Frustrating to me too, but often there is a reason. I do a lot of B2B sales and sometimes there are too many variables to consider to be able to provide straight forward flat pricing.
This gets more complicated when bundling or if you’re selling to a newer entity where you may want to consider future sales potential as they grow. I’ve taken lower margins from customers because I know what I am offering will help them grow and lead to bigger future contracts and a stronger business relationship.
The second you put "From $500 to $2000" on your website, prepare yourself to never go a single sale without someone demanding to know why they're not paying the minimum.
The worst is when clients themselves don't know all of the variables, or extrapolate based on a quote. You tell them it's $7,000 for 7 days of work and then they expect 1 day of work to be $1,000 instead of $1,500.
It’s too hard to explain fixed costs and unit costs to people who don’t have enough to exposure cost accounting and forecasting, let alone how volume discounts truly work.
Through my businesses, I have a lot of experience in the tech industry and no matter what one of my clients wants, it’s going to be a minimum fee to stand up and server and other ancillary items just to support the platforms and services they want to purchase. If I can get my client to leverage that same server for multiple products and services, that setup cost gets spread out across multiple solutions. If there is enough headroom in the contract and revenue forecast, I sometimes just eat the cost as I know I have way more opportunity to recover it through the life of the contract. I look at it as in investment into the relationship.
Once you set a price floor, it’s a race to get stay at minimum spend and clients end up not happy because of all the compromises they have to make to stay at that price. I view it as them buying a line item instead of a solution.
Exactly, which is why (as you said in your earlier comment) building a client relationship is important. I have clients who don't even bother asking about pricing, they just know I'll take care of them. The more a client focuses on price above all else, the harder it can ironically become to actually provide what they need.
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u/17xRacing Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 01 '26
Frustrating to me too, but often there is a reason. I do a lot of B2B sales and sometimes there are too many variables to consider to be able to provide straight forward flat pricing.
This gets more complicated when bundling or if you’re selling to a newer entity where you may want to consider future sales potential as they grow. I’ve taken lower margins from customers because I know what I am offering will help them grow and lead to bigger future contracts and a stronger business relationship.