How to Make Pricing Your Strongest Profit Lever

The B2B Buying Process is Stalling Deals 

According to Forrester's The State of Business Buying, 2024 report, 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process. That number reflects real friction—buyers who are frustrated, negotiations that drag on for weeks, and sales cycles that give competitors room to move in. 

When pricing takes too long or lacks transparency, buyers lose confidence. They start demanding more discounts and more favorable terms. And 75% of B2B buyers say they'd switch suppliers for a better buying experience, according to Sana Commerce's B2B Buyer Report. Getting pricing right—and getting it out faster—is one of the clearest ways to improve win rates. 

The Most Underrated Profit Lever in Your Business 

McKinsey & Company found that a 1% increase in price yields an 8.7% increase in operating profit, assuming volume holds steady. No other lever — not cost reduction, not volume growth — comes close to that kind of return. And yet most businesses are still treating pricing as an afterthought, relying on spreadsheets and gut instinct while leaving hundreds of basis points of margin on the floor. 

Four Generations of Pricing Science 

Josh walked through the evolution of pricing science in a way that's worth understanding, because most companies don't realize how far behind their tools actually are. 

Generation one is Cartesian pricing: a simple X and Y axis. It's static, limited, and still the default for many teams without a dedicated pricing solution.  

Generation two introduced decision trees, segmenting customers by size, region, and product category. The challenge is data sparsity. The more granular the segmentation, the less data you have to work with—and the more likely you are to end up averaging a $300 item with a $0.30 item just because they share the same product hierarchy. 

Generation three brought dynamic attribute segmentation, which is where most of the market sits today. It's an improvement, but it still struggles to account for seasonality or true customer-level willingness to pay. Generation four, where Conga's B2B Price Optimization sits, uses patented neural network technology. It eliminates segmentation problems, captures seasonality, and delivers precision pricing at the individual customer and SKU level. 

The Margin That Disappears Before Anyone Notices 

One of the most practical moments of the webinar was the profitability waterfall breakdown. In many enterprises, matrix discounting, customer-specific discounting, buying group discounting, payment terms discounting, and volume discounting are all happening simultaneously—often driven by four different departments with no visibility into what the others have agreed to. The result can be 800 to 900 basis points of margin leakage that nobody owns and nobody sees until it's already gone. 

Connected systems change that. When pricing, sales, finance, and marketing are working from the same data, that kind of invisible leakage becomes visible and manageable. 

The Next Generation of B2B Buyers is Already Here 

Gen Z buyers are becoming a growing force in B2B purchasing decisions, and they bring different expectations with them. They want seamless, immediate, and touchless buying experiences. They grew up with pricing that's transparent, real-time, and frictionless—and they expect the same from their business vendors. Companies that invest now in connected platforms for pricing, quoting, contracting, and document automation are the ones best positioned to earn their loyalty. 

The Takeaway 

Winning the deal is the gateway, not the goal. The real measure of success is whether you won a customer you can grow profitably year after year—and that requires a different approach to pricing, and the right tools to execute it. 

Watch the full webinar on demand to go deeper on any of these topics.