The American Transportation Research Institute keeps a list of the worst bottlenecks on America’s highways. Using GPS data from commercial trucks, they have determined which interchanges have the worst traffic, slowing semis to a crawl.
If you’ve driven across the US much, it won’t surprise you at all that Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, and LA figure prominently at the top of the list. The very worst? Where I-95 meets SR4 in Ft. Lee, NJ. During peak hours, average speed is less than 20 mph.
B2B organizations have their own bottlenecks—just not the kind you can fix with better traffic management.
When deals stall, fingers tend to point in one direction: pricing.
Sales teams, frustrated with delays, often blame pricing for being the culprit. They complain about approvals taking too long, discounting rules being too restrictive, or margin targets getting in the way of closing deals.
And so, the pricing team scrambles to prove they aren’t the bottleneck. They work to speed up approvals, reduce turnaround times, and make the quoting process as fast and painless as possible.
But that’s not the real problem. Don’t get us wrong, trying to be efficient is commendable. But jumping every time the sales team tells you to hop doesn’t do anything to address the real bottleneck in the organization.
The real bottleneck isn’t in pricing execution. It’s in missed potential.
The bottleneck of missed potential.
The real bottleneck
We have all kinds of business clichés that warn us about the dangers of over-focusing on speed and efficiency: Work smarter not harder. Go slow to go fast. Haste makes waste. We all know that getting things done quickly isn’t the same as doing things well.
But in the daily grind, it’s easy to forget. We get caught up in firefighting and miss the opportunities for real strategic improvements.
If your pricing team is solely focused on speeding up quotes and approvals, you’re not solving the real problem—you’re just greasing the wheels on potentially bad deals. The real bottleneck is that pricing isn’t being used strategically to drive higher margins, better customer segmentation, and smarter deal execution.
A pricing team that acts only as a sales support function is a missed opportunity. You have access to pricing trends, customer willingness to pay, and competitive insights—intelligence that should be guiding sales toward better, more profitable deals. When pricing steps into a strategic role, it stops being seen as a roadblock and becomes the engine that moves the business forward.
How exactly do you do that? We have some resources with suggestions:
- From Tactical to Strategic Pricing explores how have other pricing teams managed to make the transition. It explains what steps to take and how to selecting the right strategic priorities.
- Using Pricing Analysis to Drive More Growth Pricing isn’t the only thing the analytical processes and underlying data we track can be used for. Learn how we can use pricing processes and techniques to answer other powerful questions to increase the bottom line (and your internal profile).
- The Essence of Strategic Pricing discover the fundamental differences between strategic and tactical pricing. How are the goals and objectives different? How are the outcomes different? How are the activities different?
- Essential PricingFunctions highlights the most important functions of a pricing team. It pays special attention to the roles that act as force multipliers, helping the rest of the organization become more effective.
Speeding up pricing approvals without improving pricing strategy is like taking a Ferrari out on one of those bottlenecked highways during rush hour. It might look impressive, but it won’t get you where you need to go any faster.
Shifting pricing from a reactive function to a strategic growth driver is like merging into the express lane—it doesn’t just speed up individual deals, it helps the entire business move faster and more profitably.
From Tactical to Strategic Pricing
Some teams are so mired in tactical grunt work and daily firefights that they never make progress on strategic pursuits. How have other pricing teams transitioned into more strategic functions? What steps did they take?
Using Pricing Analysis to Drive More Growth
Pricing analysis capabilities are usually only focused on pricing. But pricing isn't the only thing the analytical processes and underlying data can be used for. In this on-demand webinar, you will learn how answering other powerful questions can increase your impact and internal profile.
The Essence of Strategic Pricing
It's easy to fill your to-do list with all sorts of tactical pricing tasks. But if you're only focusing on those, it's hard to generate significant results. View this recorded training seminar and learn about tackling the most powerful and effective aspects of real strategic pricing.
Essential Pricing Functions
While there's only one pricing title on the business card, there are actually many different "jobs within the job." And it isn't easy to do the right jobs, at the right times, and in the right ways.
