March 25, 2026

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Hi Everyone,

When companies feel like their pricing isn't working, the first instinct is usually "we need to charge more." But in a lot of cases, the price itself is fine.

The problem is discounts, credits, and concessions that add up across dozens of deals. The average company keeps about 84 cents of every dollar it quotes, and the range runs from 93 cents at the top to 72 at the bottom.

And less than 1 out of 3 companies break this out by sales person – Simon-Kucher puts the number at 29%. The rest can see the total but can't see who's responsible for the gap.

Today, we're walking you through a one-hour exercise to find your own ‘target vs actual’ pricing gap and what to do once you have it.

Pull your deals and do the math

This exercise works for any business where the sales team can adjust the price before closing.

Here's how to run it.

1. Export your last six months of closed deals from your CRM or accounting system.
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2. For each deal, divide the final signed price by the original quoted price. That simple ratio is the percentage of your pricing you actually kept.
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3. Sort the results by sales rep.
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4. Look at the spread. You'll likely find some reps consistently above 90% and others in the low 80s or below. That variation is where the opportunity sits.
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What tends to surprise people the first time is the range. Two reps on the same team, selling the same product at the same list price, can have ratios 15 points apart.

Why the gap is usually bigger than you'd expect

A 10% discount on one deal is easy to justify.

But when you multiply that across every rep and every deal for a year, the cost is much bigger than any individual concession.

45% of companies routinely discount more than 15% to win deals, and only about 3 in 10 track the ratio by seller. So the discounting continues, quarter after quarter, without anyone seeing the full picture - or who the main drivers are.

What to do with what you find

Two things make the biggest difference.

1. Add the ratio to your weekly sales reporting, right alongside close rates, so every rep can see their own number. When the number is visible, reps who are discounting heavily either adjust on their own or become easy to coach because you have the data in front of you.
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2. Set one rule: any discount above 10% needs a short written justification and their manager's sign-off before it goes to the customer. This forces a pause before every large concession, which is where most of the leakage happens.
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​Simon-Kucher found that companies investing in deal discipline recovered 2 to 3% of revenue in their practitioner projects. That alone is worth the hour it takes to run the exercise.

But the bigger picture is even more interesting. McKinsey found that a 1% improvement in pricing produces roughly 11% more operating profit. Closing the real vs actual pricing gap is one of the fastest ways to get that 1%.

Try this today

​Download our free spreadsheet template, export your last six months of closed deals, and enter the quoted and final prices.

It calculates each rep's collection ratio, flags anyone below 85%, and shows you the total revenue gap across your team. An hour of work, and you'll know exactly where to focus.

Get the free template

Go deeper

👉 McKinsey: The power of pricing – the analysis on why small pricing improvements produce outsized profit gains, with guidance on where price leaks hide inside your deals

👉 Simon-Kucher: Four pricing mistakes you're probably making – data from 500+ B2B companies on why the average business collects only 84% of its quoted price, and what the top performers do differently

👉 First Round Review: The price is right: essential tips for nailing your pricing strategy – useful if your collection ratio is healthy and you're ready to test the price itself

👉 BCG: Three steps to creating value from B2B discounts – despite the title, this is about fixing undisciplined discounting, with a framework for making every discount a deliberate business decision

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we'll look at why your reps aren't asking you for help on their biggest deals, and a simple meeting that fixes it.

That's it for today!

P.S. If you run the exercise this week, we'd love to hear what you found. How wide was the spread across your team?