The Price Question We Used to Dodge

The instinct to hide pricing is almost universal in professional services. What I've found, slowly and at cost, is that the buyers you lose by publishing your prices were never the right buyers. The ones who stay trust you more for it, and they're easier to work with.

There's a specific look a prospect gives you when you dodge the price question. I've been on the receiving end of it and I've caused it. Something quieter than frustration, and more final: a decision made.

I watched it happen on a call a few years ago. Our sales rep fielded the pricing question three times in twenty minutes. "Depends on the scope." "We'd need to understand your needs better." "Let's get to the proposal stage and we can look at numbers." The prospect's face didn't change, but something behind it did. By the time the call ended, the deal was already over.

I recognised the deflection because I'd taught it. We had a whole rationale for it: every project is different, we don't want to scare people off with a number before they understand the value. I believed all of that. What I didn't see was what the deflection communicated on the other side of the table.

What buyers hear when you won't talk about price

Marcus Sheridan builds the case for this in They Ask, You Answer with a disarming piece of logic. The moment you refuse to discuss price, you do not protect yourself from price comparison. You just ensure the comparison happens somewhere else, without you, with whoever shows up in Google when your prospect types "how much does [your type of service] cost."

The buyer does not stop wanting to know. They go and find out. And whoever answers the question gets the trust you forfeited.

Sheridan's case study is River Pools, a Virginia swimming pool company that published pricing on their website when every competitor refused to. Their theory was the same as ours: show the number and lose the lead. What actually happened was the opposite. They became the most visited pool company website in North America. Buyers who got to a conversation with River Pools had already decided they were a serious option. The price page pre-qualified them.

You're not preventing price comparison by hiding your fees. You're just making the comparison happen without you.

The transparency worked precisely because it was rare. When every other company in your space hides the number, being the one who shows it is a signal. It says: we have nothing to conceal, we think you're capable of understanding what things cost and why, and we'd rather work with people who've made an informed decision than people we've kept in the dark.

The buyers you lose are not the buyers you want

This was the hardest thing to accept. Publishing pricing will cost you leads. Some people will see the number and leave. We spent a long time assuming those were the leads we needed to save with a well-timed sales call. What I've come to understand is that they were mostly the leads that would have drained us.

The buyer who exits on price without engaging, without asking a question, without reading the context around the number: that buyer was looking for the cheapest option. There is nothing wrong with being the cheapest option if that is your strategy. But if you are building something based on quality, expertise, or relationship, that buyer was never going to be a good fit regardless of how the sales call went.

The buyer who stays, who reads the pricing page, who clicks through to understand what drives the cost, who books a call with context already in their head, comes in differently. They have already started forming a view that you are credible. They are not interrogating you about the number. They are ready to have a real conversation about whether you are the right fit for their specific situation.

The buyers you lose by being transparent about price were never yours. The ones who stay are far better for it.

I have had better client relationships since we started talking about price openly than at any point before. That is not coincidence.

What a pricing page actually looks like

Publishing pricing does not mean dropping a table on a page and hoping for the best. Sheridan is specific about this in They Ask, You Answer, and the companion book The Visual Sale builds it out further. The goal is not just to show a number. It is to explain the number: what drives it up, what brings it down, who it makes sense for, and who it does not.

The structure that works is closer to an explanation than a price list. Start with a range, because almost every professional service has a range. Then explain the variables. What choices does a client make that push them toward the top of that range? What would keep them toward the bottom? What is included at each level and what is not?

The final piece, and the one most companies skip, is the fit section. Who is this right for, and who is it not right for? Naming the situations where your service is not the right answer is one of the most trust-building things you can put on a page. It signals that you are thinking about the buyer's interest, not just your conversion rate.

We added a pricing page with that structure about eighteen months ago. Our sales cycle shortened. Not because we were cheaper, because we weren't, but because buyers arrived at calls knowing whether the budget was realistic. The early conversations became less about whether we were in range and more about whether we were the right team for the job.

The commodity trap, and how hiding price creates it

There is a specific dynamic Sheridan describes that I found uncomfortable to read because I recognised it so clearly. When buyers cannot get pricing information from you, they make decisions based on the only thing they can compare: the number they eventually extract, against the number your competitor quoted. You have, by refusing to contextualise your price, reduced the entire decision to price.

You wanted to avoid commodity competition. The deflection created it.

The company that publishes pricing with context around value, process, and fit has changed the conversation. The buyer is no longer comparing your number to a competitor's number. They are comparing your explanation to your competitor's silence. That is a very different contest.

I know the counter-argument. We tried it and it did not work, or we are too bespoke to publish pricing, or our competitors will use it against us. Some of those arguments apply in some markets. But in most professional services, the businesses that are most afraid of publishing pricing are the ones most at risk of the commodity trap they are trying to avoid.

The deflection signals uncertainty. The transparency signals confidence. Buyers notice both, whether they articulate it or not.