When every account has its own net price, the price list stops describing your business. A B2B pricing consultant rebuilds the rules underneath those negotiations, so price follows value, volume, and cost to serve instead of whoever pushed hardest.
Most pricing advice assumes a published price and a buyer who takes it or leaves it. That is not how a distributor with 40 branches, a manufacturer selling through channel partners, or a services firm quoting custom scopes actually earns revenue. In those businesses the list price is an opening position.
The real price is assembled deal by deal from on-invoice discounts, rebates, freight terms, payment terms, and special pricing agreements that nobody has looked at together in years.
B2B pricing consulting therefore starts in a different place. It does not begin with a survey of what the market will bear. It begins with the transaction ledger, because the ledger already records every pricing decision your organization has made, and most of them were made without a rule. The job is to read that record, find the pattern hiding in it, and turn the pattern into rules that a sales team will follow because the rules make their negotiations easier, not harder.
Our engagements typically run six to 10 weeks. The first four weeks decide whether the rest is worth doing, so this is what they contain.
We ask for 24 months of invoice-line data, which usually lives in the ERP, plus whatever the CRM holds on quotes and approvals. The fields that matter are listed below. Gaps are normal and become findings in their own right: a business that cannot say which rep approved a discount has already told us something about its governance.
| Field | Usually lives in | What it lets us see |
|---|---|---|
| Account, ship-to, branch or region | ERP customer master | Whether the same customer pays differently by location |
| SKU or service line, product family | ERP item master | Which products carry margin and which are traffic builders |
| Quantity, list price, invoice price | ERP invoice lines | On-invoice discount depth, deal by deal |
| Rebates, freight, payment terms, returns | Finance ledgers, rebate spreadsheets | The off-invoice leakage between invoice price and pocket price |
| Rep, approver, reason code | CRM or quoting tool | Who grants discounts, and whether anyone asks why |
| Standard cost or cost to serve | Finance | Whether demanding accounts are priced for what they consume |
We plot net price against account size for each major product family, which produces the price corridor described in the next section, and we build a price waterfall from list to pocket price for each channel. Together they show where price varies for a reason and where it simply drifts.
Transaction data shows what happened; it cannot show why. We interview sales leaders and a cross-section of reps, including the ones who discount least, and a sample of customers. The customer conversations test willingness to pay and what buyers actually value, which in industrial and distribution markets is often quote response time, availability, and support rather than the headline price. Where a larger sample is needed, we run structured pricing research.
The first month ends with a short list of decisions, each sized in dollars: which accounts move to the corridor and on what timeline, what the discount authority rules should be, and which products need a different price structure altogether. Structural questions about the pricing model itself are covered on our B2B pricing page; this engagement is about making the prices you negotiate consistent and defensible.
A price corridor is the band of net prices an account of a given size should fall inside for a given product family. Accounts inside the band are priced by a rule. Accounts outside it are priced by history. The example below shows how the corridor turns a vague sense that “pricing is inconsistent” into a number.
Illustrative example. One product family, list price $50 per unit, eight accounts. The corridor has three volume bands: under 5,000 units a year should net between $44 and $48, 5,000 to 20,000 units between $41 and $45, and over 20,000 units between $38 and $42.
| Account | Annual units | Net price per unit | Volume band | Corridor | Position | Annual revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3,000 | $46.50 | Under 5,000 | $44 to $48 | Inside | $139,500 |
| 2 | 4,200 | $39.00 | Under 5,000 | $44 to $48 | $5.00 below floor | $163,800 |
| 3 | 8,000 | $43.00 | 5,000 to 20,000 | $41 to $45 | Inside | $344,000 |
| 4 | 12,500 | $44.20 | 5,000 to 20,000 | $41 to $45 | Inside | $552,500 |
| 5 | 15,000 | $37.50 | 5,000 to 20,000 | $41 to $45 | $3.50 below floor | $562,500 |
| 6 | 26,000 | $40.10 | Over 20,000 | $38 to $42 | Inside | $1,042,600 |
| 7 | 31,000 | $41.60 | Over 20,000 | $38 to $42 | Inside | $1,289,600 |
| 8 | 9,500 | $48.40 | 5,000 to 20,000 | $41 to $45 | $3.40 above ceiling | $459,800 |
Total revenue across the eight accounts is $4,554,300. Three readings follow from the table.
Two accounts sit below the floor.
Account 2 buys less than 5,000 units yet pays less than the largest customers. Moving it to the $44 floor is worth $5.00 x 4,200 = $21,000 a year. Account 5 moved to the $41 floor is worth $3.50 x 15,000 = $52,500. Together that is $73,500, or 1.6% of the revenue in the table, without a single list price change.
The recovery goes straight to margin.
Price recovered on existing volume carries no extra cost. At a 30% gross margin, the eight accounts earn $1,366,290 in gross profit, so the $73,500 lifts gross profit by 5.4%. That ratio, a small percentage on revenue turning into a much larger percentage on profit, is why price consistency is usually the fastest margin lever a B2B company has.
One account pays above the ceiling, and that is not automatically a problem.
Account 8 pays $3.40 per unit more than its band suggests, $32,300 a year in total. The question is what it buys that others do not: faster quotes, guaranteed stock, a named contact. If that value is real, write the service into the offer so every account like it pays for it. If not, the account is exposed to the first competitor who calls.
The same table gives the metric that tracks progress from then on. By revenue, 74% of this product family is sold inside the corridor ($3,368,200 of $4,554,300). Measured across all transactions, that share becomes a pricing compliance rate: the percentage of sales made at approved pricing. It is one number the executive team can review monthly, and it moves long before margin shows up in the quarterly accounts.
