A prospect emails Tuesday asking for a quote. Your sales rep sends it Wednesday. Finance reviews Thursday and flags a contract question. Legal stalls for four days. Customer signs Monday. You invoice Wednesday. Payment terms are net-30. Sixty-three days after the first email, you see cash. Most teams think this is normal. It is not. It is a chain of nine handoffs, and at least three of them are probably running serially when they could run in parallel. Another two likely have no owner at all—which is why they drift. I've mapped the nine points where this cycle stalls, identified who typically owns each one, and what actually unblocks it. If your sales and finance teams are spending 45+ days between a signed contract and cash receipt, you're probably bleeding revenue and killing deal momentum on something fixable. Handoff 1: Quote creation to approval This is where most cycles grind to a halt on day one. A sales rep builds a quote in your proposal tool, your CRM, or a spreadsheet. Someone in finance or leadership reviews it before the customer sees it. If the approval happens synchronously (a Slack message, a quick call), this takes a few hours. If it's async, it's 24–72 hours. The usual friction: pricing isn't templated, discounts aren't pre-approved, or SKUs are made up on the spot. If your rep is inventing products or margins, finance has to check the math and often finds errors. If they do, the quote goes back to sales. Another day or two lost. Who owns this: Sales leader or deal ops. If there's no clear approval gate, deals stack up in someone's email backlog until they remember to check it. How to unblock it: Pre-approve discount bands and pricing rules. Lock your product catalog so reps can't invent SKUs. Route quote approval through a single person with decision authority, not a committee. If your CRM has approval workflows, use them—they timestamp handoffs and keep deals from disappearing. Orin's CRM includes quote templates and approval routing that make this synchronous rather than a guessing game about who's supposed to sign off. Handoff 2: Quote to contract generation Once the customer approves the pricing, someone has to turn it into a contract. This should take 30 minutes. In most companies, it takes three days. A contract template exists somewhere (maybe multiple versions), a legal or operations person fills in terms, they send it over for another review, and then it goes to the customer. The handoff usually happens async, and contract terms sometimes don't match the quote exactly, forcing a renegotiation. Who owns this: Operations or legal. If no one is explicitly responsible, contracts don't get drafted at all—they live as an implicit to-do in someone's head. How to unblock it: Automate contract generation from the quote. If your quote tool can populate a contract template with customer name, terms, and pricing in a single action, this handoff collapses from days to minutes. Pre-built contract templates with e-signature capability let you generate and send the contract to the customer on the same day the quote is approved. Handoff 3: Contract to signature The contract arrives in the customer's inbox. Now they have to sign it. This is where another 5–15 days vanish. Customers don't open contracts immediately. They might need internal legal review. They might ask for changes. They might lose the email. If you're sending a Word doc and asking them to sign and return it, you've already lost a week. If you're using DocuSign or a native e-signature tool, the timeline compresses to 1–3 days, but only if you follow up aggressively and the customer doesn't request redlines. Who owns this: Sales rep, but only if they chase it. Most don't. They send the contract and wait for the customer to return it. If the customer forgets, the deal stalls. How to unblock it: Use e-signature that sends reminders automatically. Include a signature request that shows the customer exactly where to sign—no ambiguity. Make sure your e-signature tool tracks when the customer opens the contract, so you know when to follow up. Send the signature request the same day the contract is generated, not two days later. Handoff 4: Signature to invoicing setup The customer signed Tuesday. Now finance has to set them up in your invoicing system. This seems mechanical, but it's another 2–5 day delay. Finance has to create a customer record, verify tax IDs (NPWP in Indonesia, NRIC in Malaysia, UEN in Singapore), confirm payment terms, and set up billing contact info. If any tax information is wrong or missing, invoicing fails downstream and the whole cycle restarts. If the customer has no tax ID on file, you can't issue an invoice at all in some jurisdictions. Who owns this: Finance or billing operations. If this is manual data entry, it's slow and error-prone. If no one has explicit ownership, signed contracts sit in a folder waiting for someone to notice. How to unblock it: Capture tax ID and billing info during the quote or contract