In B2B markets, most revenue doesn’t come from list prices or standard discounts. It comes from negotiated pricing and customer-specific agreements. These custom deals drive margins, revenue, and customer retention. But when pricing strategy fails to connect with execution, the business suffers.
For pricing teams, this gap shows up in the form of margin leakage, manual processes, and ineffective deal guidance. If any of that sounds familiar, you're not alone. It’s likely time to re-evaluate your negotiated pricing strategy and execution tools.
Here are eight negotiated pricing challenges that signal a disconnect between pricing strategy and price execution, and what pricing leaders can do to fix them.
1. Generating Agreement Quotes Is Still a Manual Process
Many pricing teams build customer-facing price documentation using Word or Excel, manually assembling data for each quote. This wastes time, introduces errors, and makes it hard to scale pricing operations. Without automated generation tied to pricing systems, version control and consistency suffer.
2. ERP Integration for Agreements Is Manual and Error-Prone
If agreement prices are emailed or managed through spreadsheets and then manually keyed into ERP systems, execution is slow and vulnerable to mistakes. This disconnect causes data discrepancies between pricing and operations. For strategy to scale, pricing updates must flow directly and reliably into backend systems.
3. Agreement Prices Often Fail to Align With Strategy
Even when guidance exists, it’s often overridden or ignored in the field. Lack of enforcement and poor adoption of pricing rules lead to inconsistent deal outcomes. If negotiated prices don’t match strategy, pricing teams lose credibility and control.
4. Approval Workflows Are Manual, Inconsistent, and Hard to Audit
Approvals for agreement pricing are often handled through emails, spreadsheets, or informal processes. These methods slow down deals, lack traceability, and create gaps in control. Without automation and auditability, enforcing pricing policy at scale becomes impossible.
5. Agreement Price Guidance Is Inconsistent or Gut-Driven
Many companies rely on cost-plus logic, historical prices, or sales instinct to set agreement pricing. This results in inconsistent outcomes and lost margin, especially when there's no tailored, data-driven guidance. Without centralized tools and contextual insights, sellers are left to interpret pricing strategy on their own.
6. Price Increases Take Too Long to Flow Into Agreements
When cost changes or strategy updates occur, pricers need the ability to respond quickly. But in many companies, it takes weeks—dor even months—to apply and enforce new prices in active agreements. This lag undermines pricing power and causes sellers to rely on outdated values.
7. Profitability Is a Blind Spot in Agreement Negotiations
Without deal-level or customer-level profitability analysis, pricing teams are flying blind. Gross margin views don’t reveal where value is leaking or which agreements are dragging down performance. Strategic pricing requires more than averages—it demands actionable, customer-specific insights.
8. Most Revenue Is Managed Through Negotiated Pricing but Remains Under-Controlled
In many B2B businesses, over 70% of revenue flows through customer-specific or agreement pricing—but those agreements are often tracked manually. Without structure, this high-value revenue source becomes a margin risk. The more revenue tied to negotiated pricing, the greater the need for strong governance, automation, and visibility.
Take Control of Negotiated Pricing Execution
The challenges outlined above aren’t isolated. They’re symptoms of a deeper disconnect between pricing strategy and execution. If pricers can’t ensure that guidance is applied consistently in negotiations, margin erosion, inconsistent deals, and operational inefficiencies are inevitable.
To close this gap, pricing teams need to embed strategy into the systems and workflows that support customer-specific pricing. That means eliminating spreadsheets, reducing manual handoffs, and replacing reactive processes with scalable, intelligent solutions.
Zilliant Sales Agreements is purpose-built to help pricing teams close the strategy-to-execution gap and take control of customer-specific pricing by enabling them to:
- Streamline agreement creation, updates, and enforcement in one centralized platform
- Minimize margin leakage with auditable, automated pricing checkpoints
- Sync negotiated prices directly into ERP and quoting tools for accuracy and speed
- Apply pricing guidance consistently with guardrails, approval workflows, and AI-powered insights
- Monitor real-time agreement performance and customer profitability
- Adjust pricing dynamically as business, market, or customer conditions evolve
If your negotiated pricing still lives in emails and spreadsheets, your strategy isn’t reaching the front lines. Zilliant Sales Agreements gives pricing teams full visibility and control to maximize customer value with every agreement.
Ready to see where you stand? Take our Negotiated Price Management Assessment to uncover your top challenges and get personalized next steps. Get started now!
