Beginning relationships with customers at a high price makes the statement: “we’re good at what we do and we know it.” Fighting with a competitor over a low price says “I’m uncertain about my abilities, so I’ll take what I can get.”

<strong>Price by the service, not by the hour</strong>.

<strong>Slow down your sales process</strong>. Slow down how, when, and who you take on as clients. You need time to determine a client’s needs before you price their projects. You must know what outcomes they desire.

<strong>Inject value into your client’s experience with your service.</strong>

Establish a client intake process

<p>Here are three things you can do now to get started on your journey toward strategic pricing:</p> <ul> <li>Develop your new client intake process, similar to the example above. Add the various steps that you feel are valuable and walk your clients through it BEFORE you begin your work.</li> <li>Begin offering three options to all of your work. And always include things in your options the client did NOT ask for. When you start selling things your client didn’t ask for, you will be surprised at how many clients choose the higher options. You will make more money and the client will get more of what they want.</li> <li>Test your pricing, but don’t benchmark! To know what your market will bear, begin pricing higher than you have been in the past just to test your market. And avoid benchmarking—which is the process of looking at what your market or direct competitors price their services at. Remember, your competition may be pricing non-strategically as well. Don’t follow the blind. Strategic pricers don’t follow, they lead!</li></ul>

In this new context, by comparison, anybody who writes anything, whether it’s an individual or a team, is now exposed in the commons. Everybody is required to review three deliverables other than their own and rank and review them. That’s a little foreign, and there’s a fair amount of pushback on that. People say, “What do you mean, other people can see my stuff?” And I say, “Well, that’s how peer learning works.”

<p>The motive in this kind of social context is altruism. It’s to help others. By contrast, the motive in a business context is all about profit.</p> <p>Enterprise behavior is different. You can’t take the same social technologies and plop them into a profit-making context and expect that people will immediately engage. The question is, once the underlying motivation shifts from purpose to profit, will the motivation to engage persist?</p>

<p>At a recent class, the students — nearly 100 of them — are in small groups discussing a question. Three possible answers to the question are projected on a screen. Before the students start talking with one another, they use a mobile device to vote for their answer. Only 29 percent got it right. After talking for a few minutes, Mazur tells them to answer the question again.</p> <p>This time, 62 percent of the students get the question right. Next, Mazur leads a discussion about the reasoning behind the answer. The process then begins again with a new question. This is a method Mazur calls "peer Instruction." He now teaches all of his classes this way.</p> <p>"What we found over now close to 20 years of using this approach is that the learning gains at the end of the semester nearly triple," he says.</p>

<p>Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading — what he calls the "information-gathering" part of education — before they come to class.</p> <p>"In class, we work on trying to make sense of the information," Mazur says. "Because if you stop to think about it, that second part is actually the hardest part. And the information transfer, especially now that we live in an information age, is the easiest part."</p>

<p>Here’s what <em>not</em> to do when you’re trying to expand or leverage your network:</p> <p><b>1. Try to take before you give.</b> </p>

<b>2. Assume others should care about your needs.</b> &nbsp;

Care about others first; then, and only then, will they truly care back.

4. Assume tools create connections.

<b>5. Reach too high.</b>

The “status” level of your connections is irrelevant. All that matters is whether you can help each other reach your goals.

Kirchner (2011 study) – collaboration in problem solving – notes that collaboration takes cognitive resources.&nbsp; Do you benefit enough? If the problems are relatively easy, then learning better in a solo setting.&nbsp; If problems more complex, then collab will lead to better learning.

<p>Typically, you will find added costs in the following areas when it comes to integrating accessibility:</p> <ul> <li>Determining accessibility requirements for final deliverables</li> <li>Developing internal style guides and best practices</li> <li>Training staff</li> <li>Finding new toolsets</li> <li>Modifying existing codebases</li> <li>Additional QA time &amp; resources</li> <li>Consultant Fees/ Salary for an internal Subject Matter Expert</li></ul>

That is, when you analyze a group, the findings often suggest that learning styles are relative unimportant, however, when you look at an individual, then the learning style often distinguishes itself as a key component of being able to learn or not.

Thus the main take-away that I get from the paper if that if you are an instructor, manager, etc. who has to help the individual learners, then learning styles make sense. On the other hand, if you are an instructional designer or someone who directs her or his efforts at the group, then learning styles are probably not that important.