Deal Desk Function in Transactional vs. Complex Sales (Part I)

What is Deal Desk?

Deal desk streamlines sales deals coordination, approves deals, helps create quotes for sales reps, and takes out the guessing & stress in the final stages of the sales process. It’s the organizational hub connecting sales, finance, legal, customer success, and product marketing amongst other stakeholders. The function also establishes business rules leveraging historical customer & deal characteristics and then defines workflows based on those business rules. We published a post summarizing what deal desk is, and furthermore why it matters. You can read that here. 

The purpose of this post is to help you identify your company’s needs regarding deal desk as a function. In part 1 we’re going to identify the current landscape to identify areas of inefficiency. 

We’re going to look at sales models in two ways:

1. Transactional Sales Model
2. Complex Sales Model

In part 2 we’ll address deal desk best practices for transactional deals, and in part 3 we’ll do the same for complex deals.

Transactional Sales Model 

Type: Transactional deals--typically on the SMB side.

Scope: 

• Higher volume 
• Lower dollar
• Lower risk
• Fewer stakeholders/decision makers
• Shorter sales cycle
• No touch/low touch
• Typically driven by marketing/sales
• Can close at trade shows
• No contracts are common

Current landscape: You’re moving really fast, so you tend to “fix” things later. There is typically a lack of structure and it looks like the wild, wild west. You’re moving at such a high speed, and while this is great, it opens up the possibility of mistakes--often in the form of human error. You have, or are considering having people come in and clean it up. Much of your process is still manual.

You also probably missed capturing key data, so you don’t have the right information for meaningful reporting, or business insights (e.g. how much revenue have you lost due to over-discounting?). You’re not documenting conversations that happened in emails, IMs, in person, etc. to the matching opportunity in your CRM. You don’t really have an easy or accurate way to audit (hellooo Soc2 and friends). If there are exceptions or “creative” deals, reps are hunting down stakeholders. And the list could go on…

To recap: It should still be about moving fast. You don’t want software that over-complicates or over-systematizes. But, you also need to add business rules, processes, and some structure to ensure your business is growing quickly and healthy--plus optimize for future growth.

See how Streemly can solve your pain for transactional deals.

Complex Sales Model 

Type: Complex deals--typically on the enterprise side.

Scope: 

• Higher dollar
• Lower volume
• Higher risk
• Many stakeholders
• Longer sales cycle
• More complex deal structure and terms

Current landscape: Enterprise sales is a marathon. From the top of the funnel, where awareness is created, to implementation, your org spends countless hours, resources, and money in the quest for customer acquisition. That’s why the last mile or final stages of the sales process is critical--especially in enterprise. Poorly created process (or lack of process), slow approvals, unknown thresholds, and other bottlenecks are lengthening your sales cycle.

You also see deals fall through the cracks, or simply not pass the finish line & get pushed to the next month. You’re losing productivity because you have reps chasing approvals instead of working deals. Between emails, IMs, texts, and in person conversations, information is scattered. Your current processes aren’t very trackable, reportable, or auditable. Which comes with a side effect of an inability to make informed decisions because the right data isn’t collected. Dare I go on?

To recap: New contract creation is tedious, there are severe delays in the approval process, there is an inability to measure processes. Documents, information, and data live in different systems of record, and get passed through different stakeholders using different communication channels (e.g. emails get lost, chat messages get buried, conversations are forgotten).

See how Streemly can solve your pain for complex deals.

Although we’ve made a lot of generalizations in this post, this summary represents hundreds of interviews we’ve done with sales reps, deal desk, sales ops, and VPs of Sales. Does it resonate with your org? We’d love to hear from you whether you run a complex or transactional sales process. What are we missing? What would you add? Let us know and stay tuned for part 2.