Deal desk / Revenue operations / Bengaluru

Open to offers

Price it. Paper it. Book it.

The desk that sits between Sales wanting the number and Finance wanting the number to hold.

Thomson Reuters and Oracle taught me the mechanics. Versa Networks handed me a five-person desk and three hundred transactions a year. At Marvin I walked into an empty page: no pricing policy, no discount thresholds, no order form worth the name. I built the function end to end, then built the software it runs on, because the products we would have licensed were built for a different shape of company.

Four of those tools are below. They work. Go and push them around.

Open the console→ Download CV↓

Bengaluru, IN13 yrs / SaaS

Years in enterprise SaaS: 13
People managed: 5
Deals structured, run rate: 200+
New ARR papered at Marvin: $1.5M+
Tools built and running: 4

01 / What I built

Four tools. Built, not licensed.

Salesforce CPQ is a good product and we run on it. Licensing a second and third product per seat, though, means paying across the whole company for something only the desk uses, and the standard configuration still would not hold our deal shapes: multi-year ramps, usage tiers, pilot conversions. So I wrote the spec for what the desk actually needed and built it on our own infrastructure. Four tools, in daily use. What follows are working models of them.

Placeholder data

Every figure inside these four panels is invented, generated in your browser, so the mechanics can be shown without putting a line of anyone's commercial data on the open internet. No customer, contract or pricing information from any employer appears here and none ever will. The career numbers further down the page are the real ones.

Built with AI assistance on our own infrastructure. I am not a software engineer and I do not claim to be. I am the person who knew precisely what the desk needed, could write the spec, and would rather ship it than wait for it to arrive on somebody's roadmap.

Live · synthetic

In-house CPQ. Runs alongside Salesforce CPQ and takes the deal shapes the standard configuration will not hold: multi-year ramps, usage tiers, pilot-to-enterprise conversions. Move the inputs and watch what each one does to margin.

Deal inputs

Seats 750

Discount 12%

Term

Ramp

Billing

Year 1 net ACV

$107K

list $122K · $162/seat

Total contract value

$321K

36 months · 750 seats

Effective discount

12.0%

12% headline · flat ramp

Gross margin

72.7%

Revenue schedule

$107KYR 1

$107KYR 2

$107KYR 3

Standard Inside policy. The desk approves it and it goes out today.

Salesforce CPQValidation rulesTiered approvalsRamp schedulesASC 606 flags

Cohort dashboard. Revenue and retention cohorts with drill-down to account and line-item level, so a renewal conversation starts from evidence instead of a guess. Switch the measure to recolour the grid.

Net revenue retention

114%

trailing 12 months

Gross revenue retention

91%

before expansion

Logo retention

88%

accounts, not dollars

Expansion surfaced

$312K

open pipeline

Cohort	M0	M1	M2	M3	M4	M5	M6	M7	M8	M9
Sep 25	100	101	103	105	105	106	107	109	111	116
Oct 25	100	102	106	109	111	111	113	117	119	124
Nov 25	100	100	100	102	105	107	108	111	114	116
Dec 25	100	103	103	107	108	108	110	112	114	·
Jan 26	100	100	102	105	104	104	107	108	·	·
Feb 26	100	101	103	107	111	110	112	·	·	·
Mar 26	100	99	99	100	100	103	·	·	·	·
Apr 26	100	104	108	111	113	·	·	·	·	·

ContractingHeld flatExpanding

Rows are signup cohorts, columns are months since signup. Hover any cell for the value.

Cohort analysisNRR / GRRExpansion scoringChurn propensityLine-item drill-down

02 / Record

What the desk actually produced.

Thirteen years, five companies, one job description that keeps getting wider. These figures come off my CV, not off the console above.

Hired to build the function. There was no desk before me.

Built the deal desk from a blank page: pricing policy, discount governance, order form design, CPQ configuration, and ASC 606 review of every booking.From zero
New ARR structured and papered in the first seven months, negotiating terms directly with enterprise procurement across North America, EMEA and APAC.$1.5M+
Own the contract redlining end to end. MSAs, order forms, DPAs and BAAs marked up in house before they reach Legal, with one consistent fallback position held across every counterparty.In house
Deals structured and quoted, at run rate. Multi-year ramps, usage-based pricing, pilot-to-enterprise conversions.200+/yr run rate
Drop in quote preparation time after rolling out AI-assisted pricing models that run what-if scenarios while the negotiation is still live.-60%
Margin held on a typical deal by CPQ validation rules that catch pricing anomalies and enforce tiered discount approvals before the quote leaves the desk.5-7 pts
Expansion pipeline surfaced by renewal alerts and expansion scoring automated through Salesforce Flows.$300K+
Internal tools specified and shipped on company infrastructure: cohort dashboard, in-house CPQ, invoicing, approval routing.4

Between Versa and Marvin: a deliberate three-month break before starting a build-from-scratch role.

