I’ve been working in value-based pricing for over 20 years and I’ve seen firsthand how it can transform a company’s profits when done right and executed properly through sales. While the specific strategies and tactics vary across industries, company size, and product offerings, many of the foundations and logic behind those strategies can be learned, and must be understood in order to grow a company’s revenue and profit growth in today’s markets. I’d love to connect about any of these topics – feel free to reach out on LinkedIn!
I wrote
Pricing with Confidence: Ten Rules for Increasing Profits and Staying Ahead of Inflation
This book keeps companies focused on what’s important.
It walks through how to hire for character, and ways to think about hiring the right kind of leaders who can develop skills (rather than the other way around), and building a company from that strong foundation. For pricing and building pricing power, it’s important to know what your company’s core capabilities are and to stay hyper-focused on them.
As leaders challenge themselves to innovate, the book emphasizes using technology to execute your core capabilities more effectively, without chasing the technology (e.g. AI) and losing sight of your core value.
________________________________ Can a good company become a great one? If so, how?
After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising - at times even shocking - to the modern mind.
Good to Great achieves a rare distinction: a management book full of vital ideas that reads as well as a fast-paced novel. It is widely regarded…
While pricing has evolved in many ways, the tenets of this book will be referenced in nearly every modern-day pricing strategy.
It’s important to understand these foundations and their logic as you build out your own strategy. The book walks through the effects of price, how it reflects on your brand, and the art of price setting and differential value as important parts of the broader picture of pricing.
Practical in focus and lively in style, this book provides a comprehensive, managerially-focused, integrated, step-by-step guide to pricing analysis and strategy development. Numerous walk-through examples show how companies successfully or unsuccessfully implement pricing strategies. Strategic Pricing; Costs; Financial analysis; Customers; Competition; Price-center strategy; Life Cycle Pricing; Managing Value Perceptions; Segmented Pricing; Pricing in and through Distribution Channels; Competitive Advantages; Customer Research for Pricing; The Law and Ethics. For Marketing Managers, Product Managers, Managers of Pricing, Managers of Strategic Planning.
This manual addresses the need to ensure that people are at the centre of the organisation. There has never been a timelier reminder of the need to ensure that leading, supporting and developing staff are critical aspects of creating the right organisational culture to grow and develop. Written with sensitivity,…
This book takes a deeper look into the psychology of choices and pricing.
It helps provide more context and understanding around some familiar tactics and what drives buyer’s decisions. While price setting can be a technical activity, leaders need to understand the softer/behavioral skills to sell that price both internally and externally. Both components are important in order to get your pricing right.
Winner, 2022 Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award, American Marketing Association
How do leaders, managers, and proprietors go about the essential task of setting prices? What biases enter into this process, and why? How can a business debias its price setting to become more productive, strategic, and profitable?
Combining perceptive insights from behavioral economics with leading-edge ideas on price management, this book offers a new approach to pricing. Gerald Smith demonstrates why understanding, reframing, and refining everyday pricing processes-a firm's or manager's pricing orientation-results in a better long-term pricing strategy. He explores how pricing actually happens in practice and shows…
Porter’s five forces have been around a long time–and they’re an important and timeless framework for strategy.
It helps companies focus on where to improve as they look to dominate a market, understanding the ecosystem of competitive threats, entrants, and substitutes.
By understanding what contributes to your pricing power and knowing your stance in different environments, leaders will learn to discern what your pricing power is and how to build and maintain it over time.
Now nearing its sixtieth printing in English and translated into nineteen languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world.
Electrifying in its simplicity-like all great breakthroughs-Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies-lowest cost, differentiation, and focus-which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and…
Few of us take the time to analyze our financial needs and goals to answer that pressing question. In Wealth Odyssey, author Larry R. Frank Sr. uses his extensive financial background to provide a universal road map that will help…
This is the logical next step in value-based building blocks.
Learning simple negotiation approaches is essential for go-to-market capability building so teams can defend their prices and get paid for the value they deliver. In order for us to sell the price we came up with, we need to understand the various types of people we’re selling to.
The book discusses how to frame value and price appropriately in order to get the most out of realized price, training customers to realize price over time and negotiating more effectively in both the short- and long-term scenarios of customer relationships.
Sales professionals now confront the most serious threat to their success. Regardless of their size, industry, country, customer type, nature of the relationship or amount of value they provide, sales professionals are finding that purchasing decisions are increasingly being limited by procurement. The modern procurement function is purchasing on steroids. Where traditional purchasing managers negotiated, procurement officials attempt to dictate. Procurement deploys a variety of tactics designed to do one thing: gain unprecedented discounts and concessions out of even the most sophisticated sales professionals. This book is a strategy guide for salespeople to help them level the procurement playing field…
Inflation is steadily and (not so) slowly eating into your profit margins. Simultaneously, your sales teams are using discounts and rebates as crutches to help them close sales, even as this habit threatens the profitability of your business.
In this book, the authors deliver a compelling argument against the conventional view that there is a tension between revenue growth and profit growth, including: the importance of a sound pricing strategy to protect profits; how stellar analytics and quality metrics can help you set the perfect price; innovation as the life blood of organizational growth; how to set sales team and customer expectations, keep valuable customers, and achieve value from technology; and building your “selling backbone” to prepare for tough negotiations and draft profitable RFPs.
When we're children, we're asked what we want to be when we grow up. But what if there isn't just one career for us in our lifetime? What if we can have a squiggly line career that spans professions and industries?
To create innovative, collaborative, and high-performing organizations, we need a new leadership model.
Speaker, consultant, and former Silicon Valley executive Minette Norman is committed to inspiring leaders by sharing some of the most important things she learned over the decades she spent in the corporate world, such as: every human…
