Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? And How A Deal Desk Can Keep A Company On The Right Course

I first heard this phrase used by a fellow colleague, a marketing leader, during a meeting. Her team were stretched, being pulled in multiple directions and spending time on work that was important to someone, but wasn't necessarily moving the biggest priorities forward. They were, as she put it, being busy fools.

Her point was simple.

Will it make the boat go faster?

Was this activity actually moving the organisation closer to where it wanted to go, or was everyone simply keeping themselves busy?

I loved the phrase and it stayed with me. Partly because of the sporting reference, but mostly because it summed up something I've always found fascinating: the link between sport and business.

The phrase was made famous through Ben Hunt-Davis and the British rowing team that won Olympic gold in Sydney in 2000. Their entire approach was built around one question: Does it make the boat go faster? Every decision was measured against it, from training and equipment to nutrition, recovery and processes. If something didn't contribute to making the boat faster, it simply wasn't worth doing.

I'm fairly certain Ben Hunt-Davis wasn't thinking about strategic management theory when he asked the question, but he was applying one of its foundational ideas. The Resource-Based View, or RBV.

At its heart, RBV argues that sustainable competitive advantage doesn't come from having unlimited resources. Every organisation faces constraints. Time. People. Capital. Technology. The organisations that consistently outperform aren't usually the ones with the biggest budgets or the largest teams. They're the ones that understand which resources create the greatest value and have the discipline to deploy them accordingly.

Every decision the rowing team made competed for their limited resources: time, energy and attention. They decided only time spent on activities they felt would ultimatelyhelp them improve was considered.

Deal Desk is where I spent some of my career working, and the lessons have stayed with me. It's not a function most people outside commercial teams have heard of, and even inside them it's often misunderstood or reduced to "the people who approve discounts." In reality, it's a capability steeped in the fundamentals of RBV, created around the same analogy as Ben Hunt-Davis and his rowing team. Focusing on making the boat go faster and focusing on what matters most for a business, shortening the sales cycle.

Growing pains

This is typically where the challenge starts. As organisations grow, complexity grows with them. More customers. More opportunities. More stakeholders. More commercial decisions. A ten-minute pricing exception starts needing four approvals and a Slack thread.

Sales spend less time selling. Finance gets pulled into reviewing deals instead of creating financial insight. Legal becomes involved in every negotiation. Everyone is trying to do the right thing, but the org has quietly built friction into its own growth. Within a small space of time, the organisation is choked, and growth, the objective all of this was meant to protect, slows down and becomes secondary.

The Evolution of Deal Desk

When I first told friends I was moving into Deal Desk, most had no idea what it meant. A few asked if I was heading off to sell desks. One was fairly convinced I'd landed a job at IKEA.

I did some quick research wroting this article and wanted to put a number on what that confusion was actually missing. PwC found that Deal Desks can cut sales cycle times by 25 to 40 percent, lift sales productivity by 15 to 20 percent, and increase corporate profitability by 5 to 10 percent. Not exactly flat-pack furniture.

Deal Desk evolved because businesses needed a better way of managing this complexity. The original idea was straightforward: create a faster route for important commercial decisions without allowing them to disappear into bureaucracy. Early Deal Desk teams sat mainly within Finance and Legal, ensuring pricing, contracts and revenue recognition aligned with the company's commercial strategy.

As technology companies scaled through the 2010s and enterprise sales became more complex, the role evolved. Deal Desk moved closer to Sales Operations and Revenue Operations, becoming a dedicated capability focused on helping organisations close the right complex deals faster. Today it has become an established function across many high-growth organisations, with its role shifting from reviewing deals to enabling growth.

Quarterbacking the deal cycle

Our American colleagues had cheesily nicknamed Deal Desk "the quarterback of the deal cycle," claiming it coordinated every part of the deal from start to finish. I was lucky enough to follow the NFL, so naturally I was hoping I was Tom Brady and could learn from a Bill Belichick. It made sense, though. We were one of the most cross-functional teams in the org, working with Sales, Finance, Legal and Operations at exactly the right moment to get a deal closed out before a deadline.

Putting it into practice

I saw this first-hand during my time working in MongoDB's Deal Desk. MongoDB did Deal Desk and Sales well. The product was completed, the technology was constantly evolving and the sales cycle was slow. It's not everyday you decide to get a new database.

As the business scaled, so did the complexity of the deals. The role of Deal Desk wasn't to create more process. It was to remove friction.

MongoDB had figured out something simple. Supporting sales teams when it really mattered, mattered!

So Deal Desk wasn't one team with a few folk, in one office working nine to five. They invested heavily in the capability. It was regional teams across Europe, Asia, and the East and West Coast, doing what they called following the sun. Deals didn't sleep. If something was still open at the end of the day in one region, it got handed to the next team in the next time zone, and the work just kept moving.

Each key account was assigned to a pod team, a small group from various functions ofbthe business who became the subject matter experts on that account. Knowledge didn't leave the building when one person did. When it came time to renew contracts or upsell, there was muscle memory built up. Everyone knew the account's history, the client, what had come before. It wasn't starting from scratch.

Deal Desk also fed into Sales enablement. Every seller was trained the same way, on what a good deal actually looked like and what were non-negotiable.

Most deals don't die in negotiation, they die in contracting, held up over small wording changes sitting in someone's inbox for days. Legal trained and empowered Deal Desk to handle standard contractual language directly, backed by a self-service repository built up over years. A term that used to mean a week of email ping-pong became a couple of clicks.

Payment terms approvals are another areas where things grind to a halt in the last hour as often it can be the last detail sales tend to consider. Finance gave Deal Desk the authority to review credit scores themselves and access pulled straight into the quote platform. Against agreed rules and thresholds, Deal Desk could approve on the spot. No waiting on Finance.

Deal Desk was authorised to make certain approvals, act as a dedicated resource for complex sales requests, and produce the commercial documentation. Approvals, documentation, and contract signatures all lived in Salesforce CPQ. One process. One system. One source of truth. And at high volume.

Deal Desk's function was to streamline the deal cycle, cut out repetitive process spanning multiple teams, and consolidate as much authority and decision making into one place.

When a Deal Desk won't succeed

It's worth pointing out that none of this works if the fundamentals aren't there first.

If decision-making isn't clear, if there's no real chain of command, if roles and ownership sit in a grey area, a Deal Desk has nothing solid to plug into. It becomes another voice in the room rather than the place decisions actually get made. The same is true if the company doesn't have a clear overarching goal. If incentives and remuneration don't align to that goal, there's no shared focus across the business for a Deal Desk to serve. Everyone is optimising for something slightly different.

The same is true of the systems underneath it. Poor data infrastructure, clunky platforms, manual intervention at every step. A Deal Desk can't move fast if the information it depends on has to be chased down, re-keyed by hand, or sits waiting because the one person who knows it is on holidays. The fundamentals have to be right first. Deal velocity (volume and speed) has to measurable Otherwise it's lipstick on a pig.

Rowing in the right direction

The best organisations aren't always the ones moving fastest. They're the ones that know what matters and focus their resources there. A Deal Desk isn't another layer of process. Done properly, it becomes a growth capability, helping organisations deploy their limited resources where they create the greatest value. That's the Resource-Based View in practice.

More than twenty years ago, the British rowing team asked one simple question before every decision.

Will it make the boat go faster?

For me it's one of the best strategic questions any growing organisation can ask. You can row as hard as you like.

It only counts if you're on course.

Blog by Padraig O'Donnell