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What We've Learned from Practice
After years of wrestling with the challenges of real-world pricing, from B2B transactions to subscription models and retail dynamics, we’ve come to a humbling realization: pricing is not, and should not be, a profession. Not because it lacks complexity, but because its value lies in how it connects strategy, behavior, and execution across a business.
What we’ve learned is that effective pricing stems not from theoretical frameworks or isolated roles, but from systems thinking. It’s about understanding the interplay between product, customer, finance, and timing—each shaping what customers actually pay and what they pay for. This led us to develop concepts like Average Realized Price (ARP) and ultimately, Profit Streams™, as practical tools to guide decision makers toward better pricing conversations.
Why Pricing Doesn’t Fit the Mold of a Profession
Professions rely on codified knowledge, standard principles, and a stable body of expertise. Pricing, in contrast, is dynamic, context-driven, and shaped by human behavior, market feedback, and business priorities. Trying to standardize pricing as a "profession" risks oversimplifying its complexity while obscuring its most powerful insights.
The idea that there is a “correct” price derived from a professional model is seductive, and misleading. The reality is that pricing is inherently fluid. ARP, for example, doesn’t aim to deliver the perfect price, but rather shines a light on the outcome of a thousand micro-decisions across product, sales, customer expectations, and time. It reveals the true state of pricing performance, and where collaboration must occur to improve it.
From Complexity to Systems Thinking
Most organizations make the mistake of treating pricing as a series of steps in a linear process. But in practice, what determines pricing outcomes is a loop, a system of feedback and adjustment. That’s why we moved away from static pricing models and toward systems thinking: to see how decisions about features, customer segments, sales incentives, and time horizons all feed into one another.
Our approach uses ARP as a diagnostic, not a destination. It shows how your actual prices diverge from intention, how value leaks out through unmanaged discounts, or how your pricing structure misaligns with customer willingness to pay. This systems view uncovers the real levers that drive profitability.
The Risk of Professionalizing Pricing
Turning pricing into a profession tends to isolate it. You get a pricing department that is fluent in optimization but disconnected from product, sales, and customers. That’s not a recipe for success. The worst outcomes we’ve seen come from companies where pricing was reduced to an administrator of list prices and tariffs or compliance role, tasked with defending a model rather than driving insight.
By contrast, companies that embrace pricing as a shared capability, one embedded into cross-functional decision making, see stronger results. Why? Because pricing outcomes are the result of dozens of small decisions made by people across roles: from how a product is scoped, to how value is communicated, to how risk is absorbed in the sales process.
Profit Streams™: Making Pricing Collaborative Again
Our work with Profit Streams™ emerged as a response to this fragmentation. It’s not a tool for pricing specialists. It’s a shared language for product managers, finance leaders, sales teams, and executives to align around how pricing decisions affect value capture. It connects pricing to product timelines, capital planning, and customer behavior, making it a business system, not a policy.
Profit Streams™ helps teams:
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Diagnose variance using ARP across segments, products, and time.
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Align stakeholders on the pricing moments that matter.
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Identify where pricing strategy breaks down in execution.
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Prioritize improvements where they impact performance most.
A Better Way to Build Pricing Capability
Rather than chasing the illusion of pricing as a profession, companies should aim to build pricing competence across the business. Here’s what that looks like:
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Product teams understand price as a strategic design input, not just a go-to-market detail.
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Sales teams are trained to navigate value-based conversations, not just apply discounts.
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Finance teams partner on trade-offs and scenario planning, not just set margin floors.
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Executives use pricing as a strategic signal of customer value and timing, not just a lever to hit quarterly goals.
Pricing becomes powerful when it is a living part of how you operate. Not a static model or a professional title, but a shared capability that improves over time.
Final Thoughts: Keep Pricing Practical
In the end, the most effective pricing practices don’t come from professional credentialing. They come from learning what works. From listening to customers, looking at actual transaction data, and iterating. From connecting what people pay to what they get, and how they experience value over time.
We don’t need more pricing experts. We need more pricing collaboration. More transparency about what drives pricing outcomes. More tools like ARP and Profit Streams™ that make those dynamics visible.
Let’s stop pretending pricing can be professionalized. Let’s keep it practical, adaptive, and above all, connected to how business actually works.
