Why ​Your Biggest Pricing Problem Isn't The Big Decisions

InnovationWhy ​Your Biggest Pricing Problem Isn't The Big DecisionsByPascal Yammine,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 15, 2026, 07:30am EDTPascal Yammine is CEO of Zilliant, a leader in price optimization and management software for business. gettyEvery company has a pricing strategy. Most believe they're executing it, but the reality is messier.When executives think about pricing risk, they tend to focus on the headlines: an annual price increase, a tariff response or a competitive repositioning. Boards debate these decisions, but the real damage rarely comes from a single bad call. Instead, it arises from dozens of small, disconnected decisions that no one tracks until the margin is already gone.​The Compounding Problem​Here's a scenario I hear repeatedly from customers and prospects. A procurement team renegotiates a supplier contract that shifts material costs by half a percent. Separately, a sales team launches an aggressive growth campaign and starts discounting by two percent. Neither team knows what the other did.​Each decision, in isolation, seems minor, but they compound. By the end of the fiscal quarter, the CFO is staring at a margin gap and trying to trace where it went. The explanation is a chain of small decisions, made across functions, without visibility into their collective impact.​A recent survey from my company found that 34% of manufacturing and distribution executives cited inconsistent discounting as a primary source of margin leakage, 29% pointed to inconsistent governance, and 27% to siloed decision-making across teams. These are all symptoms of the same fragmentation.​Nobody Owns The Whole Picture​Part of what makes this so difficult to solve is that pricing doesn't sit cleanly in any one function. Finance wants to protect margin, sales wants competitive fl...