Overview
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As a Business Development Director, you will play a critical role in driving strategic growth through customer and partner engagement, executive relationship development, and business planning.
In this 12 month contract role, you will identify and accelerate new business opportunities, develop account growth strategies, and lead complex, high impact engagements that deliver measurable business outcomes. Working closely with senior customer decision makers, partners, and cross functional teams, you will build trusted relationships, influence strategic priorities, and drive mutually beneficial business results.
You will leverage industry expertise, business insight, and a deep understanding of market dynamics to shape customer strategies, negotiate strategic agreements, and execute growth initiatives across multiple stakeholders and geographies. Success in this role requires strong executive presence, stakeholder management, strategic thinking, and the ability to orchestrate diverse teams to achieve ambitious business objectives.
If you are passionate about building strategic partnerships, influencing executive leaders, and driving transformational business outcomes, this role offers an exciting opportunity to make a meaningful impact while helping customers, partners, and Microsoft achieve more.
Responsibilities
Deal Strategy
- Proactively identifies and determines high-impact parties to partner with/sell to through orchestrating a partner/customer assessment of their current needs and defining a value proposition to meet those needs. Prioritizes and pursues large and transformative market opportunities and trends for Microsoft that provide opportunities for partners/customers to leverage Microsoft platforms/products by identifying, quantifying, and qualifying opportunities. Evaluates opportunities and leads account planning in cooperation with partners to identify and prioritize goals and objectives for an achievable target.
- Leads end-to-end functional thinking and discussions to design and drive partner/customer strategic deals for a commercial strategic framework that are aligned with strategic business objectives and partner/customer current state and needs at an appropriate motion and cadence in cooperation with customers. Oversees that strategic deals incorporate relevant market factors (e.g., competitive, economic, industry specific, cyber risk) to drive optimal results, return on investment, and optimization along customer business outcomes as well as Microsoft's security principles. Ensures prospective pipelines and opportunities are built into deals across partners/customers. Empowers a strong customer presence through a deep customer focus and strategic development, attracting and committing customers to the journey through the integration of customer feedback. Ensures information from prior engagements and learnings are integrated to build an improved strategy. Drives understanding of customer needs, gains internal customer alignment, and mobilizes partners to achieve the strategy. Facilitates the incorporation and feedback of other internal teams (e.g., product, engineering, finance, legal, sales, marketing) and executive-level leaders to help inform the strategy.
Operations
- Drives feedback consolidation and provision from/to team members and partners/customers regarding experiences and potential improvements to strategic plans with a broad impact. Provides strategic insight into strategic plan attainment to drive continuous process improvements and sales leadership decisions. Takes steps to continuously learn and develop self, and mentor less experienced team members, by bringing losses to the forefront and growing from prior engagements. Drives continuously on customer centricity, technological intensity, and process simplicity.
- Leads the management of projects in alignment with strategic goals and security guidelines. Leads coordination of projects programmatically across the different areas of engagement with stakeholders and contributors to assure appropriate resources are available and that the project is executed in a timely manner. Creates objectives to assure that outcomes are achieved in accordance with goals. Aligns the vision, outcomes, and indicators of performance against strategic goals, and assures movement forward movement toward the goal by all contributing stakeholders and constituents across Microsoft (e.g., Microsoft Consulting Services partner, One Commercial Partner [OCP]) to meet outcomes and objectives.
- Leverages domain expertise in partnership with other subject matter experts to lead efforts to drive creative and innovative solutions and processes for diverse partners and customers to drive substantial business impact, and improve optimizations of workflow broadly. Drives and scales successes, thought leadership, opportunities for improvement, best practices, and learnings internally and externally (e.g., industry events) to help drive digital transformation deals. Brainstorms new initiatives and product/projects for partners in unexplored areas partners/customers in unexplored areas (beyond current offerings).
Reporting
- Interprets, adds to, and applies reports to add value in generating and executing communication plans while ensuring that secure data privacy practices are maintained. Interprets and provides suggestions for improvements on long-term strategies and outcomes of deals across portfolios or areas of focus. Maintains communications while adhering to data privacy practices and hygiene on handling customer information (e.g., adhering to GDPR, appropriately handling PII). Evaluates and drives iterations and decisions based on return on investment figures, profit and loss reporting, and lesson-learned sessions. Leverages reports (e.g., financial and strategic) to identify and recommend appropriate actions (e.g., correction of errors, acceleration where seeing success) based on trends and insights. Provides recommendations/requests for improvements in reporting to Microsoft to generate better insights. Leads organization and alignment of stakeholders by providing financial forecasts of business, assuring it is up to date, and informing all relevant stakeholders. Identifies issues from area leadership teams as they occur, and offers resolution actions with escalation of issues if necessary.
Stakeholder Management
- Drives identification of the appropriate executive-level stakeholder within customers to connect and work with, in cooperation with Microsoft's internal marketing Business Development and in pursuit of new business generation. Leads the emphasis of Microsoft's security principles to executive-level stakeholders in order to promote a security-first mindset across Microsoft's product portfolio, including AI products. Leads the orchestration of large-scale sales or partnership pursuits with customers/partners. Acts as the voice and a trusted advisor for customers/partners across the organization to design and oversee plans/programs. Connects customers/partners with key senior level influencers/players, as well as Microsoft's value proposition, in order to drive effective customer models and strategies. Leads creation and management of connections between necessary stakeholders within Microsoft and customers. Builds and leads strategic connections with customers and partners across multiple engagements with Microsoft.
- Builds trusted advisor partnerships with executive-level leaders and managers, representing the organization to area/regional leadership. Influences across the company to accomplish initiatives and achieve business goals, owning the relationships with cross-functional (e.g., finance, engineering, legal, commercial, product, sales segments) and multi-country team members. Proactively influences and deals with resource (e.g., cash) founding to ensure the availability of resources and appropriate resource allocation. Leads the process for ensuring ecosystem-wide strategic and communication alignment to the customer/partner, making adjustments when necessary. Drives design of internal orchestrations, influences assurances, and creates to internal feedback loops with stakeholders to align resources, plan up, and support strategic growth. Drives the building of internal strategy for developing sales opportunities and across the organization, especially in solution sales management (e.g., cloud, data, Security) to drive effective capabilities and align appropriate measures for cyber risk reduction.
Qualifications
Required/minimum qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Business, Finance, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field AND 15+ years experience in business development, sales, consulting, or marketing OR equivalent experience.
5+ years project leadership/management experience.
Additional or preferred qualifications
Master's Degree in Business Administration, Finance, Computer Science, Law, or related field AND 10+ years experience in business development, sales, consulting, or marketing OR equivalent experience.
5+ years experience working in a matrixed organization, preferably in the technology industry.
10+ years project leadership/management experience.
10+ years experience in a related business/ functional domain.
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
