Why are sales organizations not excited about price increases?

Over the last year most B2B subscription software and data businesses have had one aim in common: carry out inflation-linked price increases on their customer base. For many years this hadn’t been a focus of conversation and organizations had lost the institutional know-how for executing deserved (and often, necessary) year-on-year increases. So, our clients came to us and asked ‘how’.

Most of their questions were around how to decide whom to target, how much to target them with and how to communicate the increases. But one other ‘how’ came up frequently: how do we get our sales team on board with going after the increases? On face value this seems like a fair question. A price increase conversation is a difficult one to have with a customer, especially after years of relatively low year-on-year price increases. But should it be a fair question? Shouldn’t the sales team’s organizational structure & incentives be set up in a way that the team feels equipped & excited…