Since starting Turris, I’ve plunged headfirst into the world of B2B marketing and sales. One thing quickly became clear: while there’s a wealth of advice on how to best run a sales process, not all of it is put into practice—especially when it comes to pricing transparency. Despite the common wisdom to make pricing clear and accessible, many B2B and enterprise insurtech companies still hide their prices behind layers of sales processes. As a former customer, I found this frustrating, and it’s something we’re determined to change at Turris.
Opaque pricing is a major headache. Requiring lengthy conversations and demos before revealing the cost forces customers to evaluate value without all the information, souring the sales process and making it seem like the vendor is trying to extract maximum value. Now that we provide solutions in the insurance space, we’re committed to a different approach—treating customers as we wished to be treated.
The Benefits of Fair, Transparent, and Clear Pricing
At Turris, we believe in offering a valuable product at a fair price. Our product should grow in value over time (if we’re doing our job and keep making it better), and our pricing should reflect that. If we keep our pricing transparent, then our customers can vote with their dollars if we’re keeping our side of the bargain. Additionally, there are other benefits of transparent pricing that we believe lead to a better overall relationship.
A Straightforward Buying Experience: Customers shouldn’t need 30-40 hours of their team’s time to discover that a product’s value doesn’t match its price. By being open about our pricing, prospects can focus on evaluating our product’s value.
Building Trust: We seek long-term relationships with our customers. Avoiding pricing negotiations that lead to initial frustration and resentment is crucial, especially if some customers find out that others are paying less for no reason.
Fairness: While there may be slight price differences in certain circumstances (explained below), this should be the exception, not the rule. Further, contracts shouldn’t have minimum limits. Customers should only be charged for using our services, not some arbitrary minimum contract value.
Saves Time and Expense: Many sales organizations built over the last decade (and with ZIRP money) seem bloated. Removing pricing discussions from the sales process can make our sales team more efficient, with less people. Savings from a leaner sales team can then be shared with our customers through lower prices.
Belief in Our Value: Transparent pricing shows our confidence in the value we provide. It’s a bit daunting to make our pricing public. What if no one wants it? What if it’s too high? Are we making enough to sustain our long-term goals? But the positive response so far has been encouraging.
Price Should Pace Value
Our customers should want us to raise our prices. Yes, you read that right. If we’re doing a good job of producing additional value and helping explain that value to your organization, we should increase our prices to match that. If we’re treating our customers like partners, any potential price increase should not come as a surprise. And if they don’t see the price matching the value of our product to their organization, we’d expect them to let us know.
When Might Pricing Differ?
We are building distribution relationships with different MGA platform partners (fronting carriers and investors). Customers who are part of one of these platforms may receive a discount because it’s a massive time and expense savings for us to access those customers and have them explain our value.
How Turris Implements Transparent & Fair Pricing
If you’ve been following us, you know that we’re building a compounding set of workflows to serve insurance organizations. We recently launched our first workflow to help MGAs and carriers onboard agents. For this workflow, we’ve made each of our tiers and the pricing for each public on our website. There is no back-and-forth negotiation needed. If a prospect finds value in making it easier to onboard their independent agents and wants to ensure full compliance with each state department of insurance, they can see exactly how much we’ll charge them to meet those needs. And if they want to slowly onboard their sales force over a period of time, that’s fine too. We only charge for each agent that we’ve onboarded and are tracking. As we add on more products in the future, we’ll make the cost of those workflows readily available. as well.
Overall, we hope our customers see this focus on transparent, fair, and clear pricing as an advantage to working with us. If you have thoughts or comments on our approach, we’d love to hear them!
