Worked example: a deal desk approving non-standard deals.
A deal outside the price book takes about ten days to approve. Under six hours of that is work. This is where the rest goes, and what the operation looks like redesigned.
The company is a fictional B2B software business. When a rep wants pricing or terms outside the price book, the deal has to be agreed by the deal desk, finance, legal, security and the VP of Sales before an order form can go to the customer. It happens about 60 times a month.
Nobody in the chain is slow. Each person spends between ten minutes and an hour and a half on a deal. The delay is the deal sitting in five teams’ queues, one after another, and being sent back when something is missing.
Illustrative operation. Every figure is invented for a fictional company. No client data.
The whole operation, today and redesigned.
- Monthly cost of the loop
- £18,822 → £2,232
- Elapsed time per case
- 10.1 d → 8.6 h
- Handoffs where work waits
- 10 → 4
Today: five teams, one after another.
| Step | Wait before it | Work per deal | Cost a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rep writes up the deal | 2 h | 30 min | £2,077 |
| Deal desk checks price and discount | 1 d | 40 min | £2,462 |
| Finance reviews margin and terms | 4 h | 20 min | £1,333 |
| Legal redlines the contract | 3 d | 1 h | £6,800 |
| Security answers the questionnaire | 2 d | 1.5 h | £3,375 |
| VP Sales approves | 1 d | 10 min | £1,200 |
| Rep builds the order form | 4 h | 25 min | £1,125 |
| Send for signature and log | 1 h | 10 min | £450 |
The work comes to under five hours a deal, and under six once the deals that are sent back are counted: the deal desk returns about 35% to the rep, and legal’s redlines send about 25% back to finance. About half the deals come with a security questionnaire.
The waiting comes to about ten days. Legal is the longest single wait, at three days, and the most expensive step, at £6,800 of the £18,822 the loop costs each month.
Redesigned: software and agents prepare, people decide.
| Step | Done by | Wait before it | Work per deal | Cost a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Check the request is complete | An agent | None | 2 min | £14 |
| Pull price book, past deals and approval rules | Software | None | None | £1.80 |
| Draft pricing, terms and approvals needed | An agent | None | 3 min | £54 |
| The right approver decides the exception | A person | 4 h | 20 min | £490 |
| Redline the contract against the playbook | An agent, reviewed by a person | None | 9 min | £837 |
| Answer the security questionnaire | An agent, reviewed by a person | 2 h | 15 min | £608 |
| Build the order form | Software | None | None | £3.00 |
| Rep checks and sends | A person | 1 h | 5 min | £225 |
An agent checks that each request is complete and asks the rep for what is missing, which happens on about 15% of requests. Software pulls the price book, past deals and the approval rules, and an agent drafts the pricing, the terms and the approvals needed. Deals within policy go straight to contract. The 35% or so outside policy go to the one approver the rules name, who decides the exception.
An agent redlines the contract against the playbook, and counsel reviews the non-standard clauses, on about 30% of deals. An agent answers the security questionnaire from past answers and policies, and an engineer reviews the questions with no past answer. Software builds the order form. The rep still checks it and sends it.
Elapsed time falls from about ten days to under nine hours, and the monthly cost of the loop from £18,822 to £2,232. The friction that is real stays in the design: reps still leave things out, exceptions still wait for an approver, and a person still sends.
How the figures are worked out.
People
Minutes of work on a step, times a loaded hourly rate for whoever does it, times the number of deals that reach it, counting those sent back. The rates are £40 for the deal desk, £45 for a rep, £50 for finance, £70 for an approver, £75 for security, £85 for legal and £120 for the VP.
Software and agents
A running cost for each deal a step handles, from 3p for a lookup to £1.50 for a security questionnaire.
Elapsed time
The work plus every wait between steps, counting the deals that are sent back. Waiting costs nothing in this model, so the saving in pounds understates the gain in speed.
What this example leaves out.
It does not include the price of building the system, the value of a deal lost to a ten-day wait, or the time people spend chasing approvals. It is one invented operation, drawn to show the method.
A Blueprint does the same exercise with the client’s own figures in place of invented ones.
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