Why every business needs a Pricing Champion
Who’s actually in charge of your pricing? For many businesses, the honest answer is: no one in particular. It’s spread thinly across finance, sales, product, and leadership, which means it often falls between the cracks.
That’s precisely why you need a Pricing Champion.
Someone with the remit and responsibility to keep pricing sharp, strategic, and aligned with the business as it evolves.
The reality is that pricing is a powerful lever that affects every part of the business: from growth and profitability to customer experience and brand perception. Yet despite its impact, pricing is often left unguarded.
Without a dedicated guardian, it’s hard to keep pricing on the agenda and maximise its effectiveness. But here’s the good news: with the right internal support, you can boost profitability and make revenue growth more predictable.
It’s time to formally appoint your ‘Pricing Champion’, someone within your company who’s accountable for making sure your prices reflect your value, adapt to context, and drive strategic outcomes. In this helpful guide, we’ll show you how to unlock untapped potential in your business with the help of a dedicated Pricing Champion.
Read on as we talk you through the simple steps to establishing your own internal pricing champion and why we believe it might well be the best thing you do all year.
What is a Pricing Champion?
Some companies already have someone looking after pricing. Perhaps that’s a pricing analyst, a finance lead, or even a full pricing team. As pricing consultants, we’ve worked with many of these teams, and one thing we see time and again is this: they’re often stuck in the day-to-day.
From firefighting price queries from other teams to chasing short-term revenue targets, they rarely have the space or remit to think strategically. The result? Pricing becomes reactive and fragmented, missing its full potential as a lever for long-term growth.
That’s where a Pricing Champion comes in.
A Pricing Champion is the internal advocate who connects the dots across teams, ensures pricing decisions align with broader business goals, and helps embed pricing confidence throughout the organisation.
Far from an analyst function, a Pricing Champion is someone who takes responsibility in 5 key areas.
1. Owning the pricing agenda across departments
One of the first jobs of every Pricing Champion is to get pricing on the agenda and then keep it there. That means ensuring pricing is discussed at the right moments: during planning meetings, product launches, and promotional decisions (and not just when there’s a fire to put out.) This Forbes article underpins why staying on top of your pricing is so business critical.
2. Keeping pricing aligned with evolving business goals
An effective Pricing Champion will be close to the core leadership team, with a full view of the company’s present and future ambitions. As business goals evolve, so should your pricing strategy. This, according to Industry Week, is invaluable, yet underrated. A Pricing Champion’s role is to know when a minor adjustment will do or when a bigger shift is needed, ensuring pricing strategy can be tailored to deliver on those goals.
3. Spotting gaps or risks in current pricing models
Because they’re not buried in the day-to-day, the Pricing Champion is well placed to take a step back and assess where pricing may no longer be working as intended.
Are certain products underpriced for the value they deliver? Are sales teams relying too heavily on discounting to close deals? Are your prices keeping pace with rising costs or changing customer expectations?
A Pricing Champion brings a fresh, critical eye to these questions, helping the business see what needs fixing and where small changes could unlock big improvements.
4. Driving internal alignment around pricing communications
One of the overlooked aspects of pricing is often how it’s communicated. From the copy on your website to the way your team talks about pricing in meetings, clear and confident messaging is essential.
A pricing champion is there to ensure that teams understand how to talk about the value behind pricing, are confident to action price increases (apology-free) and talk about these in a consistent tone across sales, support and marketing, even when faced with push back from customers.
5. Keeping an eye on market and customer trends
Pricing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. A great Pricing Champion keeps pricing grounded in reality by staying close to what’s happening outside the business, not just within it.
That means tracking market movements, customer behaviours, and competitor shifts. Whether it’s inflation, new entrants to the market, changing buying patterns, or evolving perceptions of value, these signals help shape smarter pricing decisions.
A Pricing Champion gathers that insight. They help keep the pace on conducting research, such as customer interviews and competitor reviews. They help make sense of it. They bring it to the table and use it to help the business stay ahead of change. Discover all about the value of evidence-led pricing in our recent article.
