The strategies that are used are unique and sometimes they are made up on the fly depending on hunches that I have. And creativity is a must.

A recent deal I did was a domain where both the buyer (my client) and the seller agreed to a price ($60,000) and both were happy. I perceived to much eagerness on the part of the seller (the tempo of his replies and his voice on the phone) and as a result managed to get him to lower his price by another $4,000 which almost covered my entire fee. All this w/o the buyer even knowing about it. (I did the entire deal from the start and the start price was $200k and it's a pretty good name actually.)

It would be hard to put in words why I decided to take that chance along with the risks etc. (And it didn't put any more money in my pocket I did it just for the fun of following my hunch).

On the sell side I once raised a price by $50,000 merely hearing the buyers voice over the phone. That said almost all deals are done by email not in person and not over the phone. (See if you can guess why I prefer to do it like that.)

This is all psychology and pattern matching and I've been doing it for many years (as well as with things that have nothing to do with domains at all) I've never read a book on it and I wouldn't do that because it would mess up my instincts.

I also do work for VC's and angels acquiring domains and I've helped plenty of people for free (but can't really do that because it's very time consuming). Questions are always invited obviously.