Guest Blog: From Afterthought to Advantage: Rethinking Rebates in Pricing

Guest Author: Kevin Betts

For many pricing professionals, rebates occupy an uncomfortable space - powerful in theory, yet often avoided in practice. Despite their potential to drive strategic outcomes, they’ve too often been associated with friction between pricing and commercial teams. Rather than working hand in hand, rebates and pricing have historically competed for influence, leading to misalignment, confusion, and missed opportunities. This legacy has left behind scepticism: memories of programs that undermined pricing intent or gave away too much value for little return.

We see this pattern across industries - from manufacturing to distribution to retail. The result is a perception problem: even when leaders recognise that rebates can influence behaviour and strengthen relationships, they struggle to win over colleagues who see them as risky or unnecessary. These perceptions, shaped by past missteps, become powerful obstacles. They stop teams from exploring what rebates could achieve when strategically designed to complement, not compete with, pricing. In many organisations, the conversation around rebates never makes it beyond finance or sales operations. Yet, when viewed through a pricing lens, rebates reveal themselves as a critical lever for steering market behaviour and aligning value exchange between trading partners.

It’s understandable why some remain wary. Many have seen rebate programs that blurred the line between pricing and promotion, or that encouraged the wrong behaviours - rewarding volume over value or granting discounts that outlasted their purpose. Others have encountered schemes so complex that their intent was lost, leaving commercial teams unsure how to communicate or execute them. When rebate design lacks intent and alignment, the consequences are real: margin erosion, confusion, and frustration. But those experiences, while valid, shouldn’t define the future.

When structured thoughtfully, rebates become one of the most versatile tools available to pricing professionals. They can incentivise an extraordinary range of behaviours - far beyond a traditional focus on just volume. In doing so, they transform pricing from a static number on a page into a dynamic system that shapes performance and partnership. When done right, rebates become the connective tissue between price, performance, and profit - turning transactional relationships into purposeful, outcome-driven ones.

To achieve this shift, pricing leaders must champion a new narrative: rebates are not a cost to be minimised, but an investment to be optimised. When aligned with pricing objectives, they reinforce commercial strategy rather than dilute it.

They allow businesses to share success in measurable, targeted ways - driving profitable outcomes and stronger customer relationships. This mindset change requires communication, clarity, and confidence from pricing teams, conveying that when deployed strategically, rebates amplify rather than undermine pricing intent.

Scepticism will always exist, and that’s healthy. It keeps us focused on outcomes. But our task as pricing professionals is to replace discomfort with understanding, and resistance with intent. Rebates done well are not an afterthought, they are a competitive advantage.

At #profitABLE25: Barcelona, I’ll explore how pricing leaders can reframe rebates as a strategic complement to pricing - addressing perceptions head-on and unlocking their full potential as instruments of pricing excellence.

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About the Author

Kevin Betts is the Senior Manager in the Advisory Team at Enable. He is a specialist in rebate management and strategy, including rebates as a key component of pricing strategy. Possessing extensive experience as a practitioner, now utilising this experience in a professional services advisory role at Enable.