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In many industrial and medtech organisations, pricing is treated as a specialist discipline: complex models in Excel, tools managed by a small central team, and approval workflows that most commercial colleagues experience as friction rather than support.

The recurring problem is not a lack of pricing know-how. It is a lack of alignment. Strategies fail before they start because finance, sales, product, marketing, IT and the C-suite all look at pricing through different lenses and pursue conflicting incentives. The result is familiar: sophisticated pricing projects that never become part of how the business actually operates.

At Manufacturing Pricing Excellence 2026 – Power of 50, Youssef Mamour, senior leader at Getinge, revealed how the company confronted this head-on by reframing pricing as a cultural project, and by treating value as the common language across the organisation. The experience offers a clear, practical blueprint for B2B leaders trying to move from pricing mechanics to a company-wide value mindset.

From Pricing Strategy to Organisational Alignment

What if the pricing strategy fails before it is implemented, purely because the organisation is not aligned?

Several misalignments commonly appear:

• A C-level focused only on topline growth, with little appetite to defend price and margin.
• Product and engineering teams designing around technology and features rather than customer value drivers.
• Marketing unable to articulate value in a way that customers can understand and sales can use.
• Sales teams excluded from price setting, left to defend prices they do not believe in or understand.
• Finance enforcing discipline on numbers it has never helped shape.
• IT not involved early, making scalable pricing processes difficult to implement.

When these disconnects exist, no tool or model will fix the problem. Any pricing initiative remains isolated, clever in theory, fragile in practice.

The Three Ingredients: Simplify, Involve, Empower

Treating pricing as change management rather than a technical upgrade led to a simple “chemistry” formula built on three ingredients: simplify, involve, and empower.

1. Simplify: creating clarity, not jargon

Industrial firms are prone to internal language that alienates commercial teams: list price, transfer price, elasticity, variance analysis. Pricing specialists are comfortable with this vocabulary; most sales and product colleagues are not.

A key step is to strip the jargon back and anchor conversations in value and customer outcomes. Instead of leading with price mechanics, pricing conversations can be reframed around questions such as:

• What value does this product create for each customer persona?
• How does that value translate into measurable financial impact?
• How do we explain this impact clearly to customers?

Simplicity here is not dumbing down. It is making the concepts accessible so that people want to engage. This moves alignment from mechanical to emotional, which is essential for behavioural change.

2. Involve: moving from consultation to co-creation

Simplicity alone is not enough, because people often understand something without acting on it. The second ingredient is genuine involvement.

That means bringing sales, finance, marketing and product into the core pricing work, particularly value definition and price setting, rather than asking them for input at the end. When value drivers and price points are co-created, acceptance is higher.

Project success equals the quality of the solution multiplied by acceptance. If acceptance is zero, the outcome is zero, regardless of how good the model is.

3. Empower: turning alignment into action

If teams are involved but not empowered, pricing remains centralised and fragile. The third ingredient is to grant real decision rights and ownership once the logic is shared and understood.

For regional leaders and sales teams, that means:

• Being part of the value and price setting process in advance.
• Receiving clear guardrails and rationale instead of one-way directives.
• Having authority to act within agreed corridors, without constant escalation.

When people are both involved and empowered, commitment follows. They are no longer obliged to execute a price; they are defending a decision they helped shape and believe is fair for both customer and company.

Combining these three elements creates true alignment: functions understand the why and the how, share the same value logic, and act coherently in the market.

Making Pricing Personal for Each Function

Pricing does not mean the same thing to all stakeholders. Trying to sell one generic pricing story across the business rarely works. It is more effective to make pricing personal and tailored to each group’s objectives.

For sales, pricing is about winning and defending deals. The narrative therefore focused on selling more at the value the company creates, providing concrete selling arguments, differentiators and competitor comparisons, and explaining why the product deserves a higher price in customer terms, not internal ones.

