Job Summary
The Director, Commercial Solutions & Bid Management – Americas is responsible for supporting the GTM teams in America across multiple stages along the commercial journey, removing sales drag, enabling prioritized and consistent proposals, and ensuring centrally established processes and guidelines are followed. This commercial leader will be responsible for guiding globally established strategies to drive pricing and deal structure to closure, while partnering with peer global commercial leaders to establish consistent pricing discipline and approval standards, bid, quote, and order processing support globally.
Responsibilities
- Acts as a trusted advisor to the regional President, SVP Sales, CRO leaders, and regional leaders in DCS and DS BUs, Finance, Legal, Billing, Ops related to commercial and proposal pursuits
- Drive continuous scale improvements in the services delivered to supported teams in line with the overall vision and strategy of Equinix (e.g., scale to support across functions, identify automation opportunities for process enhancements within Commercial Solutions and Bid Management)
- Ensure timely and consistent responses to incoming RFPs/RFIs, increasing win rates and reducing wasted efforts and pursuits
- Align with Regional Sales, Regional Ops and Finance leadership to drive a balanced approach to competing objectives in meeting customer needs for new and renewing deals with profitable business for Equinix
- Manage and oversee commercial success through Channel partners, balancing matrixed decision-makers and stakeholders across various routes-to-market centered on driving growth and scale
- Tailor Equinix’s commercial value-prop aligned to strategic verticals and Customer ecosystems, Enterprise, Public Sector/Federal entities, Service Providers, etc
- Analyze and communicate key business insights to regional leaders, based on competitive pricing intelligence, sales pricing discipline, macroeconomic impacts, and win/loss analysis to shape and drive strategic GTM action plans and accelerate sales cycles based on historical trends
- Lead regional deal reviews with executive management, ensuring compilation of appropriate analysis, summary, historical customer trends, and translating complex customer asks into comprehensive and easy to understand business recommendations for speedy review and governance approvals
- Oversee support of solutions for strategic / global nonstandard customer requests and acts as a single point of escalation for Americas sales to solution; recommend global pricing approvals for complex new and renewing deals as a central lead consolidating inputs across multiple countries/regions
- Facilitate global pricing agreement recommendations and approvals across full product portfolio interlocking with key cross-functional stakeholders and collaborating with Legal and contract management to capture appropriate terms and conditions
- Invest in sales teams’ support engaging in complex customer negotiations through a mixture of customer interactions, escalations, and internal coaching to drive consistent best practices and represent Equinix’s business and values externally
- Manage Commercial Solutions and Bid Management team performance in the Americas by motivating and providing coaching, while driving the people-development strategy including location-based engagement and initiatives
- Ensures teams are properly positioning items critical to Equinix’s continued growth and profitability across all aspects of the commercial journey, such as annual price increases, churn avoidance, ecosystem and platform growth, evaluating long-term, risk/reward opportunities and contracting with strategic partners
- Provide leadership and guidance for escalations to other RevOps and business stakeholders to frame and execute Equinix’s GTM strategy
- Bring thought-leadership and a growth mindset to challenge existing commercial support managed processes based on industry best practice and trends to ensure Equinix is maintaining a best-in-class approach
Qualifications
- Experience leading a multi-functional commercial team focused on structuring large deals, negotiating with customers and internal stakeholders, and providing commercial and pricing support to Sales
- Ability to operate in a highly cross functional, multinational business, with a strong track record for leading teams, driving growth and performance in an inclusive and diverse environment
- Prior experience in Data Center, Cloud, Telecommunications and/or IT industry is desirable
- Analytical thinker and problem solver with the ability to work under pressure and multitask while managing a team and driving process improvements
- Excellent communication and presentation skills; prior experience presenting to executive management
- People-focused leader with proven ability to build creative, collaborative teams, develop people and link performance to overall business objectives
- Ability to build and maintain strong business relationships with key stakeholders and executive management as a trusted advisor to enable speedy resolution of escalations
- Ability to demonstrate ownership and proactively drive initiatives
- Excellent in MS Office and financial modeling
- Strong knowledge of contracts and commercial terms
- Demonstrates our critical competences of transformation leadership
- Deep customer-facing and market-facing experience
- Culturally aware and adept at working across multiple geographies
- Ability to thrive in a global, matrixed-based environment
