Reset pricing discipline: a CFO roadmap to lift ARPU and protect gross margin

Today, CFOs are being asked to do more with less: to find efficiencies, protect margins, and help the business grow sustainably. It’s a challenging brief, and one that’s only getting tougher as markets become more unpredictable. The good news is that there’s a lever hiding in plain sight: pricing.

Often seen as the domain of sales or marketing, pricing strategy is in fact one of the most powerful tools in a CFO’s toolkit. A 1% increase in price can drive around an 8% increase in operating profit, assuming volumes hold (McKinsey). That’s why when CFOs get directly involved in pricing strategy, the impact on performance can be immediate and lasting.

The best part? You don’t need to rip up your pricing model or bet on risky expansion plans to see results. Often, a few smart pricing moves can unlock significant margin.

This article explores how CFOs can use pricing strategy to protect margins, improve the quality of revenue, and support sustainable growth by bringing greater financial discipline, evidence, and cross-functional alignment to pricing decisions.

5 Signs your pricing could be working harder

Pricing underperforms when ownership, strategy, and understanding of customer value are unclear, leaving teams to make reactive decisions that quietly erode margin and value.

As CFO, you’re likely already sensing where pricing is falling short. Not in dramatic failures, but in the small patterns that hold back performance. A missed margin target here. A discount granted too easily there. A pricing conversation that never quite gets resolved.

Individually, these moments seem trivial. But together, they point to a bigger issue as pricing has slipped into the background instead of leading growth. Maybe you’ve seen these at play in your business:

• There’s no clear pricing strategy Sales, product, and finance each push in different directions. Without shared goals, pricing becomes reactive and often inconsistent.

• Caution around raising prices Price changes are framed as risky or political. Everyone worries about customer pushback, even when the data says there’s room to move.

• Prices haven’t changed in years Your costs have evolved. Your value proposition has evolved. But has your pricing? When prices stand still, inflation quietly devalues your offer and squeezes margins.

• Discounts as the default To win the sale, discounts get applied. It’s quick and it works in the moment, but it trains customers to expect a deal and makes it harder to hold the line later.

• A value story that doesn’t quite land If teams can’t clearly articulate what your offering is worth, the price always feels too high.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s a sign of pricing power left untapped. The good news? These are solvable problems, and as CFO, you’re well placed to lead that shift.

Why pricing needs finance leadership

For CFOs under pressure to deliver predictable growth and margin resilience, pricing is one of the few levers that directly connects customer behaviour to financial outcomes, which is why finance leadership is critical.

Pricing is often treated as a commercial or tactical issue, owned by sales or marketing and revisited only when margins come under pressure. But when pricing is viewed through a finance lens, its impact becomes clearer and more durable. Finance leadership brings discipline, evidence, and a long-term perspective that allows pricing to deliver value across three distinct horizons.

Immediate impact: The 1% pricing lever

In the near term, pricing offers one of the fastest ways to improve financial performance without increasing cost or volume.

McKinsey research shows that for the average S&P 1500 company, a 1% increase in price, assuming volumes remain stable, can increase operating profit by around 8%. This impact is materially greater than equivalent improvements achieved through cost reduction or volume growth.

For CFOs, this matters because it reframes pricing as a measurable financial lever. Even small improvements in realised price can have an outsized effect on profitability, making pricing one of the most efficient tools available when performance needs to improve quickly.

Lasting impact: Strategic agility

Beyond short-term gains, finance-led pricing enables greater strategic agility.

According to Deloitte’s Q3 2025 CFO Signals survey, a significant majority of CFOs expect pricing to become more critical to financial performance over the next 12 months. This reflects a broader shift away from pricing as a “set it and forget it” exercise towards pricing as an ongoing strategic capability.

When finance plays an active role, pricing decisions are more likely to be reviewed regularly, tested with evidence, and aligned with changing market conditions. This allows organisations to respond faster to shifts in customer demand, competitive dynamics, and cost pressures, without relying on blunt, last-minute price increases.

Structural impact: Margin discipline over time

The most durable value from pricing comes when finance embeds discipline into how prices are set, discounted, and realised in practice. McKinsey’s pricing research highlights cases where improved management of realised, or “pocket,” price has delivered substantial profit gains. In one documented example, a relatively modest improvement in pocket price was associated with an increase in operating profit of more than 50% over a year.

This type of outcome is rarely the result of a single pricing decision. It comes from consistent governance, clear ownership, and transparency over how list prices translate into actual revenue. Finance is uniquely positioned to provide this structure, ensuring that value created by the business is not eroded through unmanaged discounts, exceptions, or inconsistencies.

