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Brennan WardDeal Desk
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Sample 6 of 7

“How have you made the deal flow itself more efficient?”

Making the deal flow itself faster

Deal: New Relic and Equifax — real work

Four examples from my career, then one from the demo. The first four are real work. The brief is a demo built on a fictional Salesforce developer org.

Revenue leakage audit (Equifax)

Cross-referenced 150 contracts a week against a new billing system during a Zuora migration. Found $127.3M in contracted revenue that would not have billed correctly. Method: build the reconciliation once in Sheets and Access, then run it as a checklist, not a heroic effort.

Sales Video Library — 62 videos (New Relic)

Recorded 62 videos, 3–5 minutes each, covering the questions Sales asked me most: common CPQ error messages, how to build a specific deal type, where to go for what, how Deal Desk actually reviews a quote. It measurably cut the volume of repeat questions my team fielded each quarter. I also host quarterly Fast Start sessions with Pricing and Legal — recent policy changes, answers to the quarter’s most common requests, and an open floor for whatever deal is on someone’s mind.

Every non-standard clause Sales kept asking for, pre-negotiated with Legal into approved fallback language. A redline review went from “open a Legal ticket and wait” to “pick from the playbook.” I also built 4 new contract templates for Partner-channel pricing in June 2024 and trained the desk on how to fill them out and handle mid-term moves between price offerings.

CPQ approval logic (New Relic)

Sat with the Salesforce BA team, mapped every approval rule, found the ones firing on deals that didn’t need review, and rewrote them — fewer approvals for the same risk coverage. This is ongoing: I still flag CPQ bugs and test new approval rules before they ship.

At scale, this is the volume the desk runs at: roughly 1,800 quotes reviewed and approved a year, from $5K to $30M in total contract value (TCV), plus signing authority on DocuSign up to $250K in ACR for fully-approved deals.

Daily Deal Brief (demo, built 2026)

A Claude plugin that reads the Salesforce pipeline each morning, scores every open opportunity, and surfaces the five that need deal strategy before Sales asks. It flags commitment overconsumption, parent and affiliate pricing, tax-exempt entities, marketplace timing, and slipping close dates, then drafts the outreach to each AE. The interactive brief and the product page show a static export of that output, with an authored sample outreach draft. Nothing on this site is sent to anyone.

Watch me work it

Clips from a recording of me working a fictional renewal pricing request in a demo Salesforce org. They show the same habits as this answer on a different deal. See the full walkthrough.

Clip 1 of 18 · 2:22

Read the request first, then decide on a call

The AE opens the request as a work item. I read it for what is reasonable and what is a throw-at-the-wall ask, check the dates (renewal ends Dec 6, customer wants to sign by Nov 6), and work through it asynchronously before booking time with the AE.

Clip 9 of 18 · 1:36

Who else needs to weigh in

I can't price Premier Support from margin math alone, so I queue a conversation with whoever delivers it. For the tax-exempt term, I confirm the customer is still exempt, a check my Deal Strategy Assistant can run, and raise it with another team if the status has changed.