Deal Desk Approval

Deal Desk Approval

Design who may approve what on non-standard deals - discounts, custom terms, risky structures - and deliver it as a spec: an approval matrix across five concession levers, a prohibited-terms class, exception intake with SLA clocks and escalation, and precedent control. This skill covers deal-desk approvals only: general business-process approvals (expense, procurement, HR, engineering change) are out of scope - say so and stop when asked for them.

Deal-desk thresholds are not standardized: every number in circulation comes from practitioner blogs and consultancies, several from content farms. The skill's core discipline is therefore provenance: label where each threshold comes from, and derive the real ones from the user's own deal data, not from an imported "industry" number.

Ground Rules

• Tag every numeric threshold with its provenance. Never present a vendor heuristic as an industry constant.
• Published practitioner source
• Single vendor blog (illustrative only)
• Derived from the user's own deal data
• Never state these circulating numbers as fact. Each is repeated across content without attribution. Omit them, or name them as circulating and unverified:
• "75% gross-margin floor"
• "1 deal-desk FTE per $40M ARR"
• "35% mid-market / 70% enterprise deal-desk hit rates"
• Stripe-attributed "4.2x churn at 30%+ discount"
• Gartner-attributed "90% of B2B purchases AI-intermediated by 2028"
• "The customer asked for it" is not a justification. The highest-weight intake field is impact of denial - what changes if the exception is refused.
• Treat accounting and legal constraints as design constraints routed to Finance, Legal, Security, or Product. Never give legal or accounting advice.
• State the negative finding plainly where relevant: pricing-discrimination law barely constrains a non-dominant SaaS vendor's differential discounting (see references/accounting-legal-constraints.md). Do not manufacture that compliance risk.
• Be honest where public practitioner guidance is thin. Design these explicitly with the user instead of presenting invented practice as standard:
• Renewal treatment of granted exceptions
• Reseller/MSP pricing governance
• Approver-absence protocol
• Treat every option ordering in this skill and its references as a default, not a law. It shifts with context and with who executes it, so re-rank it against what you already know about the user before recommending anything.
• Concretely:
• A deal desk of one analyst cannot fund a step-up register or a quarterly re-derivation.
• A sales leader with veto over policy raises the political cost of tightening any floor, which promotes floors derived from data they cannot argue with.
• A renewal book already full of grandfathered terms makes sunset a re-negotiation rather than an expiry, and step-up the realistic first move.
• Express effort as analyst review hours, approval-chain latency, the political capital of tightening a policy sales relies on, and reversibility - never as a currency amount. Discount percentages, margin floors, and win-rate arithmetic are the subject matter and stay as they are.

Interview

Ask before designing anything. One question per message; multiple-choice where possible; skip anything already answered.

• GTM motion: sales-led, PLG with sales assist, hybrid, or pure self-serve/B2C?
• Segment mix and ACV bands - what does a small, typical, and large deal look like?
• Who approves discounts today, and through what channel: nobody, manager ping, email chain, quote tool, formal desk?
• What deal data can be queried: discount distribution by segment, win rate by discount band, per-deal margin, approval cycle time?
• Margin structure: near-zero marginal cost (classic software), or usage-scaling COGS (AI/inference, data, infra-heavy)?
• Which non-price concessions show up today: payment terms, free services, legal redlines, custom SLAs, security/privacy addenda, roadmap asks?
• Deal volume per quarter, and roughly what share needs any exception today?
• Where does the pain sit: speed (deals stuck in approval) or leakage (margin erosion, unlogged concessions) - or both?
• Which functions exist to route to: Finance, Legal, Security, Product/Delivery?
• Renewals: who owns them, and do prior discounts silently carry over today?
• Does discounting spike in the final weeks of the quarter?
• Deadline: what date must this spec be live by - before this quarter closes, next quarter, or no fixed date?
• One-off win or compounding asset: fix this quarter's discounting, or set the policy every future renewal and every new rep argues from? Compounding is literal here - a concession granted once is argued from forever.
• Effort ceiling: how many analyst hours per week can the desk fund, who holds veto over tightening policy, and how much political capital can you spend with sales?

Re-rank the reference menus against those last three answers, and say out loud which answer moved which option:

• A hard deadline promotes the fast-acting options - a placeholder auto-approve floor and sunset renewal treatment both land in a day - and demotes anything needing a data pull.
• A compounding mandate promotes the win-rate-derived floor over any placeholder even at the cost of a quarter's delay, because the placeholder becomes the discount level reps expect.
• A low effort ceiling deletes step-up renewal treatment, whose per-account tracking is a standing job, and pushes the exception lane's package assembly onto fewer, larger batches.

Workflow

1. Run the Interview; collect every answer the spec depends on.
2. Confirm the scope boundary: this desk governs non-standard deals. If the request is really pricing strategy (list price, packaging, tiers) or a non-deal approval process, say so and route out.
3. Establish the five governed levers from references/approval-matrix-design.md:

• Price/discount
• Payment terms and billing
• Services and delivery commitments
• Contract risk
• Security/privacy commitments

A matrix that governs only price pushes concessions into the other four levers.

1. Design the matrix from the same reference:

• Dimensions beyond discount %: deal size, segment, motion, term, product line, margin impact.
• 3-4 tiers with an auto-approve floor at the bottom.
• A policy margin floor underneath every tier.
• The prohibited-regardless-of-approver class: MFN/best-price, open-ended price holds, uncapped liability outside carve-outs, unapproved roadmap commitments.

1. Map each exception type to its owning function and escalation trigger using references/exception-taxonomy.md.
2. Design intake, routing lanes, the two SLA clocks, elapsed-SLA escalation, approver-absence delegation, and quarter-end peak mode from references/intake-routing-and-precedent.md. The completeness standard gates the SLA clock: incomplete requests bounce with a structured return, they never queue.
3. Design precedent control from the same reference:

• Exception register, expiry on every granted exception, the pattern-to-policy review, and a renewal treatment per exception class.
• Default to sunset: it recovers the whole concession for near-zero standing effort and stays reversible. Promote step-up only where a price snap-back has already driven churn in that segment.
• Silent grandfathering is not one of the options.
• Public guidance is genuinely thin here: decide it with the user and record it as house policy.

1. Encode accounting and legal constraints as routing rules from references/accounting-legal-constraints.md: which deal structures must reach Finance or Legal before any tier can approve, and why.