Closing the quote-to-delivery gap with World Wide Technology

WWT’s Global PMO Director Mallory Woods on building the pre-sales rigor that sets delivery up to win.

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When a PM walks the customer through the plan and the customer goes, “that’s not what we agreed to,” most teams act like communication failed. Mallory Woods sees it differently. By the time you’re in that room, she’ll tell you, the damage was already done.

Mallory is Senior Director of Global PMO at World Wide Technology (WWT), one of the largest technology solution providers in the world. Before WWT, she spent eight years at Trace3 scaling the services business from $807M to $2.2B in revenue, owning the full services lifecycle, integrating four acquisitions, and supporting two PE exits.

In a recent webinar, Mallory sat down with Stawan Kadepurkar to talk about what it actually takes to close the quote-to-delivery gap in practice, and at enterprise scale.

Watch the full replay here.

Key takeaways:

• The quote-to-delivery gap persists regardless of org structure. The problem is missing connective tissue between functions, not reporting lines.
• Pre-sales scoping should be evaluated through a delivery lens. Could a PM pick up this SOW and know exactly what success looks like for the customer?
• A feedback loop between delivery and pre-sales requires shared data. Without a common baseline, you’re working off emotions and estimates.
• AI works best as a 30% head start. Not a replacement for critical thinking. The content still has to come from people.
• Heroics aren’t a delivery model. The goal is repeatability (not the impossible), and that requires process before tools, tools before people.

The quote-to-delivery gap isn’t where most teams look for it

One of the first things Mallory made clear: the quote-to-delivery gap isn’t a sales problem or a delivery problem. It’s a connective tissue problem, and it shows up regardless of how the org chart is drawn.

“I’ve been in organizations where sales and delivery are housed within the same leader. I’ve been in organizations where they’ve been separate. The same problem persists. It doesn’t matter where they sit in the organization.” — Mallory Woods

Sales is focused on winning the deal, while delivery is focused on executing the statement of work. Both are doing their jobs, but what’s missing is the process that ensures those two objectives are actually aligned before the contract is signed.

The consequence, when that alignment breaks down, tends to show up at kickoff. Or worse, mid-engagement.

Pre-sales scoping should be evaluated through a delivery lens

Mallory’s diagnostic for whether pre-sales was done right was simple: hand the SOW to a PM and ask whether they could run the engagement from it.

“Put your PM hat on. Because this is what you’re going to go in front of the customer with to establish expectations, assumptions, dependencies. Could you manage this engagement and know exactly what success looks like for that customer with what is on that paper?” — Mallory Woods

Most organizations can’t answer yes. The SOW is vague enough that delivery has to interpret it, and interpretation is where margin starts to erode. When scope shifts mid-engagement and the PM can’t hold the line because the original document didn’t draw one clearly, every judgment call becomes a margin decision.

The fix, in Mallory’s view, is to invest in the pre-work that makes the handoff clean.

The pre-sales feedback loop requires data

Getting sales and delivery aligned on a single engagement is one problem. Building a system that learns from every engagement is a harder one.

Mallory is working to close that second gap at WWT by creating a structured feedback loop between delivery outcomes and pre-sales inputs.

“I like to make this [feedback loop] grounded in data and reporting that we can report back to, versus getting in a room and talking about how we felt or how we perceived something to go to plan. You can’t argue with that.” — Mallory Woods

The goal is to embed delivery data at the task and phase level. With that data in hand, pre-sales can adjust. Without it, the same mistakes get made, and the feedback loop never closes.

In fact, Provus is built around exactly this problem: connecting what was quoted to what was delivered. But Mallory was clear that the platform is only part of the answer. “The tool is not going to solve the problem” of culture and communication, she said. It facilitates the process, but it doesn’t substitute for it.

Heroics aren’t a delivery model

One of the clearest moments in the conversation came when Mallory described what she was seeing in her team before she moved upstream: delivery professionals absorbing the consequences of pre-sales work.

“I was watching heroics. My team would pull off what looks like the impossible to make the customer happy, to deliver the outcome, and to try to fit it into whatever budget they had. As a leader, we owe that back to our team to say that shouldn’t be required.” — Mallory Woods

The problem with heroics is that they’re not scalable, and they’re expensive in ways that don’t always show up immediately. A team that has to be exceptional every time to make scoping work is a team burning out, and a business that can’t grow without finding more exceptional people.

“Having an entire team of rock stars that can pull off the impossible is not scalable.” — Mallory Woods

The alternative is repeatability. A process and a platform that give regular performers a structured starting point, so the outcome doesn’t depend on who happens to be on the project.

AI earns its place as a 30% head start

Mallory was neither skeptical of AI nor credulous about it. Her framing was purely practical: AI is useful where it accelerates work that humans still have to do. Where it tries to replace thinking, it falls short.

“If we can leverage AI to give us a 30% head start on any of the tasks that we’re operating on, it makes us faster and more efficient.” — Mallory Woods

At WWT, that looks like using AI to identify trends in delivery data. What it doesn’t replace is the judgment call, the consultative conversation with the customer, or the critical thinking that makes a services engagement go well.

“AI doesn’t solve all the problems. It doesn’t replace strategy. It doesn’t replace critical thinking.” — Mallory Woods

Building the consultative PM (and the culture around them)

The people dimension was, by Mallory’s account, the hardest part of this. And it’s where she’s spending most of her time at WWT.

Her approach: define a PM persona over a job description. Not what skills someone has on paper, but what attributes make them show up the right way with customers. Consultative. Curious about the outcome. Capable of looking around the corner on a delivery that hasn’t started yet.

“You can teach the practice of project management. But it’s very hard to teach that consultative lens or viewpoint.” — Mallory Woods

WWT is revamping its interview process around that persona, building questions designed to surface judgment and empathy alongside technical competence. The goal is to hire PMs that sales wants to bring into conversations, and customers want involved because their presence signals a higher likelihood of success.

Where services leaders can get started

The through-line in everything Mallory shared is that the quote-to-delivery gap is a solvable problem, but only if you’re honest about where it actually lives. Not in the tools or the reporting lines. It’s in the absence of a structured process that connects what was sold to what gets delivered, and feeds what was learned back into the next sale.

Start with the process, layer in the platform, then invest in the people who can carry it. That sequencing matters. Leaders who skip to the tool (or to AI) without the process underneath it tend to find that neither delivers what they expected.

If your delivery team is still absorbing the cost of pre-sales, book a demo to see how Provus gives services organizations the quoting infrastructure to close the gap before kickoff.

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