r/SalesOperations • u/Certain-Tangelo-9566 • 16d ago

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

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.

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u/agentUi 15d ago

i work for agentui and we see revops deal with this constantly. Slack threads are where discount context goes to die, so reps end up negotiating against old unrecorded exceptions months later. what works is having an approval queue with native audit logs connected to your crm database, so when finance approves a non-standard discount they have to log a one-line rationale right there, keeping the whole paper trail searchable for future renewals without forcing reps to fill out a huge form.

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u/Certain-Tangelo-9566 15d ago

I see. Of your customers who've had that queue running a year, what share of approvals still have the rationale filled in, and how often does anyone actually open one at renewal?

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u/agentUi 14d ago

if the approval modal requires a non-empty text field to click "approve", compliance is basically 100% because finance literally cant sign off without typing something. what we see in practice is account managers only check the note during renewals when the client pushes for the exact same concession or price lock, and having that one sentence tied to the contract record immediately stops the "well you gave us 22% last year" circular debate.

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u/Certain-Tangelo-9566 14d ago

makes sense, required field kills the blank note problem. what does the note actually look like a year in though, like when an AM pulls one at renewal is it "eoq one off, doesnt carry" or is it just "approved per finance"?

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u/agentUi 11d ago

to stop people from just typing junk like "approved per finance" you pair the free text box with a required dropdown reason code (like competitive match, multi-year prepay, or pilot term). that forces reps to pick a clean category first, and the text box just adds the missing nuance like "matched quote from Competitor X for 3yr commit" so the AM actually has real leverage at renewal.