[brookst]

Depends on the product. If it's off-the-shelf and every customer just does DIY deployment, 100% agree.

But many of these products have lots of different modules, and customers don't always know which ones they need. And some nearly require assistance/consulting with deployment, the complexity of which varies depending on environment.

So from the company's point of view, they don't want to put "$200k" on the website if the actual price is between $100k and $1m depending on customer specifics. It will scare off smaller customers and upset bigger customers.

But yeah if it's just one-size-fits-all, download-and-install SW, pricing should be listed.

[TeMPOraL]

Or, if you're dealing with a startup, there's a chance the product doesn't actually exist and they'll want to lock you in a deal that gives them more concrete requirements and funds the MVP. This is based on a bet that programmers can crank out code faster than the enterprise customer can finalize the deal.

In the past, I've dealt with a startup that not only did just that, but also used the non-final deal with one very large customer to try and get similar deals started with several other large companies, with half the pitch being just "we're about to deploy our solution at ${very large and well-known international you've heard of}".

[Spivak]

It has never ever been a bad strategy to get paid to build a product rather than building something and hoping there’s a market.

This is the way to do enterprise sales.

[TeMPOraL]

Right. My point is more about misleading presentation. The landing page will try to convince you the company is offering an amazing product that will solve your problems, when the reality is, the product doesn't exist and the company is trying to get you to fund it.

[bilekas]

It's funny you bring this up because a startup i was involved in at the beginning did something similar. I was one of the seniors and we would have proposed "ideas" for what could be done with the product. The next day the sales people were selling those features .. unfortunately it created a huge divide between sales and development that ultimately couldn't be overcome.

I understand the insentive is to sell, but there has to be a balancing line between sales and development, both can't work solely independent.