What is the best way to display your Pricing: Interactive or Traditional -
The way you display SaaS pricing shouldn't be an afterthought. It must be an ongoing method that's engaging and straightforward for potential customers.
Pricing is one of the most effective ways of establishing trust with your prospects, and when it is done correctly, builds momentum in the selling funnel. It can be among the most personal, engaging and sustainable elements of your sales process.
The first step towards developing this kind of experience is to examine your methods used for creating, displaying and distribute your price.
The ultimate antagonist is revealed in this story: your regular Office Suite software.
If you're using the following Office Suite software to display SaaS pricing, it's time to give your pricing a refresh. Read on for expert advice about how you can make the change.
What NOT to do: Traditional Ways to Display Pricing
1. Utilizing Sheets to Display SaaS Pricing
The things you need to make changes to: Using sheets does not show professionalism. They are dull and extremely manual - and your pricing must be different. It's not personal when using a sheet, and personalization is critical in building relationships with prospective customers. It's easy to get overwhelmed by numbers and they're time-consuming to build.
Advice from a Seller That Changed Mike Wright, Co-Founder and CEO at MESH/diversity moved from using spreadsheets and a pricing tool that is interactive. The company's CEO says:
"Leveraging an instrument for pricing can be a game changer because it allows you to be consistent, it lets you have the history of your progress in your hands which allows the user to take decisions when you're moving forward based on that historical data and in a more efficient method than the old plans or looking through older versions of your spreadsheets."
The things you need to consider: Try incorporating personalized choices that let your customers to choose the appropriate solution for them, when showing SaaS pricing plans. To avoid the labour of spreadsheets, you can use software that saves all your previous quotes so you are able to easily import the pricing of your competitors and instantly populate the calculations of prospects. That way, you no longer need to spend the time to create spreadsheets and manually doing the math each time you make a new purchase.
2. Use Slide Decks to display SaaS Pricing
The next slide...next Slide... Next pricing strategy. Please.
The things you need to make changes to: Sending decks to prospects seems like an easy way to showcase your pricing in a pleasing layout. While they may seem appealing, decks are one-dimensional. By using slide decks you are throwing away opportunities to gather information and make informed follow-ups. Your pricing must give you an advantage edge and let you know how many times your prospect views your pricing, and ensure they fully understand the pricing that is being displayed.
Tips from a Seller That ChangedStefan Kollenberg, co-founder of Crescendo, switched from using slide decks to a pricing tool that provides insights and real-time analytics. Kollenberg says:
"I will have my prices on the back of a sales deck on one slide. I never knew if [the buyers] came into the deck in order to alter it, select various options, or browse through the various levels of service we were offering. It's like you need to get as much data you can on what pricing worked, what didn't .">
Consider these things: Without data from previous deals, you will not be able to make adjustments for future customers or know the best way to serve your prospective clients. Consider using a system that allows you to gain insight in real time and keep track of all things price.
3. Using Email for Displaying SaaS Pricing
How many emails do you get each day? We all have one answer, too many.
What should you alter: Scrolling through endless emails trying to find the right information can be time-consuming and frankly irritating. Communicating your pricing through email can prolong the duration required to conclude the transaction, since it is one of the least effective methods of communicating pricing.
A Seller's Advice who switched: Jack Hannah, Sales Team Leader at LinkSquares, switched from using email for pricing communication to an interactive tool for pricing. The sales rep says:
"A large portion of our conversations took place in a conversational manner and then followed with an email summation to ensure sure both parties understood what we were actually talking about. Now, we can effectively share our screens and have a much formal, organized conversation regarding price. This, I think [helps create] more clear conversations that require far less exchanges ."
What you should consider: Avoid the headache and create seamless communication with your prospects making use of a software designed for swift and efficient communication. This tool will enable your clients to locate what they are looking for fast, but it'll also display all of the custom pricing as well as pertinent information clearly.
4. Using Collaborative Software for Displaying SaaS Pricing
Collaboration tools and software offer undisputed value to your selling process. However, if you're misusing the software for your primary price display device, you're bound to be in an out.
What you should make changes to: Collaborative tools such as those used for internal communication and brainstorming, aren't suitable to display SaaS pricing. Misusing tools in an attempt to show your prices is a sure way of making a non-sympathetic presentation and confusing your prospect. There are a myriad of tools made to help, but using tools for a price use that was not designed for pricing you are automatically going to run into many difficulties that can cause a problem.
A Seller's Advice Who Switched: Mike Pinkus, Partner at ConnectCPA, once used collaboration software to build an interactive pricing experience before he switched to a pricing platform designed with interactivity at its core. The seller says:
"We were using an application that wasn't specially designed to be a sales platform. It definitely lacked professionalism because we were using it to serve a different purpose. After switching, we have that cleanliness as well as professionalism. All is tidy and designed according to the need for selling ."
What you should consider: Misusing software may seem like a time and cost-saving option however, in the long time, it can create more problems than it can solve. Making your pricing procedures more flexible with programs that are designed to meet the specific requirements of your business while providing a better buying experience for potential buyers.
5. Utilizing PDFs for Displaying SaaS Pricing
We've all resorted to using the good old classic PDF. You may have had your designer make it all branded and pretty, but unfortunately, it is really a stagnant and unproductive way of displaying SaaS pricing.
The things you need to change: Prospects can't engage using the PDFs that you send the same way as they would with slide decks. After your prospective customer downloads the PDF file, there's no way to determine how many times it was received or the amount of times it's been opened. Making edits or changes is a tedious process that takes up a significant amount of time.
A Word from a Seller Who Switched:Ross Simmonds, Founder of Foundation Marketing Foundation Marketing, brought his pricing to life by switching from static PDFs to dynamic pricing.
"We have a PDF that outlines three different pricing tiers around what we can do to serve our customers. We'd edit that PDFeach time a potential client arrived. We would always try to create ourselves and our spreadsheets beautiful, however in doing this, we couldn't provide as much details. It's no longer necessary to ruffle between all of these different tools to put together a package We can utilize Interactive Quotes ."
Consider these: The only interactive benefit PDFs offer is the ability to sign on the dotted line, but a truly interactive experience has many more benefits than just signing to close. Use pricing software that will provide your customer with an experience that is personalized and interactive starting with initial pricing discussions and ending with final signatures.
How Should I Display my SaaS Pricing?
Pricing shouldn't be like a mess, or a chore to the people you're trying to sell it to.
The future of displaying SaaS pricing is to provide an engaging, personalized experience that is straightforward for potential customers to connect with and grasp. It means that the relationship you have with the office software that displays SaaS pricing should be ended for a complete overhaul of the SaaS pricing plan.
For a fresh approach to display SaaS pricing, you should focus on finding a pricing tool which is suited to your requirements. The three areas we suggest prioritizing in your search for the perfect tool are
1. Utilizing a software that can make your work easier through reducing your time consumption, increasing your productivity and your team's efficiency in presenting your pricing to your prospects
2. Create an engaging and interactive purchasing experience for potential customers
3. Gaining an understanding of your pricing's performance using real-time data analysis.
Today more than ever now, it's important to cut down on time and be efficient. So forget old complicated and outdated pricing. It is possible and easy to adopt a fresh pricing process that will help you work smarter, not harder, while increasing your chances of closing deals faster.
