With increased scrutiny over deal margins and efficiency, you need a cross-functional owner – armed with the right systems – to hit your revenue goals.
As companies scale, the closing process becomes a complex balancing act. Reps need input from teams like legal, finance, product, and leadership to get high-value deals across the finish line. But without a clear process, this internal tango is plagued with delays, poor communication, and fumbled opportunities. You need a cross-functional owner to coordinate these people and tasks, or else your revenue pipeline will crack.
Enter: deal desk, the answer to this puzzle for large and complex B2B sales. According to data from SalesOps.io, roughly 70% of mature SaaS companies now have a deal desk.
This function works across internal teams to structure and review deals, manage non-standard requests (e.g. discounts, terms), and proactively spot and mitigate risks in the sales cycle. As an “organizational hub” for deal management, it’s the single source of truth for pricing, contracts, approvals, and much more.
The value of deal desk has grown exponentially in today’s hybrid sales landscape. With teams hopping in across time zones, countless rounds of contract negotiations, and multiple do-or-die decisions from leadership and the buyer, deal desk manages the most vulnerable point of any large opportunity.
Investors’ renewed focus on sales efficiency has further elevated the role of deal desk. Revenue leaders are looking for ways to lower cost of sale, consolidate tooling, and curb discounts — all things that deal desk knows well. The function also continues to absorb new responsibilities, with commissions for high-velocity sales, renewals, and expansions being just a few examples.
Scaling your deal desk team doesn’t have to mean adding headcount. Public hiring data from FoundHQ shows that tech companies with strong GTM systems support 3x as many sellers with the same number of deal desk reps, a roughly 7-figure savings in overhead.
With so much at stake in the deal closing process, you can’t afford to manage requests and approvals through ad-hoc workflows over email or chat. Neither can you rely on a generic spreadsheet to enforce your policies or standard pricing; the lack of automation and integrations only creates more manual work and blind spots for your team.
It only takes a few bad habits in your deal process to snowball into bigger business risks:
None of these pitfalls are inevitable. But to avoid them, rather than being an afterthought, deal desk must become an early and frequent partner in your sales process.
Deal desk success begins with defining your team policies and processes, but just as important are the tools and systems you use to operationalize that framework. You want to make it as easy as possible for stakeholders to jump in and take action, while retaining a full audit trail for every request or approval, across product lines and regions.
Below are five key challenges any deal desk must navigate, and the estimated revenue lift of an effective solution, based on PwC's experience developing hundreds of teams.
With the right systems and processes, deal desk can be a game-changer. More and more companies are building this function to drive sales velocity and predictability, while minimizing business risk. But scaling up can also come with growing pains. Learn about the tradeoffs of CRM tooling in our build vs. buy article, and check out this case study to learn how Cloud 100 companies are launching global deal desks in under two weeks.
