[dannyobrien]

The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting the same treatment as more faceless, distant big businesses.

I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their customers shifted from being Internet users and became other, matchingly-sized corporations.

[cortesoft]

I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things.

I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.

[Workaccount2]

The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field:

1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.

[biglyburrito]

My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind.

Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote.

My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.

[sh34r]

> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer

You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.

[kldg]

Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it.

Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.

[AznHisoka]

You are also a developer though, and developers are notorious for wanting self serve.

Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.

[makeitdouble]

> sales people

> talk to people

There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that.

As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.

[arjie]

That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a <$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on the product, of course.

[pmontra]

If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and go is self preservation.

[brightball]

It depends on the environment.

If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well.

If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.

[Arainach]

Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free" source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused until you put massive gates on account creation.

[SecretDreams]

> use their sales skills

Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.

[satvikpendem]

You're not the target customer.

[Sevii]

That has definitely changed. Google AdWords today is one of the most unfriendly services to onboard I've ever encountered. Signing up is trivial, setting up your first ad is easy, then you instantly get banned. Appeals do nothing. You essentially have to hire a professional just to use it.

[LiamPowell]

Yet it's still absolutely inundated with scams and occasionally links that directly download malware[1] that they don't action reports on. I don't think the process needs to be easier if they already can't keep up with moderation.

[1]: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129387695568...

[dekhn]

The thing to understand about google services is that they see so much spam and abuse that it's easier for them to just assume you are a spammer rather than a legitimate customer, unless you go through other channels to establish yourself.

[binsquare]

Also adding onto this, it is impossible to get human support!

One of my co-workers left with an active account and active card but no passwords noted. The company gave up and just had to cancel + create a new account for the next adwords specialist.

[fersarr]

My attempts always had validation issues that stopped the ads from running but I never figured it out and stopped trying

[josefresco]

I sell managed Google Ads services and have never had issues with my clients being banned. Google Ads sucks for 1000 other reasons.

[smagdali]

Hi, as the original-thought-haver here (and a buyer of DoubleClick's services on various projects 1998-2003), I should clarify -the problem with Google's acquisition of DoubleClick wasn't just about customer scale, or even market power, it was that DoubleClick was already the skeeziest player on the internet, screwing over customers, advertisers and platforms at every opportunity, and culturally antithetical to Google at the time. And there wasn't any way that "Don't Be Evil" was going to win in the long run.

Look how quaint this seems now: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/consumer-gro...