In one way, this is essentially the "wedge". You start with a very specific long tail keyword, but you also cover related searches and topics, and the nice part is that your website analytics will then feed you more long tail keywords that are related but not exactly this page: those are ideas for other pages.
This is one reason why you'll see a page with one topic as a title often branch off to cover many related but sort of unexpected topics throughout the page - it's to cover the main keyword but also grab coverage on the related ones that might be easier to rank for (by simply mentioning it in a page vs. dedicating a page to it). As the owner of that site, you might see that one of these pages could be getting traffic from hundreds of keywords, and 10 of them are on a distinct enough topic that warrants another page. So you build a page for that, etc.
Depends on the product. Not all products are built for these types of trials. If a product needs more heavy lifting to show value then you are more likely to have a sales team. And just because you can evaluate that complex product by yourself doesn't mean that happens for everyone else.
Selling, by the way, is not just demo'ing the product. It's also navigating legal, finance, security, end users who don't know as much as you do, etc. As a buyer, it's sometimes easier to have your rep help you identify what the quickest path is. Lets me move faster, anyway.
Sales is a process. If I (as the salesperson) control the process, then I am more likely to win the deal. On average, my company has shown that doing these 3-5 touchpoints in this order leads to the greatest success, so I want people to follow this order as much as possible, and so does the rest of my team.
I'm glad to meet someone who is very capable of working with new software. They're smart and they pick up on things very quickly. Not many people are like this. If they can evaluate and sign an order form without me doing anything, I call that a big win.
But, given an average prospect, if I let them kick around and then they tell me "Nah this isn't it." do I assume that they actually evaluated the way that maximizes my likelihood of winning (or, put another way, that maximizes their chance of finding something valuable)? If I didn't talk to them, then I'm not sure if they saw X feature or could see the Y value that I typically can tell a story around. So I'd rather work through the gated process. Heck, it's even better for them because they have a higher chance of solving their problem.
Now, if you're really insistent, then I'll notice that and find a way to make the process fit your style. But on average it's better for both you and me if we do it my way.
I have seen (these are from a broader pool of a couple hundred people +/- 1 year from me): business school, other/real graduate school (e.g., math), private equity, political campaigns (e.g., Buttigieg's), startup founder, startup early employee, tech companies of all roles (commonly biz ops and PM), software engineer, restaurant line cook, large corporations (e.g., McDonald's).
Essentially, the same stuff high-achieving new grads do, but I would say my peers come out a little sharper on communication, operating independently, driving work efficiently, etc.
Logos would be one way to measure success for a sales team but rarely the only one. Most times, there is a quota the salesperson has to hit, and there is a standardized discount schedule they are pre-approved to offer against in order to hit that quota.
There is a TON of money in Salesforce. I'm rolling it out at our company right now and it's mind-boggling how many associated costs there are when you want the Salesforce connector for your existing tools:
* Data enrichment service plugging into Salesforce? Extra $10-20K/annually
* NPS service piping responses in? Upgrade for an extra $8K
* Preloading account data? There are like 5-10 sources you can have, each one with a different purpose, each one a potential $25K/annually
* How about a note-taking app that lets you modify Salesforce fields in the app? Another $40/user/month
* Hiring a consultant? $150-200/hr, and it'll take 100 hours to get it done
All that's on top of the $150/user/month Salesforce Enterprise list price
yeah and good luck deciphering their licensing. I'm a SF consultant and SF called the CEO of my company and told him to tell me to stop "socializing pricing" with one of my clients.
It really pissed me off since I have a long and trusted relationship with this client, if i can't give her a ballpark on licensing costs for some feature portfolio then what good am i as a consultant? God, it still pisses me off to even think about.
You are not playing this in a right way. It's not your job to know the prices.Tell them they need to contact Salesforce for tbis, however you could give some tips on how to negotiate a good deal.This way you'll keep both Salesforce and your client happy.
It's first and foremost a sales company, and that shows in the way they nickel and dime you for EVERYTHING. And by nickels and dimes, I mean thousands of dollars per month.
I'm just imagining a powerpoint slide that says "Yes we'll screw you over; after all you're the customer!" and a bunch of salesbros around the conference table muttering "well they have a point there..."
Want a sandbox that's big enough to use as an actual integration/staging environment rather than just a little toy "Developer Hub"? 15% of your annual contract.
And it is still quite expensive, though. I mean... having 25 little sandboxes, and a partial copy environment is just silly. I'd rather have one or two dev. environments and a full copy instead.
Hey yeah, I worked for a SaaS company (about 100 people) about 15 years ago that was paying salesforce around $500k/yr. That said, it was probably worth it.
I've no experience with this area, but the $150 per user and month seem pretty high to me. How many people would typically need that kind of access? Only Sales, or even more parts of the company?
This is list price, though to be fair they throw discounts around pretty easily (we got 35% off for a 50-user purchase). All customer-facing teams and people needing to understand customers (marketing, for example) would have access.
For us: sales, account management, support, marketing, even some engineering need licenses.
The Oracle heritage is certainly showing in the pricing.
I don't have experience with many systems, but I'd assume the accounting departments need access, as well as customer success/tech support departments.
I don't fully understand it but my company stores important customer support data (including issues and software changes) in Salesforce, and I as an engineer have no access to that information because the per user cost is too high.
It is the highest you'll get for an Enterprise Edition license as far as I know. You do get great discounts on large volumes, like some said. To give you an example: if you get, say, 500 licenses, you can probably upgrade them to Unlimited Edition (list price of USD300/user/mo) for almost no additional cost.
This is nearly a universal law in the sales world: products/services pitched to salespeople always 1) are expensive and 2) come with their own sales team who are slick and/or aggressive.
I've seen it from sales training, to software and everything in-between.
TBF sales tools probably come under the most scrutiny at just about every company for price/value. Companies that sell tools to sales can get high margins but can't price themselves above their value.
What a weird sentence to write but at least in my experience with IT/engineering so much stuff ends up being bought that, although it's is usually nice, would never stand up to scrutiny if we had to justify business value.
I work at a large company (one listed on their homepage in my country) and IIRC we pay millions per year to Salesforce. It's an incredibly expensive product.
And people said the same about SAP years ago. The challenges are no different...which basically boils down to integration and data (with the biggest exception being that there is no longer a whole "we need a whole project just to build the infrastructure that hosts the service").
