Pricing is a finance decision, and finance is usually not in the room

There is no faster lever in any business than price. A one per cent improvement in realised price falls almost entirely to the bottom line, because the cost of delivering that pound or dirham has already been incurred. The same one per cent gained through volume brings its cost with it. Everyone who has run a business knows this in the abstract. Very few organisations of a few hundred people have a process that acts on it.

What they have instead is a rate card that has drifted, a discount culture nobody can quantify, and an annual conversation about whether to put prices up by inflation.

Find out what you actually charge

Start with realised price, not list price. Take twelve months of invoiced revenue, divide it by the units actually delivered, whether that is hours, seats, licences, or projects, and compare it to the rate card. The gap is the discount you are giving, and in most businesses we look at, nobody in leadership has seen it as a single number before.

Then spread it. Plot realised price per customer against volume. A healthy picture shows larger customers paying less per unit in a way that tracks the cost of serving them. The picture we usually find is scatter: two customers of the same size paying materially different prices, with the difference explained by which salesperson closed the deal and what quarter it was.

Build the floor before the next negotiation

• A defensible cost of delivery per unit, from a margin analysis that has been split properly rather than blended.
• A minimum acceptable margin by service line, agreed by leadership, not by the person under quota pressure.
• Discount authority with tiers: what a rep can approve, what a manager can, what requires the CEO or CFO.
• Every discount recorded against a reason code, so that in six months you can tell competitive pressure apart from habit.
• Deal-level margin visible before signature, not discovered at the first month-end after delivery starts.

None of this requires new software. It requires the ledger to carry deal-level data and a short approval step in the sales process. The discipline is the product, not the tooling.

Raising prices on the existing book

The uncomfortable truth in most service and subscription businesses is that the largest pricing opportunity is not in new deals, it is in the customers already being served, especially those onboarded three or more years ago at rates that no longer reflect what is being delivered. Scope has grown, cost has grown, price has not.

Handle this as a programme rather than a mass email. Segment the book by margin and by how much the relationship has changed. Take the clearest cases first, prepare the specific evidence of what has been added since the last price was set, and give account owners a script and a fallback position. Expect some churn, model it honestly before you start, and remember that losing a customer who was delivered at negative margin improves the business.

Where finance belongs in the process

Finance should not be setting prices. Sales and the commercial team understand the market in a way a spreadsheet never will. What finance owes them is the floor, the true cost of delivery, the margin consequence of the specific concession being contemplated, and a fast answer when a live deal needs one. In the businesses where this works, finance is consulted before the offer goes out and can turn a deal review around in an afternoon.