Me: So what sort of order of magnitude are we looking at for pricing?
Exhibitors: Oh well I see you’re British I can put you in contact with our reseller in London…
This is just not good enough for any business that thinks itself truly international. I didn’t ask for a quote I asked for the order of magnitude, something roughly in the area. If a company can’t provide any idea then there’s something very wrong…
- It implies that the company has no direct presence in the UK, the further implication being that UK is not a core region hence support will be lacking and any UK specific portions of the product will be poorly maintained or just plain poor fullstop.
- It implies geographical pricing. Today’s business is global, I can and have bought COTS software from other regions. This business model doesn’t work, get over it.
- When a quick Google of the resellers also fails to reveal pricing one wonders if the product is actually available boxed, or whether it always comes with a cheesy sales drone and a whack of “consultancy” or “project management” attached. Further, there is an implication that without value added services it won’t actually work.
- Nobody likes talking to cheesy sales drones, not even IT Professionals.
So this is how it should go :-
Me: So what sort of order of magnitude are we looking at for pricing?
Exhibitor: Err, well, in the USA we either licence per device at $5pa each or you can buy a server licence for $2000pa. Obviously there will be some regional variation in the UK but they’re the sorts of figures you’ll be looking at. We have a number of partners in the UK, some just ship boxes but if you really want to get the most out of our software I’d recommend talking to blah… blah…