Avoid Lowering Your Prices; SiriusDecisions Summit; Product Management Festival

Jeff Lash

How to Avoid Lowering Your Prices
Even prospects who are enamored with your offerings and eager to buy may ask for a discount. Too often, companies (or sales reps) immediately cave to the request because they’re afraid they will lose the sale or that customers will leave. Instead, as I write in my post on the SiriusDecisions blog How to Avoid Lowering Your Prices, there are other techniques to use to get around the “discounting” issue. Even if they don’t set pricing, product managers should be involved in the decisions about discounting, concessions in negotiation, and how and when to offer different options — after all, those directly impact revenue and profitability, which are extremely relevant since product managers should be responsible for the overall commercial success of the offering. Read more in the blog post: How to Avoid Lowering Your Prices

SiriusDecisions Summit
The 2014 SiriusDecisions Summit was a great event, bringing over 2000 b-to-b sales, marketing and product leaders from around the world together for a few days of sharing of best practices, case studies, new research and models and frameworks. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend and not only present but participate in the community around the Summit. Between the networking opportunities and the huge amount of activity on social media (the #sdsummit hashtag was a top U.S. trend on Twitter several times over the course of the three days!), it was a great way to meet and engage with other like-minded individuals.

Rather than trying to provide you with a recap of the Summit, I’ll instead point you in the direction of a number of people who have already done a great job of that.

Product Management Festival 2014
Speaking of conferences, I’m honored and pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at the 2014 Product Management Festival this September in Zurich. My presentation on Wednesday, September 17 will be on Effectively Communicating Product Roadmaps. The program/agenda looks fantastic — a lot of great speakers (too many to name here for fear of unintentionally omitting and offending someone) and very interesting topics. I’m personally excited to get the chance to meet in person a number of other presenters whom I’ve only “met” online through this blog or Twitter.

Zurich is fairly centrally located, making it an easy trip for those based in Europe — and if you’re based in the U.S. like me, or elsewhere, the location is just one more good reason to register! If you’re attending, let me know and we can plan on meeting face-to-face.

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets (and retweets) which have generated the most interest over the past week; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash: