What Happens After the Numbers Tie Out?

Written by Brent Schauf and John M. Norkus

When the annual plan sets the board — and pricing reveals how the game is played

Every year, companies invest enormous effort producing an annual plan. Revenue targets are debated. Cost assumptions are negotiated. Models are refined until the numbers reconcile. The board approves. Leadership exhales.

The plan is what it is.

It is not broken. It is not misguided. It is an economic constraint — a snapshot of ambition, tradeoffs, and limits at a moment in time.

The problem begins when organizations expect that constraint to somehow carry intent on its own.

The Plan Is a Game Board, Not a Strategy

An annual plan does not tell people how to win. It sets the field of play.

It establishes boundaries: revenue expectations, cost envelopes, capital limits, risk tolerance. Within those boundaries, multiple paths are economically valid — and often mutually incompatible.

“Grow EBITDA 5%” is a perfectly reasonable outcome.

It is not intent.

There are countless ways to get there:

• Price up or volume up

• Mix shift or cost takeout

• Margin protection or share capture

• Investment or extraction

  
  

Each path implies different decisions, behaviors, and sacrifices. When leadership does not choose — or pretends those choices are not in tension — the plan becomes a neutral surface on which each function plays its own version of the game.

Why Silos Start Playing to Win

Once the plan is approved, behavior becomes predictable.

Sales optimizes for survivability and upside.

Operations protects capacity, cost, and reversibility.

Finance enforces coherence and variance control.

Pricing is asked to “hold the line” or “make it work.”

None of this is dysfunction.

It is rational behavior inside an ambiguous system.

When there is no single, shared source of truth about what the company is actually trying to do this year, each group plays to win its own game — because no one told them how to win together.

This is not misalignment.

It is ambiguity made operational.

How Ambiguity Turns Into Animosity

Ambiguity doesn’t stay neutral for long.

When intent is unclear, each function retreats inward. Not out of spite — out of self-preservation. Sales protects quota and credibility. Operations protects cost and reversibility. Finance protects control and predictability. Pricing is caught in the middle, asked to reconcile contradictions it didn’t create.

At first, this looks like healthy tension. People debate. They negotiate. They escalate.

But over time, something darker sets in.

Each group starts to assume the others are optimizing against them.

Sales sees Finance as unrealistic.

Finance sees Sales as undisciplined.

Operations sees both as careless.

Pricing becomes the department of “SLOW,” followed closely by the department of “NO.”

Animosity doesn’t explode — it accumulates.

In response, leadership adds rules. More approvals. More governance. More process. Each addition is justified as protection: of margin, of cost, of forecast accuracy.

But control doesn’t restore trust. It accelerates its erosion.

Rules signal suspicion.

Suspicion breeds distance.

Distance reduces empathy.

Reduced empathy hardens silos.

The field adapts again — quietly at first. Deals are structured to avoid scrutiny. Information is shared selectively. Exceptions become strategy. What was once collaboration becomes negotiation. What was once negotiation becomes containment.

Eventually, the argument changes:

“You don’t understand my customer.”

Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t. But at this stage, it functions less as insight and more as insulation — a way to protect price, autonomy, and personal income inside a system that no longer feels aligned or trustworthy.

The organization doesn’t just slow down.

It turns inward.

People stop trying to win together. They focus on not losing alone.

At that point, every new rule feels punitive. Every pricing decision feels adversarial. Every discussion about discipline feels like an accusation. The annual plan — which was supposed to unify — becomes the backdrop for a year-long internal struggle.

This is how ambiguity metastasizes.

Not into chaos — but into isolation.

Why This Always Shows Up in Pricing

This is why pricing is where the problem becomes visible.

Pricing sits at the intersection of strategy, finance, sales, and operations. It is where abstract economic constraints are translated into concrete decisions: what to charge, where to compete, what to walk away from, and which tradeoffs actually matter.

When the organization has not agreed on what winning looks like, pricing is forced to reconcile conflicts that were never resolved upstream. In that vacuum, pricing turns into enforcement. Rules replace judgment. Reviews replace decisions. Pricing absorbs tension that does not belong to it.

