“We had to give that discount to win the deal.”
You hear that a lot. Then you look closer, and no one ever really tested if it was true.
Pricing isn’t broken because companies don’t care. It breaks because quotes are handled manually, even when the rest of the process is system-driven.
You see the same patterns. Sales adds a “safe” discount before the customer reacts. The same product is priced differently across regions without anyone noticing. Complex configurations get forced into simple price lists that don’t reflect what’s actually being sold.
No one plans to lose margin. It just happens, one quote at a time. Most teams try to fix it once a year with a price update. That’s not pricing. That’s maintenance.
When companies actually look at their pricing, the gap is usually bigger than expected.
You could see it clearly during recent supply chain swings. Companies with real-time cost visibility held significantly stronger margins—around 20%+ better—than those relying on batch updates and manual pricing. Deloitte’s 2024 Supply Chain Survey puts that number at 23%.
Not because they had better products. Because they reacted faster and priced accordingly.
The same pattern shows up in day-to-day quoting.
Pricing sits between product, sales, and finance. Everyone touches it, no one owns it fully.
And most of it lives outside the system—spreadsheets, local adjustments, exceptions that quietly became standard. So even if leadership wants to improve pricing, there’s no way to enforce it consistently.
CPQ doesn’t magically “optimize pricing.” It does something more useful: it makes pricing executable.
Instead of guidelines, you get rules. Instead of suggestions, you get enforcement. You define how products are segmented, what discounts are allowed, and how pricing changes with configuration—and every quote follows that logic.
No hidden spreadsheets. No silent overrides. It doesn’t mean you charge more by default. It means you stop giving away margin without knowing it.
On one project, the pricing logic already existed. It just wasn’t used.
Sales had price lists and discount bands, but every deal still started from scratch. Discounts were applied early, just to be safe. Once pricing rules were built into CPQ, the starting point changed. Fewer unnecessary discounts, more consistency across regions, and better control over exceptions.
No big pricing initiative. Just structure.
Most companies aren’t underpricing by choice. Their process allows it.
Pricing isn’t a yearly adjustment. It happens in every quote. If you can’t control it there, you’re not really controlling it at all.
Read more: Implementing and Monitoring Pricing Strategies through CPQ
Book a virtual coffee with Magnus or Patrik: www.cpq.se/meetcpqse