A sales manager has a promising order sitting on her desk. The customer has asked for a discount and credit terms. The stock is available. The buyer is ready.
Then the deal enters the building.
Pricing takes time. Credit waits for pricing to finish. By the time everybody has replied to the email, the customer has started asking whether the competitor can deliver sooner.
That is the commercial cost of slow internal approvals. Your sales team can hunt hard, build trust and win the meeting, then lose the money to an approval queue nobody owns.
The Deal Was Ready Before the Business Was
Take an illustrative distributor with an order ready for approval. The customer has asked for a discretionary discount and credit terms. Pricing and credit review happen in sequence, but nobody owns the overall response to the customer.
The customer may still buy after the wait. But the commercial damage may already have started.
If the order disappears, expected gross profit disappears with it. If the order slips into another period, the forecast changes while wages, rent and supplier commitments continue. Faster, well-controlled decisions help protect the value the sales team has worked to create.
That is why I do not accept, “The deal was delayed, but we did not lose it,” as a complete answer. Did it cancel? Did it move into next month? Did you discount harder to keep it? Did the sales rep stop chasing another prospect while waiting for head office?
Those are different losses. Your reports must separate them.
The uncomfortable truth is simple.
A customer does not experience your internal process as internal.
They experience it as your ability to do business.
A slow approval tells a buyer that your company may also be slow to deliver, slow to resolve a complaint and slow to issue a credit note. They may never say that in the meeting. They just stop replying.
The queue nobody measures
Most businesses proudly report the length of the sales cycle. Fine. But that figure mixes customer meetings, procurement delays, site visits and the days your own people spent waiting for an email response.
You need to isolate the internal waiting time.
Measure approval cycle time from the moment a complete request is submitted to the moment there is a final decision. Then split the clock into pricing queue time, credit queue time and legal queue time where legal is involved.
Do not rely on the average alone. A fast routine approval can hide stalled exceptions. Review both the typical waiting time and the longer-running cases so management can see where action is needed.
Make Routine Decisions Routine
The first mistake I see is treating every discount and every credit request as though it is a board crisis.
Calm down.
A standard, in-policy request should not travel through the same maze as an exception that could hurt the business.
Create a clear approval matrix. A sales manager can approve a defined discount band. A commercial manager can approve another band. Credit can renew low-risk customers inside a documented limit. Anything outside policy goes higher, with a clear reason recorded.
The reason is not to make approval easy. The reason is to make the right approval fast.
Where the business operates in a regulated sector, delegated authority should reflect the applicable governance and risk requirements. Faster routine approvals should come from clear policy, complete information and accountable decisions.
Speed without controls is foolish.
Controls without speed are expensive.
What the complete submission must contain
Many delays are not approval delays at all. They are rework dressed up as approval delays.
Before pricing or credit receives a request, require the sales rep to submit the customer name, deal value, requested discount, current price, gross margin impact, requested payment terms, existing exposure and the reason for the exception. If one of those fields is missing, the clock should not start.
This sounds strict because it is strict. An approver cannot make a sound commercial decision from, “Please approve urgently.” Urgently is not a number.
Track your rework rate. This is the share of submissions sent back because key facts were missing or wrong. If rework is high, do not blame the credit manager for being slow. Fix the request form and teach the sales team what a complete commercial case looks like.
This is where sales training and sales systems meet corporate governance. Your people need enough commercial judgement to prepare a deal properly, and your system needs enough discipline to stop incomplete work from clogging the queue.
Measure the Money, Not Just the Minutes
A useful dashboard connects waiting time with the effect on customers, revenue and margin.
Start with these indicators.
Median approval cycle time, split between pricing, credit and legal. This exposes the queue causing the hold-up.
Long-running approval cases. These reveal delays that a typical turnaround measure can hide.
Exception rate. This tells you how many deals are outside your policy. If almost every deal is an exception, your policy is divorced from the streets.
Approval-to-rejection rate. This shows whether people are sending rubbish requests upstream.
Deals lost after approval delay. Count only cancellations where delay contributed. Do not call every delayed deal lost.
Revenue and gross margin slipped beyond month-end. This protects forecast accuracy and exposes the cash impact.
Your own approval records can show whether delays contribute to cancelled deals, postponed orders or repeated hand-offs. Use that evidence to prioritise improvements.
Keep the distinction clear between a customer who cancelled and a customer who bought later. The response should follow the actual commercial effect.
Another worked example
Consider an illustrative Harare retailer handling a corporate supply order. The customer asks for credit terms, but the sales rep sends only an invoice history and writes, “Client is good for it.”
Credit sends the request back for missing exposure details and payment references. The retailer eventually approves the account, but the customer’s procurement window has closed and the order moves into another reporting period.
No sale was necessarily lost. But expected revenue has shifted while operating commitments remain. A complete credit pack at submission would help reduce avoidable rework. Track time spent correcting the request separately from time spent making the credit decision.
Use the business’s own records to understand the problem. Isolated complaints can reveal an issue, but a consistent review of requests, decisions and outcomes gives management a stronger basis for action.
Run your own numbers. Daily. Consistent.
When a customer is ready to buy, an internal queue must not become the competitor.
Your customer relationship management records should show when the customer said yes, when the complete approval request went in, and when the final answer came out. Without those timestamps, management will keep arguing from memory.
Memory is a terrible sales report.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should internal approvals take
There is no universal answer. A low-risk, in-policy discount should move faster than an unusual credit request because the risk differs. Set service expectations by approval type and review both normal cases and longer delays.
Should salespeople approve discounts themselves
They can approve defined discounts within a documented band. Give them authority where the margin impact is understood and controlled. Do not give blanket freedom, because desperate month-end selling can destroy profit quietly.
Can we speed up credit approvals without increasing bad debt
It is possible to improve turnaround while maintaining controls. Separate routine renewals and lower-risk cases from exceptions, collect complete information and document delegated authority. Review the effect on payment performance as well as approval speed.
What is the first metric to fix
Start with approval cycle time from complete submission to final decision, split by pricing and credit. Then add rework rate. You cannot fix a queue when you do not know whether the delay came from missing information or a decision-maker.
Your sales team did not wake up early, chase the meeting, build the relationship and negotiate the order so that a vague email could kill the deal at month-end.
Build an approval process that helps your people respond promptly, protects margin and gives leaders a clear view of decisions. Complete submissions and practical delegation make it easier to move a ready customer towards a confirmed order.
Contact The Chartered Vendor to discuss sales training, approval workflows and sales-system support, and enquire for a tailored quote.
