Sales Pipeline stages like Discovery, Qualification and Proposal are important commercial milestones, but they are also natural control points to build in support for compliance checks without slowing the customer journey.
Each deal in the pipeline is, after all, a customer project, with unique risks and obligations, and each pipeline stage represents a project milestone.
Different industries have different forms of regulation, and organizations may have their own policies that add to any relevant legal regulation.
Sometimes applying the necessary checks needs specialist support, either in human or AI form, and it can be difficult for customer-facing teams to know when to call in that specialist support. New team-members may simply be unaware of the risks.
Getting that wrong can be costly in terms of legal, customer and reputational risk, fines and failed transactions.
A global technology company needed to ensure that global export control was in place. There were multiple, complex, overlapping compliance needs:
The legislation in these areas is complex and needs specialist support in some cases. In addition, the client had their own policy of conducting business ethically and responsibly, introducing a high standard for compliance.
Exposure to potential fines, risk of loss of export licences and reputational damage were measured in billions of dollars.
However, it is important not to complicate the customer journey with unnecessary review steps. So how do we ensure the right compliance checks are in place without slowing things down unnecessarily?
We automated key aspects of the compliance needs to deliver:
To ensure compliance, the projects requiring specialist review could not move to subsequent stages with activities such as Quote, Order, Ship, Pay Commission, or Complete KPI without the output of the review process.
The specialist review process itself is a prime target for AI assistance for the reviewer, or even AI agents performing some reviews autonomously.
If implementing an agentic approach, it is important to have a clear, policy-based decision framework to define which decisions can be made by AI, which need human approval and which cannot be made by AI.
The Result
The automated approach to applying the client policies and compliance checks worked very well, and was even a driver for adoption.
The majority of projects were able to move swiftly through the process without any specialist review. Those that needed review were managed in a priority queue and reviewed in a timely and compliant manner which ensured that any necessary special handling was carefully understood and discussed with the customer teams and embedded in contracts.
Critically, as policies and legislation evolved, updates were retrospectively applied to active projects, ensuring real-time compliance. Automated restricted-party checks via external data feeds proved especially valuable as global trade rules shifted.
This solution ensured that the client experienced no compliance issues and, in fact, drove adoption of the corporate CRM solution by acquired or start-up business units due to the time and cost savings compared with implementing a parallel global compliance review process.
Considering the extent of the potential fines, risk of loss of export licences and reputational damage, there was a very significant ROI on this automation.
The client achieved stronger governance, reduced risk and a smoother customer journey without slowing commercial velocity.
Embedded compliance checks accelerated CRM adoption across newly acquired and start-up business units, unifying compliance and sales processes and reducing duplicated spend.
Stage transitions with embedded business rules can guide and enforce company standards, but also take care not to load too many restrictions into the deal flow. Automate where you can for velocity and real-time compliance as things change.
The compliance specialists are still accountable for the policies. Use automation to scale the specialist knowledge and guide customer-facing teams.
At the end of the day, your customer journey and the internal process should be as simple as possible.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein, just not simpler than that.