Hidden charges

As I said in my blog last week, my wife and I had a trip planned to New Orleans for our anniversary. Our youngest daughter went with us so that she could interview with a company in New Orleans. As it turned out this trip gave me several ideas for blogs, so this is part II of the New Orleans trip.


I had a nice room reserved in an old house turned hotel. It was a nice place with one catch. The room I reserved only had one bed and they didn’t have any other rooms. As you can imagine, this presented a problem as no one was willing to sleep on the floor. So I made arrangements for a room for 3 people in another hotel that was an old warehouse turned into a hotel. This hotel was supposed to be a step up from the other hotel and of course the cost was doubled.

We arrived at the hotel to find that our room was on the second floor. We had to take an elevator to this floor and then walk down a flight of stairs. The room was nice but it had old wooden floors that made a lot of noise when you walked on them and they were extremely slick. The floors made so much noise that you could hear every step made by the people in the next room. It was so noisy that if anyone moved on one of the beds the floor noise would wake everyone in the room.

We overlooked these issues and had a great time but there was something else about the hotel that really annoyed me. The room had a costly amenities package that included breakfast and internet. This package wasn’t optional. In the other hotel these were included. As it turned out the breakfast was coffee and a cinnamon roll. One of the big features of the other hotel was the full breakfast and great service for this breakfast. The other charge, above and beyond, was parking for $30 per night which was included in the other hotel. Not to mention that this was valet parking so you have to tip the guy every time he goes to get the car for you.

All of this got me to thinking about how people price their CRM packages today. Most CRM companies have several levels of their product that start with a very low price without a lot of functionality. If you want more functionality you pay more. Many also charge for things like disk space and such. At Salesnet we made a conscious decision to provide the Salesnet product with all the functionality so that our customer would have no hidden charges. I wish our hotel had taken this approach. On my next trip to New Orleans we will stay at the hotel without the hidden charges. I hope that when you make your CRM choice you will choose the CRM product with no hidden charges “Salesnet”.

Until next week,

Good Selling