Marcos Rivera for Product Marketing Community

Speaker: Marcos Rivera

Marcos Rivera: Hi, I'm Marcos Rivera, founder and CEO of Pricing IO and author of the book Street Pricing. And I help tech companies figure out how to capture their value.

Marcos Rivera: You know, when it comes to publishing your pricing, it's not a, a universal yes or no answer to that. It really does depend and it depends on product market and customers, right? Like most things, but the thing, it really depends on when it comes to do I publish or not has a lot to do with the spend or the cost and the complexity behind the solution. And so if you think about large spends six figure contracts, you're talking annual implementation cycles, lots of services, lots of variability there. Uh oftentimes it's better not to publish. Just, just show them the options that you uh offer the packages and maybe even what the pricing depends on. And then from there, uh you can uh get a demo, get someone to uh understand better their needs and then price from there on the lower end where it's a $500 a year contract. Maybe it's a simple, you know, click, buy, get access right away product led. You're often uh better off publishing your pricing being very transparent around it. And most companies that live in the messy middle would probably want to do a hybrid. And what I mean by that is show your options, show your plans, uh show prices for the ones that are simple and straightforward. And then for the ones that are not, you can say as low as or starting from or your price depends on number of locations, number of users, number of uh amount of storage, whatever that may be. So you can be transparent on what drives it on the high end, start the conversation on the low end, just publish the price and keep it simple.

Marcos Rivera: I think some of the best pricing pages out there do a good job of just keeping it simple and keeping that mental load low. And what's happening is as you're evaluating a pricing page, most folks are evaluating that page in the pattern of a letter F. So they start on the left side, scan across, come back, scan down and then scan across again. And so if you lay out the page, so as they scan, they get the bits of information that they need to start processing and making a decision and it normally lands in these five questions. And so what you're trying to answer with a good pricing page, uh First of all is what is this right? So you want to make sure that you're super clear on what your product uh actually is and not put a lot of buzzwords around and try to make that as straightforward as possible. So what is it? And then the second natural one as well is this for me? Right? And so trying to be super clear on who's the ideal buyer? Who is this for? And uh and that way that person can connect, right? Way and stay on the page. Um The third one is really around. OK? If I use this, what's gonna happen? What's the, the aspiration? Right? So the idea is if I know what it is and it's for me and if I use it, I get the outcome that I want. So be very clear on the Roy the benefits and the value uh on that page then comes, well, all right, how much this thing is gonna cost me? Can I afford it? And that usually comes in the form of either giving some level of magnitude some Roy, what the pricing depends on or even some prices themselves where appropriate. And then the last one is how do I get started? And how I get started could be a free trial, it could be dive right in and get a demo, whatever that may be. So you start off with, remember that pattern of a letter F. So your layout is very nicely and easy to scan and consume. Now you have is uh what is this product? Is it really for me? What happens if I use it? How much would it cost? And how do I get started if you answer those questions almost in that order? That's a great pricing page.

Marcos Rivera: You know, the pricing page is the second most visited page on your website. So you got to pay a lot of attention to it, make sure it's well designed. Um I've seen a lot of mistakes, a lot of great ones. I would say the three most common mistakes that uh are really key to avoid. Uh starts with the headline or blowing the headline, right? That top line should be inspirational. Often, I'll see something like choose your pricing or simple pricing. It's not really helping. You're still in the selling mode, you're still trying to get a conversion. So put something there usually from the product page or home page that's uh really giving the customer that idea of what they want, which is, you know, let's let's cut your cycle time in half or say goodbye to TPS reports. So if you do, if you do that and you update that heading, you are on your way. The second thing is publishing these large gigantic price numbers like in this huge font, you don't need 88 point font to be simple and transparent. So scale it back. Normal size font, use some white space around it, you know, make sure you get rid of decimal places or anything that's confusing or adds cognitive load and just publish the clear price. You know, it doesn't need to be gigantic. The third mistake is around identifying that target buyer or user. So this is a maybe colorless statement of uh best plan for companies who want to grow. Uh Most companies want that try to be more specific. You know, this plan is great for multi location operators. We really want a lot of data, something like that, something that really tells the story of uh the plan that it's really for them. So if you get the heading right, get those font sizes in line and really get clear and crisp on who the target plans are for. You'll be well on your way with your pricing page.