I have been a longtime fan of Bill Caskey, the Indianapolis sales trainer and all around kind fellow (unlike other local sales trainers we know) who specializes in helping business owners to define and articulate their sales process. Therefore, it really felt great to have long held beliefs validated about setting one’s price and targeting the clients one wants to serve by reading Dan Kennedy’s book on No B.S. Price Strategy .
As all my well loved books, Kennedy’s book gained its share of Japanese quotation marks, little bracket marks 「 」I pencil into pages on favorite concepts and powerful ideas that truly spoke to me. Such marks makes it easy for me to quickly find them again, so I can accurately quote sources in true journalist fashion. The most powerful notes get their page number circled, as those are the notes that will remain with me long after the majority of the information consumed from the book is naturally forgotten or rather filed within the hard to find vaults of the ADD creative brain.
His frankness with such gems as “buying by price is rather stupid.” p 83 really hit home. Dan gives price discounters a royal, well deserved lashing for being in love with coupons and other ways to undermine their brand thru slashing prices and perceived quality in buyers minds. It took all my strength not to snapshot these paragraphs and mail them to troublesome colleagues who think coupons for the non-targeted masses is the way to prosperity.
My absolute favorite all time, kick your own bum quote is on page 190, Dan writes, “You have a duty to yourself, your family, your investors or partners or shareholders, your lenders, your venders and your customers and that responsibility is to attain the absolute highest and greatest profits possible, so you can stay in business successfully to honor every commitment to everyone one of these constituencies.” The key word being “duty” this gives the small business owner who honorably loves to help people permission to be paid what s/he is worth. It changes the psychology of doing good. Later on page 194 Dan adds, “Integrity for the entrepreneur is optimizing sales and profits and value in the business he captains. Now there’s a guy speaking to business knights.
Every business owner should pay particular attention to the ending pages 216-219, where Dan colorfully describes his experience with poorly trained, employees with poor salesmanship during Christmas time shopping. Probably one of the best illustrations about customer service that this humble, Quality Assurance standard operating procedure writer has ever read. All business owners should read this book!
