Rethink Account Management, Raise Your Prices
At the highest level of pricing centralization and, I believe, value-and-profit creation, here’s how account leaders and a value council should work together
Win Without Pitching®: Thinking
Blog
“Let’s see what kind of client you’ll make.”
Let’s try on the idea of you being as ruthlessly discerning with your prospective clients, if a little kinder in your language. What are the questions you would like to know in advance of working with a client to determine if this relationship is going to work?
The Most Valuable Skill in Business
The goal of value-based pricing is not to charge more—that’s merely a beneficial consequence. The goal of value-based pricing is to create an organization that is intently focused on creating extraordinary customer value.
Workshops: Better or Worse Than a Paid Pitch?
It’s been common for a long time for agencies to kick off a new client engagement with a workshop of some form. Sometime in the last two years, however, clients started to suggest to agencies that instead of pitching for free they would pay them to workshop some ideas. It sounds good on the surface, but is it better than pitching?
Replacing Presentations With Conversations
David re-reads the 2nd chapter of Blair’s first book, leading to a discussion about how sales people have to choose between either presenting to clients or being present to them.
The Great Convergence is Upon Us
One of the clearest trends in professional firms today is the convergence of the disciplines of design, business consulting and software engineering on the same client business challenges. This Great Convergence is pitting firms of radically different types against each other in the battle to best serve the client, and it’s creating new types of
Coaches Corner: The Solution For Being Too Expensive
It’s early January. My phone rings. It’s Sue, a former client I spoke with two weeks earlier. She had called to share she was leading a new firm and they were growing like mad. She needed our help again. I had always liked Sue. We did really good work for her and she’s a straight
A Creative Professional’s Progression of Financial Success
I’m pretty sure I can show you the levels of financial success you’ll move through in your career. I can’t predict how far you will go, but by reading the descriptions of the levels you’ll be able to see where you are on the journey and what lays ahead.
Quit Giving The Client What They Want
A mainstay of some agency new business conferences is a few highly coveted clients on the stage lecturing the agency audience on what they want from their agency partners that they’re not getting. While it would be foolish to dismiss these client entreaties out of hand, it would be just as foolish, I believe, to give them what they want.
Hacking The Value Conversation
The value conversation is where value pricing theory goes to die. The difficulty in mastering this conversation is what causes most people to give up on value-based pricing completely and revert back to selling time and materials. It needn’t be so difficult, though.
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