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Dave Gerhard
This episode is brought to you by Novatic. B2B websites are filled with too much story, too much narrative these days. We've gone the other direction. You visit a website and you have no idea what the product does and how it works. Just show me the product, right? You ever feel that this is why Novatic has become such a popular product among B2B marketers? They help you build interactive demos so you can give buyers a real look at the product before they ever talk to your sales team. And guess what they this approach works. They found that companies using interactive demos with Novatic have seen up to a 25% lift in website conversion rates and a 10 to 20% increase in inbound leads. They just released their 2025 State of the Interactive Product Demo Report, and it proves just how Much more control B2B buyers want over the buying process. Today, buyers have more access to information than ever, and companies are finally catching up by making their product front and center on the website. Their report breaks down the top performing dem ungated demos drive higher engagement and some of the best use cases and strategies for making them work. So if you want to learn more about using product demos on your site, go check it out. It's Novatic State of the Interactive Product Demo Report. Right now it's up on their website, which is N a V A T T I c dot com. That's nevatic dot com. Go check it out and get smarter about interactive product demos. You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhard.
Bill Wilson
1, 2, 3, 4, exit. 1, 2, 2.
Emily Kramer
1, 2, 3, four, exit.
Karan Sud
All right, we're back. I am very excited. This is the ultimate roast of pricing pages. So this is actually our last session of the roast, but it is by no means least. We have a killer lineup of absolute pricing experts and people I have followed and admired for quite some time in the marketing space. So first up, we have Bill Wilson. He is the founder at Pace Pricing. He is a fountain of knowledge on pricing. Then we have Emily Kramer. She's the founder of Market One, one of my favorite newsletters in the space. I've learned so much from her. She did a really great piece on pricing pages, so I had to have her on here. And then we have Karan Sud, who is director of sales operations at Rakuten and Kobo, and he publishes a ton of great pricing page related content on LinkedIn. So without further ado, I'm going to get them on stage. Hey guys, how you doing?
Unknown
Great.
Bill Wilson
Hey, how are you?
Karan Sud
All right, well, Bill Haran.
Bill Wilson
Hi.
Karan Sud
Why don't you tell me about just a little bit about yourselves before we dig into this.
Bill Wilson
Sure, I can start. So my name is Bill Wilson and I'm the founder of Pace Pricing. I've been in pricing probably for, if I really think back for a really, really long time. But you know, professionally probably for the last six years or so. And it all started when I built a B2B SaaS company. It was all around pricing and that's what really focused me in on the pricing stuff. And since then I've been helping B2B SaaS companies with their monetization efforts. Yeah, that's me.
Karan Sud
What about you, Karan?
Unknown
Hey. Hi everyone, my name is Karan. I have worked in pricing for almost, it's closing on two decades now, 17 years I think. And I've worked across Automotive, digital marketing, B2B, CPG, wholesale electronics and I've worked as a pricing person inside sales, marketing, operations, finance. So I think I've been around the block and I've seen pricing from every perspective. So it gives me this unique perspective that I constantly keep sharing. So if you ever see me on LinkedIn, I'm, I'm pretty active about evangelizing the pricing skill in general at company. So yeah, I'm looking forward to this session. It's going to be pretty exciting.
Emily Kramer
I just like Emily. I'm Emily. I've led marketing at a number of startups and been the first ish marketer about four times. So I was early at Asana where I led marketing for four years and also led marketing at Carta for the last four years. Have been doing a whole mix of things help companies build marketing overall through Market one, which is a newsletter and advisory and through that have talked to tons of companies about pricing and pricing pages specifically have written a couple of newsletters on the topic. Pricing I've always thought of as a Pricing pages specifically are very much at the intersection of a lot of things I love thinking and writing about which is web web's like the most important thing you kind of do in marketing pricing. I was like an econ major and like math a whole lot and like psychology and all that. So it brings it kind of all together and I also think it's an area where startups just like make a lot of mistakes and it's an area where it's usually cross functional to figure out what's going to happen there. And often when things are cross functional there's lots of gray areas and mistakes get made. So like talking about how to kind of fix those problems as well. So excited to dive in with this and be here with these other experts who might know a little more about pricing than me, which is keep me on my toes.
Karan Sud
I love it. I'm very excited. So we're going to get into a little bit of presentation. Bill has put together this awesome framework that he's going to briefly, like, teach. We're going to get some insights from Emily and Karan and their experience, and then we're going to get into what you guys are all here for.
Emily Kramer
Right?
Karan Sud
We're going to roast some pages. So without further ado, Bill, I'm going to hand it over to you. You have full control of the little slider, so that's great.
Bill Wilson
All right, everybody, this is it. The ultimate roast of B2B pricing pages. So I'm going to take you through a couple things today. I will try and make it as quickly as I, you know, get through it as quickly as I possibly can so that we can get to these great pages. But there's a couple things I want us to dig into. And the first thing is, like, what's the purpose of a pricing page? Now, we all know it's just to put our pricing on it, but really, if we look at our good friend here, good, better, best we can see, you know, a classic kind of layout. But what are we trying to do? And from my perspective, it's these four things. We're really trying to help the visitor understand what they're going to get and then who it's for. And probably the most important job of a pricing page is to be that clear and make it immediately obvious who it's for and what it is. The second thing we need to do is really start to build the visitors confidence and reassure them that they're making a good choice. And we can do this in a number of ways, which we'll dig into. And then we need to really show them their options. Like, we need to make sure that the offers are very, very clear and that they understand how to make a choice. So we really need to guide them towards the right option. And then finally, we need to make them take some kind of action. Right? This is what they're here for. It's like we need to get them to convert. That's the whole point. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to take you through these four sections as it relates to a pricing page, and the things that I think make the most sense around how to do some of those things. Now there's probably a lot more and Corinne and Emily will have lots of things to add to this, but I'm going to take you through each one. Okay, so the first thing is we need to focus clarity and we do that in a couple of ways. So here I've got a pricing page over on the right hand side, if you can see it there. And I've got a few things outlined here that you absolutely have to deal with when it comes to clarity. The very first thing is the main page heading and I see way too often people saying pricing, pricing plans, pick the plan for you or something along those lines. Don't do that, just put your value prop there. This is probably the second hardest working page on your website. Make it work. Like we all know the pricing pages for pricing. You don't need to tell me twice. So tell me what it is and you know who it's for. So that's to me is the number one thing that I see on pricing pages that did just get wrong. And then the next thing is around package names. And I'm really not a big fan of the generic package names that we all pick. It is very, very common. But I think we can do better as a group, you know, as a group of marketers, I think we can come up with better names for these packages that give a hint, just a hint as what it's for or who it's for. And if we can do that, I think combine that with the subheading right underneath it to really drive home who it is for and what they're going to be able to do with it, I think is probably the ultimate pricing page hack. You know, we absolutely, if we can get those things right, a lot of other things get really, really easy. So that's what I think about, you know, sort of the very first three things on a pricing page you need to nail are those. The next thing around clarity is the feature descriptions themselves. I see a lot of people use a lot of jargon, a lot of made up names, clever, cute things that they've come up with. Don't do that. Just keep it really, really simple and keep it in your customer's language. You know, if they understand the acronym and it's something they use all the time, use it, no problem. But if it's something you guys have created and you have to explain what it is, don't do it. Just spell it out, get it out there. I know that space is tight, but that's why this is hard and really, really important. So feature Descriptions have to be just right. Now, I like to do a jobs to be done test. At the end of all this, it's like if I can look at a package and