Overview
Solution Builder is where sales teams assemble enterprise deals. But when a rep needed to offer something bespoke — a custom discount, a tailored bundle, a one-off concession — the tooling forced a slow detour through manual approvals and spreadsheets. Rep Selected Offers (RSO) brought that work into the product: structured, fast, and within guardrails.
Note: visuals and specific figures on this page are illustrative and NDA-safe. Swap in your own approved screenshots and metrics.
The problem
Reps had two bad options when a deal needed a custom offer: shoehorn it into rigid catalog products that didn't fit, or take it offline into spreadsheets and email threads that no system could see. Both eroded speed, accuracy, and governance.
"I know what I want to offer this customer. I just can't get the tool to let me do it — so I work around it."
— Recurring theme from rep interviews (paraphrased)- Slow: custom offers meant manual back-and-forth and approval delays.
- Risky: off-platform offers bypassed pricing and discount governance.
- Invisible: the business couldn't report on or learn from what reps actually offered.
Process
I anchored the work in three questions: What can a rep safely decide on their own? Where must the system step in? And how do we make the right path the fastest path?
Research & framing
Working with UXR, we mapped the real journey reps took when standard products didn't fit — including every workaround. That surfaced the decision points where governance actually mattered versus where it was just friction.
Explorations
I explored several models for how much freedom to give the rep — from a fully open form to a tightly templated picker. Prototyping these early let us pressure-test each against messy real-world deals before committing.
Key decision
We landed on a guardrailed builder: reps get real flexibility to shape an offer, but the system enforces limits in real time and routes anything beyond a rep's authority to the right approver — inline, without leaving the flow.
Solution
RSO turned a slow, off-platform workaround into a structured in-product flow. Three ideas carried the design:
Build offers in plain terms
Reps express the offer the way they think about it, and the system translates it into structured, reportable data behind the scenes.
Guardrails that teach, not block
Limits and policy checks surface as the rep works — explaining the boundary instead of failing silently or after submission.
Approvals inline
When an offer needs sign-off, the right approver is pulled into the same flow — no context-switching, no lost threads.
Impact
Replace these with your real, approved numbers.
Reflection
The hardest part wasn't the interface — it was deciding where to draw the line between rep freedom and system control, and making that line feel helpful rather than restrictive. The win came from designing guardrails that explained themselves, so reps trusted the tool instead of routing around it.
If I picked this up again, I'd push earlier on the reporting story — the structured data RSO captures is as valuable to the business as the speed it gives reps.