Customer history. Pricing part 5.  If you have not made price raising part of your regular company history, this makes the job a bit harder.   This will be a change for clients and most people resist  change.  If you  have trained your customers to expect discounts, especially at quarter end and year end you are in seriously bad shape . In essence your customers are driving your prices, whether if it is through your training or your own weak negotiation position.  Compounding this is  the  ongoing corporate  reinforcement of weak selling approaches for your sales team.   To improve this  situation requires a group effort of marketing, sales and the C suite. no one of these groups can do it by themselves.

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Practical Pricing. Translating pricing theory into sustainable profit improvement. Michael Calogridis.2010. ISBN 9780230614604.  A different book on the subject than Thomas Nagles.  Calogridis gets you very quickly into the hows of pricing and gives the reader very useful tools to display the concepts to others clearly and efficiently.  It works well as a first serious book on pricing and reads quickly and easily. I really enjoyed his “here’s how to do this” style and his obvious experience with how utterly unprepared companies are to make strategic pricing decisions.  It is not always the sales guys fault that they ask for all those discounts to get the sale.  There are numerous approaches, tactics and assumptions that companies can use to be fully  ready well before the sales guy has to sell.  Once sales guys sell (and get comp’d) on value, they will start to complain about all the ways the company fails to deliver on their value promise, which will make you a better company.

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Cover via Amazon

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. A guide to growing more profitably. Thomas T. Nagle, John E. Hogan, Joseph Zale. 2011ISBn 9780136106814.  As my due diligence for a panel on pricing next week (Oct 20)  in Vancouver (http://www.regonline.ca/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=900801)  I have been reading Nagles 5th edition of his textbook on the subject and am thoroughly enjoying this book. It is as much the application of psychology as analytics.  He makes the best arguments and execution strategies for value pricing I have ever read.

In his thoroughness I am finding lots of sales aha moments. These are the times when you encountered types of  buyer  and competitor behaviour, made a decision, learned to regret it, lost  $$$$$$ , and over time  developed/learned better responses. Nagle describes the theory behind why the better responses worked and how to improve even more . This is a very similar experience I had when first reading Geoffrey Moore.  ”All the time spent learning through doing when someone had already written this down”. Of course had I known much of this sooner I would have been even more of a pain in the ass to my superiors/employers.

There may not be one book that contains everything on pricing,  but this one comes extremely close. His generous use of examples pulls tired brains like mine through some of the numeric analysis. I know I will be a much better salesperson from reading this book. I suggest this is a book for CEOs, VPs Sales, Marketing and Finance in any type of company. Thanks Steven Forth for dropping this copy off to me.

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the mesh. Why the future of business is sharing.  Lisa Gansky. 2010. ISBN 9781591843719. This is a must read book for business this year.  Ever wondered how and why Zipcars is growing so fast?  Want to find out about over 1000 ventures that have solid business models around sharing?  If you want to make serious money this is a book to read. Visit www.meshing.it  where she has also created an up to date Directory of these types of businesses .  You are welcome to share it as long as you give it full attribution to Lisa. The writing is quite “friendly” like a neighbour chatting. Some may have wanted a bit more tight editing, but I found it fine.  About enough to read on a three hour plane ride/ wait.

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The New Polymath. Profiles in compound-technology innovations. Vinnie Mirchandani. 2010. ISBN 9780470618301. You can imagine that  on my desk I have several (today 21) books to choose from to read. I was really peeved  when I picked up Vinnies book when it first arrived for a quick scan. I could not put it down. But I had tons of work to do on other projects! But this book is too important to not read immediately. If you work in Tech and intend to do well , you must read this book . One reviewer called it a fire hose of information on what is here and what is coming. Plus it is just a delightful read. His interviews and examples are concise and relevant.  this is an author who has really done his homework. I can not imagine how hard he worked on this book.  Run out, buy it and read it this summer. He has two blogs,  http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/ and http://www.florence20.typepad.com/ They are both great.

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How to write proposals,  sales letters, & reports. Neil Sawers. 2004. ISBN 0969790147.   This is a very useful small book on essential skills that many small business people do not have. The author is very organized and systematic about the  how, why and what of proposals, letters and reports.  His writing style is very direct and pragmatic.  There are lots of books on this topic around, but I liked his for being very focused on small business people.

Selling in a New Market Space. Getting customers to buy your innovative and disruptive products. Brain C. Burns & Tom U. Snyder.  2010. ISBN 9780071636100.  A worthy succesor to books like Selling in th ehigh technology market, this book speaks about a Maverick Selling  Principles.  It explains how to build highly successful sales teams that create markets from scratch by:

1. Articulating a compelling vision for the future
2. Pinpointing your target market
3. Controlling the decision making process
4. Exposing exactly how large organizations make product sections

The authors use true-life case studies showing how the Maverick Method has resulted in landmark deals and long-term success for innovative new products. I appreciated their understanding of short windows of opportunity.  Pay attention as they teach you how to build sales money maps, an often lost art these days.

