I’ve been really interested in researching productized services lately, essentially where you get clients to pay a monthly subscription fee for a specific offering of your services. It makes for consistent, ongoing work, and no customized proposals, scope of work documents and invoices. In researching this I’ve been looking at people’s offerings and pricing more.

58% of buyers want to talk about pricing in the first sales call, while 65% of salespeople want to keep the conversation on goals. (HubSpot, 2016) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

Some people do a great job of this. Check out Express Writers pricing page. You can’t get much clearer than that. There’s a big call to action button on the bottom that will take you to a page where you can call, book time, or fill out forms to communicate your needs. After taking a look at this site I chatted via Twitter with Express Writers CEO Julia McCoy about their site and clear, easily accessed pricing information. She was very helpful and had some great ideas – I highly recommend you follow her.

Not long after that, I saw an ad on Facebook for another writing service. Wanting to see what they offered, I clicked through. Here’s the ad I saw.

When I clicked through it took me to the page pictured below. By the way, I took that full page screen shot with the Chrome extension Full Page Screen Capture, which does exactly what the name would suggest.

So how does this site measure up to the other site for writers that I mentioned? If you go to Scripted on your own, not through a Facebook ad, you get a different page slightly different options. On this version I had a couple of big issues. For one, I couldn’t remember the name of the company, and didn’t find it easy to discern it from this site. It looks almost unbranded.

Next, my feel from this page is this company wants to control the conversation. There’s no access to pricing from this page. On their site that I get to from searching Google there is some pricing info that’s fairly accessible, but even then it’s quite brief. The push here seems to be for a free trial. Free trials are great when pricing is clear, but sometimes it feels like the goal is to get you dependent until you feel you need it, and then you’ll find out the cost.

Finally, I don’t really know where I’m supposed to look. This page has the feeling of a page missing the main content to me. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to fill out the form at top, or click the small button not quite at the bottom.

If I know I want someone to work with me writing content, let’s get to the point where you tell me what it costs and what I have to do. There are other options that spell things out, so it’s not the time to hold it back. If I were hunting for copy writers and were making a comparison chart of the offerings of different companies, I’d leave data blank for this company and not choose it.