#216: Website Teardown | How to Nail your B2B Pricing Page with Emily Kramer (Co-Founder & Advisor of MKT1), Bill Wilson (CEO & Founder of Pace Pricing), and Karan Sood (Director Sales Operations at Rakuten Kobo)

Is there anything more terrifying for a marketer than having to work on the pricing page? How do you handle packaging, listing out features, and deciding whether to put the actual price, or “contact sales”?In this session from our Ultimate Roast of B2B Pricing Pages, Emily Kramer (Co-Founder & Advisor of MKT1), Bill Wilson (CEO & Founder of Pace Pricing), and Karan Sood (Director Sales Operations at Rakuten Kobo) share their secrets to a killer B2B pricing page. Then, they do a live teardown of real pricing pages that you can learn from.

Emily, Bill, and Karan also cover:

• How to make your pricing page clear and transparent
• The most common mistakes SaaS companies make with pricing
• How to structure pricing tiers and communicate value effectively

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Introduction to Bill, Emily, and Karan
  
• (02:40) - - Why pricing pages are critical to conversions
  
• (04:53) - - The FAST framework
  
• (06:51) - - The four key functions of a pricing page
  
• (10:44) - - Common mistakes companies make with pricing page clarity
  
• (13:59) - - The role of social proof and risk reversal in building trust
  
• (16:12) - - Should B2B companies display pricing on their website?
  
• (18:46) - - How to structure pricing tiers for clarity and conversion
  
• (21:03) - - Live pricing page roast: Mention
  
• (33:53) - - Live pricing page roast: Flagsmith
  
• (42:06) - - Live pricing page roast: Contact Monkey
  
• (45:20) - - Why request pricing forms create unnecessary friction
  
• (47:41) - - Should you display pricing if your competitors don’t?
  
• (49:43) - - The importance of value-based pricing in B2B
  
• (54:09) - - Final takeaways and recommendations

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Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode brought to you by Navattic.B2B websites are filled with too much story, too much narrative these days. You visit a website and you have no idea what the product does and how it works.This is why Navattic has become a popular product for B2B Marketers. They help you build interactive demos so you can give buyers a real look at the product before they ever talk to sales.
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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:

You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Danielle Messler [00:00:17]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:00:44]:

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 Sood, who is director of sales operations at Rakuten and Kobo, and he publishes a ton of great pricing page content on LinkedIn. So without further ado, I'm going to get them on stage. Hey, guys. How you doing?

Karan Sood [00:01:08]:

Great.

Bill Wilson [00:01:08]:

Hey, how are you?

Danielle Messler [00:01:10]:

All right. Well, Bill, Karan.

Bill Wilson [00:01:11]:

Hi.

Danielle Messler [00:01:12]:

Why don't you tell me about just a little bit about yourselves before we dig into this?

Bill Wilson [00:01:16]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:01:38]:

What about you, Karan?

Karan Sood [00:01:40]:

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.

Karan Sood [00:02:08]:

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 [00:02:21]:

I just like.

Danielle Messler [00:02:21]:

Emily!.

Emily Kramer [00:02:22]:

I'm Emily. I've led marketing at a number of startups and been the first ish marketer about four times. So it 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.

Emily Kramer [00:03:04]:

So it brings it kind of all together. But 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.

Danielle Messler [00:03:29]:

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. Right? 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.

Danielle Messler [00:03:49]:

So that's sweet.

Bill Wilson [00:03:50]:

That's great. 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.

Bill Wilson [00:04:17]:

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 it's 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 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.

Bill Wilson [00:04:55]:

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 lots 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.

Bill Wilson [00:05:27]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:05:55]:

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 can need to nail are those. The next thing around clarity is the feature descriptions themselves.

Bill Wilson [00:06:39]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:07:04]:

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 ways.

Bill Wilson [00:07:36]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:08:01]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:08:15]:

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 direct operations at a construction company.

Bill Wilson [00:08:49]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:09:20]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:10:12]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:11:18]:

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 to a 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.

Bill Wilson [00:11:43]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:12:03]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:12:35]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:12:57]:

That's a really good point.

Bill Wilson [00:12:58]:

And then make it really, really for a quick second.

Danielle Messler [00:13:01]:

Just because we've had this question a couple 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 [00:13:31]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:13:46]:

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've got it sort of laid out.

Bill Wilson [00:14:06]:

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 you're 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.

Bill Wilson [00:14:36]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:14:48]:

Emily, what do you think? I know you have opinions.

Emily Kramer [00:14:50]:

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 going to, competitors are going to 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 up front.

