One of the biggest hurdles for me when trying a new service or product is the inevitable harassment that follows. It always starts out harmlessly.
“Hey, I saw you checking out our services. If you have any questions, please let me know.”
Anything is fine. I don’t email because I have materials, but I understand that we are all just doing our jobs.
Then it escalates.
“Hello, I’m a customer success fanzine and I’m just checking in to make sure you have the best experience possible with your trial!”
Perhaps you registered to see if your tool can do a certain thing. Otherwise, I’ve already moved on mentally and forgot about it. So when you email me, I’m either actively considering whether to purchase your product or I don’t know why you’re contacting me.
And now I’m on your mailing list forever. Receive notifications about all new releases and launches, forcing you to make a choice every time.
• “Obviously, I don’t care about this anymore.”
• “But what if the functionality I wanted was finally added?”
Because your mailing list is likely the only place on earth where you can see if platform A added feature X (because it’s obviously too difficult to put release notes somewhere accessible) I have to consider unsubscribing every time I see your marketing emails.
And that’s not the worst-case scenario either. The absolute worst case scenario is if you have to set up a “call series” when in fact you can use the service.
You cannot force a website to enter your credit card number. Next, you will need to form many interpersonal relationships with strangers via Microsoft Teams.
Join the call
Every SaaS sales team has this classic duo.
First of all, I’m a salesperson. They are friendly enough but only half paying attention. Their main focus is data entry into the CRM. Whether they’re selling rap or missiles, their approach won’t change much. Their job is to keep us moving steadily toward the sale.
And their equivalent is “Sales Engineer,” “Customer Success Engineer,” or whatever silly title they decide this week includes the word engineer. This person is one of the few people in the company who has actually read all the documents. They were brought in to explain with a constantly exhausted air that this was indeed my new “everything platform”.
“Our platform does everything you want. We’re very secure. Maybe too secure. Our engineers are the best in the world. Every release is engineered by a former Google intern. It was tested through a 300-point inspection process designed by our CTO, which strongly suggests they held a leadership position there.”
Then I end up enduring a series of demos showcasing features I’ll never use because I’m only here for one or two specific features. As you probably know, rigid demo templates don’t give you much flexibility, so you have to work your way through everything.
To appease me, salespeople always say things like:
“Matt is pretty technical. He probably already knows that.”
It’s as if this mild form of flattery makes you believe that a lowly nerd like me and a superstar salesperson like you can be friends. Instead, my empathy shifts to the sales engineer. Sales engineers’ demos always break at the worst possible times. The look of pure despair on their faces resonates deeply with me.
“Oh, I promise this usually works.”
There, there. know. Everything is held together with tape and string.
At some point, you’ll ask about compliance and security, prompting them to send you a pile of meaningless certificates. These documents do not prove that you actually did what they said. They just demonstrate that you can plausibly fake having done them.
We both know that. If I get you drunk, I’ll tell you horror stories about engineers copying databases onto their laptops and fixing them, or how user roles don’t actually work and everyone is secretly admins. Probably.
But this is still the dating phase of our relationship, so we pretend to be on our best behavior.
“Very impressive SOC-2.”
via GIPHY
get someone to pay
We have experienced the demo. You tried to bond with me and form a “team” that works together against the people who actually matter and make decisions in my company. Now you want to get my boss’s boss on a conference call and pitch him in person.
via GIPHY
Therein lies the problem. That person would rather get flamed than continue to receive 12 pitches a week from different companies. So, naturally, my job is to “put together the proposal.”
This is where things start to fall apart. The sales rep was becoming increasingly frustrated because he didn’t have to talk to me and was able to close the deal just by pitching directly to management. Sales engineers, on the other hand, are still forced to attend calls for some reason, staring into the middle distance like orphans on a battlefield.
“Look, can we get your side’s leaders involved and end this?” the clerk asked, clearly irritated.
“They’re paying me so I don’t have to talk to you,” I reply. At first you thought it was a joke, but then you realized it was the honest confession you refused to hear early in our relationship.
If I really, really value your product, I’ll reach out to the 300 people I need to get it approved. This process will take at least a month. why? That’s always the case. If I work for a Fortune 500 company, it will take at least three months, assuming everything goes perfectly.
At this point I hate myself for clicking on that cursed link and discovering the existence of your product. What was supposed to save me time has now turned into a massive project. I’m starting to wonder if I should have reverse engineered the tool myself.
Eventually, it will be approved. Money is exchanged and salespeople disappear forever. Currently, I am being handed over to Customer Service, aka Large-Scale Language Models (LLM).
honeymoon is over
It doesn’t take long to realize that “an unlimited cloud-based platform designed by the best in the industry” is actually quite limited. One day everything will be fine. Then I unconsciously cross a certain threshold and everything falls apart.
Browse our carefully curated documents to highlight your strengths. Because potential customers should never be allowed to see the warning. If you can’t find the answer, contact customer service. After wasting valuable time of your life with LLMs linking to the same useless documents, you can finally send emails to real people.
Because we didn’t select the Super Enterprise Plan™, that support email SLA is a whopping 72 business hours. Eventually you will receive a response explaining that you have reached an invisible limit and need to rebuild your workflow to work around it.
As the product continues to be used, the list of undocumented failure modes grows.
“If you click these two buttons too quickly, the iFrame will throw an error.”
Actually, try saying this to another human being. It’s as if we’re in a cyberpunk dystopia where flying cars built by idiots randomly explode in the background. Even though the stack is probably logging these errors, no one can explain them or help me fix them.
Account representative
Then, out of the blue, you will be contacted by a new account representative. They’ll want a call to “discuss how to use your product” and “see how it can help you.” Don’t be fooled. This is not an attempt to gather feedback or fix problems. It’s just a sales pitch.
After listening to my set of problems and promising to “look into it”, the real purpose of the call becomes clear. It’s about convincing me to buy more features. These “new features” cost very little, such as SSO and API access, but they make a huge difference to me. Now, I have to make a decision whether to further enhance your product or discontinue it completely and move on with my life.
It’s not my money so I’d probably agree to give more just to get the basic features that should have been included in the first place.
A pleasant farewell
Eventually, one of those open source programmers (the kind who gleefully releases a free tool and then deals with a lifetime of complaints) will create something that works exactly like your product. Sho. They have crazy names like CodeSquish, Dojo, and GitCharm.
I would like to hear from my colleagues. When I tell people I use your product, they roll their eyes, turn to me, and say, “Why don’t you try CodeSquish?”
They don’t want to admit ignorance, so they make up reasons on the spot. I then found that running Google CodeSquish in the bathroom did everything I needed, cost nothing, and performed 100 times better. Even though it’s maintained by a recluse from a farm in Vermont just to have the code pushed to him. A hosted Git repository.
i will try. Despite the fact that its only “forum” is a Discord server, it will still be far ahead of commercial products.
Then comes the farewell. Now that you’ve probably signed the contract, put it off as long as possible. Ultimately, I’m going to tell the Treasury Department not to renew it. All of a sudden, I’m getting all the attention from your team. You sell me on why open source tools are actually inferior (we both know that’s not true).
I will tell you that we will discuss this on our side. I don’t. Only me and 6 other people were interested in your product. Finally, like the coward I am, I will break up with you via email and then block your domain.
