Approve Before the Sale, Not After
Ask most sales teams whether their orders go through an approval process, and the answer is yes. Ask when the approval happens, and the honest answer is often: after the quote is already in the customer's inbox. By the time anyone reviews the discount or the credit terms, the commitment has effectively already been made. The approval exists on paper. It just doesn't do the job it's there for.
A rubber stamp dressed up as a control
This happens gradually, not by design. An approval step gets added for a good reason, a large discount, an exception to standard terms, but it gets wired in at the point where reversing course is awkward: after the quote is sent, sometimes after the order is confirmed. At that stage, an approver isn't really deciding whether to allow the deal. They're deciding whether to be the person who unwinds a commitment a salesperson already made to a customer. Almost nobody chooses that fight, so the approval becomes a formality that gets clicked through.
Moving the gate to where it actually gates
The fix is structural, not cultural: reconfigure the approval to trigger on the conditions themselves, a discount above a threshold, credit exposure past a limit, non-standard terms, and require sign-off before the quote goes out, not after. That one change in sequencing turns the same approval step from paperwork into an actual decision point, because now an approver is choosing whether to let something happen, not whether to reverse something that already did. The approval logic doesn't need to get more complicated. It just needs to sit before the exposure instead of after it.
Our take
An approval that runs after a sale has already closed is a record of what happened, not a decision about whether it should have. Majorbird looks at where a client's real financial exposure sits, discounts, credit, contract terms, and makes sure sign-off happens before that exposure exists, not after. If your approval process is unclear on whether it gates decisions or just documents them afterward, that's a conversation worth having before it costs more than it ever caught. Talk it through with the Majorbird team.