In nearly every seminar I conduct, salespeople and their managers claim that the market determines their selling price. Wrong. If the market determines price, there would be only one price that sellers could charge. The market does not determine your price. Believing that the market determines the selling price is relinquishing one’s responsibility for setting the price and sticking by that price. Like...


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Opportunity cost represents the indirect costs and missed opportunities when one chooses a course of action. Buyers often view the price difference between one seller and another as an opportunity cost and ask themselves, “What other ways could we spend or invest that money if we did not choose the more expensive alternative?” Those foregone alternatives are the opportunity costs of the more expensive...


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Blaise Pascal, scientist-turned-philosopher, wrote: “Clarity of mind means clarity of passion.” Embracing the Value-Added Selling philosophy as our core focus and organizing our sales priorities around it intentionally limit and liberate us. They limit us to performing only those tasks that add value to our efforts and liberate us from things that add cost without value—the distractions. With...


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By Tom Reilly, author of Value-Added Selling (McGraw-Hill, 2010) Discipline is a word that evokes mixed reactions from people. For some, it conjures up images of punishment and self-denial—of authoritarians and ascetics. For others, it sounds more like glue—the sinew of one’s spirit. I have found that discipline has a better ring to it as a noun than a verb. As a noun, it sounds like an attribute....


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For most of the four years that I spent in the U. S. Army, I was actively involved in training—receiving it and delivering it. In one of the leadership schools I attended, there was a poster that hung on the wall to my immediate left. I stared at it for seven weeks. It was a simple acronym, PRIDE: Professional Results In Daily Effort. I guess it stuck because nearly four decades later I still remember...


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