[djoldman]

This "crap" coming through the door must be at least partially a result of price tiering and offering.

You either:

1. Pay sales people to construct custom slices of services with custom prices and force them and your customers to hash it out via communication.

or

2. Commit to choose-your-own-adventure offerings where customers just check boxes and see pricing change in real time.

Option 1 retains negotiation advantage and makes more money for the company even though they pay sales people.

Option 2 removes sales people and gives up negotiation advantage, which customers would love.

Saying that, in the option 1 scenario, "crap" comes through the door because the process is frictionless is like saying a person died of suffocation instead of that they were strangled in a domestic dispute: there's a lot more going on.

[refulgentis]

They're right, at least a third is nonsense slop.

You're right that some fraction of people reaching out for into wouldn't be reaching out for info if the info was readily available.

This is very true, to the point its reflexively and obviously true.

It does not falsify the lived experience you'll have at a business with contact forms, be it for job applications, or product inquiries.

> Saying "crap" comes through the door because the process is frictionless is like saying a person died of suffocation instead of that they were strangled in a domestic dispute

This has to win some sort of prize for analogies.

Here's mine:

An open contact form on the internet is like leaving your front door wide open in a busy city. Sure, some people might wander in because they couldn't find your house number, but you'll also get lost tourists asking for directions, door-to-door salespeople hawking their wares, and the occasional raccoon looking for a snack. No amount of information on your facade will prevent the guy who thinks your living room is a public restroom from stumbling in.

[Aeolun]

Most of those are so obvious you could throw them out with a simple pattern matching scheme. Getting a lot of crap doesn’t really matter if you can filter it all with 5m of work per day.

I need less than a glance at the text on my contact form when I’ve seen the email address.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Beware the false negative. I'd probably fall victim to a lot of HN users' filters because I have a @yahoo.com email. However, I've had it since 1998 and I'm not likely to give it up any time soon.

[latentsea]

> occasional raccoon looking for a snack

I'm sure he'd like the enterprise snack plan.

[djoldman]

> An open contact form on the internet is like leaving your front door wide open in a busy city. Sure, some people might wander in because they couldn't find your house number, but you'll also get lost tourists asking for directions, door-to-door salespeople hawking their wares, and the occasional raccoon looking for a snack. No amount of information on your facade will prevent the guy who thinks your living room is a public restroom from stumbling in.

Agreed. I guess the point is that that is obvious to anyone who has ever run a website, and therefore facile.

It neatly skips over or ignores the fact that you don't have to have any crap come through the door at all: just put multiple signup buttons that require payment.

Coming at this another way: salespeople should be smiling and celebrating when crap comes through the door because without negotiated "enterprise" plans, the companies would probably make less money and have less need for salespeople.

Instead of crap, maybe it's salesperson gold?

[refulgentis]

A solution to people who want to talk to someone before they buy is to add multiple layers of buttons that make them buy first?

The salespeople should be celebrating every incoming contact because having contacts at all means you get sales?

These are narrowly true, I assume first isn't something you're seriously advocating for, and second is a form of "starving kids in africa"/"i used to walkup hill to school both ways" fallacy.

FWIW, I don't get the impression anyone is arguing for "how do we ensure every contact we invest in is viable?" or "We need to figure out how to ensure salespeople never have negative emotions about an incoming contact's quality".