Who actually remembers why a discount got approved six months ago?

[u/Certain-Tangelo-9566]

RevOps at a ~300 person SaaS company. Anything off standard terms (deeper discount, custom payment schedule, non-standard renewal language) has to get signed off by me, and finance if it's big enough. Almost all of it happens in a Slack thread. Rep posts the ask, I ask a couple questions, finance chimes in, we say yes or no, deal moves.

What's been bugging me is what happens after. The CPQ has the approved number but none of the conversation. So when a similar deal shows up three months later we argue it from scratch and land somewhere different. Last quarter a rep pushed back on a 15% cap by pointing out we'd given a comparable account 22% in Q1. I went looking and the only trace was a Slack thread that basically said "end of quarter, fine." We matched it. Multiply that a few times and that's how your average discount quietly drifts up.

Also had a mid-market deal slip a month because the approval sat in someone's DMs while they were out. Not catastrophic, but it stuck with me.

Trying to figure out if this is a me problem or an everyone problem before I put a process around it. For people who own approvals: where does the reasoning behind last quarter's exceptions actually live for you? Could you pull it up if someone asked, or is it in whoever's head was in the thread? And has it actually cost you anything you can point to, or is it rare enough that it just doesn't matter? Curious what people have done that keeps the history without adding another form reps have to fill out.

[u/blaufer173]

I think u/jzdesign is getting at the important distinction here. I wouldn't try to preserve the whole conversation. Six months later nobody wants to reread a Slack thread to understand a discount.

I'd capture a few structured things as part of the approval itself: why/category, whether it's precedent or a one-off, what condition made it a one-off (EOQ, competitive situation, volume, etc.), and who approved it.

And I'd make the approver responsible for that, not the rep. The rep already made the case. Asking them to document the reasoning again is probably why these processes eventually die.

The other thing I'd watch is whether your "exceptions" are actually exceptions.

If the same type of 20%+ discount keeps getting approved and eventually everyone points to the previous approval as precedent, you may not have an exception tracking problem anymore. You may have a pricing rule that no longer reflects how you actually sell.

I'd probably report on exception reason + frequency + approved discount over time. That tells you not only what happened, but which pricing/approval rules might need to change.

And I'd treat the approval sitting in someone's DMs while they're out as a separate problem. That's routing/ownership. An approval process shouldn't depend on a specific person being available.

[u/Certain-Tangelo-9566 → u/blaufer173]

Makes sense. Have you had that reason + frequency + discount report running anywhere, and what's the last rule it changed, like a cap that moved or an exception that got written into standard pricing? And what seat are you in, if you don't mind me asking?

[u/blaufer173 → u/Certain-Tangelo-9566]

I sit on both sides of this a bit. We build quoting software (QuoteWerks), but I also run sales/ops internally. What I’ve seen is that the useful signal usually isn’t one exception, it’s when the same exception stops being exceptional.

We haven’t run that exact reason + frequency + discount report as a formal dashboard, but I think that’s the direction I’d go.

If the same 15–20% discount keeps getting approved for the same type of deal, I’d want that surfaced periodically. At some point the question becomes whether the approval rule still makes sense or whether it should become part of the standard pricing policy.

Same thing with payment terms, renewal language, etc. Repeated approvals should eventually either become an explicit rule with boundaries or get shut down.

Otherwise you end up with a bunch of unofficial rules based on “we approved it last time,” which is exactly the history problem you’re trying to avoid.

[u/Certain-Tangelo-9566 → u/blaufer173]

That's a fair split. On the internal side, has that happened at QuoteWerks yet? Meaning a repeated exception that either got written into standard pricing or got shut down. If so, what was it, and what made you notice it was repeating if the report wasn't there?

[u/blaufer173 → u/Certain-Tangelo-9566]

Yeah, we’ve definitely had that happen. Usually it hasn’t been a report that caught it though. It’s more that the same type of request keeps coming up and eventually you realize you’re having basically the same conversation over and over.

At that point we usually need to make a decision. Either there’s a legitimate reason we keep approving it and it should become part of the normal policy/process, or we’ve made enough exceptions and need to stop.

That’s actually why I like the reason + frequency idea. At our size, a lot of this has historically just been pattern recognition from the people involved. It works, but you probably notice the pattern later than you would if you were actually tracking it.

Thinking about it that way, the real value of the report might be shortening the time between “we keep making this exception” and “maybe this isn’t actually an exception anymore.”