> There's also the other side of the fence though: customers who are just a resource drain.
Sweet Jesus, this. At one of my older software support jobs, we had a Law of Inverse Size-to-Attention: the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with), while the Mom-and-Pop shops that paid for the bare minimum licensing and support were the ones that called us every day and repeatedly refused to RTFM. Some would balk at the idea of paying anything at all, as though we should be so honored that Bob's Shack in Bumf*ck, ID decided to use our software that we should wave all associated costs.
> the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with)
These are all related.
Customers who are successful businesses tend to have money, and competent employees who solve many of the problems themselves. Customers who are not successful tend not to have money and less competent employees.
This is why so many people recommend startups and contractors to raise their prices - not only do you get paid more, but also you filter out less competent customers.
Yes, when you start dealing with companies who make too much to concern themselves with quibbling over a couple of million, your $75,000 bill isn't even worth a second thought.
But then you are leaving a lot of money on the table. My work built a business by selling specifically to the bottom since the market for selling to the big players was so saturated.
As a result our sales and customer support departments are massive compared to our engineering arm but we're doing pretty well for ourselves.
Sweet Jesus, this. At one of my older software support jobs, we had a Law of Inverse Size-to-Attention: the guys with hundreds of employees who paid us hundreds of thousands of dollars in support rarely called us (or if they did, they had actually competent IT staff we could work with), while the Mom-and-Pop shops that paid for the bare minimum licensing and support were the ones that called us every day and repeatedly refused to RTFM. Some would balk at the idea of paying anything at all, as though we should be so honored that Bob's Shack in Bumf*ck, ID decided to use our software that we should wave all associated costs.