GM and Happy Friday! Here are the topics we cooked up for you this week. Enjoy!

• You need to put pricing on your website. The arguments companies make against it and why none of them matter.

• Circling back on the Zoom waiting room. Revisiting a recent newsletter issue and how to capture a low-hanging fruit opportunity.

• Bad marketers use these words. They’re a sign that your company has no positioning.

💵 You need to put pricing on your website.

It’s an age-old debate in the B2B space…

Should we publish our pricing on the website?

Work in marketing long enough, and you’ll have this debate at some point. Probably with the sales team.

Companies come up with a lot of arguments about why not to put a dollar amount on the website. Reasons like:

• Our pricing is complicated. People will get too confused.

• Let’s get them in the door first! We can talk numbers later.

• If we publish our pricing, then we can never change it.

• We need sales reps to “provide value” before discussing price.

• If our competitors know what we charge, then they can undercut us.

There’s one issue with all of these arguments. They’re all about the company, not the customer.

Here’s why that's a big problem.

93% of customers said they want to know pricing before speaking to a sales rep.

Chris Walker, the CEO of Refine Labs, ran a survey asking 600 purchase decision makers what steps they take in their buying process BEFORE talking to a sales rep.

93% of respondents said they want to know pricing before a sales rep gets involved.

If you’re a customer-focused company (which we all should be if we want to win and keep customers), then it’s pretty clear that you should publish pricing on your website.

Don’t make prospects bend over backward to get the information.

Don’t send them through the painful process of BANT qualification with an inexperienced rep. Followed by a cookie-cutter demo. Then, a couple of weeks of back-and-forth over email so you can “fully understand their needs” before giving them a number.

That’s a horrible prospect experience.

Put pricing on your site upfront and let them self-select in or out.

If you can’t convince your company leadership to make all pricing info public, then at least push them to publish a “starting at” price.

If a visitor is scared away by a “starting at” price, they can’t afford you, and you don’t want to waste your time talking to them anyway.

📰 In the news this week.

🚨 Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do.

📊  The highlights from a report that surveyed consumers and marketers about social media.

👶 Parents are paying to get their babies’ social media ready.

🧑  How 65 teens feel about being online.

🏷  TikTok debuts new tools and technology to label AI content.

🔄 Circling back on the Zoom waiting room.

If you remember, a few weeks ago, we wrote about why you should be on the lookout for low-hanging fruit opportunities in your marketing strategy. If you missed it, read it here.

We gave the example of the Zoom waiting room screen and how it is underutilized.

Shoutout to one of our amazing readers for letting us know that even though Zoom isn’t using this space, YOU can!

Companies can customize the waiting room title, logo, and description at an account, group, or user level.

Here’s how…

1) Make sure your waiting room is enabled.

2) Click Customize Waiting Room.

This opens the customization window — a preview of how the waiting room will appear to meeting participants.

As you make changes, this preview will update.

3) Select your settings

These are your customization options:

• Title: Click inside the text box to update the meeting title.

• Options for what participants in the waiting room see:

  • The default screen: Just displays the title text and the meeting topic.

  • A logo and description: Display the title message, a logo you upload, and a message.

  • A video: Display the title message and a video you upload. Note: videos can include sound but are muted by default.

  • An Image: Displays the image with the title overlaid along the top of the image.

4) Click Save when you’re done.

Now, participants will see your custom waiting room branding when they join the meeting.

🤐 Bad marketers use these words.

Companies with no positioning are forced to use attributes that sound like platitudes. Words like:

• simple

• easy

• powerful

• effective

• best

• fast

• modern

• flexible

When they’re being used to describe a product or service, these words don’t mean much. And they’re entirely subjective.

Instead, describe to the reader what your company or product actually does.

😂 Marketing meme of the week.

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• 😍 Loved it

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• 👎 You didn't bring the heat 

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