understand the job that's trying to get done, then I think we've done a pretty good job of laying out the clarity for packaging. So that is all the things I think that you need to take into consideration with clarity. Now, of course, it permeates the whole page. There's lots of other places where everything has to be clear, but these are the big core pieces, I think. All right, the next thing we have to do is start building the confidence. People need to land on this page, start to feel that they're going to make a good choice. And we can do that in a couple of ways. I think there's three things that we really need to dig into and that is risk reversal, social proof, and of course, support. Those three things I think are crucial to helping people build confidence. And the very first place, just like in Clarity, the very first place is that page heading. So right underneath the page heading you have that subheading. Make it risk reversal. If you've got a free trial, say it. If you don't require a credit card, say it. If you have a money back guarantee, say it. Put it all right there. Don't make people guess. And I think it really helps immediately start to build that trust. So I think that's a big miss that I see a lot on pricing pages. And of course we need logos. Now. Everybody's like, I don't have a big, a lot of brand name logos. That's fine. Just put up the logos you have. That's still social proof. And in your industry that may, you know, may make sense. But more importantly to those logos is you need to have testimonials from people inside those companies. And I think if you are going to have testimonials, the number one thing I think you should do is make sure you have a photo, a really great quote, the name of the person, the title and the company. Make it as real as you possibly can. People love identifying themselves on these pages. They land on a page, they're scrolling down, they see, hey, I'm Bob, director of operations for a construction company. And there's another Bob on the pave that's also on the page, that's also a director, operations at a construction company. This is the right choice for me. Now if you can do it, I like to have a testimonial, at least one for every package, whoever that package is. Targeted at. I like to have one for every package. And on top of the testimonials, we can bring in third party reviews. And this comes with everything from badges from Capterra and you know, G2 and all that kind of stuff. Maybe a feed of reviews that are coming off the site. It's a little different than testimonials. Testimonials are company supplied, whereas the reviews are kind of coming from a third party. So it kind of gives a little bit of arm's length confidence that starts to build and then finally we get into that sort of support piece and the objection handling around well, how do I know this is for me? And I have all these questions surface every single question you've ever received about a subscription in your faq. What happens if I upgrade during the middle of the month? What happens if I go over my usage? Do you have a discount for nonprofits, et cetera, et cetera. Put all of that stuff in the faq, try and head them off at the pass and then finally make it really, really easy to get a hold of support. I really like having a chat bubble on a page because I think you can make it context aware and you can actually start surfacing questions or answers to pricing or even just the call to action. Start a free trial right there in the context aware chat. So people really want to feel like they can get support before and after the sale. So the next thing we're getting into is packaging. But before I do, I just want to say this. If you can nail the clarity and the confidence, you can have some shaky packaging and some shaky action stuff. But if you don't nail those things, it doesn't matter how good your packaging is and how good your calls to action are, it's not going to matter a lot. So really, really focus on that clarity and the confidence and then work on the packaging. The next thing I would say in terms of packaging, how do we make it really obvious how people should pick the right ones? And that is not to inundate them with every single feature you have in your product, but that is to show them the top three to five features for each of the plans. That one make it different from the other plan, but also are the most important thing for that audience. I see way too many pricing pages with just mile long feature comparison grids. And I think it's uncalled for. I think if at that early stage when someone first lands on the page, if you think about a first time visitor, they're just getting acquainted with this stuff and the next thing we hit them with is every single feature and every little checkbox we have. And then they're just lost in analysis paralysis and they get overwhelmed and it's just too much. So my suggestion is take all those kitchen sink features, package them up in a really beautiful pop up lightbox with sticky headers that scroll and the whole works with the prices, make it a really beautiful experience and just put it in a separate place. And that way the people who really want to go deep can go deep and the people who don't don't have to. And the people who do go deep, when they hit that X, they're right back where they left off and they can keep going down. The journey you've laid out for them on the page goes without saying. That feature list should be in priority order. Make sure that the most important features are at the top and keep driving the differentiation. Because the cross sell and upsell, you've got to keep moving that. And not everybody's going to start at the base plan. Especially if you got a good, better, best, you want people to pick the plan that's right for them. No matter where it is, it might be the best plan. The next thing I want to talk about in terms of packaging is value metrics. And this one's a little bit shaky sometimes, but really it's about how do you charge, not how much you're charging, but how you charge. So a value metric has to be a couple of things. One, it has to be incredibly close to your customer, the value your customer gets. So that's the first thing, it has to be very, very close to that. The next, it has to feel fair and familiar to them. They need to already measure this thing inside their business. And third, they need to be able to predict it. So in pricing, if you can get a great value metric, a lot of the other work becomes a lot simpler. It doesn't become easy necessarily, but it's definitely a simpler, straightforward line about how you actually position yourself. Because if you can align your pricing metric with your customer success, then your whole job is to try and make them as successful as possible. So that's how I look at value metrics. They should be surfaced right at the top. Make it very, very obvious. Some people have a couple of value metrics, make sure those are surfaced at the very, very top, and then we talk about pricing itself. Don't hide anything. Get your pricing on the page. I don't care if it's a starting at number or if it's every single plan. Make it incredibly easy for people to understand how I'm going to scale with your product and all the different charges that possibly could be there.
Karan Sud
That's a really good point.
Bill Wilson
And then make it really, really for a quick second.
Karan Sud
Just because we've had this question a couple of times in the chat. It's probably one of the hotter topics in B2B is pricing on the page. I know you guys are a fan of it, like at least have a range, have somewhere to start. We're getting some comments that like, you know, any B2B company I've been at doesn't want to do this because they don't want our competitors to find out. Christy Cutter said all the B2B companies I've worked for don't want a pricing page due to competitor reasons. Thoughts on this and any reasoning to or not to provide transparent pricing on the website. I know you guys have opinions, so let's just touch on that real quick.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, so I'll jump in on that and then the rest of the team can go. But like for me it's your pricing is not secret. Anybody can get at your pricing if they want to. That's the first thing. So if you think you're hiding something from your competitors, you're not. You're just making it a little bit more annoying to get at. You can get it. There's something really empowering about being super transparent with your customer. And the reason I say starting at or at least look, there's a transition. There's baby steps you can do through it. So for me it's like publish how you price. You don't have to put prices down. Publish how you price. This is how we do it. We do it based on, I don't know, gross revenue plus this, plus users, you know, like you've got it sort of laid out. Here's the packages, here's what's included. And maybe you don't have price, it's contact for pricing, but you're still socializing how you price, which is actually a big part of it. It's not necessarily the price tag itself. The next step with that would be starting at so you have all your packages how you price and then you say starting at $50,000, say your mid market and then the ultimate is just putting it all out there, even your volume discounts and your strategic discounts and how you do all those types of things. But yeah, that's how I look at it. I think there's baby steps and I think those are misunderstood reasons to actually hide Your pricing. If it's because you're doing straight value based pricing and you really need to understand every single customer, you can have a starting out, you're going to have a floor. Your pricing page should attract the people you want and repel the people you don't. So that's my take on it.
Karan Sud
Emily, what do you think? I know you have opinions.
