Welcome to article two of four in our order and quote exception approval series, brought to you by Nue! We’ve tapped into decades of experience to bring you approval best practices we see across sales-led B2B organizations.
These articles are more like modules than chapters—you can jump in wherever you need without losing the plot or read the full series to become an absolute legend.
Here’s a quick guide to the series:
When we say “approvals,” we can feel the collective flinch throughout the RevOps Co-op community. Those of us who’ve designed and implemented these processes know how quickly they can go sideways.
Approvals are one of those operational tasks that are easy to overengineer. And when that happens? Errors multiply, friction builds, and even the manager who insisted on a dozen routing rules ends up regretting it.
If you take ONE thing from this article, let it be the KISS method: Keep It Simple, Steven.
Whether you’ve built 20 approval workflows or are setting up your first, this guide gives you a practical framework and plenty of real-world lessons learned in the trenches.
Before we talk tech or rules, let’s talk timing.
If you're at a Seed to Series A company with a flat sales structure (think: fewer than 10 reps reporting to one manager), skip automation. These teams can handle approvals ad hoc—yes, even if it means texting someone at midnight.
Early-stage teams are also more likely to stretch the rules to win logos and prove viability. Risk tolerance is high. Control mechanisms? Not so much.
✅ Do automate approvals when:
Approach this like a consultant:
💡 Pro tip: Use your CRM or contract system to pull frequent exceptions. Real data beats guesswork.
When gathering requirements, ignore what your tech can do. Focus on your ideal state first. You can figure out feasibility later.
Ask questions like:
Then ask: “What exceptions have we seen or anticipate that I didn’t mention?”
Once you have the list:
Before anyone touches your CRM, map it out.
Great revenue operators can turn requirements into decision-tree logic. If that’s not your strength, bring someone in who can do it with you.
Your workflow map should include:
In our example, the business agrees the following circumstances do not require approval:
The business agrees the following circumstances require the following approvals:
Believe it or not, we’ve kept these rules simple for the sake of example. You may have different rules based on use case, fit of customer, and other factors not accounted for in this table.
The full decision tree would look something like this nightmare:
Here we are zoomed in on generalized pricing term logic:
This documentation will serve you very well as you develop user-facing training and your communications!
Once your logic is clear, ask: Can our tech handle this?
If you're running into walls, ask a RevOps peer whether it's a tooling issue—or a skill gap (we all have them).
Build in a sandbox, and recruit a few sales reps to test your logic. Their feedback now will save you a dozen tickets later.
Roll out your automation on a weekend.
Test edge cases, expired approvals, rejected deals, and weird data.
✅ Pre-launch checklist:
And no, this is not the week to take PTO.
📣 Golden rule: No one should be surprised on go-live day.
Create a staggered enablement plan:
Use real (but anonymized) examples of costly or risky exceptions. Make it relatable and business-relevant.
Training ideas:
Different people learn differently—and forget fast. Set expectations around how long you’ll support questions before they’re on their own.
Even the most thoughtfully designed approval processes will start to decay if you don’t revisit them. What seemed like a perfect logic tree six months ago might now be a tangled mess thanks to organizational shifts, new product lines, or changing pricing strategies.
The best approval flows are treated like products: maintained, iterated, and sunset when necessary.
Here’s how to keep your process sharp:
Plan to review your approval rules quarterly, or immediately after major GTM changes like:
Don't wait for a breakdown—schedule check-ins proactively.
Be alert to consistent complaints from the field. If reps are:
…that’s your sign to investigate and adjust.
Approvals are easy to add and hard to remove. Be ruthless about pruning:
Ask yourself: Does this rule protect the business, or just create busywork?
Set KPIs for your approval flow. Some examples:
Use these metrics to justify changes and identify friction before it becomes revenue-impacting.
Don’t let these mistakes derail your workflow:
❌ Too many approvers
Skip the manager parade. Let senior approvers escalate if needed.
❌ Redundant rule firing
Group exceptions and send one consolidated request.
❌ Approval overkill
If it’s not high risk or high cost, maybe it doesn’t need an approval at all.
❌ Using approvals as a training fix
Enable your reps—don’t micromanage them through logic gates.
❌ Skipping stakeholder alignment
No one likes surprise rules. Make decisions collaboratively.
❌ Building for edge cases
Rare issues = manual handling, not logic bloat.
❌ Never retiring old rules
Create a deprecation process before approval sprawl sets in.
❌ Rolling out without field testing
“If it works in sandbox…” isn’t good enough. Validate in the real world.
❌ Hiding the why
Explain each rule’s business impact. Make it transparent, not mysterious.
Building an approval process that actually works doesn’t mean making it airtight. It means making it useful.
Good systems don’t cover every edge case—they cover the important ones with minimal drag. Your job is to find the right balance between control and agility. That means pushing back on noise, tracking real impact, and iterating as you grow.
Treat your approval process like a product:
If it feels like overkill? It probably is.
Keep it simple. Keep it scalable. Keep it useful.
Looking for a better way to manage approvals? Approvals Pro by Nue helps Salesforce users run complex approval routing without coding or manual workarounds. Check it out here and tell them we sent you.
