I’ve gotten some comments and discussions on last month’s post ‘Use it’ says ‘Price it’ regarding putting pricing on B2B websites. Thank you to those who have been involved. I’d like to study this subject in depth, so I’m going to start a series of posts.
Why put pricing on your website? How about a recent Dilbert cartoon to explain:
The cartoon is funnier because of how true it is. I’ve been chewed out by purchasing agents for sending pricing quotes to engineers: “All pricing goes through me!” Or had new prospects saying that our quoted system is “more than we put in the budget.” And of course if you’re just doing a budget fire-drill, who wants to call a salesperson for pricing and be subjected to a barrage of follow-up calls.
So if Dilbert were able to go to the vendors website, and it had pricing (or pricing guidelines), he might have a chance to work under his pointy-haired boss’s rules. And if the project moves forward, the vendor would have a good chance of being the selected vendor.
And that’s what we want to consider: Knowing that the customer and the vendor would benefit from pricing information being available online, how can we make it happen?
We’ll look at the reasons why not in Part 2.