Steps to establishing an effective Pricing Champion
Part investigator, part negotiator, part pioneer. The role of a pricing champion is not for the faint-hearted. However, it’s an opportunity to have a pivotal role in the future success of any company, so it would appeal to someone ambitious and passionate.
So, what do you need to consider when introducing your own Pricing Champion to ensure they are set up to deliver effective pricing changes across the business?
Appoint a champion with the right skillset
A Pricing Champion should be curious, commercially minded and connected. Ideally, sitting somewhere between product, sales and finance. The key role of a pricing champion is to keep pricing in the spotlight, making sure it is deliberately discussed and regularly considered, so it needs to be someone confident to speak up, even in the face of resistance.
Action: Look to appoint someone in or near the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) to ensure they hold sway across departments. Crucially, they should also be capable of taking and demonstrating an objective view.
Establish a ‘Pricing Board’ to speed up progress
If you don’t have a pricing team already, establishing a formal support network to offer backup to the Pricing Champion is a good idea. This is known as a Pricing Board.
This cross-functional group — made up of senior voices from product, sales, finance, and marketing — brings broader business context into pricing decisions. It also helps ensure that pricing isn’t developed in isolation, but shaped through collaboration, challenge, and strategic alignment.
Together, the Pricing Board and Champion form a powerful partnership: one leads the charge, the other clears the path.
Action: Nominate a team from across the business to support your Pricing Champion, it’ll help align a company-wide approach and keep pricing front of mind. You’ll soon start seeing the returns.
Define who signs off decisions
Pricing strategy should be a collaborative process — led by the Pricing Champion and supported by the Pricing Board. But when it comes to sign-off, there should be no confusion: final decisions rest with the senior leader who holds commercial accountability.
Action: Ensure the chain of command is clear and openly discussed before any work on pricing strategy takes place so there is no confusion and no decisions are carried out without the proper go-ahead.
Run a Pricing Sprint™
A Pricing Champion gives your business ongoing ownership of pricing, but even the best internal lead needs the right tools to succeed.
That’s where a Pricing Sprint™ comes in. It’s a focused, fast-paced way bring your team together around a specific pricing challenge, and it gives your Pricing Champion a repeatable way to tackle future ones.
Running a Pricing Sprint™ can help:
- Pinpoint the right pricing problem worth solving
- Align the right people around it
- Explore options, test thinking, and land on a path forward
- Build confidence in the next steps — and who’s leading them
- It’s clarity, momentum, and capability all in one go.
Action: Learn more about Pricing Sprints™ our recent article. Of course, we’re always here to help if you have any questions.
Pricing Strategy Consultants vs. Pricing Champions: What’s the difference?
While a Pricing Champion is an internal role, a Pricing Strategy Consultant is an external partner who brings deep expertise, objectivity, and proven frameworks. The best thing is, they aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, the combination of both leads to the strongest pricing performance, with an internal champion driving the agenda, supported by external expertise to sharpen it.
So, parallel to establishing your Pricing Champion, a Pricing Consultant can help:
- Spot hidden opportunities through customer, competitor, and market analysis
- Design and test new pricing models that align with real-world value
- Build pricing capability across teams with practical frameworks and hands-on coaching
- Provide strategic oversight during key transitions like launches, repositioning, or restructuring
- Act as an objective voice to challenge assumptions and strengthen decisions
Whether you’d like support onboarding your Pricing Champion or help to fine-tune your pricing strategy, why not look for an expert independent Pricing Strategy Consultant to help. Discover some of the many strategic challenges we can help with.
Pricing Champion: there’s no better time to start
Pricing isn’t static. Your customer expectations, competitors, costs, and even your value proposition are always evolving.
A Pricing Champion ensures your pricing remains strategic, consistent, and aligned with your customers’ evolving view of value.
And if you don’t have someone in that seat yet—don’t worry. You can start by appointing a team member, or partnering with a pricing strategy consultant like Untapped Pricing to help lay the groundwork.