The four pricing levers CFOs should focus on

Pricing decisions sit across multiple teams and touch everything from customer acquisition to margin delivery. Without a clear framework, it becomes difficult to diagnose what is driving performance and where value is being lost. Finance leadership is critical here to bring structure and clarity to how pricing decisions are evaluated and prioritised.

A practical way to do this is to view pricing through the following four interlocking levers. Together, they provide a CFO-relevant lens for assessing where pricing is working, where it is leaking value, and where focused intervention will deliver the greatest return.

Position: Where you choose to win Positioning determines which customers, segments, and use cases your pricing is optimised for.

From a CFO perspective, this shows up in metrics such as contribution margin by segment, margin after discounting, and win rates by price band. In one B2B services business we worked with, segment-level analysis revealed that the fastest-growing customer group delivered materially lower contribution margins once bespoke delivery and discounting were accounted for. Resetting pricing expectations by segment allowed the business to protect margin without slowing growth.

Price: What value you actually capture Price is about realised prices, rather than list rates.

CFOs should focus on price trends by product, segment, and deal size, and on how far realised prices fall below target. In one technology company, finance identified that average realised prices had remained flat for years despite regular list price increases. Tightening discount guardrails subsequently improved realised price by a small single-digit percentage, delivering a disproportionate uplift in operating profit.

Presentation: How customers choose Presentation influences how customers compare options and where they land.

This can be seen in shifts in average selling price, package mix, or ARPU. In one subscription business, clearer tiering and revised framing moved customers toward higher-value plans without changing headline prices, increasing margin while churn remained stable.

Process: How pricing is governed Process determines whether pricing improvements stick.

Key indicators include the frequency of price reviews, approval thresholds for discounting and visibility into realised price and margin. Introducing a regular pricing review cadence reduces ad hoc discounting and replaces opinion-led debates with evidence-based decisions.

Taken together, these four levers provide a practical system for turning pricing into a managed financial capability. They allow CFOs to diagnose where value is being created or lost, prioritise action, and ensure pricing supports margin discipline and sustainable growth over time.

How to start building a stronger pricing strategy?

When tackling pricing, it is easy to feel unsure where to start, who needs to be involved, or how to navigate the internal trade-offs and politics. A focused, time-bound Pricing Sprint™ provides a practical way to create clarity and evidence quickly, without disrupting the business.

At its core, the Pricing Sprint™ follows four steps.

1. Diagnose where pricing is helping or hurting performance

Build a shared view of the current pricing reality using financial, commercial, and operational data. CFOs focus on where margins are being created or eroded, where realised prices fall below target, and which segments or products offer the greatest opportunity. The aim is to identify one or two priority areas where pricing intervention will have the biggest financial impact.

2. Design focused pricing moves

Translate insight into practical options, such as refining segmentation, adjusting price structures, reworking packages, or tightening discount guardrails. Each idea is framed as a clear commercial hypothesis, linked to measurable outcomes like margin improvement or average selling price uplift.

3. Validate decisions with evidence

Test pricing ideas before committing to change. Customer interviews, surveys, or targeted price tests help clarify value perception and price sensitivity, reducing risk and replacing internal debate with evidence.

4. Implement with discipline and review

Roll out changes with clear ownership, success metrics, and a defined review cadence. Finance plays a central role in tracking realised price, margin, and mix to ensure improvements stick and pricing remains under active management.

How to de-risk pricing decisions with evidence

The most effective CFOs use customer insight early in the process, alongside business data. When you combine both, you get structured evidence that can dramatically reduce uncertainty and the internal debates that often stall decisions.

There are three low-friction ways to build an evidence base:

Pricing Interviews: A handful of 60-minute conversations can reveal how customers perceive value, where price sensitivity truly sits, and what alternatives they compare you against. These interviews often surface insights your internal data can’t.

For one B2B technology services firm, the pricing interviews we ran revealed that customers valued delivery certainty and technical expertise over headline price. Overlaying project margin data revealed that bespoke work, which consumed more senior expertise and delivery risk, was priced similarly to standard projects. This mismatch led to late-stage margin erosion. Refining scoping and pricing conversations based on this insight improved realised margins without affecting win rates.

Pricing Surveys: When you need broader validation, a quantitative survey can test willingness-to-pay ranges, preferred packages, and which value messages resonate. Even a modest sample size provides directionally strong signals.

In a consumer subscription business, the pricing survey revealed that customers placed the highest value on features concentrated in the mid-tier, but perceived little differentiation between plans. When we overlaid this insight with ARPU and margin data, it became clear that pricing and packaging were misaligned with perceived value. Clarifying tier differences and adjusting pricing shifted demand toward the mid-tier, improving ARPU and margin without increasing churn.

