Review: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great book on negotiation, very practical and easily implementable on your day-to-day work, and very easy to read. Should be mandatory, among others, on every sales capabilities program!

It's a great (if not mandatory) complement to the hard-skills you should know about negotiation and challenged several beliefs that i had and it made me think on how to approach every negotiation process.

Beside reading it, i will study it and will definitely read my notes every time i will enter a more demanding negotiation process to complement the other negotiation tools that i already have in my negotiation strategy bag-pack.

Concepts like:(i) Labels/Accusation Audit, (ii) Calibrated Questions; (iii) Questions to identify deal killers; (iv) how to diffuse deal-killing issues; (v) how to leverage noncash offers, (vi) identify black swans; (vi) how to set goals to maximize your possible outcome (not settle with one that is in the ZOPA range); (vii) how to be a mirror; (viii) how to master the No and get "That's right" moment, etc...are of great value!

Would be great if you do not read it so i can have leverage on the next negotiation process.



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Dynamic Pricing Silver Bullet?

https://www.ibbaka.com/blog/2019/11/7/dynamic-pricing-is-a-two-edged-sword

Fully agree with this great post! When you only have (want to sell) a hammer everything looks like a nail. Every solution has its value and should be applied accordingly and we should avoid to go with the latest trend flow and thoroughly assess the pros & cons and look at the value fundamentals. "...The conflation of willingness to pay and differentiated value has to come to an end. Willingness to pay is an outcome of the creation, communication and delivery of differentiated value. It is an outcome and not a driver. Pretending that you understand value because you can estimate willingness to pay is wrong headed. ..."

Review: The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Growing More Profitably

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Growing More Profitably by Thomas T. Nagle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good text book on pricing in its strategic and tactical perspective. Decided to read it in order to shore-up my Pricing knowledge and it was of great utility. I do recommend its reading for someone that wants to know more about pricing, to the professionals already working to provide a sound framework to their day-to-day activities and allow better decisions that have implicit a tremendous value to the overall organizations they work for.

It provides pricing theory as deemed needed (and if you want to explore more you have a plethora of references you can explore), but it's practical text book that applies the theory presented to actual cases and guides you through such important strategic process. Even in the field on how to determine the pricing level (value, pricing elasticities, etc...) always have a pragmatic and practical approach that one can use immediately.

Pricing is presented where the push comes to shove. i.e. when every company captures the value it has previously created and you can see a lot of value be siphoned away due to bad practices.

From all the applicable concepts presented, i would like to highlight the following:
- The Value Cascade - great representation on how to manage value and then pricing. An how you spill value in each caption
- How to define the best value to your customer;
- How to estimate the economic value estimation (economic vs. psychological);
- How to create break-even sales curves vs. pure elasticities (difficult to estimate in real markets)
- Ethics and law - also a good chapter that push-back some preconceived ideas and limitations,

Do recommend its reading and have it readily available for every pricing professional.



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Review: Competitor Intelligence: How to Get It; How to Use It

Competitor Intelligence: How to Get It; How to Use It by Leonard M. Fuld
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Read this book based on a recommendation/reference given in another book i was reading, that i liked and do recommend (The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing).

The real classification would be between the 1 and 2 stars, finally i decided to go with a 2 stars due to a couple of good insights and especially to show me that we should always strive to be creative when we do not have readily accessible the intelligence we would find relevant for our own analysis.

It´s a clearly a dated book (1985) and it does not provide sound and practical building blocks to approach the competitor intelligence area of study. It's more a guide where to find data to support such discipline/function, that although most probably relevant for the 1980, it is clearly outdated to a 2020 reader.

The positive, if you take a very positive attitude and try to conceptualize some chapters of the book, you can define your own framework based on the potential difficulties and problems one can find while performing such important task of producing intelligence, mainly by knowing the constraints you have in the public available information on basic sources, and how to find/leverage creative sources of information and even use the some basic sources.

You should strive "mutatis mutandi" to apply some of the tools presented to the reality of 2020 and with that extract the most value of its reading.

In nutshell, if you want to learn something on this subject, this would not be book a i would recommend,

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