10/16/2026
A recent win for the company was a large purchase completed at full list price, and your organization seemed thrilled to maintain pricing discipline.
However, after you review the purchase invoice, you realize the company included some perks for the buyer to get the deal done, such as six months of free implementation; custom integration, which the product team had not previously scoped; a dedicated support contact; and a pilot that rolled into the contract term that someone approved to get the deal done at “full price.”
While discounts are typically seen as concessions to the buyer because they impact price paid and revenue, many other forms of concessions may be made over time through delivery costs, customer success teams being overwhelmed, and then at renewal when customers expect to receive similar treatment again, more concessions are typically made to prevent churn.
McKinsey’s landmark pricing research in Harvard Business Review found that a 1% improvement in price realization lifted operating profit by about 11% for the average company it studied.
Concessions and perks to the buyer that help get the deal done for your company, but that don’t ultimately discount the full listed price, wear that number down just as much, I’m sure.
Marketing should care about this more than it typically does. Concessions are often the most visible indicator that buyers don't see enough value to pay what your company asks.
When the same segment requires custom work deal after deal, it usually signals an ICP/positioning issue that no amount of sales discipline will fix.
As a CMO who wants to be part of the solution for this issue, here are some things you can do:
Take a year’s worth of closed deals and document all non-price concessions made, next to the segment, deal size, the competitor involved, and post-close account performance.
When you do this, patterns tend to show up fast; you’ll often see:
- Which customer segments consistently require "extras"
- The competitive forces in the market that cause these extra requirements
- Marketing messages that aren’t landing with buyers
-Which concession-heavy accounts churned or came back for more at renewal. Those are usually the ones that were never your ICP.
These are problems marketing can solve upstream with sharper targeting and positioning to clearly communicate value before a rep has to give something away to close a sale.
In many cases, the order form provides you much more insight into how much value the customer saw than the price does.