Price Testing: For digital or subscription businesses, controlled tests — like showing two different price points or package options to similar customer groups — provide real-world behavioural data. 

In an industrial technology business, the CFO suspected that discounting thresholds were suppressing realised price, but there was concern about the impact on conversion. Rather than applying a blanket change, we tested tighter discount limits with a defined customer segment. Tracking conversion, realised price, and margin during the test showed no material change in win rates, alongside a mid-single-digit improvement in realised price. This gave the team confidence to roll the change out more broadly, delivering a measurable uplift in operating profit.

Small Changes, Big Impact: Experiments Worth Trying

Not every pricing improvement requires a structural overhaul. In practice, some of the highest returns come from small, targeted experiments that improve how pricing is structured, presented, or controlled. The advantage of these experiments is that they are low-risk, measurable, and fast to evaluate.

Shift how customers self-select

Introducing optionality can materially change mix and average revenue, even when underlying prices stay the same. In one B2B SaaS business, moving from a single flat price to a simple three-tier structure changed buying behaviours. The mid-tier quickly became the most selected option, lifting average selling price by over 10% through clearer differentiation and anchoring.

Change the frame, not the price

Sometimes the biggest gains come without changing the price at all. A consumer healthcare brand increased spend per session by 23% among new customers by simplifying the number of options, setting a clearer default, and reframing prices around outcomes rather than features, all without changing headline price points. The shift worked because it changed how value was perceived and choices were made at the moment of decision.

Test before you commit

Controlled testing allows teams to learn quickly while limiting downside risk. In one consumer subscription business, revised packaging and price presentation were tested with a subset of new customers. Tracking conversion, average order value and early usage behaviour validated that the test delivered a mid-single-digit increase in ARPU and improved margin. That evidence provided the confidence to scale the change.

From insight to impact: making pricing a managed growth lever

Improving pricing strategy does not require a wholesale redesign or a leap into the unknown. As this article has shown, the path forward is structured and practical.

It starts with finance leadership recognising pricing as a core financial capability, not a periodic commercial exercise. By focusing on the four pricing levers, CFOs can diagnose where value is being created or lost and prioritise action where it will have the greatest impact on margin and revenue quality.

A focused Pricing Sprint™ provides a way to turn that diagnosis into action. By clarifying priorities, designing targeted pricing moves, validating them with evidence, and implementing with discipline, CFOs can improve pricing decisions without disrupting the business.

Customer insight, business data, and controlled experimentation then reduce risk and build confidence. Together, they replace opinion-led debate with evidence and allow pricing to evolve in line with customer value and financial goals.

For CFOs being asked to do more with less, pricing offers a rare opportunity. When managed deliberately, it strengthens margins, improves the quality of revenue, and supports sustainable growth, not through one-off initiatives, but through repeatable, finance-led decisions over time.

FAQ: Pricing Strategy for CFOs

1. What signs indicate that a company’s pricing isn’t working hard enough? Common signals include outdated prices, discounting as a default, unclear value messaging, and inconsistent pricing decisions across teams.

2. Why should CFOs take a leadership role in pricing? CFOs bring unique visibility into margin, cost structure, and growth targets, making them well positioned to align pricing with financial outcomes.

3. How can CFOs reduce the risk of raising prices? Use customer insight, willingness-to-pay research, and controlled tests to validate price changes before rolling them out broadly.

4. What is a Pricing Sprint™? A Pricing Sprint™ is a 4–10 week, cross-functional process that builds evidence quickly, aligns teams, and produces a testable pricing hypothesis.

5. What small pricing experiments deliver fast impact? High-leverage experiments include introducing tiered pricing, improving price presentation with psychology principles, and running controlled A/B tests.

About the authors

Jenny Millar and Ann Padley lead Untapped Pricing, a consultancy trusted by leadership teams and investors worldwide to sharpen positioning, unlock profit, and accelerate growth through pricing. They are also the co-authors of The Pricing Sprint, to be published by Bloomsbury in May 2026.

Jenny Millar is a pricing expert and the Founder and CEO of Untapped Pricing. A former eBay executive, Jenny was responsible for pricing transformations across eleven European markets and running ambitious experimentation programmes for its multi-billion-dollar verticals. 

Ann Padley is a Senior Partner, strategist and educator with nearly 20 years of expertise in human-centred design. She advises organisations from startups to Fortune 500’s on how to embed customer insight and behavioural science into pricing strategy.