Emily Kramer
Yeah, I have a, I put a shameless bung already in there. But I have a newsletter that talks specifically about all of the objections I've heard not putting pricing on the website and how to handle this. Because I hear this all the time. I think perhaps the biggest. I also hear, I always hear, besides just like people are gonna, competitors gonna find out our pricing or like things like that. It's just like it's so much better when sales walks people through our pricing. Like it needs explanation, it needs explanation from sales. If that's the problem, you actually probably have a product marketing problem which is that you're not explaining what your product is, you're not explaining what you do, you're not making that clear upfront. And also your pricing might be too complicated. So it's usually a symptom of other problems when you think that sales needs to. So I'd say like first say how can we address that problem through better product marketing or better pricing or something like that. I agree on the baby steps piece as well. You can even try like making pricing available if they chat in, if someone's available, like do something to test and show that this is actually working better. But I can see a case for not listing enterprise pricing because often that truly is custom, but you need to anchor with some pricing somewhere, at least for one of your packages. And again like I've written about a lot of these things, but often this is like symptomatic of other problems when sales doesn't want it on there and so really get to like the root cause of like what's causing some of these objections.
Karan Sud
Karan, what about you?
Unknown
Yeah, I think Bill mentioned a very good point about mechanism using your pricing page. Right. Like a lot of time what happens is there's just too many parakeets that you. But when you don't have a good setup for a good pricing for you and you don't put an ROI story out there that this is where you start or give someone a reference point when they're browsing, I think you'll leave too much to be imagined and then you attract all sorts of leads and I think then you try to target I think it's better to have something and even the biggest company, if you look at, like, I'm a big fan of Atlassian, for example, Atlassian's price, they have a calculator and you can calculate your price up to like a thousand user, ten thousand users. Like they'll give you a four for $400,000 on their website. So I think, and you know, it's a poster title, like what you can do with when, you know, when you are talking about custom build, etc. So I think it gives everyone something to start with.
Karan Sud
Awesome. All right. Sorry to interrupt you, Bill.
Bill Wilson
No, that's fine.
Karan Sud
We had a lot of questions about that. It's a hot topic, we needed to address it. So let's move on and then we'll get into some roasting.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, got it. Okay, so next in the list is triggering action. So this is the last thing. How do we get people to actually take some kind of action on the page? And there's some simple things we can do. There's four things. Make sure that the CTAs are the same everywhere, right? If you've got start, free trial and get started and they do the same thing, stop it. Just use one and use it everywhere. That includes the Chrome of your website. So if you've got start, free trial and get started in your Chrome, like, just try and keep them as consistent as possible. Also, you know, try and have one primary call to action. What is the number one action you want them to take? If it's free trial, then it's free trial. If it's get a demo, it's get a demo. One of those is going to be a secondary call to action. And if you do have a secondary call to action, I strongly recommend that it just be exactly for that. Get a demo or contact sales and only used very, very sparingly in those right places, like on that enterprise tier. Don't sprinkle it throughout. Don't give people two choices. Give them the main choice that you want them to take. And then the other big thing is just make it obvious, like, don't put it just at the top and just in the plans. Sprinkle it throughout the page at natural breakpoints. Because if I'm scrolling down the page and I get to that last testimonial or a testimonial, that seals the deal for me and I'm ready to start my trial. Like, I just, I know it seems simple, but don't make people scroll. Like, just allow them to get to that button. No matter where they're at in the page. And I really don't like links to other pages. The point of this page is to get people to convert and it's supposed to be selling, and we need people to take that action. If we give them other actions on the page, we've just sent them away, which is not what we want. We want them to make an informed decision. We've guided them to the right package, we've built the confidence now they should be able to start a trial if it's right for them, or get started with a free account or whatever it happens to be. So those are the things that I think of. I call it the FAST framework. You need to focus on clarity, you need to amplify the confidence, you need to shape the packaging and you need to trigger action. So what we want to do is sort of start with that packaging. We want to make it really actionable and we want to make it resonate. Those are the two axes that I look at when I think about these. So this is how I'll be looking at pricing pages today. I know that Karen and Emily have different rubrics, but this is how I'm going to be looking at it. I have built, and I know Danielle's already shared it in the chat, but I have built a little scorecard here. If you want to take a screenshot, you can, and you can score your own pricing page and just see how you do and see where you might need some work. All right, let's roast some pages.
Karan Sud
All right. What you're all here for, I'm very excited about this. Thank you, Bill. That was awesome. I put a link in the chat. He has a little scorecard here if you scroll up a little bit. I also put Emily's article, at least one of them, on pricing pages in there and we will send that out afterwards. Don't worry. And psa. Yes, it's being recorded. Yes, you'll get it. All right, so I'm going to share my screen now and we are going to get into our first page. There we go. First up, we have mention. All right, so they are selling to developers at Data Sensitive Enterprises. They said their comments are. It's a work in progress, but it definitely feels like it's trying to do too much. Would love your thoughts. All right, so I'll scroll down a little bit. Maybe we can get some initial reactions and then we can get into some specific feedback. I'm seeing a lot of features, Bill, and I know you're going to have something to say about that?
Unknown
I think right off the bat.
Emily Kramer
Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Graham.
Unknown
Yeah, I mean, right off the bat. I think Bill mentioned it very, very early on that. Do some more. A little bit of more hard work in your naming. I think pro and Pro plus and solo. I mean, Solo, I think, is probably a good start, but I think they lost the way from pro to Pro plus, which feels like, you know, it's just not much. Not much attention given. So I think if you really talk about who the pro is for and who the Pro plus is for, I think from the solo to the next iteration of the customer or the Persona, I think there's probably a room for improvement there.
Emily Kramer
My first reaction is more just like, these prices are so random that I feel like I'm being like it's a gimmick or not a gimmick, but I feel like there's. I feel like it's a scam. Like they might as well be like 4178. Like, it's so weird. So, like, it's just 41, 83, 149. It just, like, feels scammy. I don't know. Just like, give me a real. Right.
Bill Wilson
It's interesting you say that because what they're doing is they're leading with their yearly pricing, right. So they're giving you that discount and then it works out to be 41. But the 49, 99, 179 feels a lot better. So depending on which one you're going to lead with, that's the one you want to round out. That's the one you want to make. Really fluent, really easy to say. Makes a lot of sense.
Emily Kramer
Yeah.
Bill Wilson
And then just let the other one fall where it may. But right with the one you're going to lead with, if it's yearly, then make that one.
Emily Kramer
You can tell it was an afterthought. Like, they made their pricing and they were like, oh, we should actually do our pricing yearly and maybe we should get two months free. And now, wow. We don't want to go back and change the prices. So, like, you can. This is on any page, but, like, especially pricing. Like, I don't want to see your internal debates shipped on a website. Like, I can see what happened behind the scenes on this website and you don't want to see that. I want to see how is this delivering me value? And do I feel like this is priced fairly? And when I see prices like this, I feel like it's fun.
Bill Wilson
Yeah.
Unknown
And honestly, if you're looking at these Prices, you might as well price. If you are leading with the annual price, you might as well make it in a way that you. It's either 39 or it's either 49. The 41 is a very random price point and 83 as well. I would say if you are an the B2B space at 80 and above, you might as well be closer to 99 because I think the value difference is the price to value ratio is still going to be humongous. So you don't have credit variable. 83. I think for people who are doing annual pricing, you might as well make the annual attractive grounded and then just make the other one whatever is based out based upon the discount that you want to perceive. Discount. You want to give out this one month or two month or whatever that discount is.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, 100%.