Emily Kramer [00:15:30]:

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.

Emily Kramer [00:16:12]:

And so really get to like the root cause of like what's causing some of these objections.

Danielle Messler [00:16:17]:

Karan, what about you?

Karan Sood [00:16:18]:

Yeah, I think they mentioned a very good point about mechanism using your pricing page.

Karan Sood [00:16:23]:

Right.

Karan Sood [00:16:24]:

Like a lot of time what happens is there's just too many parameters 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 to give someone a reference point when they're browsing, I think you 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 bigger company, if you.

Karan Sood [00:16:48]:

Look at like I'm a big fan.

Karan Sood [00:16:49]:

Of Atlassian, for example, 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.

Danielle Messler [00:17:12]:

Awesome. All right. Sorry to interrupt you, Bill.

Bill Wilson [00:17:14]:

No, that's fine.

Danielle Messler [00:17:15]:

We had a lot of questions about that. It's a hot topic, we needed to need to address it. So let's move on and then we'll get into some roasting.

Bill Wilson [00:17:22]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:17:43]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:18:07]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:18:32]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:18:55]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:19:20]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:19:39]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:19:53]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:20:13]:

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.

Karan Sood [00:20:29]:

I think right off of that.

Emily Kramer [00:20:31]:

Oh, go ahead, go ahead, Graham.

Karan Sood [00:20:33]:

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 on the solo to the next iteration of the customer or the Persona, I think there's probably a room for improvement there.

Emily Kramer [00:21:03]:

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 41, 78. Like, it's so weird. So, like it's just 4183, 149. It just like feels scammy. I don't know. Just like, give me a real.

Emily Kramer [00:21:22]:

Right.

Bill Wilson [00:21:23]:

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 [00:21:39]:

Yeah.

Bill Wilson [00:21:39]:

And then just let the other one fall where it may. But with the one you're going to lead with, if it's yearly, then make that one.

Emily Kramer [00:21:44]:

You can tell it was an aftercloud. 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 we don't 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 price fairly and when I see prices like this I feel like it's fun.

Bill Wilson [00:22:11]:

Yeah.

Karan Sood [00:22:12]:

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 49, 41 is a very random price point. And 83 as well. I would say if you are in 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.

Karan Sood [00:22:39]:

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 it's best out based upon the discount that you want to perceive. Discount. You want to give out this one month or two months or whatever that discount is.

Bill Wilson [00:22:52]:

Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.

Emily Kramer [00:22:53]:

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.

Emily Kramer [00:23:17]:

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 now. 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.

Emily Kramer [00:23:38]:

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 is 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.

Danielle Messler [00:24:10]:

No, we love it. That's what we're here for.

Bill Wilson [00:24:12]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:24:29]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:24:57]:

The get a demo in the header drives me crazy. And request a demo. Like, just pick one. Just get a demo. It's 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 in the box, but we need to make sure that it's the same.

Bill Wilson [00:25:10]:

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. Yeah, like, you know, we've got 10 users, 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.

Bill Wilson [00:25:33]:

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 [00:26:01]:

I'm surprised that you said that you like the buy now bill because I had the opposite reaction in the chat before you said that. Which is like, who's gonna buy now when there's a trial? So why have it there converts? I'm not, I guess I'm just.

Bill Wilson [00:26:13]:

Yeah, exactly. I guess that's something 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 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 AB tests at that level work. Generally, AB tests in my opinion don't work unless you're getting lots and lots and lots and lots of traffic.

Emily Kramer [00:26:34]:

But yeah, 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 [00:26:54]:

Yeah, skip the trial and get a discount.

Emily Kramer [00:26:57]:

That's what you would Say that is much more succinct. Thank you, Bill.

Bill Wilson [00:27:02]:

I will say I also, I 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.

Danielle Messler [00:27:30]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:27:43]:

If you can't, that's easy. Yep.

Danielle Messler [00:27:45]:

All right, Karan, you go first. What do you think?

Karan Sood [00:27:47]:

I think it clearly needs a value proposition. What is scaling for scaling the value as you go from one plan to another. Like is it the alerts that scale it? Is it dimensions? That's scale is the user, like 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 just didn't show any add ons, which I felt was a missing piece. But anyways, I think it's like a mode. Like it's five and a half. Six is where I would land because I think it's missing some key things.

Danielle Messler [00:28:14]:

And let us know what you think in the chat too. Scale of 1 to 10. All right, Bill, you're up.

Bill Wilson [00:28:20]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:28:28]:

I think you're out of 65.

Bill Wilson [00:28:31]:

65.

