In The Mind of Chris Pople |Pricing & Revenue Growth Leader

1. What do you see as the most important development currently shaping Pricing, Revenue Growth Management or Commercial Excellence in your industry?

For B2B distribution, the biggest shift is the end of “inherited margin”. Through 2022 and 2023 almost every distributor priced the same way: cost went up, list prices went up, and customers broadly accepted it because everyone was doing the same thing. That masked a lot of weak pricing. Now that inflation has eased and volume is harder to win, margin has to be earned customer by customer and product by product, rather than passed through once a year.

Three things are driving this at the same time. Customers have far more price transparency, because they can compare online in seconds and buyers are better trained than ever. Digital channels mean a business’s web price, its account price and what a rep quotes over the phone all have to make sense together. And competitor intelligence and AI tools have made it possible to look at hundreds of thousands of price points rather than the few hundred lines a team could realistically manage on a spreadsheet.

The practical effect is that the question has moved from “how much should we increase by?” to “where, for whom, and why?” That is a very different conversation. It needs customer segmentation, clear decision rights and pricing sitting much closer to the commercial leadership table. It is not a back-office finance activity that produces a price file once a year.

The businesses I see adapting well treat pricing as a continuous commercial discipline. The ones struggling are still treating it as an annual event, and they are finding that a blanket increase is really just a decision not to decide.

2. Where do organisations still leave the most commercial value on the table, and what do more mature organisations do differently?

In my experience the biggest leak is rarely the big strategic accounts. Those get scrutiny. The value is lost in the long tail: thousands of small and mid-sized customers and slow-moving products where discounts have built up over years with no clear rationale. Nobody decided to give that margin away. It simply accumulated through individual, well-intentioned decisions at branch or rep level.

The second leak is pricing everyone the same way. Tail products, the low-value consumables and specialist items customers buy occasionally, are usually far less price-sensitive than core lines, yet many businesses price them with the same logic and the same discounts. Getting that right is often the fastest margin win available.

Earlier in my career I helped build a structured discount programme for a multi-branch tools distributor. Customers were grouped by behaviour and value, and each group had a clear starting point, a target and a floor. Branch teams kept their flexibility, but within guardrails they understood. Pricing adherence improved across the network, and the part I’m proudest of is that the sales teams eventually preferred it, because it gave them a confident answer when a customer pushed back.

More mature organisations do a few things differently:

• They segment customers on how they actually buy, not just on size.

• They make price guidance easy to use at the point of quote, so it is part of the workflow rather than a document on a shared drive.

• They have fast approvals, so governance doesn’t become an excuse to go around the process.

• They measure adherence and leakage every month and act on it.

The warning sign is price guidance that exists but nobody uses. I call that wallpaper, and most businesses have some.

3. How is AI changing your field in practice?

AI is already changing the mechanics of pricing. The bigger change, how pricing decisions get made and owned, is still ahead of us.

The work that can and should be automated is the heavy lifting that used to swallow an analyst’s week: collecting and matching competitor prices across huge catalogues, flagging anomalies and margin leakage, producing price-volume-mix and waterfall analysis, and generating first-draft recommendations. Product matching alone was close to impossible at scale ten years ago. Working on a catalogue of around half a million SKUs, we could only realistically benchmark a fraction. AI-driven intelligence tools have changed that, and response times to market movements have dropped from weeks to days.

I expect the greatest impact in two places. The first is the long tail, where AI can finally optimise the millions of price points no human ever had time to review. The second is the point of quote, where guidance built into CPQ or the ordering system can steer a salesperson towards a good price in real time, rather than relying on a report they read after the event.

Human expertise stays essential in three areas. Strategy: deciding which customers you want to win, where you will compete on price and where you won’t. Judgement: understanding the relationship, the context and the story behind a deal that the data can’t see. And change: explaining to a sales team why a price is right and earning their trust in the model.

The lesson I would stress is that AI amplifies whatever you already have. With clean data, clear segmentation and good governance, it is transformational. Without them, you just get unused recommendations faster. AI won’t fix a trust problem between pricing and sales.

4. Why do some Pricing or Commercial Excellence initiatives succeed while others fail?

Early in my career I believed a good model would sell itself. If the analysis was right, surely people would follow it. It took me a while to accept that most pricing initiatives don’t fail on the analytics. They fail on adoption, and on sponsorship that doesn’t last.

The pattern I have seen most often goes like this. A business invests in pricing, early wins arrive, and then a difficult quarter or a leadership change comes along. Under pressure, the instinct is to hand pricing authority back to the front line, because that feels like protecting volume. Hard-won governance can be unwound in a few months. So the real test of a pricing initiative isn’t the launch. It is whether it survives the first crisis.

The initiatives that succeed tend to have four things in common:

• Sponsorship from the very top, with pricing run as its own workstream rather than a side project. The strongest programmes I have led were explicitly backed by both the CEO and CFO.

• Clear decision rights. Everyone knows who sets list prices, who approves exceptions and who owns the outcome. Ambiguity always defaults back to discounting.

• Sales leaders who reinforce it with their teams, not just support it in the boardroom. That gap is where many initiatives quietly die.

• Tools built into the sales workflow, and wins that are visibly credited to the sales team. If pricing takes the credit, sales will take the blame, and the relationship breaks.

Incentives matter too. If people are paid on revenue alone, no amount of guidance will compete with that.

The best compliment a pricing team can get is not a strong margin chart. It is a salesperson saying the guidance made a difficult customer conversation easier.

5. What widely accepted belief within Pricing, Revenue Growth Management or Commercial Excellence would you challenge?

"I would challenge the idea that pricing is a project: a transformation with a start, an end and a hand-over to “business as usual”.

Many organisations fund pricing as a programme. There is a diagnostic, a new architecture, maybe a platform implementation, a margin uplift, and then success is declared. The team shrinks, the focus shifts to the annual increase and month-end reporting, and within two or three years leakage has crept back in, the segmentation is out of date, and guidance is being ignored again. The tools often survive. The discipline doesn’t.

Pricing is much more like supply chain or credit control: a permanent operating capability that has to adapt as customers, competitors and costs change. The organisations that keep their gains treat it as a continuous cycle of measuring, learning, adjusting and reinforcing, with a standing seat in commercial decision-making.

Looking three to five years ahead, I think two beliefs will look dated. The first is that pricing is a technical or finance specialism that supports the commercial team. With AI handling much of the analysis, the value of pricing professionals will move firmly towards commercial leadership: shaping strategy, owning decision rights and influencing behaviour across the business. I expect more pricing leaders sitting on executive teams, as is already the norm in some sectors.

The second is the belief that sales and pricing are natural opponents. As guidance becomes embedded in quoting tools and buying platforms, the salesperson’s role will shift from negotiating price line by line to managing value and relationships. The organisations that see pricing as something that equips their sales team, rather than something that polices it, will be the ones that pull ahead.

s there one final observation, lesson or practical recommendation you would like readers to remember?

Make the right price the easiest decision for a salesperson to make.

Most margin isn’t lost through bad strategy. It is lost in thousands of small, everyday decisions made under time pressure by people who don’t have a confident answer in front of them. Put clear, credible guidance where those decisions happen, give people the reasoning behind it, and let them share the credit for the results. Do that consistently, and pricing stops being a function the business tolerates and becomes one it relies on.