Sometimes Your Pricing Isn't Broken. Your Incentives Are.

We spend a lot of time building pricing models that reflect customer behavior.

But how often do we stop and ask:

What's happening inside our own organization that breaks pricing before it even reaches the customer?

Here are two internal saboteurs I uncovered but didn't include in the original article: https://lnkd.in/gAUDZB94

Distance kills discipline

The farther your pricing strategy is from the frontline, the more interpretation replaces intention.

Each layer adds its own spin: urgency, exceptions, politics.

Eventually, your carefully designed price turns into something completely different.

It's a corporate game of telephone where:

"Maintain margin integrity" turns into "Give away the farm if they buy before quarter end."

We reward variance

Your pricing model is designed to reduce noise.

But your sales compensation plan often creates it.

We reward reps for closing deals, not for protecting price.

Accelerators, multipliers, and end-of-quarter pressure push even well-meaning sellers into discount mode.

Pulled-forward deals, timing games, and margin cuts become expected behavior.

Meanwhile, our models assume none of that is happening.

It's like setting up a laser tripwire system and then handing out glowsticks along with directions to the vault.

That simple framework I shared, based on purchase frequency and price variance, becomes far more complex when you include organizational distance and incentive design.

So here's the real question:

Has anyone actually aligned pricing strategy and compensation plans?

Or is that still sitting in a folder called "Corporate mythology"?