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At least they HAVE pricing pages. Quickest way to lose a potential sale (and all future potential sales and references) is to not provide pricing information b

• pccampbell 13y ago
  Wow. COMPLETELY agree. Transparency is key in optimizing your sales funnel. Check this post out where we talk about it a bit, as well: http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-Secret-Pricing-Strategy-is-Overrated http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-...
  • tieTYT 13y ago
    I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think patio11 would say that if you care about this, you can't afford him/it anyway. I'm just playing the devil's advocate.
    • pccampbell 13y ago
      Yea. Keep in mind that patio11 is playing in more of the enterprise software space with consulting. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ has pricing loud and proud. A LOT of SaaS companies think they're the former when in reality they're the latter.
    • patio11 13y ago
      So I guess I have to comment on this now. I was once in the "hidden prices are for silly businesses" camp. I've matured in my understanding of this over the years. You'll note that I sell many things, some of which have sticker prices which you can see on the Internet and some of which are priced by "I pick a number from the set of the reals and if you don't like it then let's talk a bit." If our businesses can reach a mutual understanding of what is being bought and sold without two people talking to each other, sure, let's go with a sticker price. I mean that both in terms of "what it physically is" and "what it is going to do for your business." That's a product. Maybe the offering won't exactly work for your needs or capture all of the available upside, but the great part about taking the expensive Human Attention component out of the loop is that it will be very attractively priced. You'll note that at the moment I have products (for very different people) selling from everywhere from $9.99 to $2,497 to "$200 a month". There are some situations, though, where low-touch or medium-touch sales is not quite enough to reach a meeting of the minds between both parties on what they want to get out of the deal. Then we get to high-touch sales. Many intuitions from low-touch sales go out the window then. I used to do consulting. At the end of my career $30k was a pretty typical week rate for me. The last proposal I ever wrote had 7 figures attached to it. You can reasonably guess that it was not simply "50 weeks at $20k each" for somebody who looked like my typical clients with me doing my typical thing. You can also reasonably guess that "This proposal represents approximately 2X the lifetime billings of my company" would not have been to my advantage if I had stickered it on the website prior to entering the negotiations. (Don't probe for details on this anecdote, please, as it is brought to you by the letters N, D, and A and the number $LOTS.) Back before I quit consulting, I was publicly available for it but publicly coy about what it would cost. If j.random@example.com wrote me "Hey Patrick, We want to hire you, what would that cost?" I'd get in touch with them and feel them out a bit about what they do and how they were envisioning working together. Occasionally that would mean that I was talking to somebody who couldn't possibly pay any rate I'd consider working at. Sometimes they'd say, after talking for 15 minutes or an hour, "Whoa, you could have saved me some time if you had just quoted that at me. I'll never pay it." Being told this a dozen or a hundred times is worth preserving the option value of being in the solution set for the Fortune 500 or allowing my rates to move faster than common intuition says is reasonable as my demonstrable achievements and changing client base began to allow it. Also, published pricing versus private pricing is not a value judgment about people who can't afford (or otherwise won't purchase) the thingies on offer. "Moving from private pricing to published pricing will make us more money" is a testable proposition. It is, for some offerings, testably false. Some people passionately believe that it is true in a way which confounds refutation by numbers. Oh well. At least some people believe that about many things. In general, numbers still win.
      • tieTYT 13y ago
        Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I appreciate it. I hope you don't mind my original comment. > Being told this a dozen or a hundred times is worth preserving the option value of being in the solution set for the Fortune 500 or allowing my rates to move faster than common intuition says is reasonable as my demonstrable achievements and changing client base began to allow it. I didn't understand this sentence. Could someone explain what this means to me?
        • salemh 13y ago
          I believe: "Whoa, you could have saved me some time if you had just quoted that at me. I'll never pay it." being an acceptable frequent response to be able to charge quite a large amount of money to larger clients (Fortune 500 Patrick mentions). Allowing him ALSO, to set his rates continually higher then one would expect (fast-growth of pricing, from 20k/week to six figures). So, it was "ok" to have a "wasted" conversation between parties who couldn't afford his rates, to be able to continually raise his rates for those that could afford it. While, not publishing this pricing, and creating his own ceiling.
