Where's the price?

Ever quote a job for a customer that included HMI and SCADA software? You know how it goes, you're preparing quotes late at night or on a weekend but all the sales reps are enjoying their weekend while you work hard trying to sell their software. This wouldn't be a problem if industrial software companies openly published their prices.

Why is it they are so secretive with pricing? According to an old-hand sales person I know, there are only two reasons for hiding prices. Either they want to be able to cut custom pricing for different customers (whatever they can get away with) or they are trying to suck people into a conversation so they can close a sale.

In my experience both reasons may be applicable to industrial software sales, but on the latter I might add that by conversing with you they often gather intelligence.

For the first, I've seen pricing for industrial software for a fortune 500 company (though I'm sure I wasn't supposed to see it) and it was only 39% of the very best prices I ever heard of for that software, which was shocking to me.

For the second reason, when you get pricing for industrial software the sales rep wants to know who the customer is, what the job is, who the contact is and so forth. This is problematic because sometimes when you're doing comparative pricing the rep runs out afterwards and calls on your customer directly.

Like I have said in the past, most of the policies we adopt at Inductive Automation are based on my prior experiences as an integrator. If you want to know the price of Inductive Automation software just go to our website —it's all right there. There's too much work to get done to mess around with all these goofy pricing games.

Of course, I might be missing the real reason. Are they possibly ashamed of their prices and pricing model? What do you think?