How closely does your deal desk partner with your finance team?
Your answer will reveal a lot about how strategic your business is and the efficiency of your quote-to-revenue process.
Within deal desk, you likely have cross-functional partnerships throughout the org — with stakeholders across Sales, Finance, GTM, Customer Success, Legal, Contracts, Product, and even IT. Working within this web, your job is to stay laser focused on ensuring that the sales process runs efficiently and that deals are a win-win for both customers and the business.
But to best support the quote-to-revenue process — and have the greatest business impact — you need to align with Finance.
Here we explore the deal desk function, how it’s evolving, and what you can do within deal desk to uplevel your career alongside your business.
The Evolution of Deal Desk — Finance Alignment
As a functional team, a process, and a system, the deal desk has always been responsible for structuring deals — from initiation to finalizing.
In some organizations, deal desk sits within Sales, in others, it reports into Finance. Where deal desk “officially” sits isn’t incredibly important. What is important is making sure the deal desk role doesn't get pigeonholed on the Sales side into just an operational function. Instead, if deal desk can align more closely with Finance, it will be able to play a more integral and strategic role within your organization.
A brief scroll through Deal Desk Analyst job postings across LinkedIn highlights how deal desk functions differently when the emphasis is more on Sales alignment than Finance.
Regardless of where deal desk sits, at a high level, there’s an overlap of job responsibilities: the deal desk is responsible for ensuring that deals support both strategic goals and customer needs, that deals are processed accurately and quickly, and that deals are in compliance with all company policies and procedures.
But there are significant differences of focus and responsibilities when the role sits within Finance vs. Sales.
For companies where deal desk reports into Sales, the emphasis is more on efficiencies and administration with responsibilities like managing high volume deals, ensuring that deals are SOX compliant, reviewing contract details, verifying orders, analyzing customer onboarding requirements, and adhering to rev rec principles.
For companies where deal desk reports into Finance, responsibilities include making deal closure and deal structure recommendations that support finance, pricing, financial modeling, financial analysis for gross margin, and more.
Whether the deal desk officially sits within the Finance team or not, aligning with Finance gives deal desk operators the opportunity to uplevel their role to be more strategic.
Deal Desk as Strategic Finance Partner
There are a few use cases where deal desk alignment with Finance is especially impactful:
- New products. New products = new pricing and packaging. Deal desk should be involved to sort out how pricing will work for new products vs. current offerings and how different prices may be packaged together.
- New pricing and packaging. Whenever new pricing and packaging is launched, deal desk plays a key role and can help identify what changes need to be made to the GTM motion and whether there needs to be a new or separate sales process for the new pricing and packaging.
- Mergers and acquisitions. When a company acquires another company, the goal is to see the ROI as quickly as possible. That has a lot to do with GTM, but also with pricing. The question is "How can we simplify the sales motion to make it easy for sales reps to realize the value of the M&A?" Deal desk plays a key role in making that happen faster so you’re not waiting five years to show investors and the board the value of the investment.
- Going upmarket. When you’re thinking about sales using channels and partners, this is a GTM motion — but you need Finance to be heavily involved. For channels, you need to give out commission when partners sell for you. So that means you need to do enough business so that whatever cut you’re giving to your partners, it still makes it an economical deal for your business. There’s no point in doing a partner-related deal where you’re passing along money earned as a cut. That’s why you need deal desk to collaborate with Finance to own new channels, resellers, and marketplaces to maximize the financial benefits of these partnerships.
- Global expansion. If you’re expanding from one continent or geographic location to additional international locations, pricing and packaging is key. For example, how you sell in the U.S. vs Australia may be totally different with a localized edition. Deal desk can own this for a growing company.
From Simple to Complex Deals — Using Tech to Uplevel the Deal Desk Role
For smaller companies with smaller deals, you can use CPQ software. With the right CPQ platform, the system will create a code for you — you don’t need deal desk for this simple functionality.
With bigger companies up to enterprise, deals become much more complex. In these situations, deal desk can use software to automate simpler, more common deals to free up time and energy to focus on custom deals.
Case in point: I was recently on a call with a deal desk team supporting a sales rep who’d asked how to construct a deal. In this case, it wasn’t a question of whether deal desk knew more about the business — it’s just that they had system access to the CPQ, which means they had power. In a situation like this, deal desk isn’t driving the process but rather just using systems to help reps close deals.
Deal desk can best be put to use helping reps close those million-dollar deals. At this level, they should bring in the CFO and weigh out terms from a broader finance perspective. A one-year deal with net 90 vs a two-year deal with net 30 — which is a better deal in terms of cash flow? Deal desk should deep dive into deal economics — not waste time reviewing every single deal.
Deal Desk: From Quoter to Revenue Maximizer
Regardless of where your deal desk functionally sits, the role is evolving. Instead of being a quoting machine, wasting time troubleshooting faulty CPQ systems, deal desk should be focused on strategically maximizing revenue.
Ultimately, as long as the deal desk is helping to make sure deals are a win-win for both customer and business, you’re in good shape! But keep in mind that a company “win” is the financial matrix that takes into account all the different components. For example, maybe you need a specific deal because it offers cash upfront. Or maybe another deal makes sense because it gives you essential marketing rights.
When your deal desk is in lock-step with your finance team, their decisions will result in more strategic deals — and earn the deal desk more recognition and respect for the critical role it plays in supporting the business.
