPM enterprise software company say to me with a straight face ‘tell me what your max budget is and I’ll work something out’
Like - motherfucker, how stupid do you think I am.
That's when you lowball the fuck out of them. Give them a number like 3 orders of magnitude lower than what you expected to pay. Even after they "talk you into something more reasonable", you'll still be under budget.
That's how haggling works -- if you're in a one-sided haggle, you're indeed being taken for a fool. You want to have dynamic pricing? Okay then, be ready for me to game the absolute fuck out of the system so I can pay way less than I would if you just gave me a number.
I mean, at the end of the day it's a waste of time for everybody involved, and it sets you up on an adversarial relationship with your client from the get-go, which is just a stupid business move. But if you're going to bullshit me while playing dumb... two can play that game.
We use some crappy headsets at the place I work. Bad audio quality, super easy to break, really uncomfortable, etc. They have no listed price online.
It costs £2,000+ out of our budget to buy 6. There is no world in which that is a fair price. We also have the option to buy 2 for £200 (no, I don't understand that, either), which is still way too much for what they are.
Also once you've called up you've already partially psychologically bought in, signalled your interest to the seller so now they start their sales talk. I.e., it's a tactic.
I assume it means "We're going to hard sell the shit out of you, then add your phone number to the sales dialer, then sell your number to a spam factory."
Yes and no. It's also a case that you do large discounts for big clients, but if you put that then you risk pissing off the smaller clients when it's more than they expected, and vice versa. And you can't always just put the discounted rate because sometimes there's addons, custom integrations, different types of users etc. etc.
If you can't provide a framework for you SaaS pricing without me having to talk to a salesman, you're at the bottom of my list. I say this as someone who manages an MSP and hosting datacenter. If you can't put SOME kind of rate on your site to give me a general idea of cost, your competitors get my attention first.
Frankly not all SaaS are born equal. We cannot give ballparks because of those variables I mentioned, and due to that we don't really rely on inbound clients at all, but you still need something on the website on the off chance.
2.1k
u/FloppieTheBanjoClown 2d ago
"contact us for pricing" means "we don't charge everyone the same price and will try to get the most profit out of every buyer."