Emily Kramer
I'm getting both praised and also probably people are mad at me because I actually roasted the page and said some negative things. There are some positive things on the page. I think the positive things actually come later in the page. But like we can still talk about the prices. But I saw an FAQ and I always like an FAQ on a page. I think people are going to have questions and like answer them. So I think that can always be helpful especially if you have a confusing pricing model. I think that it's helpful that there's like a top nav to pricing. Like putting it in the top nav. People want to find pricing. It can be your highest converting page on your website. Put it in the top nav. So there's like some good things here. Like they have a reasonable number of packages, all of that. So it's not like all bad from the start. But my eyes just did immediately go to that number. The other thing I do like just quickly at the very top. Sorry, I'm making you go all over the place right now. But at the top it does summarize each plan. So a lot of companies just Bill, you mentioned this, they just skip this description like essential social listening and publishing capabilities. Now could these be a little more specific? Could the differences be more amplified? Could it be more clear who each one of these for? Yes, but at least they have these descriptions to sort of ground me on the what is it? Who is it for? Why is it better for each package? So to be the opposite of my roast, which I came out so strongly on some good things.
Karan Sud
No, we love it. That's what we're here for.
Bill Wilson
Right. My first reaction was like, can we just scroll up a little bit? Probably Everybody, we skipped over it. But like, this choose your plan thing, just like, stop. Like, it's not what needs to be here. Value prop, risk reversal is what needs to go on the top of the page here. So that's a big miss. You can just totally. I often go back to the homepage and look at what the value prop is and just go, say, put that here. One thing I do like here is that this per month build yearly save $96. I think that's pretty decent. They've got the two months free on the discount, which I really like, instead of showing the 17.7% discount or whatever it actually works out to be. So my rule of thumb there is kind of like anything less than 25%, do it in months free because it's a little easier to digest. I kind of do like the buy now, you know, kind of goes against my whole single call to action thing. But if that's converting for them, then by all means. The get a demo in the header drives me crazy. And request a demo. Like, just pick one. Just get a demo is fine. It's shorter. Put it on the page. I know a designer was probably trying to make it so it fit pretty in the box, but we need to make sure that it's the same. The differentiation between these at the top here, this is where I start to take issue. Like, I don't actually think there's a reason for the Pro plus plan, to be honest. Like, you know, we've got 10 unlimited users, 10 social. Like, I mean, really, this whole thing just scales by volume. What else does it scale by? Show me the top features that the solo guy needs that the pro guy doesn't, or vice versa. That's what I want to see here. Hats off for surfacing the value metrics right at the top. I think that's excellent. You need to do that. But the next thing should be, what are the big differences? Three to five differences between each of these plans that I don't get in solo, but I get in Pro, and I don't get in Pro, but I get in Pro plus, and I think they're there. I've gone through them. I had a look at them earlier, but they're kind of all over the place. So I don't really understand the differentiation there. So I think there's some really great things happening here. I think there's one too many plans, personally, and I think it would probably make the pricing a lot simpler if you just had the two and just showed how you scaled and you might even be able to command more for that pro plan than you are now.
Emily Kramer
I'm surprised that you said that you liked the buy now bill because I had the opposite reaction in the chat before you said that. Which is like who's going to buy now when there's a trial? So why have it? There's converts, I guess I'm just.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, exactly. I guess that's the thing. I'm kind of like, well like, you know, is it converting for them? Is it not? I've seen this done on some like really large PLG company, like 300, 400 million dollar companies doing a little bit of this motion and I assume that they've actually got to the point where it's worked. I've worked on a couple of those and you know, the A B tests at that level work. Generally, A B tests in my opinion don't work unless you're getting lots and lots and lots and lots of traffic. But yeah.
Dave Gerhard
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Emily Kramer
Something that I saw recently that was kind of interesting was basically like that was this buy now free trial thing. It was like, buy now and we'll give you two months free or something like that. Like it was like instead of getting the one month trial, we'll give it to you, but just buy the annual plan and we'll take two months off or something. So it was worded better than that because the way I worded it, it's like a little too complex.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, skip the trial and get a discount.
Emily Kramer
That's what you would say. That is much more succinct. Thank you, Bill.
Bill Wilson
I will say. I also have to say they've localized their pricing, which I think is fantastic. Not a lot of people do this. This is why I sort of leads me to believe that this group is a little bit more mature potentially or they get lots of business from outside of the United States. But this is a good move if you do have not a lot of traffic from those places. Having localized pricing actually is a driver to conversion. I don't know exactly what the percentages are, so I won't throw them out there. But there's definitely been studies done that localized and non localized pricing. Localized always converts better in those countries.
Karan Sud
Awesome. All right, so we're going to do quick wrap up for this one. We're going to do what's the one change you would make to make it better and rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. Bill, I know you have your percentages system, but let's just fit it to 1 to 10 if you can.
Bill Wilson
That's easy. Yep.
Karan Sud
All right, Karan, you go first. What do you think?
Unknown
I think it clearly needs a value proposition. What is scaling? What's scaling the value as you go from one plan to another? Like is it the alerts that scale it is it dimensions that scale it is the user what's generating the value? What do I have to buy more of that generates the value? Do I have to buy more alerts or do. And also like this didn't show any add ons which I felt was a missing piece. But anyways, I think it's like a More like a five and a half. Six is where I would land because I think it's missing some key things.
Karan Sud
All right. And let us know what you think in the chat, too, scale of 1 to 10. All right, Bill, you're up.
Bill Wilson
Oh, gosh. I have to look now. If I want to give a real score, which I've scored them before, since I showed the framework, I kind of have to use it. Right.
Karan Sud
I think you're at a 65.
Bill Wilson
65.
Karan Sud
65, yeah.
Bill Wilson
65. I see it. Yeah. So, yeah, 6.5 out of 10. There was a lot of things I really did like about this page, but if you scroll down, I think I want to just call out a couple of things. If you scroll all the way down. The thing I want to talk about is. So they have a really great frequently asked questions here, but, like, I don't see any, like, where's the social proof? Where are all these other people that are using this? How come I can't find myself on this? What's going on? And of course, the big thing I would say is like, this is a massive grid. Just stop. Take this for social, like, for logos and social proof and all that kind of stuff, and build a really nice. Like, it's a nicely laid out table. Put it in a lightbox and then make those headers sticky. That's the things I would do. And of course, feature differentiation up top. Lots of things.
Karan Sud
Right.
Emily Kramer
I think that the page overall, like, it has most of the things you need minus the social proof, like, the structure of it is actually better than most. I don't love the little, like, toggle for the pay yearly thing, but for the most part, it's structured like, they're not trying to reinvent the wheel on the structure of the page. And you don't. You shouldn't. With a pricing page. Like, people are going there to get information and get it quickly, think that's good. I think the things that they filled the page in with maybe need a little bit of work. And that really comes down to, like, some of the product marketing stuff on the positioning, the value prop to crowns point.
Karan Sud
So.
Emily Kramer
And I don't hate a big feature grid as long as it collapses and expands, which it does. So to me, that's kind of like, fine. If people are looking for it, you can find it. But the collapsibility, I think is important and not at the sacrifice of not having, like, social proof or quotes or logos. So I don't know. I'm. Because the structure's there. That gives Them five points because that's half the battle is having a page that's findable, usable and has prices on it. So it has prices on it. I'm gonna give it a six, maybe a seven. It has pricing on it and like, you know, the bar is low. So it's a seven.
