Sherpa chimes in on online pricing

Posted on December 17, 2007 by Dave J.

I spent a significant amount of time last winter discussing the issues of published pricing on your website (1, 2, 3, 4 and more). Now Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa chimes in on the subject: Should You Reveal Pricing Online? Overcoming Fear & Loathing.

She sums up in a few paragraphs the challenge with pricing on your website from the perspective of marketing and avoiding the issues of ‘why not’, while acknowledging that they exist. To the discussion, she brings this thought worth thinking about:

“Your prospects will find pricing information even without your help. They’ll ask friends at other companies, post queries to industry email discussion groups and boards, ping analysts or surf the Web researching.

The only problem is, you’ve now lost control of your pricing messaging. You can’t surround the conversation with value and branding. You can’t be sure that the correct information is even getting to prospects.

And they’re making those decisions before they agree (or not) to meet with your sales reps. Because pricing information is now sought much higher up in the sales funnel than most marketers suspect.”

Wow, she’s probably right. If you want to know the price, you are more likely to ask a friend than an supplier first. And she specifically calls out research that says this is true for 50K+ technology/software buys. While to us as vendors, it seems fool-hardy to go with hearsay pricing, that is exactly what she says prospects are doing.

That explains the people who finally call looking to buy with a fixed budget that is half what they actually need. One more reason why pricing info is so important as early in the game as possible. How can you get that info to the prospects?

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  • SelfServicePricing

    Dave,First, full disclosure – I am the CEO of EchoQuote.Second, I talked with Anne Holland and Stefan Tourquist (MarketingSherpa’s Research Director) during their Demand Generation Summit in Boston about this very subject; self-service pricing.Subsequently, Sean Donahue (Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa) did a case study on an enterprise class client of ours, Thunderstone Software. Thunderstone is a search product company (both software and hardware) that is a pure B2B model; high-value, high relative cost products. You can find the case study “How Self-Service Price Quote Converts 48% of Prospects Into Qualified Leads”. on Sherpa’s website at https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=30196 (must be a member to read full article).To summarize the study it is possible to capture qualified prospects using the PROMISE of self-service pricing (not publishing directly) as a very strong call to action. Think of it as another option in the Whitepaper/Webinar series; however, what we have found is that many end-users want to know if they can afford something before they spend the time on Whitepapers and/or Webinars. End users that continue to pursue the technology after getting a budgetary price tend to be very well qualified and that is the main reason Thunderstone is converting 48% of the prospects into qualified leads.The biggest obstacle we are finding is that most marketing groups do not have the budget or infrastructure needed to properly execute a self-service pricing program in-house.Dale UnderwoodEchoQuote

  • SelfServicePricing

    Dave,First, full disclosure – I am the CEO of EchoQuote.Second, I talked with Anne Holland and Stefan Tourquist (MarketingSherpa’s Research Director) during their Demand Generation Summit in Boston about this very subject; self-service pricing.Subsequently, Sean Donahue (Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa) did a case study on an enterprise class client of ours, Thunderstone Software. Thunderstone is a search product company (both software and hardware) that is a pure B2B model; high-value, high relative cost products. You can find the case study “How Self-Service Price Quote Converts 48% of Prospects Into Qualified Leads”. on Sherpa’s website at https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=30196 (must be a member to read full article).To summarize the study it is possible to capture qualified prospects using the PROMISE of self-service pricing (not publishing directly) as a very strong call to action. Think of it as another option in the Whitepaper/Webinar series; however, what we have found is that many end-users want to know if they can afford something before they spend the time on Whitepapers and/or Webinars. End users that continue to pursue the technology after getting a budgetary price tend to be very well qualified and that is the main reason Thunderstone is converting 48% of the prospects into qualified leads.The biggest obstacle we are finding is that most marketing groups do not have the budget or infrastructure needed to properly execute a self-service pricing program in-house.Dale UnderwoodEchoQuote