Someone Has to Own Pricing

What we tell every CEO who’s serious about fixing it.

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you don’t need to be convinced that pricing matters.

You already know it does.

You’ve felt the pain—missed margins, confused incentives, sales teams winning the wrong deals.

This isn’t for the executives still debating whether pricing is “strategic.”

This is for those who already know they need to do something about it—and the people ready to hand their CEO a plan and say, “This. Do this.”

Because here’s the truth: most organizations are trying to solve a pricing problem with tools built for accounting.

They’re optimizing averages, not alignment.

They’re building dashboards and models that show what’s happening but not why—and not where to push next.

Until someone owns pricing—not the data, not the reporting, but the function itself—the problem isn’t going away.

That’s where the Chief Pricer comes in.

Not another department head. Not another assessment.

The Chief Pricer is the one who finds the tension in your business model, amplifies it until everyone feels it, and then fixes it.

The Myth: Pricing Is a Data Problem

Yes, data and software matter. They’re table stakes.

But pricing is maybe 20% data—and that’s generous. The rest is judgment, pattern recognition, and cross-functional leadership.

Software fails when there’s no rallying point.

A generic infrastructure without a “what good looks like” statement is just a faster way to go in circles.

Data tells you where you’ve been.

A Chief Pricer defines where you’re going—and tunes price to get you there.

Software doesn’t force alignment.

It just makes misalignment easier to measure.

The Real Problem: Organizational Tension

Every growing business develops structural tension—success breeds it.

Sales chases revenue.

Finance chases cost.

Marketing chases attention.

Operations chases efficiency.

Each department optimizes what it owns. None of them own how those optimizations interact.

That’s the quiet cancer in mid-sized and growing companies: sub-optimization. The better each team gets at its metric, the worse the enterprise performs as a whole.

Pricing is where that tension shows up first. It’s the pressure point between what you promise, what you deliver, and what you get paid for.

A good Chief Pricer doesn’t smooth that tension over—they surface it.They put it in the ouch zone where everyone can finally feel it and fix it.

Choose the Winning Aspiration (Before You Choose a Price)

Most organizations flounder on the basics: What is our winning aspiration for the next three years?Pick one—clearly—and the rest becomes solvable. Examples:

• Profitable growth (mix/price discipline as the spine)

• Market share (penetration pricing with guardrails and a path back to yield)

• Inventory control (price as the pacing lever; demand shaping by SKU/region)

• Customer experience (price policy that removes friction and increases NPS/retention)

• Portfolio rationalization (pricing to prune long-tail customers/products gracefully)

Price can be tuned to any objective—as long as the objective is explicit.If you don’t choose, your competing objectives/incentives will. And they’ll choose chaos.

The Chief Pricer: The Ultimate Internal Consultant

Think of your Chief Pricer as the only executive who doesn’t own a silo—they own the space between silos.

Their job is to clarify how your business makes money—or share, or capacity, or loyalty—and where it leaks it.

They don’t add everything up; they add it back.Where accountants measure performance, the Chief Pricer measures potential against the chosen aspiration.

They’re the connective tissue that links commercial intent to operational and financial reality—the person who tunes the system until value flows cleanly toward the stated goal.

And they can’t be buried under another function.

If pricing reports to Finance, it becomes math.

If it reports to Sales, it becomes negotiation.

Only when it reports to the CEO does it become strategy.

Ownership, Not Oversight

Here’s where most CEOs go wrong: they delegate pricing to a task force or a tool.They install software, hire analysts, or call a consulting firm.And what they get back are dashboards, models, and reports—all of which make them feel like they’re working on pricing while nothing actually changes.

Pricing isn’t a project. It’s a function.

It needs a person with authority, clarity, and a defined time horizon to fix it.

That’s what the Chief Pricer is.

They don’t “run pricing.” They own it—against a declared aspiration—with the remit to change behavior, policy, and incentives.

The Three-Year Mandate

The right Chief Pricer doesn’t come in to analyze; they come in to align.