For product management and business areas, the focus is on designing around value rather than features by identifying which features have high perceived value for specific customer personas, running value-based pricing work early in the product lifecycle, and using quantified value to shape business cases and prioritise the roadmap.

For finance, pricing becomes a way to ensure disciplined, profitable growth by translating selling prices into target margins and corridor ranges, and allowing finance to quickly see whether pricing decisions in the field are within agreed profit expectations.

For marketing, the link is between market sensing and value communication, by detecting competitor moves or new offers that require value re-assessment., and turning internal value logic into clear messages that resonate with different customer stakeholders.

Quantifying Value Together – Not in Isolation

A decisive shift is to turn value thinking from a qualitative exercise into a quantified, cross-functional process.

Rather than pricing working alone on perceived value and then presenting numbers to the business, cross-functional teams at Getinge jointly quantify value drivers for each customer persona within a segment. For example:

• Identifying a biomedical engineer persona for a specific medtech solution.
• Determining that the product improves equipment uptime by 1–2%.
• Translating that into financial impact – for instance, €10,000 in annual savings per installed base.

These calculations are carried out with sales, finance and marketing in the room. That joint work has several effects:

• The numbers are more realistic because they combine market insight, financial rigour, and product knowledge.
• Stakeholders share ownership of the assumptions and outcomes.
• Later objections are reduced, because everyone knows the answer.

This value quantification is repeated for each relevant persona across segments and products, gradually building a consistent value library that underpins price setting, sales enablement and product design.

Embedding Value Early: From Product Design to Launch

Many companies only address value and pricing late in the product development process, when specifications and costs are fixed. That limits options and encourages cost-plus thinking.

Instead, value work at Getinge was moved to the earliest stages of product design:

• Before finalising specs, cross-functional teams assessed which customer problems were worth solving, and at what potential price points.
• Value-based pricing exercises helped define price ceilings in different markets in advance.
• Business cases were built around jointly agreed value logic rather than estimated volumes alone.

No new product was allowed to reach the market without a value-based pricing exercise embedded in formal procedures. Six to twelve months before launch, finance, marketing, sales and pricing sat together to define:

• Target value propositions by persona and segment.
• Quantified value drivers and financial impact.
• Initial price levels and margins by market.

This created a coherent thread from product concept through launch and in-market execution, with all functions aligned on what the product is worth and why.

Champions, Governance and Sustaining the Culture

Cultural change requires local ownership, not just central direction. To avoid pricing remaining a head-office initiative, the organisation intentionally developed “champions” across countries and functions.

These champions were mostly salespeople, not only finance or marketing. Their role was to:

• Advocate value-based pricing thinking in local markets.
• Explain and defend prices to colleagues using the shared value logic.
• Share success stories where value-based arguments won deals or protected margin.

With dozens of ambassadors spread across regions, pricing became a topic that commercial teams talked about among themselves, not just with the central function.

Governance came later, not first. Instead of starting with strict rules and escalation policies, the company first built shared understanding, co-created value frameworks, and proved success. Only then were pricing policies and controls put in place to sustain the new behaviours and protect the value created.

Governance without trust and buy-in simply generates resistance. Governance built on a foundation of shared value thinking provides structure without undermining ownership.

Conclusion

Treating pricing as a narrow technical discipline underestimates its potential and its complexity. When approached as a cultural organiser, pricing can become the point where product design, sales, marketing, finance and leadership converge around a shared definition of value.

Three principles stand out for B2B leaders:

• Simplicity is a strategic choice. Clear language around value and outcomes is a prerequisite for alignment.
• Involvement and empowerment are non-negotiable. Pricing done to the organisation will not last; pricing done with the organisation can reshape behaviour.
• Value must be quantified and owned jointly. Numbers created in isolation invite challenge; numbers built collaboratively create commitment.

For industrial and medtech manufacturers wrestling with complex portfolios, global markets, and margin pressure, the path forward is less about adding more tools and more about building this kind of value-based culture, one stakeholder, one product, and one pricing decision at a time.