A deal desk is a team that is responsible for managing the sales proposal, negotiation, and contract process with customers. This is typically a part of the broader opportunity-to-close process, which involves aligning the pricing, revenue structure, and risk with the organization’s overall sales strategy. The main goal of a deal desk is to ensure that the organization is able to secure profitable deals that align with its business objectives.

Needs Analysis
A deal desk may issue tools for customer needs analysis such as a checklist or process.

Buyer’s Journey
Buyer’s journey is the practice of designing the sales process from the perspective of the customer. The deal desk may design this process to support sales teams. For example, they may provide a set of sales collaterals that guide the needs analysis and proposal process.

Pricing
Developing prices based on your strategy, competitive advantages and competition.

Revenue Structure
Modeling the structure of prices with components such as one time charges, recurring fees and usage based charges.

Competitive Intelligence
Developing an understanding of your customer’s choices including the prices of competitors and strengths & weaknesses of their products. Competitive intelligence may also consider other alternatives the customer has such as substitute goods.

Sales Offers
Developing product configurations, prices and revenue structures that can be offered to customers as a standard deal without any approvals process.

Complex Deals
Developing unique product configurations, specifications for custom work, prices and revenue structures for a customer working with sales teams. This is often done for large deals or deals with a lead user that has unique use cases that show potential for being scaled out to new customers in future.

Proposals
Supporting the sales team to develop proposals and pre-approve prices and negotiating limits.

Contract Management
Negotiating contract terms working with your legal team and the customer.

Risk Management
Identifying and measuring the risk associated with a proposal or contract.

Approvals
An approvals process for non-standard deals including low margin and high risk deals. It may also be necessary to approve unique product configurations and contract terms.

Deal Measurement
Calculating key metrics for a deal such as margins and risks.

Reporting
Reporting related to the opportunity-to-close process such as revenue, revenue forecasts and average deal margins.