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.
This may work for some customers but on the flip side this is what I encounter:
- 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.
You weren't a waste of their time. You gave them the opportunity to have a worthwhile conversation with a potential customer. Ideally, if you were talking to a useful salescritter, you came away with a takeaway or two in addition to "Scratch them off the list."
It didn't pan out, but some percentage of leads not panning out is baked into the model.
I think the problem here is as much poorly-trained sales people than the practice of not disclosing pricing on the website. Smart sales people should be trained to recognize different types of buyers. From the sound of it, you are a buyer who knows exactly what he wants and just needs the price. Sales at our company would recognize this very early on and get you the info that you need minus the typical sales pitch. We specifically train our reps spot out buyers like you and handle them differently.
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.
When you buy a 60-750k product, your time is free. The same goes if you are selling a 60-750k product.
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.
The two examples you gave were about maximizing your returns by tricking your customers into buying things they don't need, not "maximis[ing] their returns on using your product" or "pric[ing] on the basis of value".
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.