Who says it's a choice between publishing the price on a public webpage and forcing the user to make the call?
The "Get free trial/demo/brochure" link to a contact form works fine: that way the company gets to decide whether they want to call you or send a form email with pricing/signup information. In theory a service like Eloqua could even automate who gets a link to the pricing page and who gets a call from the sales rep, although I suspect salespeople generally have better judgement on what looks like a good lead.
And in the mid-high priced B2B market, if you move on without leaving an email/telephone number your enquiry probably wasn't serious enough to warrant giving you a price.
Sounds like there's a market for me to employ people in the third world to call/email companies who don't publish their prices and then for me to publish that info (Think Glassdoor.com for SaaS services without transparent pricing).
It's practically the raison d'etre for third party subscription agents that already exist, although their business model revolves around actually handling the purchasing part and charging a fee for it.
I guess your alternative: flat rate access to a well structured general price list of software, data services and biz intel products would have some value to some BigCorp purchasing specialists, but would it cover the costs of putting it together?
It's also pretty easily ignored at the high end of the market where salespeople won't quote anybody without a proper telephone conversation and/or valid company email, and will claim every package is highly customised (even if it isn't). Even at the low end it's easily dismissed as "out of date", "inaccurate" or "for a different service we've discontinued"... and believe me I've had that conversation plenty of times about third party guesstimates of product prices when those excuses were actually true
The "Get free trial/demo/brochure" link to a contact form works fine: that way the company gets to decide whether they want to call you or send a form email with pricing/signup information. In theory a service like Eloqua could even automate who gets a link to the pricing page and who gets a call from the sales rep, although I suspect salespeople generally have better judgement on what looks like a good lead.
And in the mid-high priced B2B market, if you move on without leaving an email/telephone number your enquiry probably wasn't serious enough to warrant giving you a price.