In the summer of 1999, more than 30,000 people climbed into their cars and drove to Spring Hill, Tennessee. Some caravanned for days, from Boston, from Seattle, from Miami. They weren’t going to a Britney Spears concert. They were going to visit a factory that built their car.
The car was a Saturn. And the thing people loved wasn’t the horsepower, trust me. It was the pricing approach. Saturn sold cars at a set price. No haggling, no back office, no sales guy wandering off to “run the numbers” or talk to his sales manager.
The brand is gone now, shut down in GM’s 2009 collapse for reasons that had nothing to do with how it priced. The cars were ugly but the pricing idea was not.
That Saturn idea was radical back then, but not so much now. Now you build your new car online, price it, finance it and can have it dropped in your driveway without speaking to a human. The information moved to the customer’s side of the table.
Airfare stopped being a call to a travel agent decades ago. Room pricing for hotels, no calling around required. Contact sales for software? Nope, online. Eyeglasses, diamonds, mortgage rates, all online now.
From furnaces to funerals, people are hunting for prices online right now, and we see it every month in Google’s own data. “How much does X cost” is fast becoming one of the most searched questions out there.
5 Reasons to get your pricing online:
- Give the people what they want. I can give you countless survey results suggesting that people want to know and actively search for pricing online before placing a call. Boring. Just think about the last time you were going to purchase a product/service. Did you look for pricing online? How important was that to you BEFORE you made the call?
- They really DON’T want to talk to you. “Call for a quote.” No thanks. We’re breeding introverts like never before. The current and previous couple of generations would rather do anything than make a phone call. They want to find the answer, fill the form, get the number and book the time without speaking to a soul.
- AI can’t recommend what it can’t read. Intent-based search is exploding because AI scrapes pricing straight off the web and hands people an answer. Meta’s new Muse agent will shop, confirm a total and check out for you. Google, Amazon and OpenAI are building the same thing. No price online, nothing to scrape, and you’re not in the answer. The next step is already here: online estimators that ask a few questions and return a real range on the spot.
- Stop the kicking. Pricing online is the best tire-kicker screen ever invented. How many hours do you and your staff burn quoting jobs you already know are going nowhere?
- “If you’re not first, you’re last”. Saturn proved people reward whoever is brave enough to just show the number. It works one town at a time, and not only in trades. Menswear, florists, law offices, gyms, anything. The first to post an honest range becomes the obvious choice, and makes everyone who hides look like they have something to hide.
I know what you’re going to say: “I don’t want my competitors seeing my pricing.” In any market, they already know it. They secret-shopped you years ago, or a customer showed them your quote when trying to get a better price. Stop kidding yourself, you know your competitors’ prices and they know yours. Move on.
A generation ago, a real car price without setting foot on the lot was unthinkable. Today it’s a Tuesday. Your turn isn’t coming. It’s here, and your customers are now expecting it. Are you going to give them what they are looking for?
Jason Clayton, Better Mousetrap Marketing
