Every large corporate has a VP of Pricing. Your startup has nobody.
In most large companies somebody owns price outright: no sales quota, authority over the deal desk, and the standing to refuse a discount. Indian startups have nobody, so pricing lives in a founder's head, a salesperson's discretion and a quote template that has drifted. You cannot justify the headcount yet, but the function costs a fortnight to install.
Summary
- The role exists to hold a tension good intentions cannot resolve: the person with the fastest lever to close a slipping deal is the person whose number depends on it closing.
- Ask three salespeople separately what the lowest price they may offer is. Three answers means you have a suggestion, not a price list.
- You should not hire a VP of Pricing. You should install the function: a cost hierarchy, a margin floor, and a discount authority matrix.
In most large companies, there is a person whose entire job is price.
They have a title like Vice President of Pricing, or Head of Commercial Finance, or Director of . They sit inside the finance function. They do not carry a sales quota. They own the price architecture, they chair the deal desk, and they have the authority to refuse a discount that the sales organisation very badly wants.
Most Indian founders have never heard of this role. Which is strange, because the problem it exists to solve is one they face every single week.
Why the role exists at all
It is not a bureaucratic artifact. It exists because of a tension that cannot be resolved by good intentions.
A sales leader is measured on closing deals. That is correct: it is what you want a sales leader optimising for. But it means that when a deal is slipping, the fastest available lever is price, and the person holding that lever is the person whose number depends on the deal closing.
A finance leader is measured on the quality of what gets closed. Also correct. Also incomplete on its own, because a finance function with no commercial instinct will protect margin straight into a lost quarter.
Those two incentives have to be held in productive tension by somebody whose job is explicitly the second one. When they are not, when pricing sits entirely inside sales, price quietly becomes whatever is required to close. Which is a perfectly rational individual response, and a slow corporate disaster.
I spent fifteen years in corporate finance before starting SRF Capital Studio. For a good part of it I was Head of Global FP&A while also serving as CFO of the Indian operations, and I owned pricing decisions across five separate business divisions.
What that meant in practice was sitting in room after room with sales leaders who had every reason to want a lower number, and a genuinely good commercial argument for it. Sometimes they were right and I moved. Often they were right about the deal and wrong about the price, and I held.
The thing those years taught me is not a framework. It is this:
The discipline is not in the . It is in the number you will not go below, and in somebody owning that number.
What your startup has instead
Nothing. And I mean that literally, not rhetorically.
We work with a large number of Indian startups and MSMEs: we close their books, run their MIS, sit in their monthly reviews. When we ask who owns pricing, the honest answer is almost always some version of: the founder, sort of, when it comes up.
In practice, pricing lives in three places at once:
- In the founder's head. Not written down. Not consistent between Tuesday and Friday. Not transferable to anyone else.
- In a sales representative's discretion. Whatever they judged necessary to close, defended afterwards with a story that is usually plausible and occasionally true.
- In a quote template that has drifted. It was built eighteen months ago, three people have edited it since, and nobody has checked what it says against the price list.
There is no owner. So there is no accountability. So there is no improvement. The price you set in year one is still, in real terms, the price you have in year three, while your costs have risen and your product has got considerably better.
The test
Here is the fastest way to find out where you actually stand. It takes thirty seconds.
Ask three people on your sales team, separately: what is the lowest price you are allowed to offer?
If you get three different answers, you do not have a price list. You have a suggestion.
Then ask the harder question, of yourself: what is our contribution margin floor? The price below which a deal actively destroys value once you have counted every cost of serving that customer: delivery, support, onboarding, the financing cost of a ninety-day receivable.
I have asked a lot of founders that question. Very few can answer it. Almost all of them can tell me their to the week.
That asymmetry is the whole problem. You know precisely what you are spending. You do not know what you must not go below.
Why this compounds
The temptation is to file this under "things we will fix after we have traction." I understand the instinct and I think it is half right.
Getting the price level wrong early is survivable. You can raise it later, grandfather your early customers, and recover.
Getting the price architecture wrong early is a different matter. What you charge per (per seat, per transaction, per outcome) determines whether your revenue can grow inside an account without a renegotiation. Whether your margin holds as your biggest customers get bigger. Whether discounting has a natural stopping point.
Those decisions get made casually, in week one, by a founder who has never been told they are consequential. And they are the expensive ones to reverse, because unwinding them means rebuilding contracts, billing systems and sales compensation all at once.
Meanwhile the damage accrues quietly. Every deal closed with an unapproved discount sets an anchor. Every implementation waived sets an expectation. Every ninety-day payment term accepted without pricing it is a permanent three-and-a-half percent discount that will never show up in any report you read.
None of it is visible. All of it compounds.
You cannot hire the role. You can install the function.
To be clear: I am not suggesting you hire a VP of Pricing. You should not. The role does not justify itself until you are considerably larger, and there are perhaps a handful of people in India who could fill it properly anyway.
But the function is needed from your very first customer, because the absence of it starts costing you from your very first customer.
And the function, stripped down, is remarkably cheap to install. Three artifacts, and you can build all three in a fortnight:
- A [cost hierarchy](/resources/articles/gross-margin-vs-contribution-margin). Every cost classified by how it behaves when volume changes, not by where your accountant files it. This is what produces a real floor rather than a comfortable one.
- A margin floor. One number, per product, per segment. Written down. Carried by everyone who quotes a price.
- A [discount authority matrix](/resources/articles/discount-breakeven-table). Four rows. Who may approve what depth of discount, and what justification is required. The friction is the feature: if a twenty-five percent discount requires a written case, fewer will be requested, and the ones that are will be better.
No headcount. No consultant. No software. Just a decision that pricing is somebody's job rather than nobody's. In our experience, those three artifacts stop more value leakage than a quarter of additional sales hiring creates.
So, the question I would leave you with
You know your burn. You know your , probably to the week. Do you know your floor? If the answer is no, that is not a gap in your reporting. It is a role your company does not have, and every large business you compete with, or aspire to become, filled that role a long time ago.
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