Unknown
The bar is low if pricing. The pricing I think is default.
Emily Kramer
So I reviewed so many pricing station, they don't have pricing on them. So I'm going to give you these two points for. I'm going to give you seven points for the right, generally right structure. You have prices, you're going to get seven points. The extra three are.
Dave Gerhard
Because it's good.
Bill Wilson
Yeah.
Karan Sud
Great. Cool. We're moving on. Next one, we're going to flagsmith.
Bill Wilson
All right.
Karan Sud
All right, Blacksmith, what do we got here?
Unknown
Yeah, 0, A45 and then Enterprise right away. They don't leave a lot to imagine.
Karan Sud
So another toggle.
Emily Kramer
Yeah, another. I don't mind that toggle. That toggle is clear, it's centered. It's easy to understand why it's this typical yearly, annual. What I think is funny is like they're trying to fit six plans into three boxes. Like if you go back up.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, it looks that way, doesn't it?
Emily Kramer
Three box. And it just kind of hurts.
Bill Wilson
I don't even think that's necessary. Like, just put those as features. You don't need it up there. Like just have enterprise and just say crowd, private or self. Like it's up to you. Like, pick one. I don't think.
Unknown
Honestly, I didn't even think they were plans. I thought they were just the way they implement stuff.
Emily Kramer
They are.
Bill Wilson
So.
Unknown
Yes, that's why I said it looks so squished.
Emily Kramer
Yeah.
Bill Wilson
Yeah. I think they could tighten that up. I think if we scroll up a bit. I just want to talk about my favorite thing here, which is the heading. So this start using flagsmiths for free is great. Risk reversal. That's great. But it's the second line, not the first. So I know what feature flagging is, but I'm also a software developer, so it's my target market. But like, just tell me what the value prop is over you over launchdarkly or whoever else. Like, show me why. So I think that's what's missing there. I do love this. Start using flagsmiths for free. And I like your little percentage flag there. I don't really know what it meant, but I get the little hat tip to the flag and then increase your plan as your business grows. I think is irrelevant. I think, you know, just put a better value prop there. I don't know. I think they've done a pretty good job of, I think, socializing the feature differentiation between these two. Like the sort of the PLG motion around the free. And then what you actually get unlimited projects, email, technical support, scheduled flags. I just don't know if those things are super important. And if they are, then that's great. It may be worth 45amonth, I'm not sure. And of course, the 50,000 requests per month, is that a hard limit? That's my question. On the free plan, can I go over, Can I slip into a pay as you go version? Because for me, if this is all I need and I don't want scheduled flags and all these other things and I just, I'm going to have a hundred thousand requests a month, where do I go? Right? Because up to a million now I feel like I'm paying for something I don't get. So let me slide up and down here and maybe it's like start for free and then, you know, allow that expansion to happen naturally until they get to a place where it makes sense based on how much it costs for every 50,000 requests that it makes sense for them to flip over to the 45amonth plan. So I think you could actually probably start claiming a lot of value inside that free tier by actually charging for overages.
Emily Kramer
So like a platform fee and a usage fee or just, I mean both, or just one?
Bill Wilson
Oh, I think, yeah, I think platform fee plus a usage fee. But on the free plan, just make it pay as you go. Like they start to go over, they just have the features they need. And there's probably going to be a point where there's enough requests coming in that it probably makes sense that you need those other features. And you know, as the company who's building it, they would know best. But back that up with usage data. We know that Companies that do 75,000 or 300,000 requests need this stuff, but other than that, I would love people to grow money on the table there.
Unknown
And they did it and they did it inside the faq. So they said, hey, if you go over, there is a mechanism to do it. But I felt like that should be more front and center, like, hey, here's what happens if you're over 50k right up top. So.
Bill Wilson
Oh yeah. And maybe that's what they meant by that expand as you grow kind of thing. But is that including in the free plan?
Unknown
Yeah, you can go over.
Bill Wilson
All right. Then, yeah, I think that that's the case. Put that higher up. Just put $7 per 100,000 requests right in the top and start for free.
Unknown
Then, like on every pricing page, I should be able to tell without even going on your homepage what the product actually does. And I don't know what the product does on this page right now. Like, I do not know. And I think that's something that's a bit of a mess when you talk about the value story. I think you need to be able to tell what the product delivers right up top. Because we know we are here to choose a plan. No need to tell us we're here to choose a plan. But what exactly are you delivering? I think that's Misha.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, they're too close to their own problem.
Emily Kramer
That's something that I have, like, in my own rubric that's very important is like, restate your positioning. Because oftentimes people come to your website and they go straight to your pricing page or they search for pricing and go straight to the page. So restate your positioning. What is it? Who's it for? Why it's better. And then also have positioning for each package. So this comes back or each plan, this comes back to having like a line of text under the name of it state what is included in that package and who it's for or why you might need that package. Like, sounds like a lot of things, but it's a sentence under free, under startup, under enterprise here. So reposition your product and then make sure each package is sort of positioned. Who's it for? What is it? What's in it? So I don't have to read all that fine print because it gets hard to read.
Karan Sud
All right, let's get to our one key insight and key piece of advice and then our 1 to 10 ratings. All right, we're going to start with Emily this time.
Emily Kramer
Key thing I would change is just what I said. Like, you need to explain what this thing does and what each package is, and you need to simplify. So maybe the key thing is to simplify because I just get really overwhelmed by what's going on in that enterprise box there. I think the score. Okay, so they have pricing. The page is generally structured. Do they have social proof on the page?
Karan Sud
I did not see any, no.
Emily Kramer
So it's the same, I guess. Like, I'm going to give this a 5 because I really don't see a lot at all about what it is. And that enterprise box is just really stressing me out.
Unknown
So, yeah, I would give it a 5 as well. I think there are a lot of pieces missing. I don't know what the product does on the page, the pricing itself. I feel like when you. Again, I go back to the same notion because my whole career is built around monetization. I don't know. Why would you price at 45 when you're selling the B2B? Why is it not 49 or 50 or so on so forth? So that's another mess. And I think the social proof, that's the whole fact that it's so. It's not clear how many plans there are.
Bill Wilson
So I think for me. So it's funny, we're all sort of floating around the same number. I'm at a 4. 7, just to be super precise, which is basically fine. But it came out at 4.7 when I did the work. And yeah, I think the biggest thing that they should change is just surface how you charge. Like, if that free plan lets me buy more, then tell me and tell me how much it costs right there. Show me how to scale. I would do that. And of course, all the other things that has already been said, but that's the one thing I would definitely change. And then that enterprise plan just needs to get the same width and the price point. I don't know. I think my guess is that this company is kind of really sort of selling to developers at some level, and I think so they might have that motion of distribution through development teams. So developer finds it, they want to try it, they download it, they get it, they start using it, and then maybe it sort of goes up from there. But I mean, the $45 a month is kind of light, so. Yeah, I don't really know what would be a better price point there for them. We'd have to know more about their segmentation.
Unknown
I guess we just don't see any roi. So none of the pages we have so far, we've seen there's an ROI story, at least a relative ROI story that, hey, here's what we do. Here's time saved or revenue made or risk reduced. Something's got to be there to show the value, which I think is missing from all of them.
Bill Wilson
Great.
Karan Sud
All right, going to move on. Thank you guys for roasting that in the chat.
Bill Wilson
Relief with that 4.7 people.
