Introduction

When I first moved to London, I joined a wine club. I was hoping to meet new people who shared my love of blind tasting. We would put wine bottles into brown fabric sleeves, so no one could see the label. Then we would smell, taste, and try to use deduction logic to figure out what was in the glass: the grape, the region, the vintage, and if you were very good, the producer. I was addicted.

The club offered almost a thousand bottles by the glass. But, after a few visits, I felt out of place. The room, on any given evening, was full of white men in their 50s and 60s. Most of them worked in finance or law; the rest were in the wine industry. They all had one thing in common: extensive wine knowledge, acquired through money or work. I was in my 30s, a nine-to-fiver, and I was barely keeping up with the tasting.

One evening, Richard, a retired Englishman, picked up a glass I had poured. No one knew what was in it except me. The game began.

‘Pale ruby, very clean.’ He sniffed and continued. ‘Lots of red fruit – strawberry, raspberry. I like it. Very delicate. Feels like a Pinot.’

Glenn, a silver fox quant trader, added, ‘Yes, good acidity. Very silky tannins. It does feel like a Pinot. But I’m not getting any sous-bois. Too clean to be Burgundy.’

‘This is definitely not Pinot,’ Richard said, taking a second sip. ‘I don’t even think it’s an Old World.’

‘So, what do we have? Grenache? Carignan? Cinsault?’ Glenn added. ‘I don’t think it’s a blend. Definitely too fresh for Rhône. My bet’s on South Africa. Quite young – maybe ’18 or ’19.’

I sat quietly. I was competitive about blind tasting, but I wasn’t sure I had a place at this table. The way I saw it, I earned my place in two ways. Either I brought great bottles, or I brought great taste buds. Most great bottles were out of my budget, so instead I’d brought a funky natural wine from South Africa. Would that be enough of a challenge for my fellow tasters?

‘You know what? I was at a South African tasting the other day,’ Richard said, rolling up his sleeves. ‘This reminds me of one of the producers we tried. Duncan Savage. That’s the name.’

I flipped the bottle. Duncan Savage, Cinsault, Western Cape, 2019.

‘Great choice, Claire.’ Glenn raised his glass.

I smiled and told myself I needed to broaden my taste buds. Fast. I asked the head sommelier if I could volunteer at the club. I worked there three times a week, in addition to my corporate job. I tasted more wines than I could remember and I’d go home knackered. But I kept going. If I could develop better taste buds, I’d finally feel valuable to my peers.

You Know How to Appreciate It

One night, Richard opened a bottle of vintage Léoville-Las-Cases from his cellar. ‘When I bought this 30 years ago, the price wasn’t ridiculous as it is today,’ he said as he uncorked it.

It wasn’t a wine I drank regularly. I took my time with the aroma. When I finally brought it to my palate, I couldn’t hide my excitement.

Richard laughed. ‘This is good, isn’t it? I remember the first time I tried it. I was just like you.’ Then he paused and said, ‘Sometimes we get too caught up in the game of blind tasting and we forget how lucky we are to be drinking these wines. You remind us to slow down and appreciate it.’

I smiled. I guess I just wasn’t jaded yet.

That’s when it hit me. They liked having me there not because of the bottles I picked or how good I was at the game. They liked me because I was new to all of it. Still tasting many things for the first time and giving them the opportunity to share their knowledge.

By then, I’d spent over a decade working in the pricing profession. I thought I was trained well enough to easily identify what others value, yet I’d missed it by miles here.

In pricing, value is the lever. We can’t force customers to buy what they don’t want. We can only invite them to consider taking out their credit cards. The way to do that is to highlight the benefits they’ll get if they choose us.

Influence works the same way. At the tasting table, I was trying to show people the value of having me there. I couldn’t force them to invite me back, I could only influence them. And the way to do that was to show them they’d made the right call, over and over.

I tried to deliver value by doubling down on what I thought mattered: wine knowledge, more sophisticated taste buds. I could not have been more wrong. What they valued was much simpler: someone who brought enthusiasm, curiosity and appreciation.

Over my career, I’ve watched startup founders explain product features with passion yet never sign an investor. Oxbridge graduates who lead with their credentials but lose the job to someone from a less famous university. Analysts who present pages of charts while their stakeholders reply to emails, half listening. None of them failed because they didn’t try hard; they failed because they were trying hard in the wrong direction. Just like I had.

I was working after my day job ended, exhausting myself, thinking they would only value my presence if I could taste like them. Instead they enjoyed having me around, not because I could educate them, but because they could share their knowledge with me.

We all make the same mistake: highlighting a value that isn’t important to the person we need a yes from. That moment at the tasting table didn’t just teach me once again that value isn’t what you think you’re bringing, it’s what the other person is getting. It also reminded me how easy it is to get it wrong. Even for a value expert.

This book takes you back to the fundamentals: how to identify value, and how to communicate it. Because value articulation sits at the core of influence. We don’t influence by forcing people; we don’t influence by convincing; we don’t influence by persuading; we influence by inviting.

Who I Am

My name is Claire Wang, and I am a pricing strategist. I’ve spent the last two decades setting prices for things you probably pay for every month: mobile phone plans, banking fees, insurance policies. It’s a job that taught me the art of influence. Because it’s easy to get people to like you, but it’s much harder to get them to pay you. And to get them to happily part with their money, you need real influence. But the influence challenge starts long before the customer sees a price tag.

