Tipalti runs payables automation for high-growth finance teams, and it sells a platform subscription alongside the transaction volume its customers actually move. That second half made every deal hard to price. Each rep kept a spreadsheet, formulas broke, and leadership had no annual consumption number it trusted. Tipalti's Sales Ops team replaced those spreadsheets with a consumption estimator built inside a DealHub CPQ playbook, and moved approvals out of email into Salesforce. The same team now changes pricing logic, approval chains and pilot rules itself, and ships a change globally in days.
Live globally in six months, against the 12 to 18 months other CPQs quoted.
Most approval chains now clear inside four hours, down from one to three days.
Down from 40% of the team's time on manual work to under 10%.
Tipalti sells a platform fee alongside transaction-based payments, so the number that decides a deal is annual consumption billing, and nobody could predict it. Each rep kept a spreadsheet of their own. Formulas broke, assumptions drifted from one rep to the next, and a single bad cell became a wrong estimate and a late close. Sales Ops spent hours pulling the numbers back together, and leadership had no forecast it was willing to stand behind. Every hybrid deal was a black box.
Half of what we sell is consumption we have not billed yet. How do we put a number on next year that we are willing to stand behind?
Every rep is pricing from a spreadsheet they built themselves. Which of those assumptions is wrong, and how would we ever know?
An approval sits in an inbox until somebody on the other side of the world wakes up. What is that costing us on every deal we are trying to close?
The last systems we used needed a specialist for every change. How long do we wait the next time we want to test a price?
| Before | After |
|---|---|
Approvals lived in email threads, order forms went out as static PDFs from Salesforce, and a discount request was a free-text note with no audit trail. | Sales Ops reads discount levels, margin impact and approval trends inside Salesforce, and an approver clears a chain by replying rather than logging in. |
Every configuration change on Tipalti's earlier systems went to a specialist or an offshore team, and Sales Ops could not set the date it landed. | Sales Ops edits pricing logic, product records and approval rules itself, with no ticket and no specialist in the path. |
Launching a pricing or product pilot meant IT involvement and months of setup, so every experiment left technical debt behind. | Sales Ops turns a pilot on for one team, region or product, collects the feedback, and rolls it out globally when it works. |
Spreadsheets produced a static estimate, and nobody could check it against what the customer went on to consume. | Sales Ops compares predicted consumption against actual each year and tunes the estimator on what it finds. |
Sellers worked from email attachments and versioned PDFs, with no view of whether a customer had opened anything. | Reps quote inside a guided playbook and share a DealRoom where they see who opened the quote and who it was passed to. |
Moving faster on price meant working around the process, because the process was the thing that made it slow. | Sales Ops ships a global pricing change in days with the approval guardrails and the audit trail intact. |
“One of the most unique things… was the ability to build in this, what we call an estimator… And that’s where DealHub really stood out as being unique. That and the quickness and ability to be able to do it ourselves.”
Heather Taylor
Director of Global Sales Operations
Tipalti's Sales Ops team got a pricing model it could build rather than one it had to accept. Previously, annual consumption billing was a guess assembled from spreadsheets each rep kept, so no two deals ran on the same assumptions. Now the estimator reads historical usage inside the playbook and returns ACB and margin at quote time.
Tipalti's Director of Global Sales Operations, with the Sales Ops team owning configuration from go-live onward.
Business-owned. Sales Ops holds pricing logic, product records, discount rules and approval chains, with no specialist or offshore team in the change path.
CPQ, Contract Management and DealRoom went live globally in six months. Other CPQs Tipalti evaluated quoted 12 to 18 months for the same scope.
Global go-live, then continuous piloting. Tipalti has run eight or nine pricing and onboarding pilots since, each toggled on for a single team, region or product first.
Salesforce, as the system of record. Quotes, approval decisions and estimator forecast data all write back to it.
Low on engineering. Sales Ops built the estimator and the playbook logic inside DealHub CPQ with no code and no offshore development team.
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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