Should I put pricing on my B2B website?
It seems almost daily that I have a conversation with technology marketers about whether or not they should publish pricing on their websites. I’m an opponent of publishing pricing for one simple reason; it will lose you website conversions.
Here’s why…
Say you are researching IT technology equipment and are familiar with the leading players like Western Digital (WDC), Scale Computing, etc. As you visit each vendor’s website you know there is much more information available in various forms than you could possibly review. So, to shorten your vendor list you decide to look for solutions that only fit in your budget.
So far, so good….
Most of the sites you visit have no way for you to easily request pricing without filling out some ridiculously long Contact Us form. You know that even if you do fill it out, you will either get a phone call or never hear from them. You move on.
Finally, you land on a site that surprises you. You search for “pricing” in their very own site search box and wham-o….you get to a hidden page that tells you the price for that particular system. You’ve just run across what I call a Lose-Lose for the vendor but a winner for the visitor. The visitor did not have to give up any information to get the pricing; good for them, but bad for the vendor marketing team and their B2B lead generation efforts.
This creates a Lose-Lose because if the end-user CAN afford the price they see then there is no reason to contact you. They have what they need to continue on their search. If they CANNOT afford the price, they may not realize that it is overbuilt for their purpose so they to will not contact your sales team.
The bottom line is that pricing is valuable to an early-stage end user, publishing it is like throwing marketing dollars down the drain.