Discount seeking prospects and vampire customers

At Spreedly we have 3 types of prospects. The vast majority never question our prices. They decide whether the value outweighs the cost and sign up. The second group emails and asks about a discount and when told no they fall into the first group. There is a third group though that is more problematic. When told no they come back and again ask for a discount (perhaps more than once) with little more than a slight rephrasing of their original argument for why they believe they should receive a discount.

In the beginning I thought of the 3rd group as a subset of the 2nd group with a little more persistence. Over time though I’ve come to recognize that this is a distinct group of customer with it’s own unique set of challenges. At Spreedly at least there is a very high correlation between the discount seeking prospect and the vampire customer. (Vampire customer’s consume a disproportionate amount of your company’s resources; support, development and management)

Discount seeking prospects become vampire customers in 3 major ways:

1. They're cheap: Just as they tried to drive your price down they take that same approach to all aspects of their business. Spreedly is an API service thus requiring a developer to do the integration. DSP’s often use the cheapest developers — either on a project/quote basis or on staff. What that inadvertently does is shift the implementation work from their side to your side of the fence. DSP developers are the most likely to show up in your support channel with very little understanding of what your service does and wanting answers to questions at every stage of the implementation.
2. They're entitled: That same sense of entitlement that drove their discount request shows up in their expectations around what your service should do and how your support should be. They're the most likely to expect that your service support every single nuance of their use case and demand changes if it doesn’t. They have little respect for the fact you're trying to scale your service and stay focused on your core value proposition or that they're on your cheapest plan. They just need the “fix” implemented immediately as you're holding up their go live.
3. You'll never delight them: Perhaps denying their discount request up front set the tone but either way you'll never delight this customer. Any change over time (say to your API or the way your service works or if they need to upgrade to a new plan based on their growth) will kick off a new round of complaints. Their overall negativity will weigh on your support group who realizes they “can't win” with this customer.

In short they're not worth having as customers. However I will also acknowledge we haven't found a good way of handling the issue now that we've identified it. In some cases we've been successful in steering them away during pre-sales by emphasizing the lack of technical fit and our concern that they'll sign up and pay good money only to be disappointed. However if an obvious opportunity like that doesn't present itself then we're kind of stuck. For now we’ve recognized the problem and will continue to explore what we can do to solve for it.