Analyst team managed: hiring, quarterly KPIs, performance reviews, workload assignment. One promoted during the period.5 people
Chaired the cross-functional deal governance committee, running executive deal reviews and quarterly revenue forecasts with Sales, Finance, Legal and Product.Chair
Enterprise transactions a year across the desk, with me as first escalation on every complex one.300+/yr
Order processing time after rebuilding order forms with dynamic pricing logic and CPQ validation rules.3 days to 6 hrs
Incremental ARR from campaigns run off the renewal-risk, churn and upsell-propensity dashboards I built for the expansion team.$500K
Renewal revenue growth year over year, with proactive playbooks driven by product usage and engagement scoring.+20%
Deal closure time after redesigning quote-to-cash and approval workflows end to end in Salesforce CPQ.-15%

Enterprise licence agreement renewals processed and booked.50+
Booking accuracy held across them.98%
Standalone contracts consolidated into master agreements.30+
Worked the ELA renewal cycle end to end: entitlement checks, true-ups, co-term calculations and quote generation ahead of expiry, so renewals were priced and papered before the clock ran out.
The consolidation work meant reconciling overlapping contracts and aligning renewal dates, replacing a scatter of separate agreements with a single master an account team could actually manage.
Automated the case-closure workflow for daily booked orders, and built renewal tracking playbooks and compliance checks with Finance and Legal that kept every renewal audit-ready.

Five years in one seat. The longest run on this page, and where most of the instincts came from.

Average deal margin improvement across five years of pricing and discount strategy on enterprise software deals.+10%
Reviewed non-standard pricing against the discount approval matrix and escalated anything outside it with a written commercial rationale, so approvers saw the trade-off and not just the number.
Modelled multi-year deal structures for account teams: term licence, support renewal and cloud subscription combinations, and what each shape did to the revenue profile.
Worked with Revenue Recognition on non-standard terms, so a structure that read well commercially did not turn into a booking problem later.
Ran quote reviews with account teams across the region, and became the person reps came to on how a deal should be shaped before it went for approval.
Streamlined the handoffs between Sales, Finance and Legal that were causing most of the cross-functional approval delay.
Wrote the exception-handling procedures and pricing trend reports the team adopted as its working standard. Seeing the same deal patterns come round again for five years is where both came from.

Coordinated order management across Customer Service, Credit Management and Sales, and brought turnaround times down.
Standardised the order protocols, which cut error rates and lifted customer satisfaction scores. First job. Where I learned that most revenue problems are process problems wearing a costume.

Sourced from my CV. Ask me to walk through any line of it.

03 / Reach

Run from Bengaluru. Papered everywhere else.

Procurement in Boston does not negotiate the way procurement in Frankfurt does, and neither of them negotiates like Singapore. Payment terms, liability caps, data residency, what counts as a reasonable audit right: all of it moves with the jurisdiction, and the fallback has to move with it. Thirteen years of that, run from one desk in a timezone that overlaps properly with almost nobody.

Drag to spin

Countries, not counterparties. Nobody is named here and nobody will be, for the same reason nothing is named in the section below. Dot size is how much of the desk's volume sat in that market, never what any of it was worth.

04 / Paperwork

The part that starts when Legal joins the call.

At Marvin I do the contract redlining myself. MSAs, order forms, data processing agreements, BAAs: I mark them up in house before they reach Legal and hold one consistent position across every negotiation. The desk stops re-arguing its own fallbacks each quarter, and paper stops being the thing that slips a quarter end.

MSAs and order forms Data processing agreements GDPR standard contractual clauses HIPAA business associate agreements Liability caps and carve-outs Indemnity structures AI and model-training clauses Audit rights and SOC 2 substitution ASC 606 revenue review

No counterparties are named on this site, and none will be.

The agreements I work on are confidential and they stay that way. That does put me in an awkward spot on a portfolio site, so here is the honest offer instead: put a real clause in front of me in the interview and ask me where it breaks.

That will tell you more in ten minutes than a case study I would have had to sanitise into mush.

Pratiesh Soman · Deal desk

05 / Contact

Deal desk and RevOps leadership. Europe and APAC.

If you have a desk held together with a spreadsheet and goodwill, that is the job I want. If you already have a good one, I would like to make it faster.

Emailpratieshsoman@gmail.com→ LinkedIn/in/pratiesh-soman↗ PhoneOn request→ CVDownload the PDF↓

Practical

Indian passport, based in Bengaluru. I would need sponsorship to relocate. Better you know now than three interviews in.

Here is what that involves on your side, so you do not have to go and look it up.

Routes: EU Blue Card, UK Skilled Worker, Singapore Employment Pass, UAE work permit. MBA plus thirteen years in the field, which is what most of these routes weigh.
Thresholds: At the band these roles pay in my target markets, I clear the published salary minimums. I have the figures and will send them on request rather than put a number on a public page.
Notice period: Sixty days from signature.
Earliest start: Roughly two months from an offer.
Relocation: Happy either way. If relocation support is part of what you offer, I would gladly take it up. If it is not, I will fund the move myself and it will not hold anything up.

Everything else is a conversation.