The writer H. L. Mencken is often quoted as saying, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
This idea captures one of the biggest traps that pricing teams fall into. Most of the problems we face—eroding margins, runaway discounting, inconsistent price realization, relentless competitive pressure—are genuinely complex. They don’t have a single cause. Rather, they’re the product of a tangle of interrelated factors.
Getting at the root causes of these issues can be frustrating, time-consuming, and politically messy.
So when someone proposes an easy fix—pushing through a price increase, setting a discount cap, adding an approval step—it’s tempting to jump on it.
Unfortunately, these Band-Aid solutions rarely work. In fact, they often make things worse, adding friction and overhead without addressing the underlying problem.
5 examples of easy pricing fixes that don’t work
In our research, we see this pattern far more often than we’d like. Here are five of the most common places where the obvious pricing solution isn’t the right one:
1. Reps are giving away too much margin in negotiations. When discounting creeps up and margins slip, the reflex is to clamp down—impose strict discount caps, lower the approval thresholds, and make the team ask permission for anything off-list.
But treating your salespeople like kids who can’t be trusted tends to backfire. Deals stall in approval queues, reps learn to pad their requests in anticipation of the trim, and the price-sensitive deals you actually wanted to win quietly slip away.
A better approach is to make them better negotiators. Help them spot the tactics buyers use, give them a framework for defending value instead of conceding price, and adjust the systems and incentives that shape their behavior in the first place. We dig into this in Getting Your Salespeople to Price Better.
2. We’re leaving money on the table. If overall price realization looks soft, the obvious move is an across-the-board increase—say, 5% on everything.
But a blunt, uniform increase is exactly that: blunt. You’ll lose the deals where customers were already at the edge of what they’d pay, and you’ll still leave money on the table in the segments where you had room to go much higher.
The real fix is price segmentation—understanding what different customers, in different situations, are actually willing to pay, and setting prices accordingly. We walk through building a model from scratch in The Fundamentals of Price Segmentation.
3. Our pricing data is incomplete and inaccurate. If the data is a mess, it’s tempting to hit pause—launch a big cleanup initiative and wait until everything is pristine before making any decisions.
The trouble is that “perfect” data never actually arrives. Meanwhile, the clock keeps running and the opportunities you could be capturing today go untouched.
A better path is to stop waiting and learn how to derive meaningful, defensible insights from the imperfect data you already have. We show how in Working With “Bad” Pricing Data.
4. We’re drowning in price exceptions and override requests. When special-pricing requests pile up faster than you can process them, the obvious fix is to handle the volume more efficiently—throw a quoting or workflow tool at it, or add another set of hands to the pricing desk to keep the queue moving.
But that just lets you process the symptom faster. The flood never actually slows down, because you haven’t touched the reason it exists in the first place. And a constant stream of exceptions is almost always a symptom—usually of standard prices and a segmentation model that don’t reflect what the market really looks like. Automate a broken process and all you’ve got is a faster broken process.
The better move is to find what’s generating all those exceptions and fix it at the source. We cover how to diagnose your pricing “machine,” tell the two process types apart, and prioritize the right improvements in Pricing Process Improvement.
5. A competitor is undercutting us. When a competitor drops their price, the knee-jerk reaction is to match it—or beat it—before you lose the deal.
But matching every move is how price wars start. You train your customers to wait for the next discount, and you drag your own margins (and often the whole market’s) down with you.
The smarter response is to prepare for competitive pressure before it hits—with the intelligence, playbooks, and value tools that let you respond strategically instead of reactively. We lay out the options in Combating Competitive Pricing Pressure.
Avoiding the temptation of simplicity
It’s easy to fall into these traps because they look like the obvious answer to the problem right in front of you.
But if every pricing problem had an obvious solution, your company wouldn’t need a pricing team. They’ve hired you to do the hard work of understanding root causes, designing thoughtful solutions, and driving real change.
Going back to that Mencken quote that started this post: at the time it was written, public drunkenness seemed like a serious societal problem. So the government implemented the easy solution—Prohibition. If you’ve read anything about twentieth-century US history (or even just watched a gangster movie), you know how well that turned out.
Help your company avoid similar disasters. The resources linked above can help you start tackling complex pricing problems the right way.
Getting Your Salespeople to Price Better
Chances are, the behavior of your salespeople will ultimately determine whether your pricing strategies are effective or not. In this on-demand training seminar, learn proven approaches and strategies for getting your sales team to price and discount far more effectively.
The Fundamentals of Price Segmentation
In this recorded training seminar, we explain the concept of price segmentation and why it's such a powerful and important tool. We explore the essential process and even walk through a step-by-step exercise, building an example price segmentation model from scratch.
Working With "Bad" Pricing Data
In B2B, there are so many moving parts that always having a perfectly accurate and complete dataset just isn't very realistic. So we've got to figure out how to do the best we can with the data we've got.
Pricing Process Improvement
In this session, we discuss the critical differences between process types, how to use end-to-end process mapping for diagnostics and prioritization, pricing technology considerations, and common mistakes to avoid.
Combating Competitive Pricing Pressure
Pricing pressure is just a fact of life. But how well you handle that pressure can determine whether your business ultimately succeeds or fails. This guide exposes 15 ways to address (and prepare for) competitive pricing pressure.