Rethinking Sales Management.  A strategic guide for practitioners. Beth Rogers. 2007. ISBN 9780470513057. This is a very thorough book with a specific focus on sales strategy It is needed for selling is getting tougher every day.  She uses her form of  “customer portfolio matrix” , based on what I appreciate, the customers point of view.   I think her approach will assist managers in  setting  realistic objectives, designing  new strategies that add real customer value,  avoiding  wasting time on price-oriented customers and deployingresources for maximum results. Beth is from the UK which means her English is precise , but like the Economist, has depth on every page.  Not a quick read.

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Spanning Silos. The New CMO Imperative. David Aaker. 2009. ISBN 1422128768, 9781422128763. This is a specialist’s book.  After interviews with over 40 CMOs Aaaken has laid out how larger companies can better use their central marketing resources and eliminate the silos of marketing efforts that are often the norm.  This is not an issue that our clients have as they are more often worried about the silos called sales and marketing.  His ideas on how to achieve this cross silo agreement are also useful for the spanning of other silos in any company. As an academic the author is well researched and documented.  I would not rsuh out to buy this book, but it is certainly worth a library read. I appreciated his company stories.

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Managers Guide to Marketing , Advertising and Publicity.  Barry Callen. 2010. ISBN 9780071627962.  Callen explains:

• The 14 principles of marketing communications strategy
• Common marketing mistakes to avoid
• Techniques for creating powerful marketing messages
• The many choices for delivering your marketing message How to take full advantage of digital platforms

Today, you must come up with a bigger, better, brighter marketing campaign, or you’re guaranteed to be lost in the noise. This primer is ideal for anyone looking to position his or her organization as a powerful competitor in the twenty-first century.Briefcase Books, written specifically for today’s busy manager, feature eye-catching icons, very useful checklists,and sidebars to guide managers step-by-step through everyday workplace situations.  The text is simple, pragmatic  and a pretty good “Coles Notes” for marketing guide.

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socialnomics. how social media transforms the way we live and do business. erik qualman. 2009. ISBN  9780470477236.  I confess my first thought  was  not another fluffy book on social media.  This is anything but that. I consider this the sober second wave type of book that helps us determine where a technology change will really make a business difference. Examples:

The impact of having your profile available to the many and how that impacts your social behavior (What foes on in Vegas stays on Facebook)

LinkedIn is a defacto monopoly on business social networking. Once you have collected a set of references on LinkedIn why would you ever go to another site?

It is no good railing against the walled garden approach of Facebook, companies need to embrace it as another venue to meet and communicate with its target market.

Google is right to be scared of Facebook, people care less what Google thinks and more what their ‘friends” think about products etc. I just bought two items from Facebook marketplace that a few years ago I woudl have looked to ebay for. Facebook was easier, much faster and now I know the seller.

Books are being written as a crowd sourcing experiment – ask your followers a question on Twitter and write down what comes back.

Robert Murdock wanting to get his stuff not as easily searched by Google is another example of “Its my ball and I will play with it my way” thinking.  Did not work for AOL, Hasbro and Scrabulous won’t work for him

I advise you to pick this book up, it will help us dinosaurs come to grips with why the youth are embracing this media. You will enjoy his easy reading style and thoughtful analysis.

How the Mighty Fall. And why some companies never give in Jim Collins. 2009.ISBN 9780977326419. The Good to Great author has done it again  He explains that this was a much harder task than finding the commonalities for Good to Great.  He has done a good job.  He shows there are five stages of decline,

1. Hubris born of success.
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to  irrelevance or death

He illustrates how  the basics of Good to Great still apply and indicates that many of the fallen (A&P , Zenith, Circuit City, Merck….) were unable to do what the ones who came back ( Nordstrom, Xerox) , which was were they fell away from their basic strategy that helped them to grow in the first place.  From our practise we see that companies who fail to work a scenario strategy al a Schwartz (what is the best, worst that can happen  and what indicators will show you the trends)  are the ones who often make the wrong bets.  Check l out last months Wired magazine article on scenarios. It really works. This prevents the search for the silver bullet.

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Being Strategic. Plan for success;out-think your competitors;stay ahead of change. Erika Anderson. 2009. ISBN 139780312553982.   Likely one of the clearest books on strategy I have ever read. Many of our clients come to us with processes and plans that are an undisciplined mix of tactics and strategy. Anderson makes a some good definitions of strategy and tactics (e.g. Strategy is where you want to be, tactics is how you will get there) . The author clearly understands group dynamics making this an essential handbook on getting groups through strategy planning and execution sessions.  (I wish I had had this book 30 years ago. ) An easy read with sufficient activities and exercises that the reader has ample opportunity to imprint the learning.

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