Pricing-to-Approval Breakdown: A Stage 2–7 Anatomy Diagnosis of Coworking Sales 💲
- Sunil Dutt Jha
- Dec 27, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Use Case #6 of 12 — One Coworking Sales. One Anatomy™
Most coworking operators do not lose deals because pricing is unavailable or approvals are slow. They lose deals because the enterprise anatomy required to convert negotiated pricing into an approvable, executable commitment was never architected.
Discounts are agreed verbally. Exceptions are promised in calls. Broker commissions are negotiated late. Approval chains stretch across finance heads, regional leaders, and founders. What appears on the surface as a “pricing delay” is, in reality, a missing anatomical spine connecting sales intent to enterprise authorization.
This case applies the Stage 2–7 Problem Analysis Framework to one critical coworking sales use case — Pricing-to-Approval — to explain why repeated policy tightening, approval matrices, pricing tools, and dashboards fail to stabilize deal closure.
Why Stage 2–7 (and Not a Post-Mortem)
Traditional reviews ask why a deal stalled or why margins eroded. Stage 2–7 asks what was never architected in the first place.
Like a modern medical diagnosis, this framework examines the enterprise across strategy, process, systems/logic, components, implementation, and operations to surface structural absences, not operational mistakes.
Scope of This Diagnosis
This use case spans six departments from the Coworking Sales Enterprise Anatomy:
Sales (Enterprise and Local)
Finance / Pricing
Leadership / Approval Authorities
Broker Management
Legal (Commercial Clauses)
IT / Digital Platforms
Together, these departments form a single execution organism responsible for converting negotiated commercial intent into an approved, executable deal. This is the Pricing-to-Approval organ system.
Stage 2 — Strategy Analysis (P1): Intent Without Instruction
Each department had a valid strategy.
Sales aimed to close faster and win competitive enterprise accounts. Finance aimed to protect margins and standardize pricing discipline. Leadership aimed to control risk and preserve brand positioning. Broker teams aimed to maintain trust and commission clarity.
What was missing was a shared enterprise instruction set defining how pricing flexibility, approval authority, broker involvement, and deal velocity must work together to produce predictable closures.
Pricing strategy existed as principles. Approval strategy existed as hierarchy. What did not exist was an enterprise-level definition of pricing behavior — how discounts, tenure, seat type, client tier, and broker involvement interact as one executable system.
IT, notably, had no pricing or approval strategy at all — only tool delivery mandates derived from others. As a result, strategic intent never translated into enforceable enterprise behavior.
Stage 3 — Process Analysis (P2): Assumed Continuity
Pricing-to-Approval was treated as an obvious flow.
In practice, it existed only as:
sales conversations,
pricing sheets,
approval emails,
chat messages,
and individual memory.
No explicit enterprise process defined:
when a price becomes “official,”
what constitutes an exception,
how approvals differ by seat type, tenure, or client tier,
or how broker commissions affect approval thresholds.
IT implemented workflows to “speed things up,” but those workflows merely routed requests faster. They did not define the enterprise rules governing pricing authority.
Delivery logic substituted for enterprise process.
Stage 4 — Systems / Logic Analysis (P3): Floating Rules
Each department recognized its own events.
Sales recognized deal urgency. Finance recognized margin thresholds. Leadership recognized exception requests. Brokers recognized commission eligibility.
What did not exist was a shared pricing and approval event model.
Pricing rules lived inside spreadsheets. Approval logic lived inside people’s heads. Broker terms lived inside side agreements.
Business logic was embedded inside tools and emails rather than defined as explicit enterprise rules. Automation therefore scaled inconsistency instead of enforcing coherence.
Stage 5 — Component Analysis (P4): Tools Without Authority
Pricing tools, CRMs, approval trackers, and contract templates were all present.
What they lacked was alignment to a single sales object:
seat type,
tenure,
client tier,
broker involvement,
multi-location scope.
Components were designed to serve departmental convenience, not enterprise decision integrity. IT compensated through integrations that patched gaps rather than enforcing a common Pricing-to-Approval anatomy.
Stage 6 — Implementation Analysis (P5): Human Compensation at Scale
Tasks were executed competently, but they were derived from experience, urgency, and negotiation — not from explicit anatomy.
Observed task impact for this use case:
Sales: +5–7 new tasks, 4–5 refined
Finance / Pricing: +4–6 new tasks, 3–4 refined
Leadership / Approvals: +3–5 new tasks, 2–3 refined
Broker Management: +3–4 new tasks, 2–3 refined
Legal: +2–4 new tasks, 2–3 refined
IT / Digital Platforms: +6–8 new tasks, 5–7 refined
These increases did not reflect inefficiency. They reflected missing enterprise anatomy finally being compensated by people.
IT showed the highest churn because it absorbed ambiguity across all other departments.
Stage 7 — Operational Analysis (P6): Deals Close, Trust Erodes
Operations produced outcomes — approved discounts, signed MoUs, closed deals.
What they could not explain were:
inconsistent deal timelines,
repeated re-approvals,
broker disputes,
margin leakage,
and unreliable forecasts.
Efficiency existed.Coherence did not.
What Was Never Architected
The Pricing-to-Approval chain was never defined as one enterprise behavior.
It ran on negotiation memory, personal judgment, and escalation rituals — with IT acting as the compensating organ whenever breakdowns occurred.
Why This Is Different from Traditional Fixes
Traditional approaches add controls after disputes. Stage 2–7 derives authority from anatomy.
Traditional pricing tools accelerate approvals. Anatomy defines what can be approved, by whom, and why.
Traditional dashboards report deal delays. Anatomy explains why delay is inevitable without shared logic.
This is the difference between 1825 medicine and modern diagnosis.
CEO Closing Note
Pricing-to-Approval does not fail because sales negotiates too much or finance is too cautious. It fails because the enterprise anatomy connecting strategy, process, logic, components, implementation, and operations was never made explicit.
Once that anatomy exists, approvals stop being negotiations — and become predictable enterprise behavior.
Interested in a Diagnosis of Your Coworking Sales Anatomy?
This case illustrates how the Stage 2–7 Problem Analysis Framework exposes what was never architected in a critical coworking sales flow.
ICMG applies this diagnostic method across coworking and flexible-workspace operators to surface missing anatomy before pricing tools, approval policies, or automation initiatives are launched.
Organizations seeking to assess their own Pricing-to-Approval anatomy — or any other core coworking sales use case — may engage ICMG for an enterprise anatomy diagnosis tailored to their context.
Copyright & Attribution
The Stage 2–7 Problem Analysis Framework, One Coworking Sales One Anatomy™, and ICMG Enterprise Anatomy™ are proprietary intellectual property of ICMG (Internet Component Management Group).
This article is part of ICMG’s Coworking Sales Enterprise Anatomy diagnostic series and is intended solely for strategic and architectural analysis.Reproduction or derivative use without attribution is not permitted.
