Every team on a large deal can be doing its job well while the deal still waits, because the time is lost in the handoffs between them. Secant Advisors finds where deals wait, gets price and terms agreed and revenue treatment flagged for finance before signature, and measures the change. The interfaces between teams are defined so the process scales as the company scales.
Glenn Vander Laan, a founding member of US deal strategy at Splunk through a run from $668M to $2.23B in revenue and the move from perpetual to term licensing, then go-to-market systems at Okta and Klaviyo. More on the background
Most often by a CRO, CFO or COO at a software company from about $50M to $1B in revenue, and by operating partners in the first 100 days after an investment or an add-on.
Commits, ramps, drawdowns, overage and rollover terms the old quote-to-cash process was never built for.
A deal desk, RevOps or GTM systems leader leaves, and deals cannot wait for the backfill.
Two price books, two sets of contract paper and often two CPQ instances in one deal.
Bookings definitions, approval evidence for SOX and clean deal terms, ready for auditors, an S-1 or a quality of earnings review.
Exceptions, redlines and approvals add weeks, and the forecast pays for it.
New tools and AI across sales, legal and operations, and no one can say whether deals move faster.
Or simply a growing team that wants its large deals to move faster.
These five teams own the core of every large deal.
| Team | Reports to | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Sales leadership | Terms promised to the customer before deal desk, finance or legal has seen them |
| Deal desk and pricing | Finance or RevOps | Exceptions decided one deal at a time, and discounts that leak |
| Finance and Revenue Recognition | The CFO | Commitments and revenue treatment settled after the terms are agreed |
| Legal | General Counsel | Non-standard terms redlined from scratch |
| Quote-to-cash and billing systems | RevOps or the CIO | Terms the systems cannot quote, book, bill or recognize cleanly |
Deployment, business value and enablement teams join the larger deals in support.
About a minute, with captions.
Built on the processes, tools and methodology the team already runs.
Deal strategy, commercial guardrails and a regular review of the largest deals. Senior support when a deal needs extra guidance, inside agreed rules.
Only what the business and its sellers need. Typical outputs include:
An approval matrix designed with finance and documented as a control, so exceptions are decided once.
Bookings definitions ready for SEC scrutiny of an S-1, and standard structures for commits, ramps and multi-year terms.
A booking package the systems can book, bill and recognize without rework.
Sometimes the fix is AI, and often it is simply a better process. Either way: does it work, is it controlled, did deals get faster?
The trigger, what is handed over, who owns it next and how fast. Together they form one shared plan, and each team can change how it works inside without breaking it.
The five core teams in black, with Sales shown as sellers and their leaders, and three support teams in grey. Eighteen handoffs, not a straight line.
| Example handoff | Trigger | What is handed over |
|---|---|---|
| Sellers to deal desk | Non-standard pricing or terms appear | Deal context, the customer's commercial ask and the business case |
| Deal desk to Finance and Legal | Structure agreed | Terms that need review, with the revenue recognition treatment flagged |
| Sellers to deployment | Before signature, not after | Scope, success criteria and the timeline the customer agreed to |
Built from the last few quarters of closed deals in CRM, CPQ and the contract system.
Exception rate, approval turnaround, quote revisions after a proposal and booking rework, alongside discount leakage and quarter-end slippage, converted to dollars. Cycle time is tracked too.
Traced through real deals and the systems behind them, not a workshop.
The few changes that matter most, each tied to the signal it should move.
The same signals a quarter later, adjusted for deal mix so a bigger quarter is not mistaken for a faster one. Cycle time stays a direction until enough large deals close to prove it.
Start with one segment and one reading, then decide about going further.
The signals measured, every team and handoff mapped, and the costliest handoffs named. Scoped to one segment, in about four weeks.
The baseline, the handoffs defined, and missing policies and approval paths built. Fits inside a 100-day plan, and ends with a first reading. The full reading follows a quarter later, and the client's own team can run it.
A standing Deal Velocity lead, or interim cover for a deal desk, revenue operations or GTM systems seat. One to three days a week, more at larger companies or around quarter end, typically starting inside a month.
After a program: an advisory retainer for a regular review of the largest deals, or The Read, an independent quarterly grade of a program someone else runs, often for a board or investor. Secant does not sell delivery work into a program it is grading.
Larger build work, such as systems implementation, runs through trusted specialists, with who does what agreed up front.
A career spent on how large deals get structured, approved and booked. Fifteen years at Quest Software selling and running a services organization, then deal strategy at Splunk and go-to-market systems at Okta and Klaviyo, each through its growth past a billion dollars in revenue.
Along the way: booking policies for non-standard transactions, deal structure guidebooks and field training, CPQ and contract lifecycle implementations at each company, and territory automation across 400-plus reps.
AI is part of the toolkit. Hands-on building of agents and connector architectures, and a seat on a company-wide AI Council, so AI workflows are assessed by someone who has built them. More in the newsletter AI in GTM Operations.
Glenn leads every engagement. Senior operators from a trusted network join when an engagement needs more depth, and they are named before the work starts.
The first conversation is one question: how long did the last ten large deals take, and where did each one wait? If the problem is an empty seat, it is the date the seat needs filling and what it owns.
LinkedIn profile · AI in GTM Operations, the newsletter