Also, companies with diverse distributor channels would also be challenged with this approach.

Both of those are not B2B scenarios as much as what I call B3B (cube) scenarios and require a different strategy.

But, for a B2B company that only sell in one county (and may be Canada you are right! Show the price and sell/compete on other factors.

Issue 1) The vendor can’t identify the visitor (it may be a competitor and we don’t want them to get our pricing) – This falls into the “perceived issue” category because your competitor already has your basic pricing. If you have a GSA Schedule with the Federal Government then your GSA pricing is already publicly displayed on GSAAdvantage.

Issue 2) Different customers get different pricing levels. This is a legitimate issue especially with a vendor that sells its products through indirect sales channels. A single SKU (item) may have 20 different prices. Examples: Basic LIST price, Government GSA price, Educational price, Non-profit price, Registered VAR, Un-registered VAR, etc. There may be special Large integrator contracts with the likes of Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, EDS, etc…all have special pricing.

The way Echoquote solves this problem is that it delivers its quotes via email using a minimum amount of additional information (name, phone, company, that’s it). Using the email address helps identify the visitor but you still get the visitors that want to remain anonymous using hotmail, yahoo or gmail accounts. That’s fine, it just takes a minute or two more to have the vendor’s reps approve those. It’s not a problem.

The fact that you can create new pricing levels for new large customers on the fly gives us the appearance of being much larger than we really are…not a bad thing.

Issue 3) Displaying pricing would allow the visitor to avoid the sales team. If price were the last thing the visitor needed then this is true. However, the answer is deeper than that. For an existing customer that already knows everything they need to know about the solution then price should be accessible. For visitors in the research phase of a project they may not fully understand the benefits of the offer/product and could draw an incorrect conclusion about the price.

What we do at Federal Appliance is go ahead and approve List price regardless so the system will send them their quote with no hassle. We then follow-up 10 minutes later just to make sure there spam filter didn’t trap the quote and simply ask if they have “already put together” requirements for their project. If they have, fine, let us know if you need anything else. 99% of the time they are researching and we point them to our library that has some planning documents. That’s it. No pressure. No “are you ready to buy BS”.

Issue 4) Complex product sets are difficult to configure. This is a real problem because to get an idea of what a “solution” costs may involve multiple components. Once again, we solve this using Echoquote’s kit feature. It is a simple way to have a visitor request the “X250 package”. The visitor is shown all the items in the package with advice that explains whether each one is Required, Recommended or Optional. The visitor makes the decision to include each item. It gently leads the visitor down the right path.

Issue 5) The website is generally owned by marketing which has limited IT staff. The IT staff of most vendors is concentrated on the product itself, not the website. To solve all of these issues would take some concentrated development time so that is why we outsource it.

There are probably more issues but these were the big ones we set out to solve.

I am not here to pitch what we do but if you want to simply see how our self-service pricing works feel free to visit us and request a quote. Since most visitors understand what they want when them come you should request a “Equal PS50″ Product Group and choose “Add All”. Notice that you are running on Echoquote’s portal once you click on Self-Service Pricing.

Please use the following link so we will know that you are just testing it.

http://www.federalappliance.com/index.php?&source=grok

Dale

I have wondered if a “click for quote” button in place of a price tag on the product page would increase lead generation/conversion.

Our B2B business model relies upon resellers who charge vastly different retail rates for our product, often bundling their own products and discounting ours heavily. Any mention of pricing on our website immediately draws harsh criticism from our resellers along with threats to discontinue doing business for fear that our company is attempting to “go direct” to the end user, thus making us competition against our resellers. It might be possible to get around this problem by posting wholesale “list” prices, but these prices are not competitive in the market. My guess is that this would immediately disqualify more customers than we would lose otherwise. However, testing is also difficult due to the same concern about backlash.

Currently we have a contact form/800 number and a link to our reseller list, but no pricing.

How have others solved this problem?

This is an interesting point. For B2C, we often tell clients to make price visible in clear way on both product & category pages (which tend to be overlooked by some etailers who just want to funnel visitors to product pages with too little info).

In terms of B2B, Melissa’s point is just that it shouldn’t be a secret. And, particularly with higher degrees of sales complexity–e.g., professional services like ours–it’s important to demonstrate value before just showing the price.

It makes sense that a large price tag (or at least one that’s perceived as being high) could hurt conversions for a B2B site if it hasn’t properly explained the “why we’re worth it” factor. Although it may be, I’m not suggesting this is the case with your client, just that there are so many elements that go into creating a persuasive B2B site that you should be wary of not showing price just because it doesn’t seem to convert as well. On the contrary; it might suggest that not enough is being done to communicate value. So, testing whether the price is bolded or not is one thing, but what’s more important is the context, the placement of the price–and, most of all–how the experience has been planned.

Does anyone want to click a ‘Buy Now’ button next to copy that says “Only $45,000!” Not likely… But removing the mystery behind price, and not forcing people to fill out ridiculous forms can definitely increase conversion big-time for lead-generation sites.

Focusing on conversion alone can be misleading. This post should be helpful.

That’s why.

We’re a B2B that does it. For instance, we give ballpark ranges for different service levels (see Persuasion Architecture™ for “a serious 6-figure investment”). But we’re able to get even more specific with low-to-mid five-figure website assessments like the Persuasive Scenario Analysis.

Not trying to hype Future Now explicitly; just saying we’re not afraid to take our own medicine.

When I was on the business development team here, a few people commented that we were “crazy” for putting our prices on the website. Without exception, those same people became clients. Could be a coincidence, but I think they appreciate the honesty–and it shows the ROI threshold we’re looking (way) beyond for them.

-Robert

It seems like there are a lot of different approaches to this issue, but we always seem to land on, “What is the role of the website?” Get the user enough well-organized information that they need to feel comfortable with the organization and the service, and get them in touch with a salesperson. Price is obviously at the top of the list in most cases, but business are often times scared to give that info out to the public so we have to do our best to create conversions in spite of it.

I would be really interested to see a study done with somewhat high-ticket B2B items ($100,000+) that quantifies the increase in leads that occurs from just listing the price on the website!