If your input costs can move 8–15% on a policy announcement, an annual pricing review is malpractice dressed up as discipline. We've spent most of Q1 helping clients move from yearly to quarterly pricing, and the surprise is how little operational change it actually takes once the cadence is in place.
The 90-day loop
The playbook is four steps, repeated each quarter:
Day 1–15 — Re-segment by exposure, not by revenue
Most pricing books segment customers by ARR or by industry. For tariff-exposed businesses, the segmentation that matters is: how much of this customer's price is composed of inputs we don't control?
Three buckets:
- <10% exposed — price moves with overall inflation; don't touch
- 10–35% exposed — price moves quarterly, in published bands
- >35% exposed — price is contractually pegged or surcharged
You will almost certainly find that your biggest customers are in the wrong bucket.
Day 15–45 — Rewrite the contract clauses, not the prices
The mistake teams make here is going straight to "raise prices." The leverage is upstream: the contract language that permits price moves without renegotiation.
Three clauses to add or sharpen:
- A published index tied to a public number (HRC steel, Brent, a named freight index)
- A trigger threshold — e.g., "moves of more than 6% in the index trigger a price review within 30 days"
- A cap and floor — so the clause survives customer scrutiny
A clause your customer trusts is worth more than a price increase you have to fight for.
Day 45–75 — Run the playbook on one segment
Pick the segment where you have the cleanest contract language, the most exposure, and the strongest relationships. Run the full price move there. Document what broke.
Day 75–90 — Decide whether to propagate, hold, or retreat
Most teams skip this step and just propagate. Don't. The decision is whether the move paid for itself net of churn risk — and that number is rarely the one in the deck.
Why the cadence works
The cadence works because it converts pricing from an annual political event into a quarterly operational one. Each quarter, the question isn't "do we dare?" It's "what does the index say?"
That shift — from courage to process — is the entire game.
