Akamai — how not to sell

I am, as you may know, starting a new venture (Malla: “the visual CMS”). Over the past week I have been starting many a ball a rolling. Picking a provider for web hosting, one for database hosting, and a CDN.

For CDN, my first choice was Akamai, this is why:

If you know anything about performance, the web, or the speed of light, you know that 26ms is a pretty bonkers response time.

I know what you’re thinking.

The only question is, how much money must I throw their way to get these response times for my site?

What follows is an email exchange where at times I wondered if David Thorne was on the other end.

My initial enquiry:

Hi, I am starting a new project and would like to use Akamai. I haven’t started yet so don’t know real numbers, but if I were to have 50,000 visitors per month and want four files, totalling about 1MB to be server for each visit, roughly how much would that cost?

Their response:

Hi David,

I am Archana from Akamai Technologies. I understand that you have an inquiry about Akamai solutions and I’ve been assigned as the Account Development Specialist, and will be acting as your point of contact at Akamai. As part of our initial outreach, I’d like to get some information on how you discovered Akamai –
- Online search (Google, Yahoo, etc.)
- At an event / conference (name of the event if applicable)
- Advertorial / advertisement
- Press release/ media article / interview
- Analyst report / event

I’d be happy to schedule a call to discuss your requirements in detail this week. Please let me know what time suits you best.

I look forward to working with you.

The robot understands that I have an inquiry. This is good. My response to that:

Human response please.

Thank you.

To which Akamai (I couldn’t tell if this one was a robot) replied:

Hi David,

Good day! I am Archana from Akamai, please let me know how can I help you with respect to your requirement?

That’s great Archana. How can he help with respect to my requirement? I’m glad you asked.

Hi, could you respond to my initial request?

To which Archana said:

Hi David,

Please let me know what was your initial request?

I snorted and showed the email to a colleague when I got this. This is email number 6. The overall objective, remember, is for me to give them my money.

As an interlude, at the same time I’m also sussing out pricing for hosting my site (a different thing to what Akamai do). This is how you can tell how much Heroku will cost you. A table, with options, with prices. Brilliant!

Heroku now have my money.

Back to my response to Akamai:

Hi,

I typed out quite a long and detailed request into your web form.

Are you telling me that you can’t see the message that I typed?

Akamai:

Hi David,

This is very initial stage to discuss on pricing. All Akamai solutions will be customized based on your requirement and the pricing will be done based on required solutions.

In order to understand your requirement better. Could I send few scoping questions to understand your requirement better and connect you with the sales team?

Oh I see, it’s too soon in our relationship to be discussing pricing. Let’s save that for when we consummate the relationship with the first invoice.

His idea that I send a few scoping questions is a stroke of genius. Luckily I had completed that task in the past.

Archana, I filled in a web form asking a detailed question about pricing. I gave all the details you need to quote me. Can you or can you not see the question that I asked?

Archana felt that what was lacking in our relationship was a bit of structure. He decided that what we needed were some clear guidelines. My favourite from their list of demands below is: “Full Name & Physical address of the company signing the contract (Please indicate the country from where the contract will be signed from)”

A little presumptuous, don’t you think? That’s on par with “what would you like for breakfast?” as a pick-up line.

Hi David,

I spoke to my team internally, we need more details to understand your requirement better. I am from pre sales team and not authorized to give out pricing details.

As discussed, we’d need more information about your setup in order to scope the requirement better. In that effort, can you please share the below information. Feel free to send along any additional information you think could be helpful to scope your requirements.

Website URL(s) that have to be integrated onto Akamai:
What are the current pain points (Latency, Availability etc)?
Are you looking at accelerating Dynamic/Personalized content?
Are you targeting a specific region, or is the audience located globally?
How many page views are you expecting every month?
How much bandwidth do you consume on your website per month? (Traffic in GB or TB)?
Is this a B2C Website? Are you facing any latency/downtime issues with your website currently?
Hosting provider and location of the server
How many data centers do you have and where are they located?
· Full Name & Physical address of the company signing the contract (Please indicate the country from where the contract will be signed from)

· Time Frame within which you are looking to implement Akamai solutions?

· Have you allocated a budget for this CDN requirement?

· Your responsibility at your organization?

· Would you be the final decision maker?

· What would be the end user devices that you are delivering content to?

Once I get these details from you, I will pass this information to the sales team and ensure someone gets in touch with you to discuss this further

Thank you for understanding

Another interlude: by this point I’m looking at pricing for cloud-hosted databases (again, not related to Akamai). Here’s how Firebase inform you how much their product is likely to cost you. A table, with options, with prices.

Firebase now have my money.

Back to the correspondence. My reply to Akamai:

I have sent through all the details I have. If your salespeople would like to potentially make a sale, please ask them to contact me with an estimate of how much Akamai will cost, based on the details that I have provided. If they are unable to do this then I guess we won’t be doing business.

We’re negotiating now. Archana sent back a reduced list of demands:

Hi David,

I completely understand about not giving more details but we have different teams working for different verticals and solutions. Hence I would require

1. Under which Vertical or industry (e-commerce, media, business services, High tech) it falls under

2. Reason you are evaluating CDN solutions

3. The target country

4. Bandwidth

I am once more put at easy by his assertions that he completely understands.

You gotta wonder though, if having different teams for different verticals means that this is your sales process, isn’t something wrong?

But why am I dwelling on this? Why am I persevering? I guess I’ve known for some time that this relationship is over, I’ve just been going through the motions. I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet…

I understand, you are unable to give me an estimate of how much Akamai will cost despite me telling you my expected traffic/bandwidth.

If your competitors are also incapable of giving estimates then I will come back to you in the second round.

Thank you for your time.

I am small fish, I get that, and they want the whales I suppose. So I will do the only two things I can do: vote with my feet and complain on the internet.