How do I decide whether to publish pricing on my company's website?

Deeply understand your target customer and their buying preferences. How do they want to purchase from you? Will knowing the price up front help in the buying process? Are you losing out on prospects because you aren't transparent about the price?

Start with customer research and let the customer guide you to a solution.

This is a tough question as it causes a lot of fear especially for salespeople who think it will limit their ability to maintain their current average selling prices but in fact studies have shown that buyers want to see pricing and that vendors who pit pricing on their website actually engender more trust than those who don't. You might even pop to the top of a prospect's shortlist if they can get pricing on your website as having them there might give you opportunities to show them other things on the website and it might drive more traffic to your website than a competitor's website. In general, so many studies have shown that more and more buyers want to self-serve or self-research and so today I would definitely veer more towards putting pricing (or at least packaging) on your website than not.

It's become a trend today to publish pricing pages, 75% of companies do. But this is by no means a virtue.

The following is an excerpt from my book, Price To Scale.

"When you have a large market with a high degree of homogeneity, it is feasible to emulate other SaaS companies and publish the complete pricing structure online (replete with packages and prices) to help you scale your sales engine and maximum value from the market. On the other hand, if your market size is limited (say Fortune 100 Retailers) or heterogeneous (say, across Retail, Pharma, Airlines, etc.), the call is more subjective.

I've worked in enterprise SaaS companies that have opted not to publish any pricing publicly to give their Sales teams more ability to sell a targeted offer to their prospects. In those cases, the packages were defined internally, but there was lower price transparency which dissuaded package comparisons and enabled them to extract requisite value from prospects that had differing willingess to pay. In this specific context, sales reps appreciated their ability to offer their prospects the right package without necessarily getting into the 'shop-a-package' discussion."