DISC's Prices and Procedures

This page explains DISC's pricing philosophy and practice, and orients you to our account management structure and workflow. For a list of all of DISC's service prices, without descriptions, please our Sell Sheet.

This web site is designed to guide you through the “sales funnel” efficiently and transparently.  Each page describing our services includes all the information most people need, including prices, in order to decide whether to request a proposal. Prices are usually at the bottom of each page; where multiple services are listed on one page, the prices are listed by each service.

DISC does not price by "what the market will bear." Currently the market, which has insufficient supply of truly qualified professionals, is bearing very high prices. However, DISC's ethics and our goal of building goodwill and a firm that will outlast its 46-year-old founder motivate DISC to price by fair and reasonable profits on actual hours worked. Therefore, our prices for large or well-financed companies are the same as for one-person businesses -- there's no ego- and time-taxing price negotiations. In this spirit, DISC publishes our prices here and throughout our web site. We offer to people who contact us a generic sample proposal that covers our core services and resembles the custom proposals that most prospects receive. All of this up-front information saves DISC time -- and hence reduces your costs and allows us to spend more time on research -- and it assures you that we price for mutual benefit, not for the early retirement of DISC's principals.

Some of our reports and training documents are priced partly by typical hours required and partly by the need to recoup the large amount of research needed to design the deliverables. Our usability reports, for example, required a huge amount of time reading many books, purchased studies, and web sites in order to compile a complete list of web site dos and don'ts against which we check your web site. Although each new critique does require a lot of time, that time is usually less than the price divided by our hourly rates. Our various hourly rates are published at the bottom of this page.

DISC's management structure and workflow are relatively non-hierarchical, but they are highly organized, so that your dollars go directly to consummate work. You are assigned a devoted account manager, yet you have direct contact with each worker performing any part of your job. Unlike most giant SEM firms, DISC doesn't channel communications through a layer of managers who may be neither experts nor particularly close to the crucial details of your job. At the beginning of each job, we work out with your team a timeline that is posted on a web page you can bookmark and is updated on Mondays to reflect progress. DISC uses a detailed internal intranet to organize our work efficiently, and we use first-rate software to track hourly billed work (the majority of our work is flat fee, not billed hourly, which our proposals and contracts make clear). DISC is an "open book" company, meaning that all employees have access to our financial books and bonus calculations via an outside accountant: all DISC people working with you are highly motivated towards excellence that benefits everyone. CEO Rob Laporte will follow your progress and answer any vexing questions that may arise, and he leads all SEM training jobs and the writing of web marketing plans.

As the SEM industry has matured over the last few years, procedures in SEM have become more standardized, at least among the truly professional firms. Of course, as in any service industry, there are hucksters, profiteers, and incompetents who cut corners and thus increase your risk. For SEM to produce predictable and measurable results, talented and experienced professionals must go through a definite sequence of steps that takes a relatively predictable amount of time. Prices substantially below the median usually indicate that either the SEM firm is cutting corners or is one of the many hucksters out there. Prices substantially above the median suggest price gouging.

If you have an excellent SEM team in-house, a block of, say, five to ten hours of DISC's time can solve a vexing problem or generally educate your team about how to think about SEM. DISC's years of research and practice in web marketing for all kinds of companies will provide perspective that even the most accomplished in-house professionals may not possess . . . yet.

DISC's proposals and phone conversations will provide all details and answer all your questions.

You have three choices after reading the procedures and prices in this site's pages that pertain to the services you seek:

1. Request a proposal by sending the form linked here. The RFP form takes less than 3 minutes to fill out. Thank you!
   
   
2. Decide against engaging DISC because we are beyond your budget. But please remember that DISC provides a 6% finders fee for any referrals. Depending on the job referred, this fee can net you between $300 to $1200 and up for a few minutes of your time. Also, please do avail yourself of the wealth of sage SEM guidance that this web site distills from over ten years of continuous research and practice.
   
   
3. Bookmark this site, take a vacation, forget about work, have fun, come back happy and clear, then decide.