There are many places where deals can get tricky from a financial perspective. When run strategically, the deal desk keeps every team’s interests coordinated and the CPQ process moving. Here’s how a thoughtful deal desk can set your finance team up for success.
Establishing financial controls
Creating financial controls at the quote or order-entry stage is mandatory to maintaining compliance and avoiding revenue recognition headaches down the line. Building clear guardrails into the CPQ process can help you anticipate what will happen later on in your revenue pipeline.
This looks like:
- Establishing clear rules for discounting.
- Setting up revenue schedules for charges that are billed over time.
- Identifying revenue events that alter your revenue schedule and distribution.
Planning ahead for complexity
Most B2B businesses generate revenue through bespoke contracts as well as upsells. But these introduce complexity in determining SSP allocations and performance obligations, especially if they require canceling and restarting a contract each time a customer makes a change. Establishing steps within the CPQ process to address both the immediate deal terms as well as the long-term engagement empowers your sales team to pursue a wider range of revenue opportunities, and secure more revenue more easily over the lifetime of a contract — because you’ve planned ahead to accommodate future billing complexities.
Quoting with Precision and Control
Many CPQ processes and platforms are built to help sales teams create quotes and get deals done as quickly as possible. While this is efficient for the sales side of the house, it can make things messy for finance if the CPQ process doesn’t reflect what’s possible from a revenue recognition standpoint. The deal desk helps you make sure that sales quotes can actually be sold and billed without a huge amount of manual revenue recognition work.