In Brief

Before the full read, here’s what I’d share with a pricing leader in a hurry.

A national B2B organization featured later in this article achieved a 1.2% profit lift in under a year and a measurable increase in sales confidence. The breakthrough didn’t come from a new pricing theory, but from closing the execution gaps around trust, ownership, and day-to-day decision support.

In our experience, when pricing underperforms, it almost always traces back to one (or more) of these five execution gaps:

1. No clear owner: Accountability is spread across sales, finance, and product, so no one truly owns margin end-to-end.
2. Sales doesn’t trust the system: After years of black-box tools and blunt rules, reps default to instinct over guidance.
3. Incentives work against you: You ask for margin discipline, but compensation still rewards volume-first behavior.
4. Legacy tools and habits slow everything down: Spreadsheets, static matrices, and ERP/CPQ workarounds can’t keep pace with deal complexity and volatility.
5. The last mile of communication breaks: Reps lack credible, customer-ready ways to explain price changes, eroding confidence on both sides of the table.

As you scan that list, which one feels like the single biggest drag on your pricing performance right now?

Keep that in mind as you read. It’s usually the real reason execution falls short.

Pricing rarely collapses because the math is wrong. It breaks down when trust, incentives, and systems fall out of alignment.

In practice, we see misalignment surface across the same five execution gaps repeatedly.

Execution Gap #1: No Clear Ownership

Pricing responsibility is often spread across sales, finance, and product or category teams, with no single leader accountable end-to-end. That creates blind spots where margin leakage goes unnoticed. Small issues accumulate: outdated rebates, untracked discounts, freight assumptions that no longer reflect actual costs.

Without clear ownership and transparent governance, even a strong pricing strategy becomes a guessing game for the field.

Execution Gap #2: Trust Breaks in the Field

Sales teams live with pricing decisions every day. If they don’t trust the guidance, execution will stall.

Many have lived through failed initiatives or “black box” tools that never connected to commercial reality. When new guardrails appear without clarity on how they protect margin and customer relationships, they feel arbitrary. Too much data, delivered without context, only deepens skepticism.

Reps often discount not because they reject margin discipline, but because they don’t trust or fully understand the system they’re being asked to follow.

Execution Gap #3: Incentives Fight the Strategy

Even when trust exists, compensation can quietly undermine pricing goals.

In many B2B organizations, sales is still rewarded primarily for top-line growth. That naturally encourages discounting to protect volume rather than profitability. When incentives and strategy point in different directions, adoption suffers.

We’ve seen meaningful shifts when organizations realign compensation to reward margin, not just revenue. Pairing pricing initiatives with margin-based incentives and fast-start programs can dramatically accelerate adoption and reduce early leakage.

Execution Gap #4: Legacy Tools and Habits

Entrenched processes and aging technology also erode execution.

Static matrices, manual spreadsheets, and rigid ERP or CPQ configurations struggle to handle today’s deal complexity, customer segmentation, and cost volatility. Over time, these tools lose credibility with both pricing teams and the field.

We worked with a large B2B organization whose market position was strong, but whose pricing operations couldn’t keep pace with shifting costs, competitive pressure, and customer-specific agreements. Their tools didn’t support rapid scenario modeling or informed trade-off decisions.

By partnering with their pricing and data teams, we helped design a scenario-based pricing engine supported by AI-assisted recommendations and executive dashboards. Leaders could see the impact of decisions before they were deployed. That alignment ultimately contributed to more than $250M in margin expansion across targeted segments.

The breakthrough wasn’t technology alone. It was restoring confidence in how decisions were made and communicated.

Execution Gap #5: The Last Mile of Communication

Even strong pricing programs can falter in the final handoff to customers.

Reps need professional, consistent ways to explain price changes and contract updates. Without credible, customer-ready materials—branded quotes, effective-date notices, clear explanations of value—every conversation becomes harder, adoption slows, and resistance grows.

Automation that produces clear, consistent customer communications reduces friction and builds confidence for both sellers and buyers.

Closing the Execution Gap

Across distributors and manufacturers, the same conditions consistently support pricing strategies that actually stick:

• Clear ownership and accountability
• Guidance the field trusts and understands
• Incentives aligned to profitable behavior
• Systems that support, rather than hinder, decision-making
• Communication that equips reps to represent pricing with confidence

When these elements align, profitability results from disciplined execution, not chance.

One national B2B organization had long relied on manual overrides, outdated cost-plus rules, and gut instinct. The business was growing, but margin erosion was creeping in. Sales teams lacked visibility into price sensitivity, and leaders knew they needed a more intelligent, customer-specific approach—without slowing quoting or straining relationships.

By implementing a dynamic, scenario-based pricing engine tailored to their cost structures, deal history, and customer segments, the company achieved a 1.2% profit lift across targeted segments within 6–12 months. Just as important, 95% of sales reps reported higher confidence in pricing conversations.

If one of the execution gaps you saw earlier stood out as your biggest opportunity—ownership, trust, incentives, tools, or communication—it’s worth a conversation.

We spend our time helping pricing leaders close exactly that gap: turning solid strategy into systems and processes their teams actually believe in and use.

Let’s compare notes on which execution gap is holding you back and what it would take to move it forward.