As pricing professionals, we all know how somewhat stable and predictable market conditions can often lead to stale and stagnant pricing practices. When things are calm, “good enough” is a bit easier to tolerate—coarse segmentation models, loose discounting controls, sloppy customer rankings, manual systems updates, etc.
But when the market shifts dramatically—when trade policies change, demand surges, supply tightens, costs whipsaw, or competitors behave irrationally—suddenly, all of those “mildly irritating and annoying” pricing issues become much more acute sources of pain and frustration.
Ironically, this is also when the rest of the business is really paying attention to the pricing function!
While all of the chaos and turbulence can certainly expose our weaknesses and shortcomings, it also creates a rare opening to drive meaningful change. Market disruption gives us the cover, the urgency, and the internal support to fix what we’ve known was broken all along.
The Chaos Creates a Rationale Few Can Argue With
Trying to overhaul or improve pricing practices and systems in steady markets can feel a bit like we’re proposing a fire drill in the middle of a birthday party. Sales teams balk. Stakeholders drag their feet. Others don’t see the need. Top executives and budget approvers ask why we’re trying to “fix what isn’t that broken.”
But when the markets turn chaotic overnight? Suddenly, we’re no longer just trying to administer some preventative medicine. No, we’re responding to an emergency in progress! And that’s a very different thing.
Market disruption, chaos, and upheaval—whether it’s trade policy, a pandemic, supply chain disruption, cost shocks, competitive shifts, or economic volatility—creates a need for pricing efficacy that everyone can recognize and acknowledge. And we can use the momentum to correct many long-standing issues.
Fix the Fundamentals While the Spotlight Is On
In uncertain markets, leadership teams want more answers. They want more visibility and insight. They want control amid the chaos. That’s our opportunity—not just to plug gaps, but to strengthen our pricing foundations.
As we discuss in the Pricing Through Uncertainty on-demand briefing, the best place to start is with some fundamentals:
- Refine Price Segmentation: Broad strokes don’t cut it in volatile markets. Use more granular, market-based segmentation to reflect real differences in willingness-to-pay and customer behavior.
- Build Price Response Models: Flying blind on price changes is a recipe for disaster. Even heuristic, highest-lowest sensitivity estimates can help guide smarter, lower-risk pricing actions.
- Refine Approval Workflows: Are deal exceptions and approvals based on deal-specific risk profiles or just some blanket rules? Now’s the time to refine the routing logic to avoid margin leakage.
- Establish Contingency Plans: Disruption is unpredictable—but our responses don’t have to be. DefCon-style playbooks give us predefined responses when conditions shift unexpectedly.
Justify Tech Investments Without Endless Debate
When the market is stable, upgrading pricing systems and technology is like long-distance running with hurdles along the way. You have to build a case, defend the ROI, and push through many layers of skepticism.
But when market turbulence and chaos increases the pricing complexity while at the same time amplifying the need for greater speed and precision, the business case for pricing technology almost builds itself.
Modern pricing systems can help us track intelligence signals, measure price sensitivities, model different scenarios and strategies, enforce policies, automate updates, and respond quickly without flailing. With the right technology, we can navigate the complexity with a lot more confidence, accuracy, and speed. And when the markets are chaotic, everyone can understand the need.
Educate and Align While the Business Is Listening
Market disruption and upheaval tends to update understandings and reset priorities—and that includes how people think about pricing. This is when we can clarify and reinforce our roles, explain our objectives and approach, and foster better alignment across the organization.
We can teach sales teams how to use segment-specific pricing guidance to negotiate better deals. We can bring finance into the loop with CLTV ranking, cost-to-serve measures, and volume pricing rationale. And we can make sure that product, marketing, and operations all understand how, where, and why pricing needs to flex in response to changing market conditions.
Document Any New Lessons for the Next Time
While we’re adapting to the current disruptions and turbulence, we should also be preparing for the next cycles of upheaval and chaos. While we can’t predict exactly what the next cycle will look like, we can predict with absolute certainty there will be a next cycle.
So as we’re figuring out what works and what doesn’t, we need to be capturing our learnings and insights. Update our standard operating procedures. Refine our structured playbooks. Create new DefCon procedures for this specific condition. Remember that the discipline of recording what we’re learning doesn’t just prepare us for the future—it helps clarify our thoughts and improve our performance right now.
Leveraging the Chaos To Our Advantage
Market upheaval and disruption will often force pricing onto center stage. For some, that can be uncomfortable. But others will recognize that it provides a level of attention, urgency, and political capital that we may not normally have.
So instead of just applying some duct tape and hoping to survive the chaos, we should leverage the dynamics of the moment to improve our outdated processes, implement better pricing systems, and fix the big issues and inefficiencies we’ve been tolerating.
None of us like market disruption, turbulence, and chaos…but we can absolutely use it to our advantage.
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