Danielle Messler [00:28:32]:

65%.

Bill Wilson [00:28:33]:

Yeah, 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.

Bill Wilson [00:28:56]:

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 light box and then make those headers sticky. Well, that's the things I would do. And of course, feature differentiation up top.

Danielle Messler [00:29:11]:

Lots of things.

Emily Kramer [00:29:12]:

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 the pricing page, like, people are going there to get information and get it quickly. I 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, like so.

Emily Kramer [00:29:39]:

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 going to give it a six, maybe a seven, has pricing on it.

Emily Kramer [00:30:09]:

And like, you know, the bar is low. So it's a seven.

Karan Sood [00:30:13]:

The bar is low if pricing. The pricing I think is default.

Emily Kramer [00:30:16]:

So I reviewed so many pricing stations, 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 because it's good.

Danielle Messler [00:30:29]:

Yeah, great. Cool. We're moving on. Next one, we're going to Flagsmith. All right, all right, Flagsmith. What do we got here?

Karan Sood [00:30:38]:

Yeah, 0 of 45 and then Enterprise right away. They don't leave a lot too imagine.

Danielle Messler [00:30:45]:

So Another toggle.

Emily Kramer [00:30:47]:

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 places plans into three boxes. Like if you go back up.

Bill Wilson [00:30:58]:

Yeah, it looks that way, doesn't it?

Emily Kramer [00:31:00]:

Three box and it just kind of hurts.

Bill Wilson [00:31:02]:

I don't. 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.

Karan Sood [00:31:13]:

Honestly, I didn't even think they were plans. I thought they were just the way they implement.

Emily Kramer [00:31:17]:

They are.

Karan Sood [00:31:17]:

Yeah. So yes, that's why I said it looks so squished.

Emily Kramer [00:31:22]:

Yeah.

Danielle Messler [00:31:23]:

Yeah.

Bill Wilson [00:31:24]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:31:47]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:32:03]:

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 $45 a month. I'm not sure. And of course the 50,000 requests per month, is that a hard limit? That's my question.

Bill Wilson [00:32:25]:

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 $45 a month 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 [00:33:05]:

So, like a platform and a usage fee or just want to.

Bill Wilson [00:33:11]:

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 allow people to grow money on the table there.

Karan Sood [00:33:37]:

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 cool.

Bill Wilson [00:33:50]:

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 you'll have.

Karan Sood [00:33:59]:

You can go over.

Bill Wilson [00:34:00]:

All right. Yeah, I think if that's the case, put that higher up. Just put $7 per 100,000 requests right in the top and start for free.

Karan Sood [00:34:09]:

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 you're here to choose a plan.

Karan Sood [00:34:34]:

What exactly are you delivering? I think that's miss here as well.

Bill Wilson [00:34:38]:

Yeah, they're too close to their own problem.

Emily Kramer [00:34:40]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:35:24]:

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 [00:35:32]:

Key thing I would change is just what I said. 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?

Danielle Messler [00:35:51]:

I did not see any.

Emily Kramer [00:35:54]:

No. 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 in that enterprise box. It's just really stressing me out.

Karan Sood [00:36:06]:

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 it 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 [00:36:31]:

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 than. Tell me and tell me how much it costs right there.

Bill Wilson [00:36:51]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:37:23]:

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.

Karan Sood [00:37:27]:

Segmentation, 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 that.

Bill Wilson [00:37:42]:

Great.

Danielle Messler [00:37:43]:

All right, gonna move on. Thank you guys for roasting that in the chat.

Bill Wilson [00:37:49]:

Write some relief with that 4.7 people.

Emily Kramer [00:37:52]:

You're the guy that prices products at 41 or $47 instead of 50 with your rating. Now I'm broken.

Danielle Messler [00:38:03]:

Be fair to Bill. He's got this whole intense scorecard.

Emily Kramer [00:38:07]:

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 briefly. Super hard to unroast.

Bill Wilson [00:38:14]:

I will round. I will round up from now on. In fact, the rest of them are round numbers.

Danielle Messler [00:38:18]:

No, I like this.

Emily Kramer [00:38:21]:

You roast and then you thaw. Like, what's the unroast? I don't know. Working on my.

Danielle Messler [00:38:28]:

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.

Karan Sood [00:38:51]:

Well, I'm assuming. I'm assuming they have a filtering mechanism within CPA that if you click the first, the lowest tier is going to a different channel and if you click the enterprise it's going to a different channel because if it's not they might as well make it one plan and just call it called sales because right now it's like call sales, call sales, call sales.

Danielle Messler [00:39:11]:

I clicked on it and I think it's going to send me.

