This is very true and funny. I’d make a few points though:
1) It may turn out that a lot of this is necessary in order to sell B2B and keep half of the software industry going. The business on the sell side might need to reach out multiple times, engage a sales engineer, help you align all the decision makers etc otherwise it simply wouldn’t get done. Buyers are so busy and selling to a big company is so complex that some of this is just a necessary evil for B2B commerce to continue.
2) Imagine if companies were actually better at buying. They spend $millions on enterprise bloatware when startups can literally produce something 10x better at a 10th of the cost. If they were easier to sell to then we could all have nice things without this madness.
I agree that the OPs experience is soul destroying, but clients could help themselves a little and end up with more money in their pockets and better tech.
Having had the misfortune of navigating a particularly ineffective large corporate purchasing machine, this resonates.
Nobody in the chain is interested in outcomes, they’re interested in completed process.
The value of something to the business is totally uninteresting to a purchasing person. They care about contractual arrangements, compliance with all sorts of poorly thought out ethics agreements, and making sure that all the process has been followed.
The result is far more money spent for far less outcome than if we’d just got a credit card and bought something. There’s a whole ecosystem of companies which are terrible at actually solving problems, but know exactly how to meet all the requirements of a large corporate purchasing department.
I once had a small discussion with senior leadership that it was easier for me to spend $100k worth of engineering time on a project than to purchase a $1000 license.
1) It may turn out that a lot of this is necessary in order to sell B2B and keep half of the software industry going. The business on the sell side might need to reach out multiple times, engage a sales engineer, help you align all the decision makers etc otherwise it simply wouldn’t get done. Buyers are so busy and selling to a big company is so complex that some of this is just a necessary evil for B2B commerce to continue.
2) Imagine if companies were actually better at buying. They spend $millions on enterprise bloatware when startups can literally produce something 10x better at a 10th of the cost. If they were easier to sell to then we could all have nice things without this madness.
I agree that the OPs experience is soul destroying, but clients could help themselves a little and end up with more money in their pockets and better tech.