Not Only Luck.
An essay by John Melonakos

Give and Take of Website Data Collection

“If you make someone fill out a marketing form before you show them pricing, sorry, but you’re an idiot,” by @pfreet

“Ditto requiring credit card for a free trial,” by @gtryan

One of the decisions startups face at some point is where to draw the line in the give and take of website data collection. There are powerful motivations to move the line in each direction.

On the one hand gathering lead information is the life blood of the business. Without lead information, you can not do sales and are at the whim of passive incoming demand. On the other hand pushing website visitors to prematurely give up their information is pushy and can drive people away before they even get started.

I agree with the two opinions quoted above. For most businesses, it is best to provide pricing information publicly, not behind a registered login. Here are some thoughts:

  • You may find that website registrations decrease by exposing pricing. At AccelerEyes, we hid pricing behind login for some time and once we exposed it, we saw a small temporary dip in registration volume.
  • The dip however is actually somewhat beneficial. One of the biggest challenges in a sales process is to identify leads that are not worth the hassle because they will never buy your product or do anything valuable for your business. Assuming your price points are right, scaring people away by your pricing is beneficial, not harmful, because it filters out dead weight.
  • One of the most important things to accomplish in a sales process is an alignment with customers on the cost framework for doing business together. You want your pricing information available early, often, and wide so that the market and your customers adjust to your business model.
  • You can still collect information when you provide value to the customer, e.g. through whitepapers, free demos or webinars, free trials, etc.

Here is our pricing page.

What are your thoughts on the give and take of website data collection? What are your favorite pricing pages?

 

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From the conversation

Comments preserved from the original post.

Erik Gabrielson

Good post. I think SFDC has the SaaS pricing page mastered. It’s easy to digest and compare plans, simple and clean. http://www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp

The free trial with a credit card vs. without is something each business needs to test. In the past, I’ve found that a free trial without a credit card required can sure drive a lot of signups, but the conversion to a paid account was low. So in some cases the credit card can serve to identify leads that might actually become paying customers. Test, test, test!

Erik Gabrielson

Ryan Anderson

Hey, that’s me!

But seriously, I can’t remember ever signing up for a “free” trial that involved inputting a credit card unless I was already prepared to sign up and pay for the service. Mostly because I just assume that my card is going to get charged at least once anyway, and I don’t want to have to deal with the hassle of talking with the company and/or my CC company to get the charge removed.

However, there have been a number of times I’ve signed up for a truly free trial and converted in to a paying customer; often scrambling to rip open my wallet and give them my money after getting all of my information into the platform and really seeing how it operates.

melonakos

In reply to an earlier comment

SFDC does have a nice pricing page. I sat there looking at it for a long time analyzing it’s layout.