Fliptop posts transparent pricing, chides other predictive firms for not doing so

{Updated 6.29.15 and 6.30.15 with statements from Infer and Lattice Engines.}

Predictive lead scoring firms are in the business of clarifying which prospects are most likely to become customers.

Today, predictive marketing firm Fliptop is offering a similar clarity for its pricing.

The company said it is launching “transparent pricing” by listing what its services cost on its website. While this would seem less than news for other industry sectors, the company claims this as an industry first.

Most other predictive lead scoring vendors, CEO and founder Doug Camplejohn told me via email, “have some internal guidelines and a floor pricing, and say pricing based on number of records, or net new leads or number of models.”

But, he added, “we’ve gone up against Predictive Marketing vendors in enough bake-offs to see that it’s a bit of a ‘wet your finger and hold it in the air’ approach” on many occasions. Their pricing, he said, is quoted prior to a contract signing, but not from the beginning.

Camplejohn compared Fliptop’s new pricing scheme to those of software-as-a-service companies like Salesforce, Box, InsideSales, and Marketo, which “publish pricing in order to speed up the sales process and build customer trust.” Three of the ones he mentioned — Salesforce, InsideSales, and Marketo — offer varying degrees of predictive marketing through their own platforms or through integrated partners. On the other hand, he said, consulting companies and ones focused on large enterprises “generally do not” publish their pricing.

Since Fliptop wants to provide a SaaS platform for mid-market companies that does not require them to have data scientists, he said, it similarly wants to provide “straightforward, simple pricing.”

Fliptop’s pricing, he said, is based on overall record volume and broken out into different stages of the B2B sales funnel, such as leads, accounts, and opportunities. This way, Camplejohn said, customers will only pay for what they need.

Of five key Fliptop competitors in the predictive lead scoring space — Lattice Engines, InsideSales, Mintigo, Infer, and 6sense — only InsideSales shows pricing on its website, as Camplejohn mentioned. However, that company provides predictive services as part of a bundle of sales acceleration tools, and its pricing reflects a bundled service.

We’ve reached out to the other four to see if they will post their pricing, and will update this post with any replies.

Here’s an emailed statement from Infer’s VP of marketing Jamie Grenney:

“We agree in simple, straightforward pricing, and being as transparent as possible. What Fliptop has on their site is a step in that direction. They put some of their pricing out front, but they still require you to contact them for custom quotes.

“Given the complexity of predictive modeling and of our customer’s environments, we find it is better to first get an understanding of their objectives vs. publishing pricing that could end up being misleading. Infer’s solution offers several advanced options for model builds, and we give our prospects a pricing sheet early on with tiers that are specific to the products they want and need. Through that approach, we can be clear about a realistic pricing range that is appropriate for each customer.

“We should also note that when you get more strategic into the premium end of the market, there are good reasons to remove pricing. Jason Lemkin has a great post that explains why.”

From Lattice Engine’s director of communications Caitlin Ridge:

“Fliptop’s pricing model is well suited to the SMB market and for organizations with very simple lead-flows. We also use a standard pricing list, and are completely transparent with our prospects and customers about our pricing. Since our customers tend to be more sophisticated, our pricing model reflects their need for multiple predictive models, varied use-cases, non-standard data-sources, workflow integration into other applications, internationalization, transparent insights and integrated reporting.”