For finance leaders
Margin is leaking through pricing and quoting
List price is a suggestion, approvals are a formality, and nobody can say what discounting costs you in a year.
What is usually wrong underneath
Discount leakage is rarely one bad decision. It is many small ones: an exception approved at quarter end, a bundle priced from memory, a renewal that kept a launch discount. Each is reasonable alone. Together they set your real price.
Most finance teams cannot see it, because the quote lives in one system, the approval in an inbox, and the invoice in another system. Reconciling them by hand is a project, so it happens once and goes stale.
A forced quoting migration raises the stakes. Moving quoting rules to a new system without first knowing which rules protect margin carries the leak across with them.
What we do about it
This door opens into pricing and quote-to-cash, foundation and governance.
- Discount leakage tracking. Realized price against list price, by segment, seller, and product.
- Quote-to-cash workflow. Quoting rules and approvals that survive a CPQ migration.
- Proprietary context layer. Win history, pricing, and customer records modeled so your tools can read them.
The Margin Diagnostic
Every engagement starts with a fixed-price diagnostic. You keep the findings whether or not you continue.
Price and duration are not published yet
The diagnostic is fixed price and fixed length. Both numbers appear here once the pricing record is approved. We will not show a number we have not committed to.
What you walk away with
- Realized price against list price, by segment, seller, and product
- The approval and quoting steps where discount leaks
- A ranked list of fixes, each with the evidence behind it
- A scoped build plan you can run with us or without us
How it works
We read quoting, discounting, and billing data through scoped, read-only access and reconcile what was quoted against what was invoiced.
Data access
Read-only service accounts on credentials you own. Access is time-boxed, logged, and revoked when the diagnostic ends.
Who it is for
- Finance leaders who suspect discounting is unmanaged
- Companies facing a forced CPQ migration
Who it is not for
- Companies with no quoting or discounting data in a system
- Teams looking for a pricing strategy study rather than a data review
What happens after the diagnostic
Build. A small pod builds the ranked fixes inside your systems, on credentials you own.
Managed operations. If you want us to run the layer with your team, we do, under the same documentation you hold.
Migration. When a platform change is forced on you, we carry the rules that matter across and drop the ones that do not.
Ownership. You keep what we build: the data models, the workflows, and the documentation. Nothing depends on us staying.
Objections, answered
Why not a pricing consultancy?
A pricing consultancy is the right choice when the question is what your prices should be. Our question is narrower: what price are you realizing today, and where does the difference go. We answer it from your own data, and we leave you the system that keeps answering it.
We are mid-migration on quoting. Is this the wrong time?
It is a good time. A migration forces you to restate every quoting rule. Knowing which rules protect margin, and which are ignored, tells you what to carry across and what to drop.
Will my CRM's built-in AI do this soon?
Partly, yes. Native CRM agents already handle summaries, basic scoring, and standard routing well, and they will absorb more. They work on the data inside the CRM. They do not model your win history, your pricing, or the sources that live outside it. That proprietary part is the layer we build.
What do we own at the end?
Everything. The data models, the workflows, the documentation, and the credentials stay in your environment. If you stop working with us, the system keeps running.
What access do you need?
For a diagnostic, read-only service accounts on credentials you own. Access is time-boxed and logged, and you can revoke it at any moment. Write access is scoped per module during a build and only with your approval.
Related research
No research published for this situation yet
Limerine Research items tagged to this situation appear here when they are published.
Start with a fixed-price diagnostic
Five questions, then a booking. You leave the diagnostic with a ranked plan you can run with us or without us.