Why Your Pricing Team Can't Be All Strategy Or All Execution

Most pricing teams don’t fail because of bad intent or lack of effort. They fail because they’re lopsided. Either they overthink and never ship, or they ship nonstop without ever improving. Leaders feel it before they can explain it — the sense that everything is reactive, or that nothing ever quite sticks.

We’ve seen teams caught in both traps. And we’ve worked with clients who didn’t realize they had a gap until a pricing leader quit, a system broke, or sales started ignoring the playbook.

This isn’t a headcount issue. It’s a structure issue. This article lays out how unbalanced pricing teams show up, why it happens, and what we’ve seen work to fix it.

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What Strategy-Heavy Pricing Teams Get Wrong 

Strategy people usually have great slides. They’ve got frameworks, benchmarks, and long-term roadmaps. But when there’s no one to translate that into systems, processes, or field behavior,

all that thinking gets stranded.

We’ve seen teams design gorgeous pricing architectures — ideal segmentation, new discount tiers, waterfall redesigns — but nothing makes it into the quoting tool. Nothing lives in the approval logic. The pricing policy might be technically correct, but it’s two steps removed from what reps are doing in Salesforce.

The most frustrating part? It sounds good in meetings. Until someone asks: “Okay... but where has this actually been implemented?”

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What Happens When It’s All Execution 

Execution-heavy teams have the opposite problem. They’re fast, responsive, and deeply plugged into sales workflows — but they can’t get out of the loop. Same quote exceptions. Same margin issues. Same urgent requests, week after week.

We’ve seen teams where analysts are buried in deal support and price overrides, spending 80% of their time reacting and 20% fixing root causes — when there’s time. They’re essential, but exhausted. They keep the engine running, but they don’t get to rewire it.

At some point, senior leadership notices. And the team that’s been praised for hustle suddenly gets asked: “What’s your long-term plan for reducing this?”

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What Causes the Imbalance 

It usually starts with who got hired first.

A VP from a top-tier strategy background builds a team of consultants — sharp thinkers, weak systems.

A legacy pricing analyst gets promoted into leadership — and hires more operators who know the tools but don’t challenge the model.

A company prioritizes tools over structure — rolling out CPQ or dashboards before anyone’s defined how pricing decisions are supposed to be made or enforced.

Then the business scales. The volume goes up. The pain shows up. And the team that was “good enough for now” stops being good enough.

We’ve had clients come to us thinking they needed more analysts, when what they actually needed was a systems owner to stop the work from sliding into chaos. Or a policy lead to stop fighting every quote on a case-by-case basis.

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What a Balanced Team Looks Like in Practice 

The best pricing teams we’ve seen aren’t big. But they’re shaped intentionally.

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There’s someone who can analyze patterns and spot trends.

There’s someone who owns tooling and automation — the glue between pricing logic and quoting behavior.

And there’s someone who defines policy — not in a vacuum, but with real understanding of what will hold up in the field.

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Sometimes that’s three people. Sometimes it’s one person with depth in two lanes and support in the third. But when those lanes are missing altogether, things start breaking — slowly at first, then visibly.

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How to Tell What You’re Missing 

The signs are usually right in front of you — but they don’t always show up in a dashboard.

If strategy is missing, you’ll see the team chasing noise. They’ll be busy, responsive, and buried in exceptions — but no one’s asking the harder questions about pricing structure, segmentation, or deal design. Sales is still running the show, and pricing is just cleaning up after them.

If systems are missing, everything slows down. Good ideas never scale. Quote logic lives in spreadsheets or Slack threads. Analysts build the same report five different ways, and no one’s sure what made it into the CPQ or the ERP. The feedback loop breaks.

If analytics is weak, the team is flying blind. There’s a lot of opinion, a lot of back-and-forth, but not much insight driving the decisions. The group might be operationally sound — but they’re optimizing yesterday’s logic, not asking whether it still holds.

Most pricing leaders know something’s off. What they need is a way to name it — and a plan to fix it without throwing bodies at the problem.

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How We Help Clients Spot This 

We’ve worked with companies who thought they needed more horsepower when they really needed better coverage. In those cases, the resume isn’t the issue — it’s the role design. Or the misalignment between who’s in the seat and what the function actually needs.

Sometimes we help rebalance the team through a net-new hire.

Sometimes it’s replacing a generalist with a deeper operator.

Sometimes it’s advising the current team on how to reorganize and build bridges between policy, systems, and analytics.

Either way, the problem usually isn’t invisible. It’s just not always named clearly — until we help name it.

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Final Thought 

A pricing team that’s all strategy and no execution burns credibility. A team that’s all execution and no strategy burns out.

The best teams flex across both — not with superheroes, but with balance. They don’t just think. They build. They don’t just build. They fix.

And when something breaks, they know whether it’s a logic issue, a tooling issue, or a design issue — because they’ve got someone thinking in each lane.

If you’re stuck in quote approvals, stalled on strategy, or unsure why nothing’s landing, you don’t need a bigger team. You probably need a more balanced one.