

Please Stop Quoting Your Product's Price - joabla
http://joabla.com/2011/07/21/please-stop-quoting-your-products-price/

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roel_v
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.

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

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PaulHoule
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.

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thyrsus
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!".

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bitdiffusion
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.

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dauwk
@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.

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forgotAgain
_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.

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Angostura
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.

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byrneseyeview
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.

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inthewoods
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.

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joabla
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.

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ehutch79
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'?