That does not make pricing the problem.

It makes pricing the signal.

When Pricing Leadership Exists, the Plan Becomes Playable

When pricing leadership is present — and properly empowered — something different happens.

The plan does not become more detailed.

It becomes more intelligible.

Pricing leadership gives the plan a language people can act on. It translates economic constraints into a small number of clear, understandable principles that define how the organization is trying to win.

Not complex rules.

Simple objectives.

When that translation is done well:

• Sales can operate in a portfolio mindset

• Tradeoffs are visible before they become fights

• Decisions feel coherent, even when they are hard

  
  

This is what organizational health looks like in practice.

Where Sales Incentives and Portfolios Come In — and Where They Don’t

This is usually where the conversation turns to sales compensation and portfolio management — and it's worth being explicit about roles.

Pricing leadership does not own sales incentive design, nor does it manage accounts or territories. Those responsibilities sit elsewhere, and they should.

But pricing leadership is uniquely qualified to inform whether those mechanisms are tuned to the same economic intent as the plan.

Incentives and portfolio rules are powerful forces. If they reward behavior that contradicts the company’s definition of growth, no amount of pricing discipline will compensate for it. Conversely, when they reinforce the same tradeoffs — price, volume, mix, and margin — the organization stops fighting itself.

This is where flexibility, visibility, and accountability show up as supporting players, not constraints. Sales gains freedom to operate intelligently. Performance becomes visible without surveillance. Accountability feels fair rather than imposed.

Pricing leadership does not control these levers — but it can tell you, quickly and credibly, whether they are working together or at cross purposes.

Flexibility, Visibility, and Accountability Are a Test — Not a Program

Flexibility, visibility, and accountability are not policies to be rolled out or behaviors to be demanded. They are the natural byproduct of something more fundamental: the existence of a single, shared source of truth about what the organization is trying to accomplish.

When that truth exists:

• Flexibility works, because people know what they are free to do.

• Visibility is natural, because progress can be seen against a shared objective.

• Accountability is inevitable, because outcomes can be judged honestly.

  
  

No extra bureaucracy.

No surveillance.

No theater.

The Uncomfortable Realization

At this point, many executives have the same reaction:

“We don’t actually have pricing leadership that can do this.”

That reaction is understandable — and often correct.

Then comes the second thought:

“Wait — we price things every day. We have smart people, tools, and processes. So what’s actually missing?”

What’s missing is not pricing capability. It’s ownership.

Most companies have pricing activity — analysts, councils, models, policies. What they don’t have is a single person clearly in charge of how pricing decisions resolve tradeoffs across the business when priorities collide.

Pricing leadership is not a title. It is not a committee. It is the authority to make the hard calls visible, consistent, and actionable for the field.

Without that authority, pricing cannot make the plan sing.

It can only enforce ambiguity.

The Only Question That Matters

The test is not whether the plan is ambitious or precise.

The test is:

How is this year’s plan different from last year’s in the way decisions will actually be made?

If execution still relies on escalation, negotiation, and end-of-quarter heroics, then the game has not changed — regardless of the numbers on the page.

New targets.

Same game.

After the Numbers Tie Out

This is not an argument against planning. The plan sets the board. The constraints are real.

The question is whether anyone is responsible for making the game playable — for turning economic outcomes into a shared understanding of how the organization intends to win.

When that connective tissue exists, execution feels different.

When it does not, the organization spends the year playing against itself.

And no amount of discipline will fix that.

Brent Schauf is a pricing and finance leader with 25+ years of experience helping companies turn annual plans into real commercial decisions. He works at the intersection of pricing, finance, and sales to clarify tradeoffs, align incentives, and restore trust where pricing has become a source of friction.

John M. Norkus is a pricing leader who works with executives to align strategy, incentives, and execution — and is paid based on whether that alignment improves performance. He is the founder of ChiefPricingOfficer.com.