May 16, 2008 
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My Top 3 |
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I saw the following chart this morning from MarketingSherpa, which backs up a position I’ve held for a long time when it comes to pricing. There is a belief out that if you release your pricing, it could scare off a prospect, be matched, bettered, or negotiated down. Thus marketers would rather force the prospect to reach out to the company before disclosing their prices. Being open about pricing can be an asset.
According to the research by MarketingSherpa, 89% of decision makers were able to recall a purchase when open pricing had a specific impact on the progress of the purchase. While it is true that the more consideration and cost that a product requires, the less likely it is that having open pricing will be enough to shortlist a vendor; there is a limit to the number of companies a prospect is going to contact just to get basic pricing so you run the risk of not being contacted due to sales fatigue. Another point to consider is in cases where companies require a rapid turnaround, open pricing can make the sale before you even “meet” the prospect.
Consider this anecdote from a post-survey interview from this research: a growing software company realized the need to upgrade their physical printing of manuals to include full color. They went looking for a printer who could meet their volume and time constraints.
In the words of the Marketing Director: “First of all, every website looked the same, so I couldn’t tell who was big and who was small – they all looked small from their sites. Bad design, no functionality. I tried calling a few to get quotes, sent a few emails and didn’t hear back from some and heard back later in the week from others. It blew my mind – I was looking to give the first decent candidate 25,000 full color books to print in two weeks. Finally, I found a site that had a pricing calculator that got me started, and it turned out that the final price was 5% lower after we haggled a bit. That JavaScript calculator made them a lot of money.”
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