Many B2B companies have modernised sales and analytics, yet pricing still lives in spreadsheets, where small mistakes can quietly become expensive. According to the SAPinsider article, that approach encourages inconsistent decisions, slower responses to market changes and avoidable margin erosion.
The case for moving to a pricing framework is less about technology for its own sake than about bringing order to a process that often spans sales, finance and pricing teams with diff...
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erent priorities. A structured model gives organisations clearer governance, better visibility and more capacity to scale as costs, demand and competitive pressure shift. In practice, that means pricing is no longer a series of isolated edits and approvals, but a controlled process tied to business outcomes.
The risks of remaining spreadsheet-dependent are well documented across the pricing software industry. Zilliant has argued that manual pricing in B2B can turn minor errors, such as delayed cost updates or incorrect discounts, into material profit losses. It cites research from Ernst & Young suggesting that stronger pricing execution can lift EBIT by 2 to 5 per cent of sales, a difference worth millions of dollars for a mid-sized company.
Other providers make a similar point: spreadsheets may be flexible, but they struggle to support consistent pricing at scale. Vendavo says they often create version-control problems, fragmented logic and weak auditability, while Zilliant’s work on negotiated pricing highlights the difficulty of keeping agreement prices aligned with strategy when ERP systems and approval rules are not properly connected. In food manufacturing and retail, where catalogues are large and costs move quickly, those weaknesses become even more pronounced.
The SAPinsider article frames a pricing framework as a practical answer. Its three pillars are governance, visibility and scalability. Governance assigns responsibility and sets approval rules. Visibility connects pricing actions to financial outcomes. Scalability ensures the process can absorb market or cost changes without constant manual intervention. Together, those elements help companies move away from reactive discounting and towards deliberate price management.
That shift does not require a complete overhaul on day one. The article recommends starting with the basics: map how prices are created and approved, assign ownership and establish guardrails such as approval thresholds and margin limits. Once those foundations are in place, automation and analytics can do more of the heavy lifting, reducing manual effort and improving consistency.
The wider business case is straightforward. Manual pricing invites delays, errors and competing versions of the truth. A structured framework improves traceability, shortens response times and gives leaders more confidence in the numbers they are using. For B2B organisations trying to protect margin while growing revenue, that discipline can be the difference between pricing as an administrative burden and pricing as a strategic advantage.
Source: Noah Wire Services
