The Price Is Right
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The Price Is Right is of the longest running game show on television and one of the most beloved. I grew up watching it hosted by Bob Barker and it is still going today, hosted by Drew Carey. The show features a variety of challenges for players but most of them involve guessing at the retail price of various products ranging from groceries all the way up to vehicles and vacation packages. The concept of guessing at prices reminded me of shopping for IT solutions.
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I’m sure most of you know what I am talking about. You start researching various hardware and software solutions but you quickly find that the price is not readily available. You have to contact the vendor for pricing. Why? Often they can’t even give you a ballpark estimate. Why? The answer is simple, but awful. They want to charge you the highest price possible and the only way to do that is withhold pricing until they have sufficiently worked you over with a double whammy of sales and marketing.
IT is a cost center. We all accept this. Organizations don’t want to spend any more on IT than is necessary, but it is necessary, at least to a point. These vendors want to artificially build up that need for more and more before they hit you with a price because they want you to spend more.
Personally, I hate this practice of withholding pricing. I want to have an idea of what a solution costs up front when I am researching. I don’t need a sales guy smooth talking me to soften the blow of the price. I’m an adult. I know how money works. This practice is all too common in IT solution sales. That’s why I love Scale Computing. We are different.
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Did you see what I did there? Pricing for our HC3 systems. Not all the pricing. We have a lot of configuration options and it would be a feat of engineering to try to show everything. Base pricing to give you a starting point. Pricing that includes 1 year of maintenance and support. Why are we different? Well, we just think our pricing is fair to begin with. We don’t want you to have to guess. Don’t guess. Those are per node prices and we gave you a couple examples to get you started. We just want you to get a great solution at a great price.
Can you afford it? We will work with you to get you exact pricing on the configuration you need and nothing more. We can do an assessment of what you need and show you some of the costs of integration, management, maintenance, and support that come with or without our HC3 solution. If the numbers don’t add up, that’s fine. We won’t sell you a solution that you can’t afford, don’t want, or won’t work for you. We think you will want it and probably can afford it. In fact, you might find out that you can’t afford NOT to have it.
By the way, that pricing is available in our HC3 Sales Brochure right on our website. For more information on some of the tertiary costs of IT ownership, check out this white paper, “How HC3 Lowers the Total Cost of Infrastructure”.
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After having worked with other vendors to get pricing on several projects, straight forward, ballpark pricing is one of the things that makes Scale Computing worth taking the time to get to know!
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I look forward to acquiring a client sooner or later that can benefit from a @scale solution.
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When i took an 18 month sabbatical from working i watched the Price is Right and Let's Make a Deal almost every day.
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@momurda said in The Price Is Right:
When i took an 18 month sabbatical from working i watched the Price is Right and Let's Make a Deal almost every day.
You REALLY wanted to make sure taht you wanted to go back to work didn't you!
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2 things drive me away from a vendor faster than anything. 1. If they make it hard for me to give them money. Require a PO signed and faxed over approving the...NOPE. I will find a new solution. 2. Vague pricing or requiring my personal contact information before giving me a ball park idea of what something will cost up front. If I can't compare prices before I reach out to vendors I don't compare that vendor.
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@s.hackleman said in The Price Is Right:
2 things drive me away from a vendor faster than anything. 1. If they make it hard for me to give them money. Require a PO signed and faxed over approving the...NOPE. I will find a new solution.
Just take a CC and you are off and running!
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@scottalanmiller said in The Price Is Right:
@s.hackleman said in The Price Is Right:
2 things drive me away from a vendor faster than anything. 1. If they make it hard for me to give them money. Require a PO signed and faxed over approving the...NOPE. I will find a new solution.
Just take a CC and you are off and running!
Tried to buy a product direct from VMWare once after they bought Shavlik. So I contacted them, and tried to give them money. It took a week, and 3 faxes... yes fax after 2010. I had to write my CC number on paper and fax it to them then wait for them to email me my software. I haven't spent a dollar with them since.
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What I don't get for a sales team looking to make money, surely they want to qualify the client as in or out as fast as possible, so by showing the ballpark range the client can already opt into the solution and you waste less time on people "Looking for pricing" and then you can focus on less people but the spenders get more attention.
There's just this madness that if we hide the price, we can fiddle with it up or down depending on the client we get.
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Oh come on Scale.
Don't turn me into a lead, leads are for dogs. Let me qualify myself by getting the pricing straight away.
https://www.scalecomputing.com/scale-computing-pricing-and-quotes/
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@s.hackleman said in The Price Is Right:
@scottalanmiller said in The Price Is Right:
@s.hackleman said in The Price Is Right:
2 things drive me away from a vendor faster than anything. 1. If they make it hard for me to give them money. Require a PO signed and faxed over approving the...NOPE. I will find a new solution.
Just take a CC and you are off and running!
Tried to buy a product direct from VMWare once after they bought Shavlik. So I contacted them, and tried to give them money. It took a week, and 3 faxes... yes fax after 2010. I had to write my CC number on paper and fax it to them then wait for them to email me my software. I haven't spent a dollar with them since.
Wow.
