Where does a pricing team's time really go: 

the actual distribution

The Work That Has No Name

A job description for a pricing manager outlines the decisions involved: defining pricing policy, determining market positioning, and managing margins. A typical week in the life of a pricing manager, however, involves something else entirely: files, follow-ups, meetings, and explanations.

This discrepancy is not a sign of poor organization. It is structural and stems from a unique aspect of pricing: it is a function that has almost none of its own data. Sales data belongs to management control, purchasing terms to the buyers, inventory to the supply chain, competitor data to a service provider, and the product catalog to a third-party system. Setting a price therefore requires gathering information before making a decision—and gathering that information costs more than the decision-making process itself. This lack of control goes beyond the mere issue of time, as our article on companies that truly control their pricing demonstrates.

Why This Time Remains Invisible

Because it isn't included in any annual goals or metrics. No one is evaluated based on the number of hours spent consolidating data extracts; everyone is evaluated based on profit margin. Preparatory work is therefore seen as a natural prerequisite—just like turning on your computer—rather than as a burden that could be measured and reduced.

It also remains invisible because it is fragmented. Three-quarters of an hour here, twenty minutes there: none of these moments seems significant on its own. It is their cumulative effect that matters, and that cumulative effect can only be seen if one measures it deliberately.

This survey does not focus on pricing teams but on retail management, and that is why it is useful: it shows that the administrative burden in the sector is a measurable phenomenon, not just a perception. The pricing function is a special case, with its own unique challenge: it depends on data held by five different departments.

The Five Tasks That Take Up the Week

1. Data Preparation

Extract, reconcile, verify, correct obvious anomalies, and reconstruct a comparable scope from one month to the next. This is the most labor-intensive and thankless task: it repeats exactly the same process every cycle and leaves no trace of value. When done in a spreadsheet, this preparation quickly reaches its structural limits, particularly when it comes to monitoring competitors’ prices.

2. Coordination

Following up with a buyer about a missing requirement, waiting for approval, requesting an incomplete competitive analysis, mediating a disagreement between two departments. This position has one distinctive feature: it cannot be streamlined through technology alone, because it depends on the organization and decision-making processes.

3. Formatting

Turning an analysis into a presentable document, adapting the same content for three different audiences, reworking a slide because the scope changed the day before. This role grows with the number of governance bodies, and it’s the first to become overwhelming when an organization adds a committee.

4. The Justification

Explaining why a particular price was set—to a buyer, a store manager, or sales management—is a legitimate and necessary task. The cost of doing so depends entirely on one thing: the system’s ability to reconstruct the decision-making process. When this process must be reconstructed manually for every question, providing justification becomes a part-time job. This is exactly the challenge described in our article on explaining a pricing decision.

5. Correction

Manually correct what the system has suggested incorrectly. Each repeated correction highlights knowledge that the tool lacks, and we’ve devoted an entire article to this topic:business context is not data. As long as it isn’t formalized, the team re-enters it manually, week after week.

Measure Your Actual Distribution in Two Weeks

Before correcting anything, we need a number. Self-reported estimates are worthless in this context: the discrepancy between the time people think they spend on a task and the time they actually spend on it is commonly a factor of two—and always in the same direction.

The Minimum Protocol

• Two weeks, not just one. A single week is always unusual: there’s a special committee meeting, a sales promotion, or an absence.
• Five categories, not fifteen. The five categories listed above are sufficient. An overly detailed grid goes unfilled, and an unfilled grid doesn't measure anything.
• One entry per half-day, not continuously. The goal is to provide a useful order of magnitude, not detailed cost accounting. Thirty seconds twice a day.
• The entire team, not just the supervisor. The division of responsibilities differs significantly between a supervisor and a manager, and it is precisely this difference that indicates where action is needed. It directly informs the discussion on how to structure a pricing organization.

The two key figures to take away

The first is the decision-making component: the percentage of time spent analyzing, simulating, and making judgments. This is the indicator of the function’s health. The second is the recurring portion: the percentage of time spent on tasks that are identical from one cycle to the next. This is the source of potential, because tasks that repeat identically are the ones that lend themselves best to automation.

These two figures serve another, often more immediate purpose: they turn a request for resources into a demonstration. A team that simply asks for additional staff rarely gets its way; a team that shows that 70% of its week consists of recurring tasks gets a serious discussion.

Eliminate, automate, delegate: in that order

The order is more important than the measurements themselves, and in practice it is almost always reversed.

1. Delete

The first question to ask about every recurring task isn’t “How can we speed it up?” but “What happens if we stop doing it?” A weekly report that three people received but only one actually opened; a metric produced out of habit since a reorganization long ago; a committee whose agenda is empty half the time. This task is systematically underestimated, and it’s the only one with zero cost.

Automating a pointless task is the worst possible outcome: it makes the task permanent, since no one has any reason to question it anymore.

2. Automate

Only then—and starting with data preparation, which is the most time-consuming and routine task—can we proceed. The order of priority is directly reflected in the measurement: frequency multiplied by duration, starting with what is most stable from one cycle to the next.

The "justification" feature deserves special mention because it automates the process in an unexpected way: not by generating explanations more quickly, but by enabling the system to provide them on its own, so that the buyer can find the answer without having to go through the team.

3. Delegate

Finally, because delegating a task doesn't make it disappear from the organization—it simply shifts it elsewhere. This makes sense when the task requires less expertise than it currently requires, not when the goal is simply to free up time on someone's schedule.

What a team does with the time it saves

This is the part that almost no one prepares for, and it’s what determines whether the whole effort was worth it. Unplanned free time fills itself up on its own, and it fills up with whatever screams the loudest—that is, the day’s urgent tasks.

Three Profitable Pricing Strategies

• Simulate before deciding. Testing three scenarios rather than just going with the first one is exactly what a team that’s behind schedule never has time to do—and yet that’s where the difference in margin comes into play.
• Measure after making a decision. Review the decisions from the previous quarter to verify their actual impact. Without this feedback loop, a team will consistently repeat its mistakes.
• Challenge the rules. Reexamine legacy constraints rather than working around them—which ties into the system review described in the “rule debt” of a pricing engine.

The recommended wording

Saving time is not an end in itself, and this is also why it should not be confused with the return on investment of a pricing project, as we explain in detail in “Time Savings vs. Margin Gains.” A team freed from preparation work does not generate value in and of itself. It generates value if, and only if, someone has decided in advance what the team will do with those hours. This decision is made before the project begins, not after.

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