Stop Saying “Pricing for Growth” — It’s Not a Strategy

If you run a company — or own one — you’ve likely heard “pricing for growth” in the boardroom.

It sounds visionary. It signals ambition. It plays well in investor updates.

But here’s the problem: when it’s left undefined, it becomes an open invitation to drain profit, reset customer expectations downward, and undermine valuation — often without realizing it until the damage is done.

“Pricing for growth” sounds strategic, ambitious, and boardroom-ready.

But ask yourself — growth of what? Revenue? Market share? Margin percentage? Total dollar contribution? Sales comp? Executive bonuses? Without clarity, the phrase is just corporate filler — vague enough to pass as strategy, but dangerous when it drives actual pricing decisions.

The Danger in Vagueness

When “growth” is undefined, the gravitational pull is toward volume — chasing revenue at the expense of margin, resetting customer expectations downward, and ultimately hurting valuation. It’s like sending a meal back to the kitchen and telling the chef to “make it better.” Everyone nods, but no one knows what the hell that means.

How Pricing Discipline Gets Lost

Too often, executive calls for growth erode the very pricing discipline that protects profit:

• Guardrails are relaxed.

• Reviews are eliminated.

• Discounts (or are they “investments”? Hard to tell anymore) run unchecked.

When Pricing Wins Are Left on the Table

In one recent engagement, a company had clear, documented opportunities to recover multiple margin percentage points through basic price hygiene — the disciplined act of setting prices deliberately, executing them consistently, and then measuring the results to inform future decisions.

The fixes required no customer uproar, no brand risk, and no capital expenditure. But because “gain share” had been declared the corporate priority, the work was shelved. The result? The self-funding margin improvement was never realized, and ironically, the share-gain program ended up underfunded.

The “We Don’t Need Pricing” Spiral

In another case, a company’s growth mandate led leadership to believe that pricing was a barrier. The pricing team wasn’t just sidelined — it was disbanded. Within months, discounts ballooned, price floors vanished, and competitors were handed a map to the bottom. By the time the damage showed up in quarterly results, customers had already anchored to the lower prices. Restoring margin meant years of retraining both the market and the sales force — a cost no one had budgeted for.

If Market Share Is the Goal

It’s not inherently wrong to remove price as the perceived barrier to winning business — if:

1️⃣ Price, among a long list of potential decision inputs, is actually the barrier (validated by research).

2️⃣ You know precisely how far to move the pricing needle (modeled and tested for long-term impact).

Both require the feedback loop: set prices with intention, execute with discipline, measure results, and feed those insights back into the next round of decisions. It’s simple to describe but non-trivial to execute — and it’s the difference between steering with data and drifting with assumptions.

💡 Pricing decisions compound in value the same way interest does — small, disciplined adjustments today can drive multiple turns of EBITDA tomorrow. The reverse is also true: undisciplined pricing decisions compound negatively, eroding margin, resetting customer expectations downward, and destroying enterprise value over time.

Without that discipline, you’re just letting prices bob like corks in the unpredictable currents of today’s market — reacting to noise instead of steering with purpose.

Pricing as Strategic Glue

Pricing isn’t a department. It’s the connective tissue of the business model — linking strategic vision, market reality, and sustainable profit. Remove it from the executive agenda, and you leave critical decisions to drift between functions, each with its own incentives and blind spots.

Price for growth? — Retire the phrase. Replace it with specific, measurable strategic intent, reinforced by the set–execute–measure feedback loop. Otherwise, you’re not leading with pricing — you’re just hoping the current takes you where you want to go.