Volume Vantage

 One of the real advantages of building and truly understanding a revenue bridge is that it gives you more than a way to report price‑level changes. It lets you dig into individual transactions, categorize them, and compare them using the same metrics that show up in most P&Ls.

Take margin, for example. Margin gets referenced constantly. A products margin. The margin of a deal. Margin at the close of a quarter or fiscal year. But margin becomes far more interesting when we use it to view different sections of the revenue bridge.

We can break down a single sales rep’s revenue bridge by filtering all their data, then looking at the margins they achieve on specific products, on recurring business, on non‑recurring business, and on new business. That view tells us a lot.

If customers stop purchasing from us, we can look at the margin profile and ask:
Are we losing high‑value, high‑margin customers?
Or are we losing customers who weren’t particularly profitable partners to begin with?

On the flip side, when we look at new‑business margin, we can see whether we’re generating growth by discounting heavily or whether we’re winning new business at margins higher than our current base. That distinction matters. It helps us understand the quality of our sales reps’ deals and the quality of the customers we’re bringing in.

This is how we start to understand the business as a whole — not just price as a siloed, finite lever.

Sometimes we struggle to differentiate what’s “good” from what’s “bad,” and one of my favorite examples of this comes from Moneyball. The whole premise is that the Oakland A’s were trying to build a winning baseball team with limited resources. Other teams were trying to buy good players. But as the book explains, the real goal for the A’s isn’t to buy players — it’s to buy wins.

I think pricing has a similar dynamic. We often struggle to differentiate what’s “good” from what’s “bad”. Which tends to make us lean and focus on revenue, and in a way, we try to “buy” revenue by changing our price. But if we step back and say, “Profit comes from value—both the value we deliver to customers and the value we cultivate within the business,” everything shifts.

We start paying sales reps for the value they create, not just the revenue they bring in. We understand the value of an open role and start looking for individuals that meet that value.
We start building strategic partnerships with customers who bring real value to the company, instead of signing whatever deal happens to show up.

This is how we move from chasing revenue to building a healthier, more profitable business — one grounded in insight, not instinct.