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Margins and pricing accountability in B2B
We asked thirteen B2B companies three plain questions. Who answers “is this customer profitable?”. Is there a floor under your price. How does a discount actually get approved. Here is every answer we got.
0 / 13
have a margin floor that actually binds
7 / 13
cannot clearly say who owns the profitability question
8 / 13
approve off-standard prices with no system support at all
What the thirteen answered
Single choice unless noted. The bar length is the count, nothing else, and the count is printed next to every label.
Is there a floor — a minimum margin or a discount limit?
13 responses · single choice
Not one company has a floor that holds. Where a floor exists, an individual approval can go under it.
Who answers “Is this customer profitable?”
13 responses · single choice
This measures who answers the question — not who holds the budget or who buys software.
How is a price outside standard terms approved?
13 responses · single choice
Eight of thirteen approve by email, by phone, or not at all.
What is a quote calculated in?
13 responses · multi-select · 18 mentions
A pricing tool is the only source in a single company, and that one is home-built. One company calculates in Excel but approves in an in-house tool.
How visible is margin?
13 responses · single choice
More than half see margin continuously. That turns out to change nothing about whether the floor holds.
What the open answers were about
12 of 13 wrote something · grouped by theme
Mostly organisational, not technical. Free text is summarised by theme and quoted without attribution.
Ownership against the floor
The two questions crossed. With thirteen responses the cells are small, so read them as counts and not as rates.
| Who answers the profitability question | What their floor looks like |
|---|---|
| Controlling / FP&A (5) | 5 × “yes, but bypassable” — without exception |
| Shared (4) | 2 × guideline · 1 × bypassable · 1 × none |
| Not systematically answered (3) | 2 × none · 1 × don’t know |
| CFO / commercial director (1) | none |
Where Controlling owns the question, a floor exists in 5 of 5 cases and is bypassable in 5 of 5. That is the only statement these numbers support. There is no general “ownership decides the rule” pattern: the one CFO-owned company has no floor, one of the four “shared” has none either, and “don’t know” means unknown, not “no floor”.
The problem is enforcement, not visibility.
Seven of the thirteen see margin continuously, per customer and per item. Of those seven, none has a binding floor — four can be bypassed, two are guidelines, one has nothing. Four of them approve prices informally or not at all.
Size does not help. All three companies above €500m revenue have a bypassable floor, and two of them approve by email or phone.
The gap in this sample is not that people cannot see the margin. It is that seeing it changes nothing at the moment the price is given away.
Who answered
Revenue
13 responses
Industry
13 responses
Method, and what this does not show
- Field period 4 to 9 September 2026. 13 responses, counted programmatically from the submissions export of 10 September 2026.
- The sample is self-selected, not random. 6 of the 13 are in distribution or manufacturing. Treat it as thirteen conversations that happen to be countable, not as a market measurement.
- The export records only the answers people chose. Nothing can be inferred about options nobody picked, and no such claim appears on this page.
- Free-text answers are grouped by theme and quoted without attribution.
- The four service companies are a different case. Their open answers point at overhead allocation rather than at price lag, so the pattern above is a B2B goods pattern first.
- One thing this survey does not measure: how long a cost change takes to reach a quote. That question was never fielded, so nothing here speaks to it.
Source: submissions export of 10 September 2026, n = 13.
Thirteen answers are a hint. Your own data is the proof.
The Margin Scan runs the same questions against your real transactions instead of a survey, and tells you where your price is actually leaving.