The corridor is the diagnosis. What makes it hold are the working tools the sales and finance teams use every day. A typical engagement leaves these behind:
| Discount below target price | Who approves | What is recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 5% | Rep, within corridor | Reason code |
| 5% to 10% | Sales manager | Reason code and competitor evidence |
| 10% to 15% | Deal desk or regional director | Account margin after the discount |
| Above 15% or below floor | CFO or commercial director | Written case, expiry date, and review at renewal |
Illustrative thresholds; the real bands are set from your own dispersion data.
Where the rules need to live inside quoting systems and be monitored continuously, PricePro© carries them forward after the engagement.
The client results below are as the clients reported them. Both clients are anonymized.
The business sold more than 110,000 SKUs through more than 40 locations and over 100 salespeople, and selling prices varied widely between branches, reps, and customers. Leadership wanted standard selling prices with floors, governance that someone owned, and sales incentives that pointed the same way as the pricing.
We reviewed current pricing practices and stakeholder views on governance and incentives, then analyzed sales data by category, region, customer size, and loyalty to find quick wins. Customer research on the value proposition, switching barriers, and willingness to pay produced the segments.
Two insights reshaped the design. Customers prioritized quote response time, availability, and support, and accepted higher prices for them. Price elasticity varied sharply by customer size. So the new structure used branch-level price waterfalls with discounts set by product role, segment, willingness to pay, and supplier MSRP, supported by pricing workflows, RACI roles, KPI dashboards, price calculators, automated reading of supplier catalogs, and competitor price scraping. Sales incentives were recalibrated on revenue, margin, and new logos.
In the first year the client reported a gross margin uplift of 8.1%, and pricing compliance, the share of transactions at approved pricing, rose from under 40% to 77%.
This manufacturer sold through distributors who set prices independently, had limited visibility of what end customers paid, and had no central owner for pricing. Previous price increases had cost volume in the segments that were most price sensitive. The goal was a value-based model by product and segment, with finance, sales, and marketing working from it together, and higher margins with minimal churn.
Transaction analysis located margin leakage by region and channel. List prices and discount structure followed a segmentation by industry, region, and spend, and customer research showed that price sensitivity differed sharply by region: buyers in the United States and Europe were not price sensitive, while Asia-Pacific buyers were highly so. The result was value-based pricing by region and segment, distributor pricing and incentives aligned with it, and governance with escalation rules, with sales equipped to defend the premium positioning. The client reported an 8% improvement in price realization.
Every B2B pricing consultancy can produce a price file. Whether the price file changes behavior depends on the sales team, and sales teams resist rules that feel like a loss of control. Four practices make the difference in our experience.
We would rather say this before an engagement than after it. Outside help is unlikely to pay back in four situations.
Too few transactions to find a pattern.
A business closing a dozen large contracts a year needs deal-by-deal value work, not a corridor built from statistics.
The problem is the product, not the price.
If win rates are falling because the offer no longer fits the market, repricing it will not help, and we will say so.
Leadership will not hold the floor.
Pricing rules survive only if the executive team backs them the first time a large account objects. If that commitment is not there, the money is better spent elsewhere.
You need a price list, not a change in behavior.
A one-off price refresh is a smaller job than the one described on this page, and can often be done in-house.
If pricing is not your biggest opportunity, we will tell you. For a broader view of when outside pricing help makes sense, see our pricing consultant page.
Acustrategy has worked on pricing since 2008 and has delivered more than 100 pricing engagements. The people on your engagement are the senior people you meet in the first conversation, not a revolving team of juniors. They include Mohammed Zakir, our founder, who worked at Simon Kucher before founding Acustrategy and has more than 25 years in pricing strategy and value creation; Britt Nichols, a former CEO, CRO, and CCO with more than 25 years in pricing, go-to-market, and commercial performance; and Brock Hansen, a former CEO and COO who is Lean and Six Sigma certified and leads the process and technology side of implementation.
Our B2B work concentrates on distribution, manufacturing and industrial, and business and professional services companies, many of them backed by private equity. Where a sponsor is driving the pricing agenda, the work links into the private equity value creation plan.
Most B2B companies have never seen their net prices plotted against account size. Talk to us about running that analysis on one of your product families and what it would take to bring the outliers into line.
Usually, yes. Multi-branch and post-acquisition businesses rarely have one clean ledger. We map item and customer codes across systems during the first week and flag what cannot be reconciled. Imperfect data delays the precision of the corridor, not the direction of it.
You cannot dictate a partner’s resale price, but you can shape it. Levers are your net price to the partner, rebate and incentive structures tied to how they sell, and a recommended price architecture they can adopt. In the chemicals case above, aligned distributor pricing and incentives helped realization improve.
They move in steps, usually timed to contract renewals, with a clear explanation of the new pricing basis. Some accounts get a documented reason to stay below the band, such as a strategic volume commitment. What ends is the undocumented exception with no expiry date.
No. They gain a defined range they can use without asking permission, which most reps find faster than today’s informal escalation. What they lose is the ability to go below the floor without a recorded reason.
Compliance moves first, often within the first quarters of the new rules, because it is measured on every new transaction. Margin follows as contracts renew and exceptions expire. The distributor above reported its 8.1% margin uplift over the first 12 months.
Often both, in sequence. A consultant designs the corridor, the rules, and the governance, and gets leadership to commit to them. An internal analyst then runs them. Many of our clients hire or appoint that owner during the engagement so the handover is to a named person.