Emily Kramer
You're the guy that prices products at 41 or $47 instead of 50 with your rating.
Bill Wilson
Not true.
Karan Sud
Be fair to Bill. He's got this whole intense scorecard.
Emily Kramer
Yeah, Bill scored these beforehand, so Cronin I didn't Bill like went and went through his scorecard. So that's where he's coming up like super hard.
Bill Wilson
I will round. I will round up from now on. In fact, the rest of them are round number.
Karan Sud
No, I like this.
Emily Kramer
You roast and then you thaw. Like, what's the unroast? I don't know. Working on my.
Karan Sud
All right, next up we have Contact Monkey. This one was specifically requested because it did not have pricing. So they sell to internal communicators. They're an internal communication software that helps companies create and send emails to their employees. And they said they got about 2,000 sessions to their pricing page. So I will just do a quick skin of this. You guys can read, boss me around, tell me what you want to see.
Unknown
Well, I'm assuming, I'm assuming they have a filtering mechanism within CTA that if you click the first, the lowest tier is going to a different channel and if you click the enterprise, it go into a different channel because if it's not, they might as well make it one plan and just call it call Sales. Because right now it's like Call Sales. Call Sales. Call Sales.
Karan Sud
I clicked on it and I think it's going to send me.
Bill Wilson
It's going to be the same. It's the same place. It's the same place.
Emily Kramer
Sending you the same place. You're giving them too much credit on that one there. The one thing they do well is I think it's often hard to know how do you do an add on appropriately under plans. And I think the structure for how they did the add on. If you go up a little bit. Danielle. Yeah, like just how they have the SMS communications down as an add on. Like design wise, I think that's sort of like a best practice. And you have an add on. It spans across right underneath the package grid. Yeah. So the add on is the SMS communications and so that's like kind of clear and done.
Bill Wilson
Okay, click View Pricing and it takes you to another page.
Karan Sud
But we have pricing for this but nothing else.
Bill Wilson
As far as I can tell. It's just for like, can I buy this separately or is it the add on or.
Emily Kramer
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Bill Wilson
What am I doing here? And if they don't do that, they should fence at the top like sms, email, email. And then the SMS becomes an add on to the email, which is totally fine. But let people choose where they want to be. I get it. They want the entry point to be email, but maybe it is sms.
Emily Kramer
Yeah, I guess that could Be more clear. And the thing I find most ironic is that the very top it says you're pricing your way.
Bill Wilson
I know there's no pricing, so I'm.
Emily Kramer
Like, oh, maybe it's just my pricing. Like do I just nick the pricing? It's my way. Okay, $5. Like that's the thing that's like most ironic here. I really think for something like this, for an email tool, an internal tool, like you've gotta list pricing. Like you have to know that this starts at a price point that's affordable. And so I can't see why you wouldn't for you could just go to.
Bill Wilson
The other monkey shape messaging platform.
Emily Kramer
Yeah.
Unknown
And that's because their scaling mechanism is easy. Not easy, but at least they scale with emails sent or with number of people in an organization. And you can basically go from small, medium to large businesses in a way to scale your fraud in your different options. But. And you have the scaling factors. Why not make it a little bit easier? And I feel like they talk to PR and HR in a way like HR most because it's more internal communication and they are not the best in terms of like understanding going through this motion of like who's talking to them and you know, who is the finances, procurement. I think an upfront way to get that initial pricing would definitely help them a long way. Go a long way.
Emily Kramer
So I'm really curious if you go because Danielle just scrolled by. I'm really curious. The request pricing. The thing that actually makes me the most crazy is when I see a pricing page that doesn't have pricing. And then there's something that has me fill out a form and says request pricing. And I bet it still doesn't give you pricing. I bet it just goes to a demo. So now you're making me go to a page without pricing. You're making me fill out a form and it says request pricing, pricing. And then I probably still don't get pricing. I've gone through a lot of these flows. Maybe they do. I hope that it actually gives me a price, but it probably doesn't. So now you're just creating tons and tons of friction and you're really frustrating me. And rarely do I say it's better to not have a pricing page at all. But at that point it might be better not to have a pricing page at all. If you're going to make me go to a place and then fill out a form.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, I mean, you know what, you could have a pricing page that is just like your value metrics. Some of the features and more and a form and just says, get in touch, like, book a demo. This is how we do our pricing. And then throw a starting ad on that, like just get rid of it. It's like we work best with companies with a hundred employees or more, right? Like the reason they're asking all those questions when they're in place, they're trying to filter you out. They're just going to send you away if you don't match their icp. So figure out the right tell people what your ICP is. What I usually hear is like, oh, no, we don't want to scare anybody away. I'm like, yes, you do. Some people are not good business. Some people are not good business. I want to work with the people who want to work with us. I tell people that all the time. Everybody's scared to niche down a little bit because they want to service the entire market. But if you try and service everybody, you're servicing no one. And I think everybody knows that, but it bears repeating. So if you can here niche down into the best size company that you work with and get one form, don't say, get custom pricing, say book a demo because that's what you want them to do. That's the biggest thing I would take from this page. I do like their differentiation, but their target market's not going to understand it, I don't think.
Emily Kramer
I think it's interesting. I get two pieces of very conflicting feedback when I'm like, hey, marketer, you should do this. And it's like, well, to your point, Bill, it's like, well, sales doesn't want us to like, rule anyone out with our pricing page. They don't want to scare people away. And then when I tell people to add, like, book a meeting, the ability to schedule a meeting right in your demo, flow through Chili Piper, Revenue Hero, those kinds of tools, they're like, oh, they don't want to get meetings that they shouldn't be getting. They only want to get meetings with the high quality leads. So how do you prevent that? And it's the opposite. It's like you don't want to scare people away. We do want to scare people away. What is it? And I think ultimately you need to be transparent and clear about what you offer and try to get the right people to think.
Bill Wilson
Like I said, it has to attract the people you want and repel the people you don't like. That's the job.
Emily Kramer
Conflicting feedback. So I think always when you get that sort of conflicting feedback, I Think it's just like they've been trained that they don't want pricing on their page and that it hurts. And they've been trained that they want to like control who's booking meetings and scheduling it. And I think the key is to like, get underneath that. Like, what's really the fear here? What are the actual problems when you're selling? What are the objections? What are your issues with competitors? So it's like going a layer deeper because sometimes people are just trained to have objections to these things based on what they've seen in the past.
Bill Wilson
A really great question in chat here. Basically it says, if your competitor doesn't show pricing, should you show your pricing? And my answer to that is 100% hell yes.
Emily Kramer
Competitive advantage.
Unknown
Absolutely.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, I know lots of pricing.
Emily Kramer
Yeah, we'll go. Because it seems faster. Same with like a free plan. It's like if I can just sign up and don't have to talk to someone and get in there. And if it has pricing, like, you know, you're just creating friction.
Bill Wilson
So, yeah, if you want to disrupt your little corner of the world in SaaS and everybody literally has their pricing hidden, just do that.
Emily Kramer
Yes.
Karan Sud
What do you think?
Bill Wilson
And then position around it, basically saying everybody else doesn't show you the pricing. We do. And this is why, because we want to be transparent and share with you how you grow. Like, just use it as a positioning and then everybody will show me pricing. And then you can level the playing field after that.
Unknown
Yeah, I mean, when you price a product, you price it on value delivered.
Emily Kramer
Right.
