This quick test can help tell you at a glance if your pricing team is focusing on the right things.
Over the years, we’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of different pricing teams—and that experience has allowed us to develop a simple test that can tell you whether your team is doing the right things. It only takes 10–15 minutes, but it’s remarkably accurate at pinpointing how evolved your pricing function really is.
How most pricing teams start
Most pricing teams are born out of a genuine desire to improve. The company puts some pricing people in place, and those people get to work building processes that didn’t exist before—spreadsheets, manual analysis, basic controls. It’s necessary work, and it helps. But the benefits plateau over time.
Eventually, the best pricing teams make a critical shift. Instead of focusing on efficiency—streamlining processes—they shift their focus to effectiveness: helping the sales team win more deals at higher margins. That distinction is subtle but hugely important. In the long run, an effectiveness focus has a far bigger impact on revenue and profit than efficiency ever will.
Here’s the test
Start by listing all the tasks you expect to do today. (If today isn’t representative, use the full week instead.) Then go through your list and sort each task into one of two categories:
- Efficiency — streamlining pricing processes, reducing manual work, improving internal operations
- Effectiveness — helping salespeople win more business at better margins, instilling pricing best practices, reducing dependence on one-off decisions
The ratio tells you a lot about where your team sits on the pricing maturity curve.
What your results mean
If your list skews heavily toward efficiency tasks, it’s a sign you’re still early in the maturity cycle—and there’s significant upside you’re not capturing yet. If effectiveness tasks dominate, congratulations. But that’s not the finish line; it just means you understand how much opportunity there is and how much work remains. For a strong pricing team, finding new ways to drive effectiveness is never really “done.”
You can also run this exercise at the team level—list tasks across a full month or quarter for a big-picture view of where your collective energy is actually going. The results are often surprising.
Take it further
No matter how your list shook out, there’s always more leverage to find. Two of our on-demand webinars—Powerhouse Pricing Teams and Developing a Winning Roadmap for Pricing Success—can help you identify specific moves to shift more of your team’s energy toward effectiveness and accelerate where you are in the maturity cycle. Worth a look whether you passed the test or not.
Powerhouse Pricing Teams
In B2B, dedicated pricing teams are still a relatively new development. And as such, there are no long-standing rules for how everything should work. In this on-demand webinar, explore the common traits, characteristics, and behaviors of successful pricing teams that have been around longer than most.
Developing a Winning Roadmap for Pricing
From our research, leading pricing functions go through key evolutionary phases in becoming more effective and strategic. In this 3-part training webinar, learn how to develop a roadmap that streamlines that evolution with a plan to be a more valuable and strategic function.
