For years our pricing page said “Talk to sales”. Buyers did, and most of the first call was spent on a number we could have printed. Sales teams told me the same story every week: the prospect was keen, the call went well, and then it stalled on a question about cost that nobody wanted to answer in writing.
So we decided to put the prices on the website and answer every pricing question in the open. It felt risky. It turned out to be one of the most useful things the marketing team did that year.
What we published
We started by listening to forty recorded first calls and writing down every question about money. There were fewer than we expected. Five questions came up again and again, in slightly different words.
Three plans instead of five, with plain names a buyer could say out loud.
The limits that actually mattered, such as seats and storage, not every feature in a grid.
The five most common pricing questions, answered on the page in two sentences each.
A short note on discounts for charities and schools, so nobody had to ask.
What changed, and what didn’t
Sales questions about pricing dropped by a third within a quarter. The calls that were left were about fit, not cost, and those are the conversations a salesperson can actually win. Deal sizes did not fall, which was the fear that had kept the page hidden for so long.
Some things stayed the same. Large customers still wanted to negotiate, and that was fine. The public page gave them a starting point instead of a mystery.
If I did it again, I would publish sooner. We waited for a perfect page and lost a quarter of learning. A clear, slightly rough price page beats a beautiful “contact us” button every time.
A note on timing. We published the new page on a Tuesday, told sales the Friday before, and gave support a one-page guide with the five answers. Nobody was surprised by a question they had not seen, and that made the first week calm instead of hectic.
We also kept a simple log of every pricing question that still reached sales after launch. Each month we read it, picked the most common new question and added the answer to the page. After six months the log was almost empty, which told us the page was finally doing its job.
The bigger lesson was about trust. Buyers who can see a price early arrive at the first call already half-decided. They are not looking for a number; they are looking for a reason to say yes. That is a much better conversation to have, for them and for us.
Written by Emma Whitson
Product Marketing Lead in Manchester. I write these after the launch, not before.