        • patio11 13y ago
          Sorry, that sentence is terribly written. Let me try to express it in separate thoughts: Hidden pricing will inevitably create some circumstances where a lead and I spend a bit of time talking to each other despite that lead not being a great fit for my services. From my perspective, this is OK, because if I were to unhide my prices it would make it impossible for me to do things like pitch BigCo on a million dollar engagement, which is valuable to me. Unhiding prices would also limit my flexibility in changing them. Over the 2.5 year course of my consulting career they went from $100 an hour to $30k a week, often with discontinuous jumps between engagement N and engagement N+1. Clients who were prepared to pay the price I quoted N+1 might be less inclined to pay it if they were aware that, mere days earlier, I had been charging the rate I charged for engagement N for what might, to that client, feel like "the same" thing.
        • lowkeykiwi 13y ago
          and that's why he was paid the $$BIGBUCKS
  • agibsonccc 13y ago
    I have to counterpoint this as well. It doesn't work for everyone. I'm paying the bills by myself by appealing to the businesses that want SLAs, purchase orders, etc. Everyone usually wants something custom for them. Different scales of customers want different things. In a way I prefer the high touch model to an extent if only because of the fact I get to learn about the problems the business is solving. Bulk/cheap SaaS typically CAN (not always) cause more support costs for less margins (depending on how you're staffed). I think for the primary audience here the advice is very applicable though.
• toomuchtodo 13y ago
  I'm in violent agreement with this. If I have to call you to get a price, I've already moved on.
  • at-fates-hands 13y ago
    I'm the same way. Why even have a website if after looking at the site for twenty minutes to get some idea, even a ballpark of pricing, you're going to try and push me to call/email someone to get a price quote?? Nothing gets me more annoyed than companies and their sites that do this. It's completely the opposite reason for having a website in the first place. DUH
    • brandnewlow 13y ago
      They do this because they are signalling that they're not interested in your business. They are interested in the business of companies that can afford to pay someone to go through the dance of reaching out and setting up a call to learn about pricing.
    • pccampbell 13y ago
      Haha. Good way to put it. Feel the same way. We talked more about it here: "Why Your Secret Pricing Strategy is Overrated" - http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-Secret-Pricing-Strategy-is-Overrated http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-...
  • reinhardt 13y ago
    It works backwards too: If having to call me to get a price makes you move on, you wouldn't afford me anyway.
    • deleted 13y ago
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      • tdawson 13y ago
        And the point is to appeal to multiple customer segments. You can always offer custom plans over the phone and advertise that option alongside the more affordable plans you display on your page.
• deleted 13y ago
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• zaidf 13y ago
  Quickest way to lose a sale is to provide pricing to non-expert buyers who are not likely to understand key parts of your product just from reading about it on the site. We have customers who are used to paying $5 bucks/mo for a shitty website; it takes some convincing for us to get them to pay us 10-20x more(for a much better product). If we simply put up the pricing on the site, we'd scare them away and never even get to speak with them.
  • pccampbell 13y ago
    Agreed that some products (a lot in enterprise software or consulting) require a more buttoned up pricing strategy, but if you serve the mid-market at all you should at least provide them some sort of signpost. "Here's what a project sort of looks and here's where the price starts" With good design you can make it happen. You'll actually help the sales process 10x, because you'll get rid of the tire kickers and people who are just sort of interested.
  • thrush 13y ago
    This seems to be a softspoken opinion on this thread, but I definitely agree. Would love to see data on different products and the results of their pricing strategy. I think the major differentiator is SaaS that is sold in bulk (the entire company will start using the service after the buying decision is made) versus single license from a user that is making a buying decision only for themselves. The data could help to show how SaaS relates to a long tail distribution, where the tail is made up of the sort of single license purchases I mentioned. Also, what the article doesn't talk about is Free Trial options. This might not really be related to pricing pages in general, but are definitely important to how buying decisions are made.
  • notahacker 13y ago
    This. And even when you're the only game in town, a ten minute conversation can do a much better job of helping the genuine prospect choose the $700/month plan over the $250/month plan than a couple of bullet points on a feature list. And a clients that wouldn't quibble at a quote of $2000/month for the version that does everything they think they need are a lot more likely to do so when a brightly coloured matrix points out they could get away with paying $200 if they didn't want the Excel export... Frankly, if customers are choosing their plan from a price/feature list rather than receiving a quote based on an assessment of the level of service they need to maximise their returns on using your product, the service isn't really priced on the basis of value.
• jasonkester 13y ago
  As a buyer, I feel the same way. The business guy in the back of my head wonders how much business is really being lost by those companies. Imagine the answer was always >$50k/year. Would said company ever have anybody click the "add to cart" button after browsing a website for a while? It could be that the missing price is just a signal that this is not that sort of business and if you're looking for something that doesn't require sales people, contracts and purchase orders, you're probably better off just looking elsewhere. I suppose they could say that directly on the site, but even that might turn out to not be such a good idea. Unless you test these sorts of things, you never really know.
