My boss asked me to look into a proposal management software/sort-of ERP system called ‘Privia’ today by a company called SpringCM.
I’m curious if any of you in the business world have used it and would love your opinions.
What I found strange, however, is that it took me 20 minutes of me listening to a sales pitch, with me interrupting several times saying “how much does it cost?” to get an answer. If the guy had gone on another few minutes, I would have just hung up. I did eventually get the data. While advertising your pricing on your website obviously makes it easy for a competitor to adjust their price to beat yours, do those stupid “call for price” things ever work? Sure, it gets rid of the riff raff that were never serious, but if I can’t even find out if your software is on the scale of $100 a user license, or $10,000 a user license, I find that very annoying. And I’m pretty sure rule one in business is “don’t piss off your customer”.
I get that service organizations may not be able to give prices if each job is different, but if you sell a product, shouldn’t you at least have some basic prices listed to give me ballpark data? Even if I am a competitor looking to price match, why do they assume I won’t call pretending to be a customer to get the price anyway?
I may be totally wrong, but, didn’t one of the Dopers work for Privia? Moved down to Atlanta or something, and tried screwing their own employees? about a year ago??
Like I said, I could be wrong, big time. I don’t have search, etc…
I work for a company that sells software+support packages to businesses. Our prices are not publicly available. I haven’t been privy to any sales pitches, but knowing our guys, they bullshit as long as possible before presenting any real figures.
The company has never been profitable and almost ran out of money last spring. It will almost run out of money again later this year.
The most shocked, deer-in-the-headlights look I have ever seen was from a software company salesman about to make a presentation to our group, when my boss set a tape recorder down on the table in front of him, and said “you don’t mind if I record this, right? I’m legally blind, so it’s hard for me to take notes.” I swear, it took about 15 seconds for him to stammer out “No, no – I don’t mind.”
And there were many points in his presentation where he obviously started to give a standard line, and then thought better of it. Or said it, but then quickly added a qualification to the statement. And they were quite noticeable, because he glanced down at the tape recorder every time he did it.