tl;dr summary: The original article mostly applies to the subset of products/services that can be sold online. Many successful companies choose to sell using different rules for good commercial reasons.
I said:
>>We do all of his wrongs, but we don't sell to small companies.
I should have said "some" not "all", however you have chosen three examples of things that we do indeed do "wrong"...
Background: we are a 6 person company with 100 clients selling to entities with 10's of employees to 1000's of employees i.e. we don't sell to large entities. We mostly charge per user per annum (plus initial setup costs of up to one years fees - cashflow needed for longer sales cycles). The company was bootstrapped, and is profitable (in the real sense of the word - not ramen profitable).
> Don’t hide your pricing behind a sales process
Our clients have a budget, and that budget varies by an order of magnitude. I think this is normal for larger entities. e.g. a government department may pay 10 times more than a company with tight margins, like a retail client. We removed pricing so that we could vary our prices according to the client. Variable costs are mostly covered by our initial setup fees, so increase in price goes straight to bottom line. Not signalling pricing was a good move.
> Don’t make me read a whitepaper in order to get essential information about your product. Put it on your website. In HTML.
We have some information on the web site, and some in PDF's. Due to variation in the client base we are careful how we disseminate much information E.g. don't advertise a feature that is confusing to some clients, or a feature that is too expensive to configure for a cheap/small client.
> Don’t make it hard for me to talk to a technical person at your company about the nitty gritty details of how your product works.
Probably doesn't apply since our sales people are technically competent. Most customers are not technical people, so shouldn't be interrupting developers. When judged appropriate, customers do have access to any of our staff.
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Perhaps another useful way to think of it is that many of his rules apply when your target market is more than say 10000 clients? Or maybe they apply in a highly competitive market?
Re Joel's article: Maybe it is a false dichotomy between small and large sales (although as a very broad approximation it may be a useful idea). I believe there are a huge number of SME/medium sized companies with a variety of sales processes where cost of sale is somewhere between $0 to $50k i.e. the stated $50k minimum hurdle doesn't exist. Sales in that range may be your sweet spot, depending upon what you are selling.
I said: >>We do all of his wrongs, but we don't sell to small companies.
I should have said "some" not "all", however you have chosen three examples of things that we do indeed do "wrong"...
Background: we are a 6 person company with 100 clients selling to entities with 10's of employees to 1000's of employees i.e. we don't sell to large entities. We mostly charge per user per annum (plus initial setup costs of up to one years fees - cashflow needed for longer sales cycles). The company was bootstrapped, and is profitable (in the real sense of the word - not ramen profitable).
> Don’t hide your pricing behind a sales process
Our clients have a budget, and that budget varies by an order of magnitude. I think this is normal for larger entities. e.g. a government department may pay 10 times more than a company with tight margins, like a retail client. We removed pricing so that we could vary our prices according to the client. Variable costs are mostly covered by our initial setup fees, so increase in price goes straight to bottom line. Not signalling pricing was a good move.
> Don’t make me read a whitepaper in order to get essential information about your product. Put it on your website. In HTML.
We have some information on the web site, and some in PDF's. Due to variation in the client base we are careful how we disseminate much information E.g. don't advertise a feature that is confusing to some clients, or a feature that is too expensive to configure for a cheap/small client.
> Don’t make it hard for me to talk to a technical person at your company about the nitty gritty details of how your product works.
Probably doesn't apply since our sales people are technically competent. Most customers are not technical people, so shouldn't be interrupting developers. When judged appropriate, customers do have access to any of our staff.
---
Perhaps another useful way to think of it is that many of his rules apply when your target market is more than say 10000 clients? Or maybe they apply in a highly competitive market?
Re Joel's article: Maybe it is a false dichotomy between small and large sales (although as a very broad approximation it may be a useful idea). I believe there are a huge number of SME/medium sized companies with a variety of sales processes where cost of sale is somewhere between $0 to $50k i.e. the stated $50k minimum hurdle doesn't exist. Sales in that range may be your sweet spot, depending upon what you are selling.