Maturity isn’t just a matter of acquiring the right skills. It’s about knowing how to use them.
To understand what that means, all you have to do is spend a little time around teenagers. They have a lot of skills.
But they do stupid stuff with them.
By way of example, we heard a story about a high school teacher who forget to lock down their computer when they stepped out of the room for a few minutes. An enterprising student took advantage of that time to take a screenshot of the teacher’s desktop (including all the icons). They then hid all the icons on the desktop and made the previous screenshot the desktop image. When the teacher came back, they kept trying to click the icons, but nothing would happen. It took several hours with IT (over several days) for the teacher to figure out what happened.
Did that require some skills and ingenuity? Absolutely. Was it really funny? Hell, yes. But was is mature? Absolutely not.
Immaturity in Pricing
Now, we don’t think most of you are playing pranks on the other teams in your org. (Although if you are, we’d like to hear about it, because it might make us laugh.)
But on the other hand, we hear about a lot of situations where pricing folks have the right tools and even produce the right work product—but it comes to nothing.
For example, consider a situation where a pricing team builds a solid segmentation model. They expect it to kick off some strategic changes. Instead, sales uses it to justify more price exceptions. Finance cherry-picks a few numbers to push broader price increases, and product marketing files it away as “interesting.”
The work was good—the business environment just wasn’t ready. To put it simply, they were immature.
The Stages of Pricing Maturity
B2B pricing teams typically pass through four separate stages:
- Reactive pricing: Pricing plays defense—approvals, fire drills, and urgent fixes. There is little process discipline and almost no influence on upstream decisions. If your team is young, you might still be here. To move to the next level, check out Breaking out of Your Pricing Box.
- Tactical Pricing: Teams in this stage have defined their processes. Meetings happen regularly, and pricing has a seat at the table. It might seem like you’ve matured. But if you look deeper, most of the communication that’s happening is simple data-sharing. The team isn’t making recommendations—just running reports. We cover how to grow past this stage in From Tactical to Strategic Pricing.
- Strategic Pricing: At this level, pricing shapes decisions instead of reacting to them. Their work incorporates competitor strategy, value drivers, customer behavior, and segmentation—not just cost and discounting patterns. They gain input on product roadmaps and help drive strategy. For many teams, reaching this stage feels like a huge accomplishment, but there is still one more level to go: Being an Internal Pricing Consultant.
- Predictive and Transformational Pricing: With enough maturity, pricing becomes a commercial intelligence center. They can proactively model market shifts, anticipate competitor reactions, and establish organizational discipline around value. Data science, behavioral insights, competitive intelligence, and cross-functional alignment all converge here.
To learn more about this next-level approach to pricing, check out More Effective Cross-Functional Pricing.
Where Teams Get Stuck
So where do teams often stop on this journey to maturity?
In our experience, it’s stage two that is the biggest trap. Teams feel like they are busy, productive, and legitimate. They are getting stuff done. They’re going to meetings. People ask them for information.
But they don’t have any real influence on the organization.
Other teams aren’t asking for their opinion and input. They aren’t shaping the real decision-making.
Climbing the maturity ladder isn’t about skills, budget, headcount, or sophisticated software. It’s about building the mindsets, relationships, and strategic processes that allow pricing to shape decisions rather than simply support them.
If that sounds like a place you’d like your team to be, check out Developing a Winning Roadmap for Pricing Success. It can help you develop a mental model of what maturity would look like for your team.
No matter how much we might appreciate teenage humor, we don’t trust people that immature to lead anything important. By helping your team grow past these levels of immaturity, you’ll prepare to take on more responsibility, more challenges, and more meaningful success.
Breaking Out of Your Pricing "Box"
Effective pricing in B2B often requires coordination between marketing, sales, product management, and even accounting. This on-demand training session exposes how to influence the other departments that can make or break your pricing efforts.
From Tactical to Strategic Pricing
Some teams are so mired in tactical grunt work and daily firefights that they never make progress on strategic pursuits. How have other pricing teams transitioned into more strategic functions? What steps did they take?
Being An Internal Pricing Consultant
For pricing functions in B2B, frustration and conflict seem inevitable. But learn how a "consulting" mindset and approach can make driving improvement in B2B much easier...and far less frustrating.
More Effective Cross-Functional Pricing
Pricing in a B2B environment is cross-functional by nature. In this on-demand webinar, learn about improving overall pricing performance by working more effectively with other groups and departments.
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.
