Here’s a little secret. The price of your product or service is probably already out there.
It’s a fact with which few in the business, and especially sales, world are not comfortable. For most of us, we set a price on our product or service that is indicative of the value we bring to the lives of those who will purchase it.
We can make their lives easier, better, more enjoyable, etc. And we put a price on our widget/service that matches that confidence.
But apprehension talks to us. It whispers in our ear.
“If you throw your price out there, you’ll lose business. You’ll scare people away who might become customers. Your leads will dry up.”
But leads don’t pay your bills, clients do. And the time you spent on unqualified leads could have been time spent taking care of existing customers, or nurturing qualified leads, or building content that draws in qualified leads.
People want to know price. And if you use a little bit of reason, your reason will tell you that people who want to know price are people who are thinking about spending money. So the people who Google “How much does X cost?” are somewhere towards the bottom of the sales funnel, or nearing a landing on your planet, or close to the end of the buying cycle.
Those are people you want to be in front of.
Like it or not, the price of your product or service is probably already out there. Stop right now, open another browser tab, do a search for “How much does [my stuff] cost?”, and look at the first ten results. You’ll probably be surprised. You’ll find one of two things.
- The price is already out there. We did some research for a client this week and found a disturbing forum thread related to their price question. People were upset about the price (not good leads anyway) and they were upset about how hard it was to get to a price when they talked with sales staff. Some of those were good leads who were turned off by the lack of transparency of the business. So why would you want to jump in when it’s already out there? Because you get to be in control of this portion of the conversation. You get to attach your sales pitch to the price, talk about why things are priced the way they are, what to look out for, etc. If that conversation is going on anyway, you need to be involved.
- Nobody in the industry is talking about price. Say hello to opportunity. So many businesses think alike that if you take a step out there and talk about this unmentionable, you can rake in a lot of business. We have a couple of pricing posts on our site and we have clients who talk about price and those posts often bring in more traffic than any others. We’re talking about drawing in search traffic and qualifying that traffic. Those are good things to do.
So HOW Do You Talk About Price?
There are several ways you can go about this. Find the one that’s right for you.
- Price Range – This is a great way to discuss cost because it educates the prospect on both the low end and high end of what they might spend. Check out How Much Does A Fiberglass Pool Cost? to see this done well. That’s on a pool installation business website and they get A TON of business from that one post alone. Notice how the price ranges are bolded and there is plenty of explanation. You don’t have to make a big sales pitch for your company, but feel free to highlight why the prospect should consider the options you offer. Also see our Website Development Costs: Small Business Shopping Guide. And here is How Much Does A Boat Cost?
- “Starting At” – This approach is good because it qualifies or disqualifies some leads, but lets you continue the conversation beyond the first hurdle. And you can combine it with the “Download Pricing” option below if you like.
- Full Pricing Chart – HubSpot gets a ton of leads because they have so much marketing material on the web drawing incredible amounts of traffic. That means they need to do a lot of weeding out to keep their sales team focused on the right leads. So putting the price out there makes a lot of sense. If you go to the pricing page, you notice something else that is interesting. A popup chat window opens and you have the option to converse with a representative. Great way to go.
- Download Pricing Behind Form – Full disclosure of pricing is valuable to the consumer. So you can put the pricing information behind a form. Once the visitor fills out the form, you have a little more information to know whether that is someone you’d like to follow up with to make sure they understand the pricing. And they can go on a drip email campaign that gives the prospect more information about the service they are interested in. We do this with One Week Website Pricing.
Make It Easy To Access
You’ll probably be referencing these pricing guides regularly, so make them EASY to get to. By that I mean make the URL very short. That way you can tell someone on the phone or in person to go to your-website-address/pricing or your-website-address/cost. The fiberglass pools post referenced earlier is at http://www.riverpoolsandspas.com/cost and HubSpot’s price sheet is at http://hubspot.com/pricing. That comes in handy for quick reference.
Feel Free To Mention The Competition
You can find creative ways to mention your competitors in your pricing post to pull in traffic based on branded searches. See the first paragraph of this post for an idea. Mentioning your competitors in text form can send google traffic to you based on “Competitor X Pricing” searches. You successfully just stole leads from your competitors who are too scared to talk pricing openly. Way to go!
Titling Your Post/Content
Without doing keyword research you can guess what people are going to type into Google and that’s what you want to title the page you build with some form of pricing on it. (We use proprietary keyword research tools to eliminate the guesswork.) Some of the searches you can be sure people are typing in . . .
- How Much Does X Cost?
- X Pricing
- X Pricing Guide
- How Much Is X?
- How Much Should I Pay For X?
- Price of X
- Prices for X
- Pricing of X
- What Does X Cost?
Name your post or page with one of those titles and Google will recognize that that is what the page is about.
Have you seen cost and price handled well lately? Let me know in the comments.
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