Deal Desk Bottleneck to
2-Minute Self-Service Quoting Engine
How we replaced a manual request-and-wait process with automated pricing governance and live collaboration—transforming the Deal Desk from bottleneck to competitive advantage.
Key Outcomes
Document creation time
Increase in Deal Desk capacity
Manual spreadsheet calculations
Our Role
Technical Architecture & Development
Technology Stack
The Challenge: A "Black Box" Deal Desk Workflow
For the sales team, generating a quote wasn't a self-service action. It was a dependency.
A Sales Rep would submit a request to the Deal Desk and then wait. Every quote had to be manually assembled from scratch. Deal Desk analysts calculated complex multi-year pricing in spreadsheets, checked pricing rules by hand, and copied values into legal templates. The process worked, but it didn't scale.
Growing Bottleneck
Document creation alone took 30 to 45 minutes per quote. Total turnaround stretched into days depending on backlog.
Manual Governance
Pricing rules lived in people's heads and spreadsheets. Miss a threshold, and the quote was rejected for a full rebuild.
Disconnected Approvals
Approvals happened in email threads or chat messages, completely detached from the actual quote and its data.
The Solution: Governance Built Into the System
We built a custom CPQ experience directly inside Salesforce using Lightning Web Components. The goal: move pricing logic and enforcement out of human workflows and into the platform itself.
Spreadsheet calculations for multi-year pricing
Pricing rules stored in analyst's heads
Approvals via scattered email threads
Static PDFs emailed back and forth
"final_v5_new_Updated.pdf" chaos
Pricing logic encoded in guided wizard
Automatic validation before submission
One-click email approvals
Live Google Doc synced to Salesforce
Single source of truth for all stakeholders
Pre-Validated Quoting
We encoded multi-year pricing ramps, stub terms, discount thresholds, and deal-type logic directly into the Salesforce wizard. By the time a quote reaches review, it's already structurally correct.
Frictionless Approvals
Executives don't want to log into Salesforce to approve a deal. We built an email-based workflow—formatted deal summary lands in their inbox, approve or reject with a single reply.
Live Collaboration
Instead of static PDFs, the system generates a live Google Doc linked to the Opportunity. Legal, Sales, and stakeholders collaborate in one place—changes sync back to Salesforce automatically.
Under the Hood: The Architecture
While users see a simple quoting wizard, the backend handles complex orchestration between Salesforce and Google's APIs.
System Architecture Overview
Automated Deal Intelligence
Custom Apex logic engine determines whether a deal is a Renewal, New Logo, or complex Multi-Term agreement—and applies the correct pricing and template logic automatically.
Bi-Directional Sync
The system maintains a persistent link between Salesforce and the Google Doc, ensuring Salesforce remains the system of record even as the document evolves through negotiations.
The Results
By treating quote generation as an engineering problem instead of an administrative task, we collapsed the timeline from request to delivery.
Document Creation Time
Deal Desk Capacity Increase
Sales Cycle Velocity
Why This Matters
We didn't just help the team type faster. We helped them govern smarter. By baking pricing rules directly into the system and streamlining approvals, the Deal Desk stopped being a bottleneck and became a competitive advantage. Reps get compliant, professional quotes in front of customers faster—shortening the overall sales cycle.
Final Thought
This architecture demonstrates how operational workflows in Salesforce can be transformed from manual processes into governed, self-service systems.
The key insight: Don't just automate document generation—operationalize your pricing strategy.