B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine » Not converting enough? Try price papers along with white papers

Not converting enough? Try price papers along with white papers

March 23rd, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Many – perhaps most – B2Bs now use one or more white papers as offers in their online lead-generation program. But are those papers giving their early-stage prospects everything they need?

Recent research by MarketingSherpa/Enquiro shows that pricing is the most desired information potential business customers look for on a vendor website. And we can just hear you now…

“Pricing information on our website?? Horrors!! Our product is hideously complex (and expensive), and revealing our price before prospects fully understand our value proposition would only scare them off.”

Not so, says Dale Underwood, in a great post on B2B Conversations Now. Early-stage prospects are trying to understand two things in parallel:

will this product benefit our business? and
can we budget for it in a reasonable timeframe?

So the pricing information they’re after is not to be used as a purchase criterion, but for budgetary purposes. And if they can’t get it on your site, they may resort to an analyst’s (potentially inaccurate) version; or worse, drop you from further consideration.

As Dale puts it, “Potential B2B customers need budgetary pricing much earlier in the sales cycle than most marketers realize.” He suggests B2Bs stop trying to fight this, and instead try providing what prospects need in the form of a “price paper”.

What’s a price paper look like? Well, it can be quite short, even 1-2 pages. And it has a very specific purpose: providing a strong offer to encourage conversion, while providing the prospect with useful budgetary pricing. There’s no reason to treat everything the company makes; just pick a subset, or perhaps your most frequently-sold offering. And if you already offer white papers, your sign-up/delivery process is already in place.

Dale has also provided a sample price paper here. It’s actually in two sections: the first provides the pricing info, while the second provides the prospect with a plan for their acquisition project …which creates the opportunity to begin influencing decision criteria that will become differentiators in the sales dialog to come.