Role: Finance Director
Industry: Managed services
PromiseGuard: When do you first know a deal may be economically weak?
Finance Director: Usually before signature, if the information is visible. The warning signs are not only the discount. They are the combination of transition effort, payment timing, custom work, service levels and the assumptions people are using to protect the margin case.
PromiseGuard: Why does the problem show up later?
Finance Director: Because delivery is where the assumptions become real. Finance may see a clean model, but if the model assumes standard effort and the promise is not standard, the margin loss appears after kickoff.
PromiseGuard: What gets missed in approval?
Finance Director: The whole-deal view. One team approves the discount, another the legal term, another the implementation date. Each answer can be reasonable. The combined economics can still be weak.
PromiseGuard: What would you want before the deal goes out?
Finance Director: A one-page view of the promise and the economics behind it. I want to know which assumptions matter, which are evidenced, and what we are giving away beyond price.
PromiseGuard: Would another approval layer help?
Finance Director: Not by itself. More approvers can slow the deal without improving the decision. The quality of the information reaching the approver matters more.
PromiseGuard: What makes a review commercially useful?
Finance Director: It has to show the repair. If the answer is simply no, Sales will work around it. If the answer is “keep the customer outcome but change this one lever,” it becomes useful.
PromiseGuard: What would convince you to make the control mandatory?
Finance Director: Evidence. Run it beside our current process. Show me the issues it catches, the false alarms it avoids and whether the decisions correlate with later economics. Then we can talk about making it a control point.