From pricing negotiations to post-sale handoffs, deal desk success depends on strong cross-functional workflows. Point solutions will only suppress your revenue potential.
Closing deals is a game of numbers: pricing, discounts, terms, quotes, the list continues. But underlying all that data are relationships. You need to bring together multiple teams, and orchestrate complex internal approvals, to get revenue in the door – on the best possible terms.
Given its collaboration across departments, deal desks may use a range of tools within its daily workflows, from email and chats to CRM, CPQ, and CLM software. These point solutions all serve a given purpose, but none offer a good “home” platform for deal desk to consolidate its requests and prioritize work, while maintaining a full audit trail of every deal.
These cross-functional workflows are too critical to your revenue goals to rely on ad-hoc processes or spreadsheets, which inevitably lead to blind spots and incomplete forecasts.
As a company scales, the operational burden placed on deal desk is only partly a function of monthly sales volume or product and pricing complexity. Required headcount also depends on the maturity of your GTM systems, processes, and automation. According to recent public hiring data, many revenue teams in B2B and SaaS need only half as many deal desk reps to support 3x the number of sellers. This equates to a 7-figure savings in overhead from streamlined coordination and process automation, rather than blindly allocating more people to the team.
Working alongside sales, legal, and finance, deal desk has to learn to work with a variety of point technologies that each come with narrow benefits but also pitfalls and limitations.
As the “source of truth” for sales teams, CRMs centralize all customer data, contact information, and opportunity tracking. Similarly, deal desk teams rely on CRMs as a central record and space to drive pipeline visibility for leadership. But these platforms come up short when it comes to managing complex or high-volume internal deal support. Built-in ticketing or case features offer some tracking, but the tools are clunky and inefficient. Deal information is dispersed across multiple pages, there isn’t a central place to attach files or integration items, and execution inevitably spills across ad-hoc email and chat threads, where it goes untracked. Examples: Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive
B2B and SaaS pricing strategies continue to grow more complex. Freemium, seat count, and consumption-based are just a few models that many companies are juggling. CPQ tools help deal desk teams automate the creation of proposals for complex deals and product lines, increasing revenue efficiency and accelerating the time to close. As adoption of these tools grows, there remains key gaps around the centralization of intake and communication around each approval, leading many deal desk teams to supplement CPQ with other team workflow solutions. Examples: Salesforce CPQ, Dealhub, Oracle
CLM software is used by legal teams to manage negotiations and signatures, speed up the contracting process with templates, and ensure compliance with obligations to avoid risk. While these tools address only a narrow piece of the sales process, deal desk teams may need to go into CLM software to coordinate internal approvals; other times, they simply need to maintain links between deal support requests – such as non-standard terms or redlined contracts – and any relevant CLM records. Examples: DocuSign, IronClad, ContractPodAI
Smaller deal desk teams often use a dedicated Slack or Teams channel to centralize deal support requests from across internal business units. This approach is tempting as it’s easy to get up and running, and internal teams are already familiar with the interface, but it quickly runs into major problems. A shared channel bombards everyone with unnecessary distractions, there’s no clear ownership around any given deliverable or next step, and there’s a lack of tracking for deal desk teams across requests. As deal support volumes scale, deal desk has to maintain a separate spreadsheet or board just to visualize and prioritize all its tasks, and even this fails to capture everything or reflect the latest live status and bottlenecks. Examples: Slack, Microsoft Teams
Deal desk teams also use business intelligence tools to create dashboards that track pricing trends, on-target performance, or process bottlenecks. These graphs provide critical insights for leadership and help deal desk get a seat at the table. But without centralized team workflows and tracking, these reports are incredibly time-intensive to build, and inevitably come with missing and/or inaccurate data about end-to-end deal execution. Plus, there’s the ongoing maintenance of any reports you build. Examples: Tableau, Power BI
If you’re launching a deal desk process for the first time, you might start with a simple Slack or Teams channel. As multiple request types come into play, maybe your CRM becomes a place to run basic Case tickets or Deal Support Requests. But at some point, these methods will break. You’ll need a more robust platform to coordinate deals across regions and product lines, and drive centrally tracked workflows that surface live bottlenecks.
Many fast-scaling tech companies have learned this lesson the hard way. “Previously, all our deal requests over Slack and email were unstructured data, which means they were unreportable,” notes David Z., Revenue Systems & Strategy Lead at LaunchDarkly, a DevOps pioneer and fast-scaling Cloud 100 leader.
He adds: “As request volumes grow, companies need a platform like Prelay to scale and manage deal resources in a structured & reportable way. The ability to pull Salesforce dashboards based on open deal deliverable bottlenecks solved a lot of visibility issues.”
In tech’s new era of efficient growth, deal desk is a key strategic player sitting at the intersection of pricing, profitability, and the buyer journey. More and more companies are scaling a deal desk function to increase sales velocity and minimize risk, while expanding across new regions and product lines.
Point solutions will never offer a holistic solution. And its narrow use cases come at a high cost to build and maintain. Meanwhile, your competitors may already be using a Team Selling Platform to accelerate deals. See how one Cloud 100 hyper-scaler relaunched its global deal desk in under 2 weeks, to streamline hundreds of stakeholders across thousands of deals.
