To price publicly or not to price publicly that is the question

As a business owner for 5 years now I’ve realized that time if your most precious commodity.  You really need to give the consumer as much information about your services up front as you possibly can. Who wants to invest time in the sales process only to get the end and the clients budget is 1/3 of what you charge. If there is one thing that every buyer wants to know before they commit, it’s “What is this going to cost me?” and what do I get.

Why won’t you put your prices out there?

When I suggest placing price on a client’s site typically I get some version of these responses:

1) “It’s not done in our industry”

2) “What happens if my competition sees it?”

3) “All our pricing is custom, nothing is standard”

And then simply:

4) “We would never do that”

It takes some negotiation, to be

Why should you put your prices out there?

– sorts out the tire kickers a bit more. Include pricing in your meta descriptions, ads (paid and free)
– sets expectations around pricing before you ever talk – and since the money part is the hardest part of the relationship it allows your initial qualifying conversation to get a lot more focused on the relationship
– positions your agency brand – one of the key components of any brand positioning should be price. By getting yours out there sooner in the client journey, you help build your brand more
– forces you to get your sales and delivery processes really tight – if you don’t have some systemization of process for your deliverables, public pricing will definitely force you to get them tight. You can’t set a price expectation and then have to backtrack. Either you’ll end up eating up the scope creep or your client will get real frustrated. We work hard to set process and deliverables expectations up front so they understand exactly what’s included (and not included) so when the scope starts creeping there’s very little crying.

Here’s my logic: any buyer is trained to search for price as part of any purchase decision. They will continue to search until they find a price. And if it’s not on your site, you are not part of the price dialog. If there’s a price conversation going on anyway, don’t you want to be a part of it? It’s up to you to own the price conversation.

Not having price on your site cedes the opportunity to your competition — or worse, someone not even affiliated with your industry — to control this crucial aspect of the buying decision. In fact, in keeping with a true inbound strategy, you should even blog about price. Openly share results and what your service costs with the people who are looking for that information.

Conclusion:

Always view your competitions prices and reflect on yours. Always ask yourself, “Would this help my business? Does this reflect the integrity of my business? Does this put me at a competitive advantage? Would this cause me to become just a cheap alternative?”. That is why it is never actually a bad idea to show your prices to consumers or other businesses. It forms a bigger base line relationship with customer and business competitions alike.