Braze powers real-time customer engagement for marketers and had become a public company with a complex pricing model. Its pricing lived in an Excel calculator, approvals ran over email, and the only discount data was self-reported by reps, none of which stands up to an auditor. DealHub AI replaced the calculator and the inbox with pricing guardrails, discount approvals and an audit trail in one system connected to Salesforce. Braze's Deal Desk now administers all of it itself, and no product or pricing change waits on an outside partner.
Excel pricing and email approvals replaced by guardrails and an audit trail the business sets.
October kickoff, March go-live, two Deal Desk people on top of their day jobs.
Sales reps quote in it and Deal Desk administers it, with no outside partner.
Braze had reached the point, as a public company, where pricing in an Excel calculator and approvals over email no longer met its financial and accounting compliance needs. Reps added opportunity products by hand, discount data was whatever the sales team reported about itself, and the Deal Desk that structured every deal had no audit trail and no way to report on any of it. The C-suite asked for automated pricing. Deal Desk, the team that sits between pricing and packaging, legal, revenue accounting and sales, ran a 10-vendor RFP from small startups to the legacy heavy hitters, with one criterion a lot of the field could not meet: a tool the team could administer in-house, so that no product, SKU or pricing change would wait on an outside partner.
We're a public company now and our pricing lives in an Excel calculator. What do we show an auditor when they ask how a discount was approved?
Our discount data is whatever the reps who gave the discounts report. How do we report average discount per rep or per team on a number we can't trust?
Our approvals run over email. Where is the audit trail when Legal or Revenue Accounting asks for it?
Our pricing is complex and so is every enterprise CPQ we've demoed. Are we going to contract a partner every time we add a SKU or something breaks?
| Before | After |
|---|---|
Pricing lived in an Excel calculator, and reps keyed opportunity products into the CRM by hand. | Pricing rules sit in DealHub CPQ, opportunity products create automatically in Salesforce, and Deal Desk reports discount by rep and by team. |
Approvals ran over email, with stakeholders chasing contract versions and updates. | Approvals run in the system with an audit trail that Legal, Revenue Accounting and Finance can report on. |
A complex pricing model needed a tool that could hold it without becoming complex to administer. | Deal Desk configures complex pricing and approval rules itself, in a tool that is not complex to run. |
Braze needed a tool both sales reps and system administrators would adopt, after previous tools had failed on complexity. | Reps quote through a guided selling flow, and an admin with no prior systems background runs the configuration. |
On other CPQs Braze evaluated, implementation and every later change meant contracting an outside partner. | Deal Desk adds net-new SKUs itself in a matter of weeks, ahead of pricing and packaging's deadlines, with no partner in the loop. |
DealHub AI gave Braze's Deal Desk one system for pricing, discounts and approvals, with an audit trail. Previously, pricing ran in an Excel calculator, approvals ran over email, and the only discount data was what reps reported about themselves. Now discount by rep and by team is reported from the system, and every approval can be shown to an auditor.
“We were doing our pricing in Excel… I don’t know if I’m necessarily gonna trust self-reported discounts… Having that all in the system with a clear audit trail and being able to report on it was just a huge win.”
“Unlike a lot of the other competitors in your space where you need to contract with outside vendors or partners to set up implementation… Am I gonna have to contract with a partner every time I wanna make an update… There’s no time for downtime.”
“We had someone who has had no experience in the past administering or implementing a system… And then now is a superior DealHub admin in couple of months time… Really easy to manage if you’re a system administrator.”
“You’re able to configure complex pricing and complex approval workflows and complex configurations in a tool that is by no means complex… A tool like DealHub is very simple and straightforward, but can still support and manage that level of complexity, which is huge.”
Global Deal Desk, which ran the 10-vendor RFP and the implementation on top of its day jobs, with the DealHub AI implementation team.
Business-administered. Deal Desk sets pricing guidelines, discount approval rules and SKU changes itself, with no partner or developer.
Kickoff in October, live in March, across the holidays and Braze's fiscal year-end, with a two-person team and no dedicated project manager.
Sales reps and Deal Desk admins together at go-live, with the DealHub AI implementation team on a projector in the Braze office from nine to five through launch week.
Salesforce (CRM, automatic opportunity product creation).
Low ongoing. Deal Desk administers the tool in-house, and the interim admin who took it on had never administered or implemented a system before.
DealHub is ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 22301, and ISO 42001 certified, holds SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2 Type II attestations, and is GDPR and CCPA compliant, alongside additional security, privacy, and compliance frameworks.
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