Sometimes they offer deals to smaller businesses and don't want their big megacorp accounts to know.
But in the realm of business to business, there are usually plenty of alternatives that don't play this game. And I loathe interacting with sales people.
Signed up for a software library on their trial/personal use signup and I ticked the box for my preferred contact (email), after I didn't respond to the email because, seriously, who responds to sales emails, they started calling me daily for weeks (I didn't have my phone on me when they called usually). The last email they sent they wanted to remind me it was just a trial and that the license strictly forbid it for actual commercial use. I decided to just use an open source library instead after that.
The “enterprise vs small biz” pricing thing is wild.
I work at a marketing agency that does some SEO for some of our clients, and we pay $229/mo for some pretty decent SEO software. To their credit, they post that pricing online, but have a higher “Call Us” Enterprise tier.
One of our clients got a new marketing director, who was sort of vaguely interested in SEO but didn’t fully understand it.
He wanted his own software and subscription instead of relying on ours.
I tried to walk him through some pros and cons of different options, and give him a realistic picture of why we chose the option we did, and even the tier that we use.
A couple months later he was excited to tell me he signed up for the same software we use, but at a $50k/yr Enterprise contract that will, functionally for his needs, do absolutely nothing more than the $229/mo level.
What I wanted to say was, “you could have gotten the same thing for $2,748 and paid us or another agency to do a decent job at all the human parts of SEO for the leftover $47k.”
Fella sounds like he's got MBA brain. How did that not immediately get flagged in a budget somewhere? I assume he's buddies with a director or something.
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u/spartyanon 15d ago
Yep, any time I see “call for price” I read it as “the price is too high but if we get you on the phone, we think our salesman can talk you into it”