Whitepaper
Designing the approval gate
AI removed the cost of producing work, so the bottleneck moved to the person signing it off. What a review step has to show to stay a control rather than a signature.
Who it is for: Sales ops, RevOps, and anyone who owns a review step that has quietly become a formality.
Have it sent to meWhy are sales approvals still slow after automating the workflow?
Because routing was never the bottleneck. AI made the documents cheap to produce, so more of them arrive at the same approver with no more time to judge them, and automating the routing simply delivers the backlog faster. The fix is redesigning what the gate shows, not how fast it moves.
Approval steps were designed when the things being approved were scarce. A custom quote took an afternoon and a redlined contract took a lawyer, so the cost of producing the work acted as a filter long before anything reached an approver. That filter is gone.
A model now drafts the quote, the proposal, the follow-up and the exception rationale in seconds. The volume arriving at the approval step went up and the time available to judge it did not. Automating the routing on top of that does not help: it delivers more, faster, to the same person.
The failure is quiet, and it looks like success. Approval rates climb towards a hundred percent, median time to approve falls, and disputes after signature rise. The gate is still in the workflow diagram and has stopped doing anything, which is worse than not having one, because everybody downstream believes the document was checked.
So the question is what a gate owes the person standing at it: the diff rather than the whole document, the provenance of every number, the one thing in here that is unusual, a rejection path as cheap as approval, and a record of what the approver was actually shown at the moment they decided.
Where this comes from
Read the underlying work before you ask for the file. If the pages below are not useful to you, the file will not be either.
Also in the library
- Data packThe GTM Stack Cost IndexWhat a go-to-market stack actually costs, counted across every tool we track rather than estimated, with per-seat and flat-rate medians kept apart.Read it
- Field guideThe Lens Model: a field guideOrganic traffic is falling and pipeline is not. The operating rhythm for that, in four moves a small team can run on one campaign in a fortnight.Read it