A guided sales tool that catches risky deals without slowing the team down.
Sales choices could create delivery, approval, and margin problems later in the process.
Worked with sales, operations, technology, and leadership to design a guided workflow.
Made preferred offers clearer and flagged higher-risk choices earlier.
Helped add control to the process without removing useful sales flexibility.
A global B2B business needed more control over the offers account managers were putting in front of customers. Account managers were incentivised to sell, but not always exposed to the operational cost, delivery complexity, or margin risk created by the offers they selected.
The issue was not that account managers were deliberately making bad choices. The problem was that the system allowed too much freedom without enough guidance. Offers could be combined in ways that helped close deals but created headaches for operations, commercial teams, and the wider business later.
My role was to help turn that risk into a guided workflow: account managers could still build customer offers, but the system would highlight preferred options, score offer combinations, and route risky or non-preferred choices into approval before they became expensive problems.
Account managers had a pool of possible offers, but not every offer combination was equally good for the business. Some combinations were preferred, easier to deliver, better aligned to the commercial strategy. Others created exceptions, approvals, operational work, or margin risk. The problem was that those differences were not always visible at the point of selection.
By the time a risky offer reached approval or operations, it had already gained momentum with the customer. The business needed to surface risk earlier, while the offer was still being built, rather than waiting until later teams had to unpick it.
And training alone wouldn't fix it. In a live sales environment, people move quickly and optimise for the deal in front of them. The guidance needed to sit inside the workflow, where offer choices were actually being made.
Research built on conversations with account managers and business stakeholders, alongside input from operations, marketing, technology teams, Salesforce, and PriceFX. It looked at how offers were currently selected, where risky combinations entered the process, who felt the impact downstream, and what type of guidance would help account managers move quickly without exposing the business to unnecessary cost. The solution then moved through prototyping, user testing, live testing, and a regional pilot, meaning the work didn't stop at a concept but became a measurable workflow.
Account managers were focused on selling and closing deals. That's their job. But some offers that helped win a deal could create cost, complexity, or operational pain later. The business needed a way to protect margin and delivery without expecting account managers to manually balance every downstream consequence.
Account managers had a pool of possible offers, but not every offer combination was equally good for the business. Some were preferred, easier to deliver, and better aligned to commercial strategy. Others created exceptions, approvals, operational work, or margin risk. The differences weren't always visible at the point of selection.
By the time a risky offer reached approval or operations, it had already gained momentum with the customer. The business needed to surface risk earlier, while the offer was still being built, rather than waiting until later teams had to unpick it.
Telling account managers which offers were preferred wouldn't be enough. In a live sales environment, people move quickly and optimise for the deal in front of them. The guidance needed to sit inside the workflow, where offer choices were actually being made.
Operations teams were often left to deal with the consequences of offers that were hard to deliver, poorly aligned, or unnecessarily bespoke. A better offer process needed to reduce the number of difficult combinations entering the system in the first place.
The configurator wasn't only about stopping risky offers. It also gave the business a clearer view of what account managers were selecting, where exceptions were happening, and whether preferred offers were being used.
The work helped turn offer selection from a loose, informal sales behaviour into a guided workflow with built-in guardrails. Account managers still had flexibility, but the system made preferred offers easier to choose and made risky combinations visible earlier.
This mattered because risky offers weren't just a sales issue. They could affect operations, delivery teams, commercial performance, margin, reporting, and customer expectations. By shaping the offer process at the point of selection, the business had a better chance of reducing downstream cost and operational pain.
The pilot results gave early evidence that the approach worked: account managers were much more likely to stay within recommended and available offers, and risky combinations could be routed into approval rather than slipping through unnoticed.