Why Does Pricing Still Lack C-Suite Visibility? The Case for Change!

In over 20 years of working with global organizations on pricing strategy, there is a common paradox: Pricing is demonstrated as the biggest impact on profitability — yet often has the least strategic visibility.

In many billion-dollar companies, there’s a Chief Marketing Officer, a Chief Sales Officer, a Chief Finance Officer but no Chief Pricing Officer.   

Why does pricing remain a corporate orphan?

Let’s unpack the structural, political, and cultural reasons — and more importantly, how we can fix it.

1. Pricing Is Everyone’s Job — And Therefore No One’s

Pricing touches finance, sales, product, marketing, even supply chain. But that makes it hard to own. Too often, it’s scattered across functions with conflicting goals:

• Finance wants margin control.
• Sales wants flexibility to close deals.
• Marketing wants consistency with value proposition and positioning but isn’t incentivized to enforce it.

This lack of ownership keeps pricing in that tactical, not strategic level.

2. The Strategic Value of Pricing Is Undeniable

The mathematics are very clear; a 1% improvement in price will usually deliver 8–12% improvement in operating profit for most organisations. The multiplier effect on profit outperforms the comparable improvements in fixed cost, variable cost, or volume. The analysis of financial performance across industries has proven this, but many leadership teams still view pricing through a cost-plus or discount lens, not as a lever of growth in revenue or margin.

Pricing deserves to be at the strategy table — alongside marketing, product, and finance.

3. Political Friction Blocks Elevation

Let’s be honest: Sales often resists pricing governance, as there is a long-standing perception that pricing “gets in the way of closing deals.” The reality is totally different to that; strong pricing enables confidence, profitability, and better customer targeting. And that same strong pricing makes sales more efficient not less. Every industry has market volatility driven by supply chain disruption, inflationary pressures, tariffs.  When Sales are trying to close deals, they need somebody else to worry about all that to give them the highest probability of closing the deal.

Every organisation will want sales to be more effective.  By having a strong and strategic pricing function delivering personalized pricing and product recommendations, with automated approvals and deal scoring they become more efficient and effective while improving margin. This isn’t obvious however, so change management and strong communication is critical— with this needing to be politically navigated otherwise pricing stays buried.

4. Historic Underinvestment in Tools & Talent

While billions have been spent on CRM, ERP, and other automation tools, pricing is often managed through spreadsheets. Complicated spreadsheets that are prone to errors, prone to not having the most recent data in them, and prone to, well frankly just being wrong. Only recently have pricing platforms (e.g., Pricefx, PROS, Vendavo, Zilliant) started to get any C-suite or executive boardroom attention.

Without investment in both strategy and tools, pricing will remain operational rather than transformational.

5. Pricing ≠ Discounting

Too many companies confuse pricing with discount control. In the corporate environment customer agreements represent some of the most valuable yet often the least focused on commercial asset. Real pricing strategy is about:

• Multi-dimensional customer segmentation to include purchasing patterns, willingness to pay, service levels and compliance
• Value-based pricing and understanding the perceived value that is delivered by an offering to the customer, in their language
• Monetization commercial models to tailor the pricing to maximize customer loyalty and stickiness
• Elasticity analytics that understands customer behaviour what happens to demand as prices change is critical in optimizing revenue and developing the correct price points for an offering
• Behavioural pricing that will have a strong impact on managing promotions and other marketing strategies for target segments by understanding the customer in the realm of pricing

Pricing is often seen as a gate keeper function that is connected to Finance. The gatekeeper stops bad deals when it is arguably too late, and the sales team have made a sale.

Pricing is much more than just converting a value proposition into a number that is connected to Marketing. We shouldn’t be expecting Product or Strategic Marketing to understand elasticity of demand, or hugely complex segmentation. Their job to is create the value proposition, or the growth strategy to penetrate segments.

So; What needs to happen?

The key is to accept that Pricing isn’t a threat to any other function, it’s actually a help.  Helps Finance by growing margin, and avoiding bad deals, helps Sales by delivering optimized prices based on deep segmentation and a deep understanding of the customer.

To elevate pricing to its rightful strategic role:

1. Educate the C-suite — Start thinking about the power of 1% and start to show the ROI of pricing vs. cost or volume levers.
2. Reframe pricing as growth and move away from thinking pricing is about control.
3. Appoint a Head of Pricing or CPO and have somebody who owns the monetization strategy. If the organization is ready for a Chief Pricing Officer, at least have this role reporting to the CEO.
4. Centralize the pricing capability to remove that conflict between sales and margin ownership.
5. Invest in pricing analytics and governance and stop using spreadsheets. Typically, every $1 invested in pricing will generate $20-25 additional margin.

And finally-

• Marketing owns the value proposition and brand.
• Finance owns the P&L
• Sales owns the relationship with the customer

Pricing is the function that determines how much value is truly captured from the customer.

Would love to hear your experiences. Is pricing respected where you work? Or still misunderstood?