If you haven’t already, check out Gerhard Gschwandtner interviewing Ron Hubsher from the Sales Optimization Group on the sales negotiation process. Ron looks at the sales process with the same philosophy I do– namely, selling value instead of price, and … Read More
pricing strategy
The World Cup, Data Analysis, and Maximizing Profit
I’m a big fan of analytics. And sports (although I no longer have time to keep up with them). So I’ve always been puzzled that with so much money and pride on the line, teams have done so little analyze … Read More
Be Better, Not Cheaper
Who doesn’t love a bargain? We all do, and we know our customers do, too. But that doesn’t mean price is the only thing that’s important. It becomes the only thing that’s important if everything else is the same. Many … Read More
Is pricing an art or a science?
I get this question a lot. Sometimes from people who want to think it’s some kind of magic that doesn’t require rigorous analytical thinking, usually from people who want to prove that it’s a science. Often their desire for proof … Read More
Subscriptions are in, free is out
Chris Anderson of Wired said that Free is the price of the future. Some of us beg to differ. Among those with other opinions are Lincoln Murphy of 16 Ventures who published a paper called The Reality of Freemium in … Read More
Agility Key to Success in Turbulent Times
The economy’s in a bubble! A crash! A recovery? Careful, you might get whiplash. Looking back at the roller coaster ride, a lot of companies lost a lot of money because they could not act, or even react, quickly enough. … Read More
What’s your plan to close out 2009?
What’s your plan to close out 2009? For many companies, 2009 has been a tough year. While many people remember the crash of the dot-com bubble, some people seem to have forgotten, and even that crash didn’t impact the broader … Read More
The exponential benefits of differential value
I wrote a couple weeks ago about Value, Scarcity and Pricing in the Age of Superabundance. Now there’s a timely report about the concentration of profits among cell phone makers from Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. Sacconaghi estimated that while … Read More
Value, Scarcity, and Pricing in the Age of Superabundance
For most people, throughout most of human existence, scarcity was paramount.** Now we live in an age of not just abundance, but superabundance. The agricultural revolution created abundance– not by today’s standards– in food. The industrial revolution created abundance in … Read More
The hidden story from Apple’s WWDC
Unless you’ve been assiduously avoiding the news lately, you probably heard that Apple announced a new iPhone model yesterday at their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), along with updated laptops and various software updates. Most of the news coverage focused … Read More