Please Stop Quoting Your Product's Price | Hacker News Reader

Please Stop Quoting Your Product's Price

joabla.com

12 pointsjoabla13 comments

I'm not sure what kind of parallel universe this guy is living in. If somebody wouldn't quote me a price for something but would only say 'you'll make it back in 2 months!' (without making any guarantees or sharing any of the risk), I'd laugh him out of the room.

You know who uses this same tactic? Multi-level marketing and condo-sharing organizations. 'Don't worry about going 5 times your yearly salary into debt! You'll make it back, guaranteed! [^]'

[^] Some restrictions may apply. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Void where prohibited.

Agree 100%. You tell me what your service is and how much it costs. Leave the projections about my business to me.

One of the things I hate about B2B marketing is vendors that won't quote a price in public.

It's how I qualify vendors. No price on the web site, no call to a salesperson. Period, you lost the sale.

When I don't see a price where there should be a price, I call it "price too obscene for the internet" - though usually it's in the context of end user goods advertised with "Call now for special pricing!".

You might be surprised that a lot of those vendors you've been passing up, and which your competitors might be using to run their business, might actually have cheaper prices than the ones that post price on their site. (That said, even that thought is incorrect, as companies with posted prices are often still negotiable: the posted price is just the initial bid... the day you find out that Amazon AWS has a business sales division you can negotiate with is the day your mind explodes.)

Unless you are working on a profit-share type deal where you are going to do the work at a cut-rate price and share in the profits later, most clients in my experience want to know what something is going to cost as early as possible (even it it's just a guesstimate).

You can work as much as you like on a proposal and it can, on paper, be the greatest thing ever and promise to increase profits by whatever-percentage but if it's something that is going to be out of reach of the immediate budget of the client, then you're wasting your own (and their) time.

I have been involved in multi-million £ proposals and when it got to the end it turns out the client was expecting something for 50k. Would have been much easier to lay the cards on the table earlier in the process.

@bitdiffusion Thanks for the real world reply. The only decision maker able to just work on an ROI number is the CEO and even then I'm not sure. Budgets rule. And I have worked for both Fortune 3 and 3-person startups. ROI is important but more important is the cost of entry.

As a customer, it is of very limited use for me to know that your product’s price is 100K.

That's true in business school cases but few other places. Budgets matter whether they are 10K or 10KKK.

Please stop trying to obfuscate your product's pricing. I won't buy from you unless you give me clear pricing. If I can't work out for myself how much money it will save/make me, that's the fault of your supporting marketing materials.

This applies almost exclusively to B2B markets with high price points. Even then, the quoted price makes a big difference.

If I'm spending money, I care more about my cash outlay than about the optimistic estimates of someone who a) believes in their product, and b) doesn't know my business. But moreover, lots of products have no measurable ROI: it's a little amusing to imagine a grocery store using this kind of pricing.

I guess the best way to illustrate this is to note that I can get the author a 200% ROI by editing and perhaps rewriting this blog post. All he has to do is send me a blank check and I'll get started.

Agreed with all the posts here so far - I would only add that if you're selling to a larger organization, you'll likely go through some sort of vendor qualification by a centralized group - and it is unlikely that you'd ever get by without quoting a price.

The author also seems to forget that most companies have budgets for software - so you might be quoting a great ROI, but if the price is outside of my budget, it's a no-go.

An ROI analysis, at the end of the day, is a good add-on to a proposal in my opinion, but can't replace a pricing schedule.

I agree with previous comments. In fact, you can’t calculate an ROI without the product’s pricing schedule. A pricing schedule is always part of a proposal. My point is not just to quote a price – as the startup mentioned did. Always place it in the context of an ROI-calculation. Start pitching the ROI. Explain the outcome with your assumptions about additional revenue and your product’s price.

If you quote someone for a project, and never specify that you're going to want approximate $X, wouldn't that mean you're quoting 'free'?

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