When Pricing Habits Masquerade as Strategy
“The way we’ve always done things.” It sounds practical. It signals stability. In pricing, it often explains why companies miss what’s right in front of them.
The core problem: teams treat pricing like a one-time decision rather than a living system. Without evidence, habits fill the void. This post helps you recognize the signs of status-quo thinking and decide whether “the way we’ve always done it” still deserves to be the way.
Why B2B Pricing Teams Cling to the Status Quo
Across B2B organizations, familiar patterns emerge. Fear of customer pushback or volume loss often keeps teams from raising prices, especially when they lack analytics to gauge willingness to pay. Without data, every increase feels risky, like flying blind.
A common refrain is, “Our industry is different.” It sounds definitive but is often an untested belief used to justify inertia. Leaders lean on it to avoid change, even when evidence points to opportunity.
Change fatigue also looms large. In organizations flooded with transformation agendas, leaders only tolerate changes with a clear ROI. If you can’t quantify the business impact of today’s approach, there won’t be much appetite to change it. Complacency is another trap. Results that seem “acceptable” can hide significant upside. (Getting across the country via horse was perfectly acceptable to those who were unaware trains had suddenly become an option!) In pricing, “fine” often means leaving profit on the table.
And of course, cost-plus pricing persists. It’s comfortable, easy to defend, and familiar to customers, especially in legacy industries. But comfort isn’t the same as optimal.
If any of these patterns sound familiar, it’s a signal to reassess, not a reason to double down on old habits.
A Quick Pricing Self-Assessment: Are You Stuck in Old Habits?
When pricing “just happens,” it’s usually because no one can answer a few simple questions consistently:
- What is our pricing strategy? (Cost-plus and “list less discount” are methods, not strategies.)
- Can we explain and defend our prices? (If the only explanation is “we give sales autonomy to win,” you’re likely missing guardrails that prevent over-discounting.)
- Do we know where we’re winning and losing, and why? (If the answer is a shrug, you’re navigating by anecdotes, not analysis.)
The goal isn’t a checklist for the wall. It’s an honest conversation: are we navigating by evidence or by habit?
From Habit to Pricing Systems: Guardrails, Incentives, and Exception Management
Pricing changes only stick when the system supports them. Incentives are a natural starting point: if sellers are rewarded for “how we’ve always done it,” behavior won’t change. Aligning compensation and KPIs with desired outcomes gives new practices staying power.
Exception governance is equally important. Without clear rules, exceptions quickly become the rule. Setting approval paths, expiration dates, and review cadences creates discipline without heavy bureaucracy. Managed well, exceptions turn from silent profit drains into valuable signals.
Measurement closes the loop. Tracking only revenue means managing only revenue. Adding realized price versus guidance, and monitoring exception rates, makes performance visible and prevents discount sprawl while keeping pricing flexible.
Guardrails like these don’t silence sales feedback; they sharpen it. Instead of defaulting to price cuts, sales requests become prompts for investigation, grounded in evidence rather than habit.
Real-World Pricing Example: When a “Loss Leader” Isn’t
At one company I worked with, a deeply held belief said a commonly purchased product was a loss leader that unlocked high-margin attachment. Selling it at or even below cost felt justified and was widely accepted.
A bit of analysis told a different story: roughly four in ten purchases were stand-alone; no follow-on, no attachment. For those customers, the loss leader was just a loss.
The fix: raise prices for those stand-alone scenarios. If some customers stopped buying, that was acceptable; the business was already losing money on those transactions. Profitability improved, and practice finally aligned with reality.
The lesson: statements that feel like facts need evidence. “That’s how our industry works.” “We have to price at X to keep volume.” “This item is a loss leader.” If no one can produce the data, it’s probably another form of “the way we’ve always done it.”
How AI Is Accelerating the Gap Between Habit and Data-Driven Pricing
That “loss leader myth” was perpetuated because habit outran evidence. AI raises the stakes; it makes evidence cheap and fast – so clinging to “the way we’ve always done it” gets more expensive by the day.
The pace of AI innovation introduces uncertainty, and I see three common paths:
- Paralysis. (AKA Status-quo autopilot) Leaders sense that AI will affect everything; without direction they hesitate—leaning harder into old habits. (Marshall Goldsmith said it best: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.)
- Ad-hoc rush. (AKA Shiny-object habit) Others sprint to “do something with AI,” bolting on tools around customers, products, or internal operations—then wonder why impact is low.
- Purposeful planners. (AKA Evidence-first habit.) These teams prepare deliberately to thrive. They aren’t allergic to the past, but they refuse to rely on it. They are being intentional about how they integrate emerging AI technology into their processes and educating their people along the way.
Across all three, the barrier isn’t fear of technology, it’s trust and integration. Without robust AI education, people don’t understand how different types of AI work. Without that understanding, mistrust grows. The remedy: use the right AI for the right process and explain the how and why to those affected. In short, AI doesn’t replace judgement, but it removes excuses for habit-based pricing.
If AI remains a black box in a dashboard or a separate center of excellence, people will revert to the way they’ve always worked. Companies that win scale people and processes alongside the tech, building understanding and confidence.
Closing Thought: Challenging the Pricing Status Quo with Evidence
“The way we’ve always done things” isn’t automatically wrong. Sometimes it is the best way. The real question is: when was the last time we verified that assumption?
Treat familiar phrases such as “our industry is different,” “this is a loss leader,” or “we have to price at X to maintain volume” as invitations to dig deeper. If the evidence supports them, great. If not, you’ve found an opportunity hiding in plain sight.
If your pricing still relies on “the way we’ve always done it,” let’s talk about a better way forward.
Matthew Knaggs is a Senior Business Value Lead at Zilliant, where he works with customers and prospects to demonstrate the ROI and business impact of implementing Zilliant solutions.
