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.
edit: typo
- I am given a fixed budget to implement something. (I work for the government so I spend millions of dollars a year, but budgeting is done once a year so I go into a project knowing I have $100k to spend.)
- Find that all the prospective vendors in a field are hidden pricing.
- I end up filling out the "contact us for pricing" forms on a dozen websites.
- I field calls from a dozen salespeople, who don't want to give even approximate pricing until they've done at least a demo and a second conference call.
- When I get to pricing 8 of those 12 are prima facia more than we can afford (see fixed budget above)
- I've just wasted 20-30 hours of my time and 2-3 hours of each vendors time learning about and examining products that I now know I can't afford. Plus there are always several salespeople that don't give up. (I've had salespeople continue to prospect me even after an RFP with published results and purchase from another vendor.)
I remember doing ID Management. We ended up doing Novell at about $60k. But I remember when we got to the pricing stage with another vendor and got a price on the order of $750k. That's 1/3 of the entire departmental budget including salaries and benefits. If I know some amount of pricing going in, I wouldn't have wasted their time.
For example, if a buyer sounds highly technical from the beginning(or if they use certain buzz words), the sales reps will transfer to me so I can have a more nuanced conversation.
It didn't pan out, but some percentage of leads not panning out is baked into the model.
This is called a Purchase funnel (or Sales Funnel)
We ended up doing Novell at about $60k. But I remember when we got to the pricing stage with another vendor and got a price on the order of $750k.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that pricing is fixed.
It's not. If the vendors have some idea of your budget they can tailor the offering to you a lot better.
It's the difference between buying a coffee, and buying a house. You wouldn't buy or sell a house without spending a bit of time on it.
And it's even better value for the vendors (and some customers), because their marginal costs are very low. They can offer a discount to some buyers, and give high prices to less cost sensitive ones.
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.
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.
The best inside sales ops do not allow this because when you do this at scale, you find out that customers will realize the true value of your product over time and if you significantly overcharged them at the time of signing up, you will lose trust, have trouble renewing and getting referrals. So grossly overcharging just because they are willing to pay is generally a poor business decision.
The fly-by-night operations are more likely to do what you are saying but fly-by-night ops aren't limited to sales-rep model.