A good approval process enables sales leaders to balance margin and deal volume, without losing any deal momentum. 

A bad approval process will make you lose deals you could have won, and frustrate your reps and customers with impatience.

Ensuring compliance with proper legal documentation, products and pricing is table stakes for approvals –  you have to be accurate, compliant and fast. 

And we have the data to prove it. 

Methodology and Findings

The dataset specifically focuses on SaaS proposals that require more than one level of approval, and measures the time from first approval request to final approval submitted. 

Larger deals typically need more layers of approval, because the downside is larger if unfavourable terms are offered. But our data suggests bigger deals do not have to equal more time – and there’s good proof to avoid unnecessary delays.  

Each bucket represents a different time frame, from rapid approvals within 2 to 4 hours to prolonged processes extending beyond 10 days.

Here's how the data stacks up:

After 3 days, the data shows a strong correlation between longer approval cycles leading to a lower win rate. 

Significance of the Findings

#1. Every extra delay after three days will lead to lost deals

As the approval process stretches beyond 36 hours, win rates begin to incrementally decline. The most significant drop is seen when approvals take more than 10 days, where the win rate falls to 44%. This stark decrease highlights the critical importance of timely decision-making in the approval process.

#2. Big deals don’t need more than 4 hours to approve

AE’s are often held up 1-2 extra days just from legal teams because they need ‘time to review’ enterprise deals. But our data shows the largest deals are actually approved the fastest on average. This could also imply that companies doing the largest deals are also the fastest at approving. What’s certain is you don’t want to blow your chances of $50K+ deals by having slow approval times. 

#3 You need tech and process for efficient approval cycles 

Your CPQ software should allow you to set up approval groups. This way, anyone within an authorized group can approve, leading to faster turnaround times and less bottlenecks. It also allows you to have sign-off from multiple departments, such as sales, finance, and legal. 

Avoid CPQs that are complex or require code to make simple approval updates. 

Finally, setup Slack alerts for managers when an approval request has been waiting for more than one hour. 

How to Optimize Multi-Level SaaS Approvals

Our goal is not to convince you to turn off approvals, but rather show you the importance of having fast approval cycles. You can achieve shorter cycles with faster response times, tech enablement, rule-based triggers, and alerts when deals are stalled. 

And Cacheflows CPQ approval engine is designed with exactly this in mind. Advanced approval logic is easy to configure, you can use approver groups, and create alerts for stalled deals. 

Book a demo to see how Cacheflow CPQ is enabling SaaS go-to-market teams to fix their approval cycles and increase sales efficiency.