Unknown
Like the whole notion is value is delivered, then you charge x percent of that value. Right. Like, and again, the value metric is just missing in all of these things. And I'm actually surprised and I'm actually sort of mad at people and our own pricing people, my own pricing community, who's probably out there doing this pricing. Because it's absolutely criminal to not have any value story around your pricing, no matter where what kind of organization you are. And I can sense a lot of these companies that don't have any information probably don't have any pricing, let alone pricing team. They probably don't have a person in charge of pricing. It's probably a mixed bag of different people coming up with what they're. And what happens then is. And there's a lot of zens who think they're good at pricing and it end up becoming a mishmash of different things. I mean, my advice to a lot of these founders generally is that as soon as you get to a critical mass of revenue. You need to start building a pricing muscle in the organization. But that's how you'll start experimenting, changing things and everything that Bell and Emily also talked about. There's just main thing that you need to start doing.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, start now. If you're not. That's the best advice I give people. They say, what? You know, how should I tackle my pricing? I'm like, start now, get people together, start talking about it. I can't tell you how many times I get in a room full of people that basically just say this is the first time we've all got together and talked about pricing. And then you realize you're just going to be the argument settler. But that's a different story.
Karan Sud
All right, we got a question from Adam in the chat. Karan, do you have any thoughts about cost plus versus market based versus value based pricing in this context? What do you guys think?
Unknown
So obviously like unless you're selling widgets and cookies, you need to stay away from cost plus. At least in the SaaS phase. There's absolutely, there's no reason to do it market based. Obviously you need to be mindful of where the market is. But I think the magic starts at value based. And the way the value based pricing needs to be done done is you have this product, let's say if this was Contact Monkey and you were basically now trying to figure out how much value, you need to figure out how much either how much revenue it makes, how much cost is saved the customer, how much risk is saved the customer, how much. OPEX CAPEX you need to quantify all of that in B2B. It's absolutely essential. Like that's the beauty of B2B. You can actually quantify stuff. You can't quantify pricing for cookies apart from financial metrics. But in B2B you can actually quantify stuff. And that's why you calculate the value and then you figure out what your percentage of the value you want to charge. Is it 10%, 15% and the range is somewhere between 5 to 25% I would say is what you wouldn't charge. And then you figure out what the mechanism of charging that price is and that's your value based pricing. And you know, that's the way to go. That's the only way to go, I would say. Plus they.
Bill Wilson
Yeah. And I mean I think that's sort of like the economic value to the enterprise or the customer, depending on how you look at it. But yeah, like what's your next best competitive Alternative, what are the things you can add differently? What's that value pool? And then what percentage of that value pool do you want to claim as your price? It really helps a lot of early stage companies figure out what their pricing should be because most of the time they guess. So if you can actually start to quantify some of this stuff then that's great. And it really does get you closer and closer to value based pricing. The worst thing though that people could do I think is like take all those things that they've quantified and then just go, we save you time, we make you more money. Of course you do. You have to do one of those two things because you're software and I'm not buying you if you don't. You need to make my life better somehow. So the value prop can't be based on those things, but your value story can be, especially if you're actually doing value selling, like true value selling, where you are doing that for an individual customer getting on the call and saying, hey, we looked at your numbers, this is what it looks like. This is what we can do for you. Here's your roi, here's how much we're going to charge you. That's sort of the holy grail of value based pricing, but very hard to get to.
Emily Kramer
Awesome.
Karan Sud
Well, let's wrap it up. One key thing you would change here and then let's rate it 1 to 10 or bill, you know, get in the weeds there and have a, you know, 6.5.
Bill Wilson
I give it a 6 out of 10. And now after listening to all this, I may change my rating. There are some big things that need to change here. It's like some of the things that are wrong are really wrong. But overall I do think that there's some good stuff on this page. I do like the SMS add on, like Emily pointed out. I do like the feature differentiation at least if I was understood it. I don't like the fact there's no value metric so I would change that. And I just don't like that you're not telling me how you price and what the hell it is you do. And so those are the things I would change. But six out of ten.
Karan Sud
All right. Karan, what about you?
Unknown
Yeah, 5.75, right? I'll go with both. Both 5.75. Yeah, there's, I think a lot has been mentioned. They need a starting point, they need a value story. I think the way they've laid it out is nice. I think the add ons can go separate if you have something that's an add on in every plan. You might as well just have it as a separate. It's almost like feature at the bottom that basically, hey, this is how add on should work. But yeah, so I mean they need to have a starting price at least to filter out like the tire kickers and just filter out before it goes off to procurement. This is a B2B enterprise kind of software.
Karan Sud
So bring us home three.
Emily Kramer
Three even I just don't appreciate pricing, especially for a product like this doesn't make sense to me. And the request for pricing that I know probably doesn't give me pricing. If it gave me pricing I would give it higher. But I bet it doesn't that it's just, I think it's going to hurt you to not have that information. So a couple of points there because you have the pricing page, it's in the top nav but without pricing you get a three. I want to drive that point home. It's worth the internal debate to get pricing on your page. It's worth the hours spent trying to convince people and show people and run the test and baby step your way there. So the three. I know that there's probably, you know, challenges a content might be to make it happen. I'm not trying to discount that. Great that you have a page, but it's so important to get these pages right. They can really deliver for you and help drive conversion and help drive a higher ACV per customer. All of these things. You get it right but you got to put pricing on there.
Karan Sud
Awesome. Well, we are at time and I want to be respectful to everyone here who's been here, some of you all day. I just heard someone in the chat that they were all here all day, which is crazy and awesome and you're my favorite person, but huge thank you to you, Bill, Karan and Emily for being on this session, for sharing your insights. I'm just very grateful. So we also have. I'm going to drop your LinkedIns in the chat, so please go follow them. Subscribe to Emily's newsletter. Sign up for Bill's little pricing calculator there and then also follow Karan. And last but not least, we have five winners to pull for. What are they? Pricing strategy reviews.
Emily Kramer
Bill.
Bill Wilson
Yeah, pricing strategy review.
Karan Sud
They will actually be with Bill himself. So we have some pulled. All right, so first we got Erica Schneider from Cut the Fluff. Congrats. Erica Karim Kosar from Unthread, Bhavya Sharma from Swapcard, Colin O'Hearn from BWZ and Sheila Sicharam from Mother Duck, which is maybe my favorite name of a company ever. But we will follow up via email. There you go. Drop them in the chat. And thank you, guys.
Bill Wilson
Thank you. It was fantastic. And if you like these video teardowns, you definitely have to check out Curran's page. He has some really dope funny memes he drops about pricing, so you need to check it out. And I do videos. And Emily's got an amazing newsletter, so let's keep it going.
Karan Sud
Has been dropping some fire jokes too, so go check those out, please. All right, we'll see you guys later. Thanks for joining. And that concludes the first ultimate roast of B2B websites. Thank you so much for joining today. This has been like a dream come true and just so thrilled with how it turned out. Some fun housekeeping stuff. Yes, you're getting all the recordings, you're getting some extras in there. So we're gonna have an awesome email filled for you probably tomorrow because I'm gonna go eat some dinner, hang out, walk my dog. But yeah, Todd, we will share all of the presenters LinkedIn profiles and yeah, so look out for that email tomorrow. Thank you all so much from the bottom of my heart for joining today. And we are just thrilled that you are part of our community. And yeah, see you later. Bye.
Dave Gerhard
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review.
Bill Wilson
Review.
Dave Gerhard
Because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails. Well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love Knack here at Exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performing emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in Nack first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in action@knack.com exit5 that's kn a k.com exit5 or just let them know you heard about Knack from exit5. That's us.
Podcast Summary: Episode #216: Website Teardown | How to Nail your B2B Pricing Page
Title: B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt
Host: Dave Gerhardt
Guests:
In Episode #216 of "B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt," host Dave Gerhardt delves deep into the intricacies of crafting effective B2B pricing pages. Joined by industry experts Emily Kramer, Bill Wilson, and Karan Sud, the episode offers a comprehensive analysis of best practices, common pitfalls, and innovative strategies to optimize pricing pages for higher conversions and better customer engagement.
Dave Gerhardt opens the session by introducing the panelists, each bringing a wealth of experience in pricing strategies and B2B marketing:
Bill Wilson shares his journey from founding a B2B SaaS company to establishing Pace Pricing, focusing on monetization efforts for SaaS businesses.
"I've been helping B2B SaaS companies with their monetization efforts for the last six years." [03:03]
Karan Sud discusses his extensive 17-year career spanning various industries, emphasizing his cross-functional expertise in pricing.
"I've worked as a pricing person inside sales, marketing, operations, finance, giving me a unique perspective." [03:05]
Emily Kramer highlights her leadership roles in startups like Asana and Carta, and her passion for pricing pages intersecting web design, economics, and psychology.
"Pricing pages are where I combine my love for web design, economics, and psychology." [03:45]
Karan Sud introduces the session's main focus: a critical analysis or "roast" of existing B2B pricing pages. The goal is to identify strengths and areas for improvement to help listeners refine their own pricing strategies.
Bill Wilson outlines the FAST Framework—Clarity, Amplify Confidence, Shape Packaging, and Trigger Action—as essential pillars for constructing successful pricing pages.
Purpose of a Pricing Page:
Beyond displaying prices, a pricing page should clearly communicate what the product does and who it's for.
"The most important job of a pricing page is to make it immediately obvious who it's for and what it is." [05:16]
Key Elements:
Main Page Heading: Avoid generic titles like "Pricing Plans." Instead, highlight the value proposition.
"Don't do that, just put your value prop there." [06:00]
Package Names: Move away from generic names (e.g., Basic, Pro). Create names that hint at their purpose or target audience.
"Better names for packages give a hint as to what they're for." [06:30]
Feature Descriptions: Use simple, customer-centric language. Avoid jargon and ensure clarity in what each feature offers.
"Feature descriptions have to be just right—clear and in your customer's language." [07:15]
Strategies to Build Trust:
Risk Reversal: Highlight offers like free trials, no credit card requirements, or money-back guarantees prominently.
"If you've got a free trial, say it. If you don't require a credit card, say it." [08:00]
Social Proof: Incorporate logos of reputable clients and genuine testimonials with photos, names, and titles.
"Testimonials should include a photo, a great quote, the name of the person, and their company." [09:10]
Support and Objection Handling: Provide comprehensive FAQs and easy access to support channels, such as a context-aware chat.
"Put all those questions in the FAQ to handle objections upfront." [10:00]
Optimizing Package Presentation:
Feature Prioritization: Highlight the top three to five features per plan to prevent overwhelming visitors.
"Show the top features for each plan, not every single feature." [11:30]
Value Metrics: Align pricing with metrics closely tied to customer value, ensuring fairness and predictability.
"A value metric must be closely aligned with the value your customer receives." [13:00]
Avoiding Feature Grids: Replace long, cumbersome feature comparison tables with interactive elements like pop-up lightboxes for detailed information.
Effective Call-to-Actions (CTAs):
Consistency: Use a single, primary CTA throughout the page to minimize decision fatigue. For instance, choose between "Start Free Trial" or "Get a Demo," but not both.
"Use one primary call to action. If it's a free trial, make it free trial everywhere." [14:00]
Strategic Placement: Position CTAs at natural breakpoints within the content to capture intent-driven engagement without forcing excessive scrolling.
"Sprinkle CTAs throughout the page at natural breakpoints." [14:30]
Avoid External Links: Keep visitors focused on conversion by minimizing links that navigate away from the pricing page.
The panel critiques specific examples to illustrate common mistakes and best practices.
Overview: Mention targets developers at data-sensitive enterprises but struggles with clarity and pricing transparency.
Key Critiques:
Confusing Pricing Structure: Random pricing points (e.g., $41, $83, $149) feel scammy and lack logical progression.
"The prices are so random that it feels like a scam." [22:28]
Lack of Clear Value Proposition: The main heading doesn't communicate the product's value over competitors.
"Just tell me what it is and you know who it's for." [23:04]
Overwhelming Feature Lists: A massive grid of features leads to analysis paralysis, deterring conversions.
"Just stop. Take this for social proof and build a nicely laid out table elsewhere." [32:28]
Recommendations:
Simplify Pricing: Use round numbers and align annual pricing with clear discounts.
"If you're leading with annual pricing, make it smooth and easy to understand." [24:17]
Enhance Social Proof: Include more testimonials and recognizable client logos to build trust.
Ratings:
Overview: Contact Monkey specializes in internal communication software but opts for a "Request Pricing" approach without displaying actual prices.
Key Critiques:
Hidden Pricing: Requiring visitors to fill out forms to access pricing deters quick conversions and adds unnecessary friction.
"You're making me go to a place without pricing, creating tons of friction." [44:41]
Unclear Value Proposition: The page doesn't clearly communicate what the product does, leaving visitors confused about its value.
"I do not know what the product does on this page right now." [37:24]
Inconsistent Feature Presentation: While add-ons like SMS communications are present, their placement alongside packages lacks clarity.
Recommendations:
Display Transparent Pricing: Even if offering a starting price or tiered options, visibility fosters trust and aids decision-making.
"An upfront way to get pricing would definitely help them a lot." [43:54]
Clarify Product Value: Ensure that the pricing page succinctly restates the product's purpose and benefits.
Ratings:
A listener poses a question about different pricing strategies. Bill Wilson and Karan Sud advocate for Value-Based Pricing as the most effective approach in the B2B SaaS landscape.
Bill Wilson's Insights:
Value-Based Pricing: Aligns pricing with the economic value delivered to the customer, focusing on metrics that matter to the client's success.
"Calculate the value, then figure out what percentage of that value to charge." [51:54]
Avoid Cost-Plus and Market-Based: These approaches often fail to capture the true value delivered and can misalign with customer perceptions.
Karan Sud's Perspective:
Quantifying Value: Emphasizes the importance of measuring how much revenue is generated or costs are saved for the customer.
"Value-based pricing is the magic that starts at understanding the value you deliver." [49:54]
Final Recommendation: Adopt value-based pricing by thoroughly understanding and quantifying the value your product provides to customers, ensuring alignment between price points and delivered benefits.
The episode underscores the critical importance of clarity and confidence on pricing pages. By implementing the FAST Framework, B2B marketers can create pricing pages that not only present prices but also effectively communicate value, build trust, and drive conversions.
Key Takeaways:
Notable Quotes:
This episode serves as an invaluable resource for B2B marketers aiming to refine their pricing pages. By integrating expert insights and real-world examples, listeners are equipped with actionable strategies to enhance their pricing strategies and drive meaningful business outcomes.