Services industry? Publish your pricing

tl;dr: If you're in the services industry, irrespective of whether you offer low pricing or are selling high-ticket services, publish your pricing on your website.

I've been doing banking & payments consulting for the better part of 12 years now. One thing I always held back was making our price public. Why? It had always been thing way in our industry. No one publishes their prices. It is impossible to do without first even gauging what the scope of work is, etc. and who the client is? are they fishing for information? is it a competitor? can I milk more from this client if it is a big company? etc.

All these were the excuses we gave ourselves for years. Then one day we started to look at where most of our efforts went, guess what? They went into that email thread up to where we outlay our pricing.

Many conversations stopped there (presumably they did not like the pricing, or could not afford it, or whatever their reason was). One thing was for sure. Everyone and I mean everyone wanted to know what the price was. That was their quintessential goal.

Any information that we may have collected, prior to that, is in many ways useless (even though it is intelligent data gathering), but if the person/startup cannot afford it or was just hunting for pricing reference, there is nothing much we can do with that. But we can spend our time on other tasks, etc.

So why not publish the price? We eventually did.

Just a side note, we sell high-ticket items. No one, not even a single competitor or competitor-like company published their prices. Even today, most don't.

My company on the other hand decided to do just the opposite.

Publish our pricing in excruciating detail.

Allow people to get what we would essentially call elementary pricing. You can then pick-and-choose like an a la carte menu on the services you want. When you publish your pricing, especially in an open-services consulting area, you will feel much more liberated. Your potential customers will respect your trade, and your competition will feel like they've just been hit in the gut.

Price transparency is a huge-deal in the open-services consulting industry. It also gives you a really good sense of what you are selling, an understanding of your time, and gives you a very good understanding of your menu of services (your boundary).

What was the end result for us? I wish we could have documented it more, in a numerical sense, perhaps we will in the future, it did shave off many many hours of our time responding to emails leading up to the price.

Now, anyone can see our pricing and then determine if they would like to engage with us or not.

If you're someone who has been sitting on the fence on this issue. Go ahead, try it. Publish your price and you will know what I mean.

Let me know your thoughts on this?

PS: I wrote a slightly updated version of this called: Why every Freelancer, Entrepreneur, and Solopreneur should publish their price sheet