I think trust in your providers treating you well is required for low-touch SaaS sales for key infrastructure to work well. If you don't trust your counterparties, then you get long contract negotiations and minimum viable contract sizes balloon, as many potential buyers just won't be willing to be dependent on your company without assurances.
Exactly. Certain SAAS companies (cough Datadog cough) seem to have very old school sales processes in place. I don't love the larger cloud providers, but at least they lay out their standard prices, supply a price calculator, and I can figure out if I want to use them without hearing someone tell me they'll have to "clear it with their director".
I imagine anytime someone says the have to "clear it with their director", you're talking about discounted or private pricing not the list pricing they have on their website. Every SaaS company has that, including the cloud providers.
Well yes, one wouldn't be talking to them in the first place if it were on the website. For many companies though "Enterprise" plans are always non-website prices, so there's nothing special about negotiating them, and the salespeople pretty much always are just saying that stuff to have a chance to go away, recalculate their monthly commission chances and figure out the price to try with you rather than actually seeking permission.
