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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• Getting Your Pricing Right – A BCTIA Panel Discussion in Vancouver (leveragepoint.com)
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• The Real Growth Driver: Blending Commoditization and Differentiation (leveragepoint.com)