Synopses & Reviews
Face facts: Customers have never met a price they liked. And they will use every trick in the book to get you to lower your prices and give up profits. The typical business response is to discount, discount, discountresulting in less revenue and lower profits.
In Pricing with Confidence, pricing gurus Reed Holden and Mark Burton offer a radically different solutionone that actually builds revenues and profits without lowering prices. The key? Linking prices to the value delivered. The real trick is to bring people from marketing, product development, sales, and senior management into the process of discovering and defending the value you create for customers.
Holden and Burton show you how you can get everyone in your firm to feel 100% confident in your pricingno matter what customers are saying or how fierce the competition. By following the ten simple rules outlined in Pricing with Confidence, you will be able to hold steady or even raise prices while your customers experience increased value for every dollar they spend. The result is increased revenues and profits.
Pricing with Confidence is a road map for senior leadership in sales, marketing, finance, and pricing to work together to outperform the competition. Pricing with Confidence is organized into ten simple and practical rules to help senior leaders tackle rampant price discounting, negotiate with poker-faced customers, and protect the value a company works so hard to create.
Synopsis
Bad pricing is a great way to destroy your company’s value, revenue, and profits. With ten simple rules, this book shows you how to deliver both healthy profit margins and robust revenue growth while kicking the dreaded discounting habit. The authors destroy the conventional wisdom that you have to trade margins for revenues and show you how to fully exploit the value your company offers customers. This is a proven plan for increasing sales without sacrificing profits.
Synopsis
10 ways to help executives capture value, grow revenue, and increase profits
Bad pricing is a massive destroyer of a company's value, revenue, and profits. With ten simple rules, Pricing with Confidence demonstrates how managers can deliver both healthy profit margins and robust revenue growth while kicking the dreaded discounting habit. This book is your road map through the practical implementation of value-based pricing based on the authors' real-world experiences. Demonstrating that a critical source of competitive advantage is an organization's ability to manage and exploit value, Holden and Burton deflate the conventional wisdom that managers must trade margins for revenues.
Readers will discover a proven toolkit to drive pricing and business decisions that have enabled dozens of companies to exceed expectations. Pricing with Confidence gives you confidence in pricing and the things you have to do to make pricing work better in your business.
Reed K. Holden, PhD, and Mark Burton (Concord, MA) are cofounders of Holden Advisors, a pricing consultancy. Dr. Holden is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University. Mr. Burton developed and presented the Services Pricing Workshop for the Professional Pricing Society.
Synopsis
Pricing with Confidence
Pricing is hard. If you get it wrong, you lose profits, revenue, or both. This book is your road map for getting pricing right. Here is a sampling of the rules you need to follow if you want to stop leaving money on the table:
Rule One: Replace the Discounting Habit with a Little Arrogance
Who says you have to discount? See how one company kicked the end-of-quarter discount habit and increased revenue seventeen percent and profits thirty-seven percent, grabbing $300 million off the poker table.
Rule Two: Understand Your Value to Your Customer
Your customers are eager to tell you. Are you ready to listen? By focusing on value delivered, Phillips garnered twenty-five percent of the price-competitive lamp market. See how Phillips did it.
Rule Three: Apply One of Three Simple Pricing Strategies
One of these three simple strategies will work for you. See how Dell stumbled with the wrong pricing strategy and how it recovered.
Rule Five: Price to Increase Profits
Revenue is good, but profits are better. Southwest Airlines and JetBlue have figured this out and avoided "dumb-bell pricing." Here's how you can, too.
Rule Eight: Build Your Selling Backbone
Use the first seven rules to add confidence as you sell to tough customers. Find out how a supplier of commodity electronics grabbed an extra $12.5 million off the table in a tough customer negotiation.
About the Author
Dr. Reed K. Holden is founder of Holden Advisors, a pricing consulting firm that specializes in working across product, marketing, pricing, and selling functions to improve pricing performance. Dr. Holden is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University. He has been speaking professionally for twenty years and is a regular keynote speaker on pricing and customer value. He can be reached at
[email protected].
Mark R. Burton is cofounder and Vice President of Holden Advisors. He speaks frequently at Fortune 2000 events and conferences, and has developed leading-edge, risk-based models for the pricing industry. He can be reached at [email protected].
For more information, please visit: PricingWithConfidenceBook.com
Table of Contents
Introduction. Why Pricing Is So Hard and Why Most Companies Mess It Up.
Rule One. Replace the Discounting Habit with a Little Arrogance.
Rule Two. Understand the Value You Offer Your Customer.
Rule Three. Apply a Simple Pricing Strategy.
Rule Four. Play Better Poker with Customers.
Rule Five. Price to Increase Profits.
Rule Six. Innovate for Growth.
Rule Seven. Get Your Competitor to React to You.
Rule Eight. Build Selling Backbone.
Rule Nine. Take Simple Steps to Move from Cost-Plus to Value-Based Pricing.
Rule Ten. Pricing with Confidence: Remember Who You Are.