Your pricing is negotiable, you just have not noticed
Pull a report: average discount per AE, last twelve months. At one of our clients it read 4 percent for one and 19 for the other. Same products, same customer size, same region. The difference was not negotiation skill. One never asked for approval, the other always did, and the approval came by shout-out: quick email to the VP of Sales, “fine by me”, deal out the door.
That is what pricing without rules looks like. There is a price list, but it is a suggestion. What the customer actually pays gets decided by a mix of daily form, end of quarter, and the question of who needs their quota how badly right now. That costs margin, obviously. But it costs something more expensive too: your existing customers talk to each other, and at some point you are sitting in a renewal conversation across from a CEO who knows his acquaintance pays 15 percent less.
The solution is unspectacular, and that is exactly why it so rarely gets built. Discount tiers with approval logic, directly in the CRM. Up to 10 percent the AE decides himself, up to 20 the VP of Sales, above that the executive team, and every approval runs as a process in the system instead of an email in an inbox. Salesforce does this natively, HubSpot too, Dynamics anyway. No new tool, no license, one to two days of configuration plus the actually hard part: agreeing beforehand on which tiers should apply at all.
The side effect is almost more valuable than the control. Approvals in the system leave data behind. Who discounts how much, in which segment, with what justification, and how often does anything above 20 percent even get approved? After six months you have a picture of your real price realization that no Excel estimate can deliver. Maybe it shows the list is set too high. Maybe it shows a particular AE has a coaching topic. Either is better than not knowing.
The usual objection: this slows us down, the customer will not wait for internal approvals. A well-built approval chain decides in hours, not days, because it pings the responsible person directly instead of drowning in a CC list. Slow is the old model, nobody notices only because the waiting time is hidden inside email threads.
Two percentage points less spread in your discounts, at 5 million in revenue, is 100,000 euros. How much configuration effort would that be worth to you?
