The Price Negotiation Playbook: A Practical B2B Guide for Winning Your Best Price with Confidence

Today’s sales professionals face pricing challenges and pressures like no other time in history.  With prolific visibility of competitor pricing, the widespread emergence of internet channels, and pop-up businesses offering bare bone prices to muddy the waters, the sales game has changed leaving organizations struggling to get their fair price and increase profits. Whether you’re a sales leader, corporate pricing resource, or a front line sales professional, this book will give you the tools you need to overcome tough price pressure from customers and aggressive pricing from competitors. Sales negotiation skills have long been viewed as crucial for success, but they are no longer enough. Top companies understand this and are arming their sales force with the price training necessary to win in todays’ competitive environment.

In this practical guide renowned pricing expert Joanne Smith shows with clarity how to gain price for maximum profit while balancing your growth goals. Joanne shares her first hand success at executing the strategies in this book to bring DuPont and many other top global B2B companies to superior profits.  She includes a comprehensive Price Execution Toolkit to guide you in making smarter profit generating decisions and includes personalized exercises so you can begin formulating your own winning game plan.  You will gain confidence in your pricing as you learn:

• How to successfully both get your fair price and raise price
• When and how to make smart price discounting decisions
• How to manage price in very competitive markets

This winning formula has been tested time again in diverse businesses. The results?  Superior profits and an inspired sales team.  

"Joanne taught these price negotiation skills to my six businesses in an

eye-opening and actionable way. It pushed us to new promising strategies in each business. The confidence of my segment leaders was significantly enhanced."

-Dr. Dirk Hoehler, Senior Vice President Marketing & Sales, Evonik

"My businesses relied on Joanne's models and training to create exceptional profits and recapture lost margins. Her ability to bring the critical drivers of success together--committed leadership, fair price, and negotiation skills--in a way business and sales people can implement is exceptional."

-Tim McCann, Former DuPont Chief Marketing & Sales Officer and Business President

"Joanne Smith's training workshops at PPS Events have been invaluable for our members worldwide. Her pricing-thought leadership combined with her experience and success at DuPont make "The Price Negotiation Playbook" a great read. This playbook will be an invaluable resource to lead B2B sales organizations to profitable growth."

- Kevin Mitchell, President, The Professional Pricing Society, Inc.

"Many of our businesses are facing severe pricing pressure. Smith trained our Sales & Marketing so that everyone understood the approaches for profitable growth. Smith's confident and bold teaching style, supported by her hands-on business experience, helped boost participants' self-confidence to handle pricing pressure."

-Michael G. Rübenkönig, Vice President Pricing, Evonik Performance Materials GmbH

"Smith's pricing approaches are fantastic. She provides practical insights we had not considered before. Smith is a great teacher with a wealth of experience. I would recommend this book or her course to any B2B sales organization interested in improving their profits."

-Arthur Schultheiss, Director of Global Sales, Air Liquide

"Skills and confidence! Every salesperson should have the skills taught in this book, which will build the confidence to implement the teachings."

-Sharon Gidumal, Former Senior Sales Professional, DuPont

"Having worked with Joanne several times, I'm pleased to see her concepts presented in her new book. They will lead any organization to understanding the most powerful lever on profitability--pricing. Joanne helped us identify those key behaviors which are critical to the success of pricing in a manner which strengthens customer loyalty."

-D. Harold Dodd, Commercial Manager, Americas, Huntsman Performance Products

Joanne Smith spent over 20 years driving profitability from a variety of business, marketing, and pricing leadership roles inside of DuPont. As the Corporate Director of Marketing and Pricing at DuPont, she headed a highly innovative pricing team that influenced senior leaders including those in the marketing and sales organizations to adopt new, bold pricing approaches. Currently, she is president of Price to Profits Consulting (www.price2profits.com) which assists B2B companies in transforming their pricing performance to enhance long-term profitability. Joanne is the author of "The Pricing and Profit Playbook." She teaches pricing courses, as well as provides keynote speeches, around the world. Joanne resides in Avondale, Pennsylvania.