How Pricing Decisions Change When the CFO Is in the Room

In many organizations, pricing sits with the commercial team. The CFO reports and reviews margins after deals are signed.

I spent a decade in corporate banking before becoming a CFO. In banking, I evaluated companies from the outside, analyzing their financial health and creditworthiness to inform lending decisions. When I moved to the CFO side, I noticed that similar financial scrutiny wasn’t always applied internally to pricing.

Finance and commercial teams tend to operate on different timelines and look at different metrics, and the result is that relevant cost data often doesn’t reach pricing conversations when it would be most useful. And, Deloitte’s Q3 2025 CFO Signals survey confirms this. 86% of North American finance chiefs say pricing will become more important to their organizations over the next year, and competitive pressure was the top factor influencing pricing decisions, cited by 62% of CFOs.

Pricing is where revenues and margins take shape, and finance holds information that can improve how those decisions are made.

What CFOs see in pricing that sales teams don’t

Commercial teams are close to the client. They understand what the market will bear, what competitors charge, and what the client values. And their perspective is essential.

Finance, however, holds a different angle — the actual cost of delivery, how overhead is distributed across clients, which project types carry stronger margins, and where profitability may be thinner than expected.

When I started joining pricing discussions, having this data in the room led to better-informed decisions. A Deloitte survey suggests this gap is common — 54% of CFOs said their organizations lack a cohesive pricing strategy, and over half pointed to a lack of accessible data as a key barrier to pricing responsiveness.

In some cases, we delivered at the highest standard and had real negotiating power, but the team agreed to lower rates out of concern that the pricing might feel too high. In others, we were pushing to maximize rates on accounts where competitors were actively competing with us on price, effort that would have been better directed elsewhere. Both lead to margin erosion over time, and both come from pricing without the full picture.

How CFOs can participate in pricing without taking it over

In practice, this means staying in regular contact with client-facing departments and, where it makes sense, with clients themselves. We’ve introduced a process where pricing to end clients is coordinated with the finance team, so that the rates we agree on reflect the client dynamic, market conditions, and our actual delivery costs.

One thing I’ve learned is that how you enter the pricing conversation matters. If the commercial team feels that finance is there to audit or override their judgment, the collaboration won’t work. The goal is to add a layer of information, not to second-guess their client relationships. In our case, it helped that the finance team invested time in understanding the commercial context before offering a financial perspective. That built trust over time and made the financial input more relevant, because it was grounded in how the business actually operates, not just in what the numbers suggested in isolation.

Over time, we built a financial model that tracks profitability at both the company level and the individual project level. What started as a finance tool is now widely used by the commercial team as well. When both sides work with the same numbers, it becomes easier to spot when margins on a project aren’t tracking as expected and to adjust course early. It also helps the commercial team see which clients and project types are most profitable, which over time, influences where they focus their efforts.

How pricing discipline compounds over time

Over the past three years, our company has grown revenue from approximately €7 million to €22.5 million while nearly doubling our EBITDA margin. A meaningful part of that improvement comes from connecting pricing into an ongoing conversation between the commercial and the finance teams.

Finance leaders considering this approach should start by joining one pricing review with margin data in hand. See what it adds to the discussion. In my experience, once the commercial and finance teams start working from the same numbers, it tends to stick. The goal is to make sure the people setting prices have the same information as the people tracking profitability. When that happens, pricing decisions tend to improve, and margins become more predictable.

It’s worth noting that this doesn’t require a large finance team or sophisticated tools to start. When I first got involved in pricing, the data I brought was relatively basic: project-level cost breakdowns and margin comparisons across client segments. The value came from having that information in the room at the right time, not from the complexity of the analysis.

In many organizations, pricing sits with the commercial team. The CFO reports and reviews margins after deals are signed.

I spent a decade in corporate banking before becoming a CFO. In banking, I evaluated companies from the outside, analyzing their financial health and creditworthiness to inform lending decisions. When I moved to the CFO side, I noticed that similar financial scrutiny wasn’t always applied internally to pricing.

Finance and commercial teams tend to operate on different timelines and look at different metrics, and the result is that relevant cost data often doesn’t reach pricing conversations when it would be most useful. And, Deloitte’s Q3 2025 CFO Signals survey confirms this. 86% of North American finance chiefs say pricing will become more important to their organizations over the next year, and competitive pressure was the top factor influencing pricing decisions, cited by 62% of CFOs.