Their mission:

1. Diagnose where value, share, capacity, or trust is leaking—relative to the aspiration.

2. Clarify the trade-offs we must make (and sequence) to move the needle.

3. Build the behaviors – the processes, policies, and incentives so pricing discipline survives leadership turnover and budget cycles.

And then—they leave.

This isn’t a forever role. It’s a transformation.

Give them three years.

Compensate them on the chosen aspiration (profit, share, inventory turns, NPS/retention, portfolio mix)—not on the precision of their spreadsheets.

“Don’t make pricing someone’s job. Make it someone’s mission.”

Why It Can’t Be an Inside Job

The internal candidate “who knows the business” usually knows it too well.They’ve internalized the taboos: what “can’t be changed,” what’s politically sensitive, what leadership doesn’t want to hear.

An effective Chief Pricer needs the oxygen of independence.

They must be free to question everything and protected to follow the logic wherever it leads.

That’s not disloyal—it’s the point.

Whether full-time or fractional, the key is fresh eyes + real authority.

The Alignment Dividend (Defined by Your Aspiration)

When pricing is owned and aligned to a clear aspiration, you feel it quickly—in the metric that matters most right now:

• If share is the goal: acquisition cost per new customer drops, and share gains don’t torch lifetime value because guardrails are built in.

• If inventory is the goal: aged stock turns faster without nuking brand equity; demand shaping becomes predictable.

• If profitable growth is the goal: mix improves, discounting variance collapses, and contribution rises even when volumes are flat.

• If customer experience is the goal: fewer pricing escalations, cleaner renewals, higher NPS/retention without margin surprises.

• If portfolio rationalization is the goal: chronically under-profitable customers/products exit or renew on sustainable terms; sales capacity shifts to winners.

That’s the alignment dividend. It isn’t a single line item.It’s the organization finally pulling in one direction—the one you chose.

“Accountants add everything up.

Chief Pricers add it back—the value you lost between the silos.”

Why Pricing Software Implementations Fail (and How to Make Them Work)

They fail because teams install tools without a goal.They configure rules before they’ve declared what good looks like.

Then they’re shocked when there’s tissue rejection and behaviors don’t change.

Flip it:

1. Declare the aspiration. Write it on the first slide of every pricing meeting.

2. Align policy to the aspiration. (Examples: floor price logic for profit; entry-price SKUs for share; time-boxed mark-downs for inventory; renewal simplicity for CX.)

3. Instrument the system to manage to that aspiration—and only then buy/configure software to scale it.

4. Incent the behavior you need—sales, product, finance—so the system reinforces itself.

Tools don’t create discipline.

Discipline makes tools worthwhile.

The Call to Action

If you’re serious about pricing, stop funding reports and start funding ownership.

Stop buying dashboards and start buying alignment.

Pick a winning aspiration and give one person the mandate to tune price to that goal across the enterprise.

When you find that person—whether a full-time hire or a fractional executive—give them the authority, the CEO’s ear, and three years to fix it.

Because what you’ve been calling a pricing problem is really an ownership problem—and a clarity problem about where you’re steering the ship.

Choose the destination.Empower the Chief Pricer to get you there.And watch the organization finally row in rhythm.

And When It’s Done…

When the system is tuned, the data finally makes sense, and the wins start stacking up quarter after quarter, something subtle but powerful happens—the company starts to act like a team again.

People who once argued over credit start celebrating shared outcomes. Sales trusts Finance. Finance trusts Sales. Operations knows why the plan makes sense.

That’s not an accident. That’s the Chief Pricer’s fingerprint.

Good Chief Pricers know pricing is a team sport. Their job is to build the playbook, coach the discipline, and help the team rack up wins that actually count. They’re not the ones doing the victory lap—they’re the ones watching from the sidelines, satisfied that the enterprise finally knows how to win on its own.

You’ll know you found the right one when, after three years, they leave quietly—not because they failed, but because they finished.

No banners. No ego. Just a company that now knows how to price—and play—to win.