• nostromo 13y ago
  Either everyone that does this is an idiot (unlikely) or it actually works for their markets and increases their bottom line (likely). I once worked for a fairly big (500m-1b market cap) company that worked this way. Pricing was customized for every client. They, like many companies, made a ton of money doing this. One down side, however, was that this business model can trap you. Once you've sold customers at lots of different price points, you can never go back and publish pricing, since those customers that are overpaying will be upset. You could set your prices high, but that would turn off many new customers who need a lower price point. So, while you can make a lot of money doing this, give it some thought before committing to it. This is why Google Adwords is so genius. It's both dynamic (charging more for bigger pockets) and it scales, which is hard balance to strike.
  • pccampbell 13y ago
    Agreed. It's a bit of a tradeoff. Definitely companies that need to hold prices in, but I'd venture that a lot of mid market companies that are opaque about their pricing should actually be more transparent. Good rule of thumb - more custom product or custom customer, then more customer/opaque pricing. You can still do much better than a "contact us for pricing" page though.
  • ceejayoz 13y ago
    > Once you've sold customers at lots of different price points, you can never go back and publish pricing, since those customers that are overpaying will be upset. That seems easily solvable by giving those customers a discount to the price you want to set across the board (which is likely to make them happy), waiting a few months, and then implementing the pricing changes.
    • eli 13y ago
      Sure, but that means you lose the revenue from being able to charge them more (obviously) and it also means the customer still knows that you weren't giving them your best price all along.
  • danielweber 13y ago
• nicholas73 13y ago
  I've got a story to one-up this one. At one company I worked for, I was actually told by marketing that the product datasheets were knowingly poor, so customers would have to call in to ask questions. Then they would try to upsell them.
  • pccampbell 13y ago
    Sounds like a great customer experience (sarcasm intended). Coyness has it's place I suppose, especially when you're first starting out with your pricing or need to optimize for touch over scale. Hopefully they figured that out ASAP.
• run4_too 13y ago
  >I have to call/email/otherwise contact you when all I want is an estimate so I know if I'm looking at a trivial-dollars-a-year or a reorganize-the-entire-budget-to-pay-for-this product/service. "If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it." Seriously though, if you have to contact a salesperson, it's likely that the product is a "reorganize-the-entire-budget-to-pay-for-this product" type of service. Ergo, if that isn't appealing to you, you aren't the target market, and therefore a waste of time to them. This assumes a "smart" approach as nostromo mentions, of course. I'll add the caveat that I see several "idiot" approaches to this simply because the "talk to our sales rep" approach is the default in many industries, particularly B2B. You can often hear it expressed as "If we publish our prices, our competitors will know them too!". In my industry - insurance - I've seen 6 figure sales consultants involved in week long sales processes that make us $200 in revenue a year. That's not "smart" at all. There isn't a 'right' approach, but it depends entirely on the product being sold and the target market whose needs are being addressed.
  • tanzam75 13y ago
    > In my industry - insurance - I've seen 6 figure sales consultants involved in week long sales processes that make us $200 in revenue a year. That's not "smart" at all. And that's exactly how GEICO and Progressive were able to come out of nowhere to capture 18% of the automobile insurance market. By using direct sales, they can replace the insurance agent's 10% commission with hourly call-center employees in low-wage states. In fact, GEICO is now getting very close to knocking Allstate out of its perennial #2 position. Who would've thought, ten years ago? Private passenger automobile premiums written in 2012: 1. State Farm $32.10 billion 18.37% share 2. Allstate $17.48 billion 10.00% 3. GEICO $16.75 billion 9.58% 4. Progressive $14.44 billion 8.26% http://www.naic.org/documents/research_top_25_market_share_pc.pdf http://www.naic.org/documents/research_top_25_market_share_p...
• landryraccoon 13y ago
  Lets suppose you're selling a B2B analytics product where the minimum commitment is $5K/month for 6 months. Using this product to maximum value will require some training QA, CS and possibly dev staff in your organization. Is there any chance that a customer would purchase this product without calling the vendor in person and probably arranging several meetings between the vendor and key stakeholders in the customer's company? More to the point, would the customer even consider purchasing the product unless they expected to get a 10X ROI on the investment? I don't see how publishing the price is advantageous at all to the vendor (since they want to price discriminate) or a dealbreaker for the customer (since they will have to reorganize to use the product and expect to get a massive return anyway).