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
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.
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 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…
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…
Coming from the perspective of a neurosurgeon, I have witnessed many successes and failures over more than four decades. I recognized decades ago that communication with patients at a level that involves emotions is a necessary part of being a complete physician. This involves being empathetic and, henceforth, digging deep to find the strength to be transparent, vulnerable, compassionate, understanding, and, when needed, forceful (some would call this paternalism). Although the five books I have chosen to highlight vary widely in content, they have one common theme – finding within us the will and wherewithal to succeed.
My book is a collection of monthly Editor-in-Chief letters to the readership of World Neurosurgery, a journal that I edit. Each essay is short and sweet. The letters were written for neurosurgeons but have been re-edited so that they apply to all human beings. They cover topics such as leadership, empathy, vulnerability, stress, burnout, and on and on…. These essays are relevant for all who strive to craft a better version of themselves.
Life lessons learned by the author during his 40+ year neurosurgery career are shared and translated into real-life scenarios. Between the covers are many lessons that are derived from the experiences of the author and then applied to all humans. The mastering of these lessons should translate into a sense of pride and satisfaction. In keeping with the theme of the book, this process should culminate in the feeling at the end of the day that ‘Today was, indeed, a good day.’
Today Was A Good Day: A Collection of Essays From The Heart Of A Neurosurgeon
About the Book Today Was A Good Day: A Collection of Essays From The Heart Of A Neurosurgeon features many topics that pertain to how neurosurgeons interact with others and how each of us can use introspection to modify how we are using tools and strategies such as empathy, respect, stress management, and much more. This book provides some insights into leadership, effective communication, and fulfillment from the perspective of a neurosurgeon, and it causes the reader to think about and consider many, many attributes of a leader. We all want to have a good day. This book provides strategies…
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