By: Natalie Johnson
Pricing is a powerful expression of commercial strategy. It has become a powerful tool for shaping a company’s long‑term future. At the same time, businesses are dealing with more data, more technology, and more complicated customer expectations. This means they need better systems, more transparent decision-making, and closer collaboration across teams so their pricing decisions actually support the company’s direction.
“The first step is to define what long‑term success actually looks like,” says Daniela Leon Cornejo, Founder and CEO of the global pricing consultancy Value of Insights. She stresses that leaders must look beyond financial outcomes to include customer experience, positioning, and relationship depth as essential markers of long‑term health. When teams share this broader definition, strategy shifts from isolated efforts to a coordinated, organization-wide direction.
For Leon, long‑term commercial success hinges on aligning pricing, governance, and daily decision‑making around a clear strategic intent. This principle has shaped her trajectory across banking, airlines, and hospitality, and now drives her advisory work with financial institutions and early-stage companies across Latin America. But even strong strategies falter when governance is fragmented. “Governance is where strategy becomes real,” she says. When organizations clarify who decides, which data matters, and how tradeoffs are judged, pricing becomes a focused and scalable lever for progress.
Translating Strategic Intent into Daily Actions
Once the strategic direction is clear, the challenge becomes ensuring that daily decisions reinforce it. Leon points to the need for precision around intent. Is the company pursuing higher retention, profitability, or market share? “Pricing must align with that intent,” she says. Cross‑functional governance plays a central role. Leon, who has built pricing frameworks for banks, airlines, and early-stage companies, stresses the value of having a committee that brings sales, finance, product, treasury, and marketing together. Such a forum allows teams to codify decision rights and align on shared metrics.
“You don’t create alignment by enforcing rules,” she says. “You create it by designing shared logic, shared incentives, shared wins.” She believes leaders must understand what motivates each team, how they are measured, and what language they speak. Only when people feel the strategy aligns with their goals will they fully commit to it. The same initiative can generate different wins for different teams.
Bringing Humanity into Data‑Driven Strategy
Effective pricing requires combining data with human insight, because numbers alone cannot explain customer reactions or build trust. Testing both price points and the story behind them ensures strategies resonate emotionally and perform well in practice. “Data tells you what, but people tell you why,” she says. A good strategy integrates analytical rigor with an understanding of human reactions.
In regions like Latin America, where commercial dynamics are often relational and negotiations are common, misreading human signals leads to misaligned pricing. Leon emphasizes testing as a bridge between insights and intuition. Organizations must test not only price points but also price stories. “How we explain and position a price often matters more than the number itself,” she says. These tests should capture both numerical outcomes and emotional responses, allowing leaders to refine strategies that will scale across customer segments. A price optimized solely in spreadsheets will fail if customers do not believe in the value it represents.
The Role of AI in Strengthening Strategic Alignment
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way companies design and execute strategy, and for Leon, its value lies in creating stronger coherence. AI improves real‑time decision‑making, personalized pricing, and behavioral segmentation while embedding strategic principles into everyday actions, closing the gap between intention and execution. In one project, her team built alert systems that served as an early‑warning compass, signaling when daily operations drifted from strategic goals. Instead of waiting for monthly reports, leaders could see deviations in real time, understand what good performance should look like, and correct course before minor issues became structural problems. It turned strategy from something discussed in meetings into something lived every day. Even as technology improves forecasting, experimentation, and resource allocation, human judgment remains essential for designing strategies that honor trust and brand equity. “AI gives you speed, but values, governance, and clarity give you direction,” she says.
The Hidden Skill That Makes Alignment Possible
Looking back on transformational projects she has led, Leon sees one capability as the true differentiator in long‑term alignment: cross‑functional empathy. She calls it developing teams that can be “like chameleons,” able to adapt their language, understand incentives, and view decisions from multiple stakeholder perspectives. This skill set turns fragmented groups into unified teams. It accelerates change management and strengthens commitment to shared outcomes. “The big difference between a project that was successful and one that was not comes down to whether you had this type of team player,” she says. In her view, cultivating these adaptable, empathetic leaders is one of the most valuable long‑term investments an organization can make.
To learn more about Daniela Leon Cornejo’s work and insights, connect with her on LinkedIn or visit her website.
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