By Todd Caponi
In periods of economic contraction or stagnation, organizations’ revenue growth expectations often remain the same. In response, many organizations pursue “low-hanging fruit” strategies perceived as more accessible and immediate.
However, the common knee-jerk response to “low-hanging fruit” often misses the most accessible and potentially easiest fix.
Instead of allocating energy to structural improvements of how revenue is created and captured, organizations tend to default to short-term, activity-based interventions. These include increasing pressure on teams to generate pipeline, raising prices on existing customers, and introducing time-bound incentives to clients designed to accelerate deal closure.
The frequently overlooked source of revenue improvement in most organizations lies in how they communicate pricing, deliver proposals, and negotiate commercial terms. These milestones, which are quite literally the revenue itself, are often under-structured and inconsistently executed.
The Consequences of Short-Term Revenue Tactics
The common short-term revenue focus used in many revenue organizations often leads to unintended consequences, such as:
- Increased seller pressure: Heightening expectations on team members, coupled with more oversight, tends to signal asymmetry to buyers. They sense the seller’s incentives are no longer aligned with their own. This reduces trust and prolongs sales cycles.
- Price increases on existing customers: While increasing prices without actually earning them may have a quick, short-term revenue impact, it’s quickly offset by the behavior it causes in those customers. For example, a price increase often triggers a re-evaluation that otherwise wouldn’t have happened had prices stayed the same, which means you’re having to allocate seller time to saving accounts. This increases the cost to renew and often increases churn. Also, price increases negatively impact upsell and cross-sell revenue.
- Time-bound discounts and artificial urgency: You’re building long-term relationships in which those discounts multiply by every year your customers stay, every additional purchase they make, and every peer they talk to. Fake expiring discounts train buyers to wait, telling them the best deals come later. You’re also signaling that your price wasn’t real and, therefore, you lose leverage through those discounts by inviting more negotiating and thus lower revenue. And as information proliferates, AI exposes pricing models, and peers connect more easily, having every client paying a different amount becomes a race to the bottom.
- Expanded pipeline requirements: The requirement on sellers to increase pipeline loads typically results in more pipeline. However, when the pipeline is the focus, conversion and quality typically suffer. In other words, “our pipeline-to-quota ratio is now 5:1 since it’s filled with crap!”
The “Low-Hanging Fruit” of Pricing Integrity
Over a century ago, Thomas Herbert Russell, in his book Salesmanship Theory & Practice, wrote: “The knowledge of buyers has increased, and they are no longer disposed to pay what is asked of them unless persuaded in their minds that the sellers regulate their prices on some sound basis.”
In other words, the problem in how we communicate pricing, deliver proposals, and negotiate commercial terms typically results in a lack of a “sound basis,” or a belief that the price is actually the price. We don’t negotiate the price of groceries at the supermarket, at the gas pump, or at a retailer because we believe that the price is the price. The business-to-business world has created a “sound basis” problem from the first conversation about pricing that implies:
- Variability based on negotiation dynamics instead of the underlying economics
- Conditional discounts tied to arbitrary whims
- Inconsistent application of commercial terms across customers
- Limited confidence or articulation of the factors that influence the price
To buyers, these conditions signal ambiguity. When the pricing foundation is unclear and delivery lacks confidence, the buyer concludes that the price is negotiable beyond what’s presented. The result is reduced revenue, slower decision-making, and longer sales cycles.
The Relationship Between Transparency and Revenue Impact
Clarity and confidence in pricing communication, proposal delivery, and negotiations create a revenue lift alongside an operational advantage.
When buyers understand the structure behind your pricing, what drives it, how trade-offs work, and why certain elements exist, they’re better equipped and more confident in their decision-making.
We all want to feel like we’re getting the best deal possible and are paying the same or less than other customers under similar circumstances. When leadership energy is pointed towards enabling this structure and confidence, the result is:
- Increased decision confidence: Buyers are enabled with control of their own outcomes.
- Reduced negotiation friction: Discussions center around the structural variables instead of positions.
- Improved deal metrics, including forecasting accuracy: Trust goes up, discounting goes down, and deal alignment provides better predictability.
What this means for revenue leaders is the opportunity may lie less in activity and pressure, and more in focusing on how commercial interactions are structured and communicated. Practically, this means clearly defining the variables that influence your price. These variables correspond to:
- Volume: How much of your product the customer is committing to buying from you, whether that means users, licenses, hours, locations, parts, or similar units. More is better than less.
- Timing of cash: How fast the customer is committing to paying for the volume of your product. Faster is better than slower.
- Length of commitment: How long the customer is committing to the volume of the product. Longer is better than shorter.
- Timing of the deal: When the customer is willing to make the commitment to your product. Mutual alignment and predictability are values worth sharing with the customer.
The Opportunity in Plain Sight
When economic pressure is high, the instinct in many revenue organizations is to focus on things like increasing activity volume, increasing oversight, increasing pressure on team members, and forcing price increases on customers. However, the most accessible improvements in revenue performance may lie in simple changes to how pricing is communicated, proposals are structured, and negotiations are conducted.
Establishing a “sound basis” for clear, consistent, and defensible pricing may be an opportunity in plain sight.
Todd Caponi, CSP® is a multitime C-Level sales leader, a behavioral science and sales history nerd, and has led through two companies with successful exits. He now speaks and teaches revenue organizations and their leaders on leveraging transparency and decision science to maximize their revenue capacity as Principal of Sales Melon LLC. He’s the author of two previous award-winning books, The Transparency Sale and The Transparent Sales Leader. His newly released book is Four Levers Negotiating: The Simple, Counterintuitive Way to Higher Deal Values and Lasting Trust (Matt Holt Books, Jan. 27, 2026). Learn more at toddcaponi.com.
