Benchmarks and Recommended Size for the Pricing Function

How large should a company’s pricing team be? How should executives and consultants even benchmark the size of a pricing team across industries?

CEO and other C-Suite executives are investing more in the pricing function today than they have in the past, as noted in research by Stephan Liouzu (See research here). Francesca Venditti reports a 38”% YOY increase in hiring for pricing. A key question for investing in the pricing function is: What is the target? How large of a pricing function should my company have?

Executives need benchmarks to set targets. On Friday, 1 August 2025, I published a poll on LinkedIn to ask professionals the metric they would use to benchmark the pricing function and the recommended benchmarks they would have. The results are in.

Pricing Professionals by Revenue

With 44 professionals polled, an overwhelming 68% of professionals benchmark the pricing team size by revenue under management.

Ozlem Elgun defended the revenue metric by stating that revenue “directly reflects the scale and impact of our pricing decisions. The larger the revenue base, the greater the profit potential you can unlock with a strong pricing team and good pricing strategy.”

Revenue benchmarks of 1 pricing professional per $100 million to $500 million in revenue were well accepted. This would imply a $4 billion enterprise should employ somewhere between 5 and 40

pricing professionals. The variation in a best-practice benchmark was attributed to differences in complexity.

Some companies exceed this benchmark. Notably, the hospitality industry is known to operate with thousands of pricing professionals, usually with the title of “Revenue Manager”. A single large hotel may employ multiple revenue managers.

Srinivasa Murthy Vanapali has benchmarked the current pricing team sizes for companies operating in business-to-business distribution with a multifactor regression on revenue and the log of revenue. His equation speaks to what is observed, not what is recommended as best practice. Applying his equation results in a pricing function somewhat below that recommended by the poll.

Vanapali‘s equation for predicting the current size of the pricing function was “Pricing Team Size = 0.5 + 0.6 × ln(Revenue in Millions) + 0.3 × max(0, Revenue in Billions − 5). Apply a 0.7× multiplier for highly automated orgs; 1.3× multiplier if serving super-fragmented customer bases.”

Pricing Professionals by Employee Headcount

9% of respondents suggested benchmarking the pricing team size by the number of employees at the company.

Julian Andres Sacristan Forero defended the employee metric by stating, “Working in pricing is more about influencing people than managing SKUs or revenues.” This speaks well to the purpose of the pricing function in driving value-based pricing decisions and discipline throughout the organization, from sales and marketing to finance and operations, touching most every function in between.

George Boretos has benchmarked the current pricing team sizes for companies operating using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. His research reports that a little over 100,000 people do pricing professionally. When looking at individual industries, he identified a ratio of 1 pricing professional per 2000 employees as the overall average. The ranges varied by 1/5,000 to 1 / 1,000. His research similarly speaks to what is observed, not what is recommended as best practice. Applying his research results in a pricing function somewhat below that recommended. (See full research here.)

Pricing Professionals by SKUs

11% of respondents suggested benchmarking the pricing team size by the number of shop keeping units (SKUs) under management.

We have heard that some consulting firms benchmark the pricing function by the number of SKUs under management. Those consulting firms typically serve companies with a large aftermarket parts business. While I am unsure of the specific benchmark they use, I suspect it is in the range of 1 per 80,000 SKUs to 1 per 400,000 SKUs.

Stefan Kontschinsky noted the challenge of benchmarking the pricing function by SKUs. He said, “Number of SKUs is an interesting one, but doesn’t that mostly apply to some industries (eg, CPG, Retail, Automotive, etc) while in others (eg, SaaS, Finance, Energy) even the biggest companies

have nowhere near 400k SKUs.” SKU counts vary widely between companies and industries, with some large companies having only a handful of SKUs while others have millions.

Author’s Favorite

My favorite benchmark is pricing professionals per revenue dollars in the range of 1/$100 to 1/$500 million. I have been using this ratio for the past three years in writing my Pricing Spineometer case studies.