The EnterpriseEdge 02 / Contracting and approval
The Approval Edge
Procurement, Finance, Legal, InfoSec and now AI governance were in none of the meetings where you built the case. They arrive at the end, they arrive sceptical, and they are measured on things nobody told you about. Dean spent two decades on their side of that table deciding which deals moved forward.
The job
Getting the deal through approval.
Procurement, Finance, Legal, InfoSec and now AI governance were in none of the meetings where you built the case. They arrive at the end, they arrive sceptical, and they are measured on things nobody told you about. Dean spent two decades on their side of that table.
What the hour covers
The work
What they actually evaluate
The criteria a commercial review runs on, which are rarely the ones your champion described. Where a strong deal becomes vulnerable, and what a reviewer is looking for when they ask a question that sounds like a formality.
InfoSec and AI governance
Security review was already a gate. AI governance is the new one, and most sellers walk into it unprepared: where the data goes, what the model was trained on, what happens to customer information, who is accountable when it gets something wrong. Deals now stall here that would have closed two years ago, and the stall rarely announces itself as a security problem.
The price challenge
How to answer price pressure by widening the value conversation instead of discounting on reflex. The reflex discount is the expensive one: it concedes the frame, and the frame is what the rest of the negotiation runs on.
Equipping your champion
How to hand your champion a value case and a risk case they can make through Procurement, Finance, Legal and security review when you are not there. In their words, at their level of detail, answerable under challenge.
The goal is not to beat Procurement. It is to become easy to approve.
Who leads it
Dean Edwards
Founder and CEO of ConvergSPT. Former Fortune 500 Chief Procurement Officer.
Dean spent more than twenty years running Procurement and Sourcing at Kaiser Permanente, Yahoo, Levi Strauss and Ingram Micro. As Chief Procurement and Supply Officer at Kaiser Permanente he delivered over $1 billion in savings against a $6 billion spend. At Levi Strauss he built a Procurement capability that had not existed before him, on the transformation team that took the company to its 2019 IPO. He founded ConvergSPT to help revenue teams engage Procurement as an ally instead of an obstacle.
Through ConvergSPT, Dean runs workshops and advisory sessions on Procurement engagement, plus deal-readiness frameworks for account planning and negotiation prep. His work is used by teams at CD&R, Tenable and BlackLine.
The other two edges
One hour is a third of the deal.
Enterprise revenue has to clear all three. The half day takes them in order, because the order is the argument.