Pricing the Profitable Sale: The Manager's Guide to Value Pricing represents a complete revision of a prior work entitled Pricing for Profit: The Manager's Guide to Market Oriented Pricing. Like the earlier book, its purpose is to assist corporate managers in realizing the full potential available in the product or service price as a company's primary revenue and profit generator. The book is a radical departure from standard texts in its practical and quantitative approach. Because of its heavy use of formulas, graphs, reference tables, and pricing rules and guidelines, it will appeal primarily to marketers with a background in the sciences or engineering and less so to individuals who prefer a less rigorous treatment of the subject. A special feature of the book is three chapters devoted to price optimization techniques for determining sell prices of products or services designed to achieve maximum sales revenues, market share, or profits for the firm. Numerous examples throughout the text demonstrate the use of the material presented. Pricing the Profitable Sale should also be of interest to academia. In a business school MBA program, it could serve either as the primary text in a course on pricing or, in an advanced marketing class, as a supplement to one of the standard marketing texts.
Peter Zell grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Oak Park, Illinois, where he attended high school. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. After two years of active duty with the U.S. Army Reserve, Mr. Zell was employed as an engineer by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Virginia. He subsequently left for New York City to study business administration earning an MBA degree from the Columbia Business School. There followed a successful career in marketing and sales management with diverse multinational companies, both stateside and abroad. Mr. Zell also holds a law degree and is a retired member of the Illinois State Bar Association. Since 2003, he has lived in retirement near Phoenix, Arizona.