Can Transparent Pricing Propel Growth?

Make your pricing open, make it clear, and make it fair. Kept coming back from customers, kept coming back in the data. Don't guard your pricing information like it's a treasure. Now I know some of you are thinking, oh Dharmesh. We're B2B, we're in a very niche industry. Every one of our prospective customers is a special little snowflake, and we create special little price quotes for each individual one. I get it, not every industry is the same, but that doesn't mean you can't provide some guidance around your pricing. We charge by the hour, we charge by the project, and it starts from $25,000 and goes up to $75,000. Give them some idea, and the reality is, It's out there anyway. People can find this stuff. There's this thing called the internet. The data substantiates this again. We asked people, if a company doesn't have pricing information, what do you do? 75% of the people said they would look for an alternative. Let's talk about clear pricing. Customers should not need a math degree to understand what they're going to pay for the product or service. Data once again says If you have confusing pricing, people don't buy as often. 69% said, yes, I would leave as a result of confusing pricing. Let's talk about fair pricing. Now there are 2 parts to being fair. There's the charge that's proportional to the value received, but there's also the charge me the same price that you charge other customers that are like me. Pricing should be programmatic. Don't make customers negotiate. They will reluctantly if they have to, but you should not make them. You can have discounts, they just need to be programmatic. So you can say we're running a promotion for the holiday, or it's a full moon, or this is a repeat customer, or this customer bought multiple products. All those are great reasons to to offer a discount, just don't offer different discounts to different people at the same point in time if they have a similar profile. In the future, that's a recipe in my mind for discrimination. There's going to be a time where people pay a higher price simply because of where they're from or what they look like. That's just bad. It's just bad business. Dharmesh Shah is a professor of business at the University of California, San Diego.