The role of a pricing leader has become increasingly complex. Depending on the organization, the role entails setting list prices, real-time yield management and web pricing, price approvals, confirming rebates and trade terms, input into commission structures, and close coordination on value for leadership.

Some companies have standalone pricing departments backed by teams of analysts. In contrast, others employ a single pricing head within finance or marketing and rely on busy business intelligence teams for analytical services. Effective pricing leadership requires analytical skills, strategic thinking, and cross-functional collaboration. Pricing leaders must have a strong understanding of their data environments, sales teams, incentives, and broader digital and customer self-service initiatives.

We spoke with several pricing leaders at leading companies and distilled five questions others in the role need to consider to maximize impact in their first 100 days:

1. How pricing strategies can support your commercial goals

As a first step, understand your commercial strategy and ensure it is well-documented and agreed upon throughout the organization. For example, is your product a premium offering or a value play? Is your company positioned to drive market leadership or simply a fast follower? While many individuals in an organization can answer these questions, answers often vary widely between departments and personnel, indicating a lack of a cohesive commercial strategy for the pricing team to support.

Speak with stakeholders from across your business — including executives, your sales team, product managers, and even your operations team. Identify your positioning relative to the competition, your customer value proposition, and your business’s growth ambitions. Most importantly, speak with customers and understand how they perceive your positioning. Document your findings and align them with the company’s leadership so you can price in a way that supports the commercial strategy.

2. How price changes can impact your margins and growth

Many pricing teams have embarked on aggressive price increase programs. One of the key challenges now is ensuring that price changes drive margin growth by staying ahead of cost changes and discouraging trade-downs that

deteriorate the mix and that volumes grow effectively without giving up on price. To measure this, start by running a Price-Volume-Mix (PVM) analysis, which helps unpack the impacts of pricing change on volume and a mix of product margins.

3. How customer segmentation can improve your pricing strategy

Certain pockets of your business likely have a greater willingness to pay versus others, and it’s critical to understand what attributes drive this behavior. Region, customer industry, and customer size can all influence price. Some customers may need rapid turnaround times and be willing to pay extra for them, while others may want the lowest price.

When you segment your customers, ensure that you have a well-documented profile of each segment’s needs (or “key purchase criteria”) and how they perceive your company’s ability to meet them. Segments that need value-added services and view your company as able to deliver on those ought to have higher pricing. Check whether this is the case by examining price variability and seeing if your customer segmentation can explain it. If your least sensitive customers don’t have the highest pricing, it may mean you need to realign pricing or introduce new discounting controls and rules. Understanding customer value is one of the highest return use cases of predictive AI modeling and often a quick win to drive sales and pricing alignment on strategy.

4. How data quality can drive smarter pricing decisions

As a baseline, ensure you have clean and complete transactional data and a clear product hierarchy aligned to customer decision logic. To enable higher-level analyses, consider seeking out three additional datasets.

First, assess the quality of CRM data. Are top-of-funnel opportunities consistently recorded? Are wins and losses well-documented with reason codes?

Second, understand what market data sources are available and develop a plan to fill in gaps. Can you track market share changes, especially relative to price moves? What about publicly available competitor pricing data?

Last, search for firmographic data on your customer base. Do you understand each customer’s overall revenue, growth, and share of the wallet? This data should be stored in a centralized data layer, ready for your team to run analyses and drive insights. 

5. How your organization can effectively support pricing execution

Pricing across many businesses is ultimately a team sport, and getting to the right end customer price relies on decisions made by the marketing, pricing, sales, operations, and finance organizations. Many pricing efforts struggle because they sit in only one of these silos or don’t have the full buy-in of the organization.

The pricing organization has the opportunity to drive a consistent vision of how prices should be executed in the market, as well as the tools and insights needed. An important first step for any pricing leader is understanding who controls what and ensuring the pricing strategy is deployed with an eye on each function. Then, the pricing leader can steer the ship by setting prices and discounts.

However, setting the right list prices and discounts can only go so far — if those prices aren’t implemented as planned, margins will quickly erode. In one example of this, a large industrial company rolled out a new premium pricing model for one of its product lines. Still, the sales compensation encouraged the field force to excessively discount offerings intended to be premium in the market, negating the entire strategy. To evaluate the organization’s ability to execute your pricing strategy, you can measure leakages from quoted prices to ordered prices, review customer contracts to understand limitations on price changes, and ensure sales teams are effectively incentivized on price or margin.

After answering these five questions, you can create a roadmap and business case to improve your business’ pricing capabilities. With a well-defined plan, you, as the pricing leader, can confidently navigate pricing complexities and deliver significant value for your organization.