As much as I wished every number I proposed could go straight onto the shelf the next day, the reality was different. Each price had to survive multiple layers of corporate sign-off: marketing, finance, product, sales. Every one of them had a view. Every one of them needed to agree. That, too, takes influence. And after 20 years of doing this, I’ve learned the secret: to get a yes from anyone, you need to know what matters to them. What they’d gain by saying yes, and what they’d give up by agreeing with you. Once you can see the decision through their eyes, and once you learn to orchestrate a yes the way a pricer does, you can move anyone to a yes.

If you want to move up in your career, be seen as a true business partner, or simply bring the ideas you care about into the world, you need to influence. You need to turn the value you see into value others can understand and support.

Who You Are

Perhaps you are an analyst, an engineer, an accountant, or a specialist of any kind, and you are tired of being overlooked in your company despite being right. You are great at the technical side of your job, yet you are constantly passed over for promotions. You bring strong ideas, backed by evidence and logic, yet get dismissed during executive meetings. Over and over again, you spend endless energy explaining your ideas. Yet you have little impact.

Then, you watch weaker ideas get approved because someone else knows how to sell them. This is not fair.

I used to be just like you. I would go into executive meetings armed with a compelling story, ready to support my case with numbers I’d spent days preparing. Except, most of the time, I didn’t even get a chance to present them. Someone else would steal the stage, despite their ideas being half-baked, in my opinion.

When people didn’t buy into my ideas, I thought it was politics, stupidity or irrational resistance. I never thought it had anything to do with how I presented those ideas or how they would be perceived by others. This is the trap I found myself in for much of my early career. And this book was written to help you get out of that trap.

You’ll find this book useful if you lack formal authority entirely. Or, if you have authority but wonder why, despite hearing yeses, nothing moves forward. It’s very likely that you work with capable, opinionated stakeholders, but that you can never instruct them or tell them what to do. You can only learn to influence them. You tell yourself: If only they could hear what I’ve got to say. That’s all I need.

If this sounds like you, you are in the right place.

Think Like a Pricer

It took me over a decade to realise that the art and science a pricer uses to influence a customer’s buying decision can be applied to influence any decision. When customers make a purchasing decision, it’s rarely about the product itself. What they’re really buying is the promise of a desired outcome. Understanding the motives behind that decision is everything. So to influence, we need to first understand what outcome our proposal is helping our audience achieve. Unless they see the value in saying yes, your idea is not going anywhere.

Your idea is the product. The person you need a yes from is your buyer. And, like any buyer, they’re weighing what you’re offering against what it costs them to say yes. Their time. Their energy. Their money. Their reputation. The risk of being wrong.

If you agree that selling an idea is no different from selling anything, then using the pricing framework seems like a no-brainer. According to McKinsey, pricing is the single most effective lever a company can pull to improve its profitability, more so than increasing volume or reducing costs. I argue that the pricing framework is the single most effective way to influence, and influence should be taught through pricing principles.

To influence a decision, you need to close the gap between what you’re offering and what your buyer values. This book will show you how, in four stages:

• Know your buyer: You don’t need to influence everyone; you just need to move the person whose yes actually matters.
• Enter their world: Assume you know nothing. Learn what they value, how they see the problem, and the constraints within which they’re working.
• Make your move: Lead with what they need to hear in the first 60 seconds, using language they recognise.
• Become the default: Deliver, then deliver again. Trust isn’t earned in a single yes, it accumulates across the yeses that follow.

These four stages come down to one discipline: understand what your buyer values, then deliver it in a way they recognise. Influence, here, is about an alignment in value. When the alignment is missing, no matter how smart or logical your idea is, it will not move.

If your goal is to grow your influence, what you need to do isn’t push your ideas harder, it’s to identify how to add value in ways your buyer cares about. That’s the framework, and this is what it will give you.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of this book, when you present your ideas at a meeting, you’ll stop wondering Why don’t they just get it? Instead, you’ll start asking, What value are they not seeing? When someone says no, you won’t hear rejection, you’ll hear information: I haven’t shown them my value in terms they care about yet. The shift isn’t about talking more, it’s about listening better, translating faster, and pricing your ideas according to the reality your stakeholders live in.

You’ll stop chasing buy-in at any cost. You’ll stop giving more just to get a yes, or overworking just to be accepted. Instead, you’ll act like a good pricer who knows when to walk away from a bad deal – you’ll hold your price. Because influence isn’t about convincing everyone, it’s about articulating values where the terms make sense for both sides.

This book won’t deliver if you’re looking for persuasion scripts or communication templates, or a one-size-fits-all influence playbook. It will not teach you charisma, or how to have more executive presence, although I agree that both are very important. You will adopt a lens for seeing influence from a brand-new perspective. You’ll develop a new mindset – that of a pricing strategist. You’ll learn diagnostic questions to ask, lenses to apply, and patterns to recognise. They are not rigid steps, they are flexible tools that adapt to the situation you are in.

If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting thinking, I had the right answer, they just didn’t get it, this book will show you a different way – not louder, not harder. Better aligned with how decisions actually get made. You’ll stop fighting just to be heard, and you’ll learn to build influence by attracting and inviting.

Are you ready? Let’s get started.