Start with what you actually charge
Pricing projects tend to begin with willingness-to-pay research, which is useful and slow. A faster first step is to look at the distribution of realized prices across a company's own customer base for the same product.
In most organizations that distribution is wider than leadership expects, and the spread is not explained by volume, contract length, or strategic value. It is explained by who negotiated, under what deadline, and with how much authority.
Exceptions become structure
Discount authority is usually granted for a reason: close a quarter, hold a competitive account, land a logo. Each individual exception is defensible. In aggregate, and over enough quarters, the exception becomes the price and the list becomes fiction.
The tell is an exception log that nobody reviews and an approval threshold that everybody knows how to route around.
Each individual exception is defensible. In aggregate, the exception becomes the price.
Tahmid Islam, Chief Financial Officer
Consistency first
The first move is rarely to raise prices. It is to narrow the spread, so that comparable customers pay comparable amounts and the sales organization can explain why.
That alone tends to recover margin, and it produces the clean baseline that any subsequent pricing change needs in order to be measurable.
