Have you ever heard this from a B2B Sales or Marketing Manager?
Never, ever, ever give the customer pricing until you've CREATED VALUE!
I have and it's wrong.
What if I told you I can prove it?
We'll get to the proof in a minute but let's examine the myth first. I began my IT sales career in the early 90s and we were involved in the "complex" sales process I keep hearing so much about. At that time, marketing did things like trade shows and advertising to generate inbound interest for our products. We as sales people attended those events, gathered leads (pocketed the good ones), and did our share of outbound calling. The message to customers was tightly controlled by both marketing and sales to the point that the customer depended on us for information. The world was in order.
The internet changed all that.
Starting in the late 90s the tempo of information exchange increased. As a busy sales person, I was happy to inform my customer that he could "just go to our website" for that brochure on the new product, I didn't have to mail him one. Wonderful. "You need product specifications?", I asked. "It's on our website!"
Little did we know we were conditioning our customers to bypass us and we were giving all the power to marketing; they owned the website. Our competitor's marketing groups were also busy on their websites adding more and more sales information. The more the customer ignored marketing, the more marketing published. It became a vicious circle of trying to use an ever increasing amount of content to engage an increasingly indifferent pool of potential customers.
By 2005 it got to the point that there was almost no reason to directly contact any sales person to find product information. Just Google it.
The issue was no longer about a customer finding product or solution information, but rather deciding which solutions they would research themselves. They were empowered with self-service information and had the ability to be selective. When business customers are looking at potential solutions early in the sales cycle they are considering a variety of criteria including features and benefits, but one in particular leads the pack - budget fit.
Budget fit? Yes, Budget fit.
Ask yourself this: Would you spend an hour listening to a sales presentation for something you know you couldn't afford? Probably not. So why do you expect a customer to sign up for an online webinar, or worse, download your "Free Trial" if they don't understand what it will cost them if the decide they DO want it?
Budget fit helps the prospect understand the nature of your offer so they can determine if they want to invest the time to research it.
So back to my original statement about violating the cardinal sales rule of "Never give pricing until you've established value". In most B2B cases today you will not have the opportunity to present your value proposition until your potential customer understands the budget implications, i.e. rough cost, of your solution. The ironic part of this story is that your customer will use Google to find your pricing somewhere and in many cases will get the wrong information. Good luck winning that deal if you even find out about it.
If you want to prove this to yourself try this. Ask your marketing department to create a special landing page called "Pricing" on your corporate website. Model it after your standard Contact Us page so visitors will not be upset if they really can't get pricing. Put a direct link to it at the top of every page. Ensure that you have the ability to measure the number of times website visitors click on that page. Compare the page count for the Pricing page against the Contact Us page and if you are getting more than a 2 to 1 ratio then you are missing a lot of sales opportunities.
If you want live proof from us just check out this Results page.
Link to original post