Where exactly is your pricing losing money? This article gives you a twelve-question diagnostic, split between strategy and execution, that a leadership team can answer in an afternoon to identify specific gaps and decide what to fix first.
The maturity ladder shows which level your pricing operates at. The diagnostic turns that into specifics, pinpointing the individual capabilities that are missing. It is built for a leadership team, not a specialist, and is designed to be answered honestly based on the last quarter of real deals.
The gaps are almost always there. In a Bain survey of more than 1,700 B2B companies, roughly 85% of executives said their pricing decisions could be improved, with the largest gaps in discount structure, sales incentives, tooling, and cross-functional ownership. The value of a diagnostic is not discovering that gaps exist; it is naming which ones are yours.
This article is part of our Pricing and Packaging series and one of the tools we use to put the framework into practice. Throughout the series, we follow Meridian Software, an eighty-million-dollar workflow platform, reviewing whether its pricing still holds up. For the diagnostic, we score Meridian on all twelve questions.
The diagnostic is twelve yes-or-no questions in two groups: six on strategy, the decisions that set the price, and six on execution, the discipline that protects it in the field. You answer each based on what actually happened last quarter, not on what the strategy says should happen.
Count the yeses. The split between the two groups matters as much as the total, because a company can be strong on strategy and weak on execution, or the reverse, and the fix is different in each case.
The Twelve-Question Pricing Diagnostic
Answer yes or no, honestly, from your last quarter of deals. Count each yes to calculate your score.
The strategy questions test whether the decisions that set your price are actually made, rather than assumed. Each maps to one of the framework’s decisions.
Do we segment customers by willingness to pay, not just size or industry?
Does each tier map to a segment and have a clear job, rather than growing by feature accretion?
Can we quantify our value in the buyer’s own metrics?
Does our pricing model match how customers receive value?
Have we chosen a deliberate market posture for each tier?
Does pricing have a clear owner, rather than three functions each holding a piece?
A low score here means the price itself may be wrong at the root, set on assumptions rather than evidence. No amount of execution discipline fixes a price that was never grounded in what customers value.
The execution questions test whether the price you set holds up in the field. These map to the Economics decision and the operating process.
Do we have a written margin floor and a discount authority matrix?
Do reps lead with value before reaching for a discount?
Does compensation reward holding price, not just volume?
Do floors and guardrails live in our systems, not just in policy?
Do we review realized price and margin on a regular cadence?
Do won and lost deals feed back into our pricing decisions?
A low score here means a sound price is leaking on the way to the customer. The strategy may be right, but without floors, aligned comp, and a cadence, the realized price drifts well below the set price.
Add up the yeses across all twelve, and read the range.
Urgent
Pricing is likely leaking margin right now. The priority is the fundamentals: a floor, a discount matrix, and an owner, before anything more sophisticated.
Real Gaps
The most common range and the most actionable. Look at which group scored lower—strategy or execution—and prioritize the missing capabilities in that area.
Strong
Your pricing is well managed. The work now is refinement and instrumentation, moving toward the top of the maturity ladder.
The split between strategy and execution is the most useful signal in the diagnostic. A company strong on strategy but weak on execution is giving away a good price at the deal table, while one strong on execution but weak on strategy is enforcing a price that was wrong to begin with.
Of the two, the second is the harder problem, because the discipline is real and it is protecting the wrong number. Nothing in the deal data will flag it, since every deal closed at the price the company intended.
Meridian Software, the platform we follow through this series, ran the diagnostic honestly against its last quarter of deals. The result was a lopsided score that told them exactly where to look.
On strategy, Meridian scored two of six. Yes, on the pricing model, which is a straightforward per-seat subscription that customers understand, and yes, it's on a clear enough owner. No on segmenting by willingness to pay, no on tier design, no on quantifying value, and no on deliberate market posture, since Meridian prices in the middle of its market by drift rather than by decision.
On execution, it scored one of six. Yes, it's only on reviewing the realized price, which finance tracks even without a formal cadence. No on a written floor, no on an authority matrix, no on compensation that rewards holding price, no on floors living in systems, and no on won-and-lost deals feeding back.
A total of three of twelve places Meridian firmly in the urgent range, and the split confirms what the maturity ladder already suggested. The strategy gaps are real, and the execution gaps are worse, which means the fundamentals of margin discipline come first.
A diagnostic is only useful if it drives a decision about what to do next. The pattern of the answers points the way: a low strategy score sends you back to the six decisions, while a low execution score sends you to margin discipline and the operating process.
When both are low, as at Meridian, execution goes first. A floor and a matrix take weeks and stop the bleeding immediately. Measuring willingness to pay takes a quarter and pays off only once there is discipline to hold the price it justifies.
Whatever the pattern, the sequence for acting on it is the same, and we lay it out in the first ninety days, which turns the gaps the diagnostic finds into a paced plan. The point of the diagnostic is to make that plan specific to your gaps rather than generic.
AI is making the diagnostic continuous rather than periodic. Much of what these twelve questions test —discount patterns, realized margin, whether value is being communicated—can now be monitored in real time using deal data, so gaps surface as they emerge rather than at an annual review.
The questions still matter, because they frame what to watch for, but the answers increasingly come from live data. We cover this two-sided shift across all six decisions in our article on pricing power in the age of AI.
The diagnostic sits between the maturity ladder, which tells you your level, and the first ninety days, which sequences the fix. Together, they turn the six decisions from a way of thinking into a specific, prioritized plan of action.
This work sits inside our broader commercial transformation practice, where a pricing diagnostic is often the first step in a larger revenue engagement.
Twelve honest questions, split across strategy and execution, locate the specific gaps in your pricing faster than any general sense that it could be better. The total tells you how urgent the work is; the split tells you where to start.
For Meridian, a score near three out of twelve made the priority unmistakable: build the fundamentals of margin discipline first. For any company, the diagnostic turns a vague unease about pricing into a named list of what to fix.
Download the Pricing and Packaging Framework
The complete framework, with the maturity ladder, the diagnostic, and a sequenced ninety-day plan.
The Pricing and Packaging Assessment
We run the full diagnostic with you, score every question against your deal data, and build the plan.
Next, we turn the diagnosis into action: a first-ninety-days plan that sequences the fixes, from the fast margin-protection wins to the deeper work of measuring willingness to pay.
Sources
Bain & Company survey of more than 1,700 B2B companies, for the share of executives who believe their pricing could improve and the largest capability gaps. Figures are stated directionally rather than as precise claims.