I'm in the same boat as the GP, and while I'm clearly also not the customer, that's not necessarily reflective of how much money is being forgone by missing out on my business. Oh well, their loss and the competition's gain.
Then...you are not the customer. The customer for Contact Us is vastly different than the customer that can enter their credit card details and gain immediate access.
For me it's a bit like typo in phishing/scam emails. If you think "oh my god this scam is so bad how can anyone fall for it" then you are probably not the target group.
It's not about being "dumb" but about wanting to talk to a human and understanding the product before dropping thousands of dollars on it. As usual, it seems tech people cannot empathize with non-tech workers at their companies, which is ironic, as those exact salespeople are what provide the salaries for tech workers in essentially all enterprise B2B companies, which is a large portion of employers.
You are not the customer because you are not who is being targeted by the website. You don't have the ability to pay X thousand a year as an individual or even as a corporate spender, there are specific people in companies that buy software, and those are who these websites target. It is nothing personal, it's just that you are not the customer, no more than if you go to a ski resort and want to surf instead, asking why you can't surf at the ski resort.
False dichotomy. I want to talk to a human and learn about the product and have the money, though. I just don’t want to be forced to do that in order to learn a basic amount about what the product offers and how it works.
That's what the landing page is for, I don't understand what you're asking for. If you want to learn about the product from a human, then you have to, well, get on a call with a human. Sales calls are not usually to give you basic information, that is the job of the website and whatever research you do online before getting on a call. They are, in most of my experience, to ask questions about the product and to eventually get the process going for procurement from my company as a buyer.
I agree, but many of the software companies that force you to "talk to sales" don't actually have enough info on the site for buyers to conduct a basic evaluation of product capabilities. There's a difference between making someone talk to sales in order to buy the product and making them talk to sales in order to learn anything meaningful about it. A lot of the "you're not the customer" folks in this thread seem to imagine that only the former exists.
Sometimes that's also by design and can also signal that you're not the customer. For example, CIOs may hear of a product and are very willing to get on a call to learn more about a product rather than necessarily reading a landing page at all. This provides the opportunity for the company to teach a potential customer about how exactly it fits their specific use case rather than a more generic landing page (and some companies do have a solutions page with more pages for various specific industries precisely to combat this too), and also, well, to make the buyer interested enough to buy. People who want to learn more by themselves on the landing page are typically not buyers because CIO and VP level executives do absolutely want to learn even the basics from a human and be able to ask specific questions relating to their use case.
If you are in enterprise companies and see these discussions, you can see that the shift from product-led to sales-led (ie, enterprise) is a pretty conscious decision that companies make, as they know exactly the type of persona they are trying to target.
I disagree with them here, but I think their point is that they're aiming for a certain type of customer, and you aren't a good fit for their business.
Not every business wants every customer. Some businesses know they can do very well if they keep their costs-per-customer low and their revenue-per-customer high, even if they have to have fewer customers to do it.
Some of those "contact us" companies are in that situation. I think that most of them aren't, but wish they were.
However, by leaving some customers to feed the competition, they're also providing an avenue for their competitors to grow stronger and also take away the customers they currently enjoy having.
In particular I find that Chinese companies are hungry for all business, more willing to provide up-front information, and more willing to send a direct quote no-questions-asked rather than scheduling a meeting with a sales rep. I'm not surprised when I see them win.
Yes, product led vs sales led growth. But note that even then, as the former grow larger and target more enterprise, they shift to a "contact us" model anyway over time, until yet another competitor comes in, rinse and repeat. Intercom has this model, their pricing used to be very simple and now it's not, because it's tailored to enterprise, and now a lot of upstart competitors exist with that simple pricing.
>Not every business wants every customer. Some businesses know they can do very well if they keep their costs-per-customer low and their revenue-per-customer high, even if they have to have fewer customers to do it.
So they forego customers that just want to pay $N amount of money to try&use their software/service in favor of customers that want touchy-feely phone support at every step?
Yes they do, because you will likely pay less than people who go through the sales process and can be convinced to pay much more. Sticker shock is a real thing, it is very difficult to convince someone to pay $10k for example through their credit card if they see that price on a landing page, whereas it is easier to convince them if they can talk to a real human in the process.
The customer who just wants to put in their CC# and buy the product isn't a pipeline customer. You can't come back to that customer every other quarter and take them out for golf and pump them for additional services based on the "strength" of your relationship. You don't have any opportunity to make an in-person upsell pitch at the customer who just wants to put in their CC# and go.
In-person sales work at least in part because salesbros are trained to handle and overcome objections. They do it in many ways, and most of those ways take advantage of the fact that people by and large tend to want to act agreeable and kind to each other kind of by default. If you opt for the in-person meeting, the salesbro knows they have the opportunity to guilt or nudge or suggest you into buying additional services, or a longer service agreement, or a higher SLA, or whatever.
So, OP isn't the customer because they're announcing they're not interested in the dance. Many (not all!) IT vendors prefer the dance because it makes more money.
I say this as a former presales engineer for EMC (before it was EMC/DELL), serving large enterprise named accounts in the Houston area. If my boss saw me in the office, he'd kick me out and tell me I should be out taking clients out to lunch or to Astros games or whatever. I spent probably $2-3k/week on entertainment, and it was basically imaginary money to EMC, because if me and my salesbro blew $20-30k hooking a client, we were going to be doing it on a $2-3 million Symmetrix deal with 70-80% margin.
So yeah. OP isn't a customer because they don't want to play, and (most, not all!) companies can extract more revenue out of customers who DO play.
Indeed, like I mentioned in another comment, if you saw a $10k pricing model on a landing page, you will be extremely likely to not buy it, but if you went through a human-led sales process, your chances of buying go up astronomically. That is why sales exists and why companies have sales teams.
I have no desire to be in your fucking sales funnel.