Bill Wilson [00:39:13]:

It's going to be the same. It's the same place.

Emily Kramer [00:39:15]:

It's the same place 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 designizing that sort of like a best practice. You have an add on it spans across right underneath the package grid. Yeah.

Emily Kramer [00:39:38]:

So the add on is the SMS communications and so that's like kind of clear and done. Okay.

Bill Wilson [00:39:43]:

You click View pricing and it takes you to another page.

Danielle Messler [00:39:46]:

But we have pricing for this but.

Bill Wilson [00:39:48]:

Nothing else 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 [00:39:54]:

Yeah, I guess that's true.

Bill Wilson [00:39:55]:

What am I doing here? 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 [00:40:09]:

Yeah, I guess that could be more clear. I think the thing I find most ironic is that the very top it says you're pricing your way.

Bill Wilson [00:40:15]:

I know.

Karan Sood [00:40:16]:

And there's no pricing.

Emily Kramer [00:40:17]:

So I'm 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 [00:40:38]:

The other monkey shape messaging platform.

Emily Kramer [00:40:41]:

Yeah.

Karan Sood [00:40:42]:

And that's because their scaling mechanism is easy. Not easy, but at least they scale with email 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 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.

Emily Kramer [00:41:07]:

Yeah.

Karan Sood [00:41:07]:

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 [00:41:25]:

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.

Emily Kramer [00:41:47]:

You're making me fill out a form and it says request 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.

Emily Kramer [00:42:05]:

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. And then fill out a form.

Bill Wilson [00:42:11]:

Yeah. I mean, 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.

Bill Wilson [00:42:29]:

Right. Like the reason they're asking all those questions about number employees. 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.

Bill Wilson [00:42:41]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:43:09]:

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 [00:43:16]:

I think it's interesting. I get two pieces of very conflicting feedback when I 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.

Emily Kramer [00:43:46]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:43:54]:

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 [00:44:00]:

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, 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 [00:44:26]:

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 [00:44:34]:

Competitive advantage.

Karan Sood [00:44:35]:

Absolutely.

Bill Wilson [00:44:36]:

Yeah, I know. Lots.

Emily Kramer [00:44:39]:

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 [00:44:47]:

So if you want to disrupt your little corner of the world in SaaS and everybody literally has their pricing hidden, just do that.

Danielle Messler [00:44:53]:

Ron, what do you think?

Bill Wilson [00:44:54]:

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. And then you can level the playing field after that.

Karan Sood [00:45:06]:

Yeah, I mean when you price a product, you price it on value delivered.

Bill Wilson [00:45:09]:

Right.

Karan Sood [00:45:10]:

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 companies. 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.

Karan Sood [00:45:50]:

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 Bill and Emily also talked about. The just main thing that you need to start doing.

Bill Wilson [00:46:11]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:46:28]:

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?

Karan Sood [00:46:38]:

So obviously like unless you're selling widgets and cookies. You need to stay away from cost plus, at least in the SaaS space. 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 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.

Karan Sood [00:47:07]:

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 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.

Karan Sood [00:47:41]:

That's the only way to go, I would say. Plus they love it.

Bill Wilson [00:47:46]:

Yeah. And I mean I think 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 is 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.

Bill Wilson [00:48:24]:

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. Very hard to get to.

Danielle Messler [00:48:45]:

Awesome. 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, I'll go first. 25, 6 out of 10.

Bill Wilson [00:48:57]:

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.

Bill Wilson [00:49:16]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:49:24]:

All right. Karan, what about you?

Karan Sood [00:49:25]:

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.

Karan Sood [00:49:47]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:49:58]:

So bring us home three.

Emily Kramer [00:50:02]:

Three even I just don't a pricing page without 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.

Emily Kramer [00:50:37]:

So the three. I know that there's probably, you know, challenges a content monkey 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.

Danielle Messler [00:50:54]:

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 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.

Danielle Messler [00:51:32]:

What are they? Pricing strategy reviews.

Emily Kramer [00:51:34]:

Bill.

Bill Wilson [00:51:35]:

Yeah, Pricing strategy review.

Danielle Messler [00:51:37]:

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. Dropped him in the chat.

Danielle Messler [00:52:02]:

And thank you, guys.

Bill Wilson [00:52:03]:

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.

Danielle Messler [00:52:20]:

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. I'm just so thrilled with how it turned out. Some fun housekeeping stuff.

Danielle Messler [00:52:41]:

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 Gerhardt [00:53:10]:

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Dave Gerhardt [00:53:38]:

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 exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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