Spooky Pricing Practices Still Haunting B2B Teams in 2025 👻🎃
Even the most sophisticated commercial teams can fall victim to silent pricing traps that drain margin, confuse customers, and leave revenue on the table.
At FintastIQ, we see it every quarter:
• Revenue targets missed, not because deals aren’t happening, but because of margin erosion
• Product portfolios bloated with low-value SKUs that refuse to die
• Discounts scattered like candy, with no guardrails
• Pricing decisions based on instinct, not insight
This Halloween, we’re calling out five pricing practices that continue to haunt B2B organizations and sharing practical antidotes to help you break the cycle before year-end.
💀 The Cost-Plus Curse
🎃 Spooky Practice: Basing pricing decisions solely on internal costs, then applying a flat markup across products or regions. This approach ignores what the market is willing to pay and assumes that cost equals value. It leads to chronic underpricing in high-value segments and overpricing in competitive or commoditized categories. Worse, it disconnects your pricing from your customers' perception of value and limits upside on premium offerings.
🧪 Antidote: Shift to value-based pricing that starts with your customer’s outcomes, not your internal expense model. Use segmentation to understand willingness to pay, and build value propositions around economic impact, risk reduction, or competitive advantage. Equip teams with economic value estimation tools and competitor benchmarks to support pricing decisions rooted in customer value.
🦴 Discounting Without a Coffin Plan
🎃 Spooky Practice: Allowing sales teams to discount freely to close deals without structure, thresholds, or value defense. This leads to margin leakage, inconsistent customer experiences, and a dangerous precedent where pricing becomes negotiable by default. It also causes internal tension between sales, finance, and pricing teams who are working from different playbooks.
🧪 Antidote: Establish discount fences tied to customer segments, deal size, product type, and strategic importance. Build a tiered approval matrix to control margin thresholds and give sales reps clear guidance on where they can flex and where they cannot. Reinforce value messaging in your sales process so pricing conversations are framed around ROI, total cost of ownership, or opportunity cost, not just sticker price.
🕷️ Zombie SKUs That Drain Profit
🎃 Spooky Practice: Keeping underperforming or outdated SKUs in the portfolio indefinitely, even when they generate low volume, poor margins, or operational drag. These SKUs clutter your catalog, confuse customers, slow down quoting and fulfillment, and consume internal resources with little commercial return.
🧪 Antidote: Conduct SKU rationalization every quarter to evaluate products by contribution margin, sales velocity, and cost-to-serve. Flag SKUs that have not sold in 12 months, that routinely sell below margin thresholds, or that generate excessive service burden. Make clear decisions to retire, reprice, or reposition these SKUs to focus attention and energy on the products that truly drive growth.
🎭 Phantom Price Anchors and Tiering Traps
🎃 Spooky Practice: Introducing new pricing tiers, bundles, or “premium” offers without a clear value story. Customers see vague upgrades with confusing names or slight feature differences but no compelling reason to pay more. This erodes trust, increases churn risk, and can even drive customers toward lower tiers or competitors with more transparent pricing.
🧪 Antidote: Build a tiered pricing architecture with distinct value propositions at each level. Ensure each step up includes a meaningful and clearly communicated benefit, whether it’s functionality, service level, or strategic impact. Use behavioral pricing techniques like good-better-best, feature framing, and transparent comparison charts to guide customers toward higher tiers with confidence.
🔮 Ghosting the Data
🎃 Spooky Practice: Relying on gut feel, outdated spreadsheets, or inherited pricing logic instead of live customer and deal data. This makes it impossible to track profitability by segment, understand where you’re leaking margin, or respond to shifts in competitor behavior or buyer expectations.
🧪 Antidote: Build a foundational pricing analytics capability that brings visibility and structure to your decisions. Start with a price waterfall to track how list prices erode through discounts, rebates, and terms. Layer in win-loss data, price elasticity insights, and profitability reporting by product and customer segment. Use the data to drive continuous improvement, not just to justify decisions after the fact.
🎯 Bottom Line
These pricing mistakes don’t scream. They whisper. But left unchecked, they erode strategic clarity, compress margins, and damage commercial confidence. Every quarter that goes by without action deepens the impact.
This Halloween, take the opportunity to do a commercial cleanse:
• Price based on the value you create, not the cost you incur
• Align your offer structure to real customer needs
• Use data to defend and refine your decisions
• And never let pricing operate in the dark again