Business Development Manager, Mult-National Customer at Microsoft

Job number: 1191997
Travel: 25 - 50 %
Profession: Business Programs & Operations
Role Type: Individual Contributor
Employment Type: Full-Time

Job Overview

• Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Africa is one of the best places on the planet to bring our mission to life. It is home to 1.3B people and 54 countries.
• The talent in Africa reflects a tremendously rich and diverse potential that can truly impact the world over the next few decades. Being the youngest continent in the world with a median age of just 19.5 years, Africa is contributing to +12M youth being added to the global labor force every year. By 2040, half of the world's young people will live in Africa. Africa's growth is propelled by being a mobile first continent which is fueling connectivity, innovation, and scalability.
• Our aspiration is to transform Africa to a Cloud-first, Digital-first continent enabling a thriving digital economy across Africa while reinventing Microsoft's digital assets and capabilities to serve the young continent's transformation needs.

With that in mind was the establishment of new team; the Africa Transformation Office (ATO), which will be established and chartered with the following: 

• Build strategic, unconventional partnerships with key governments, institutions and enterprises to enable and accelerate digital economy across the African continent.
• Develop digital marketing engines to enable and accelerate Startups and SMBs.
• Plan and land infrastructure enablers and game-changers in the continent.
• Enable Africa as a Foreign Direct Investment destination supported by expanding our technologies for MNCs across key industries.
• Manage the 4Afrika initiative and further integrate it to key company programs and engines to amplify its impact.
• Foster digital skilling and job creation to maximize the economic opportunity for the African youth and workforce.
• We are excited to be hiring a Business Development Manager to focus on MNC's within our Strategic Partnership pillar to bring this strategy to life.

Responsibilities

• Identifies appropriate Mult-National Customers (MNCs) and other pan-African large organizations to partner with/sell to through conducting customer assessment of their current needs and defining a value proposition to meet those needs.
• Evaluates, prioritizes, and pursues market opportunities and trends across specialists that provide opportunities for partners/customers to leverage Microsoft platforms/products by identifying, quantifying, and qualifying opportunities.
• Contributes to evaluation of opportunities and leads account planning in cooperation with partners to identify and prioritize goals and objectives for an achievable target.
• Identifies and incorporates other internal teams (e.g., Global Accounts teams, Downstream teams, product, engineering, finance, legal, sales, marketing) and business leaders to help inform and align the strategy.
• Designs 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.
• Ensures strategic deals incorporate relevant market factors (e.g., competitive, economic, industry-specific) to drive optimal results and return on investment.
• Empowers a strong customer presence through a deep customer focus and strategic development, attracting and committing customers to the journey through integration of customer feedback.
• Builds prospective pipelines and opportunities into deals. Creates a strong customer focus throughout strategic development and brings customer along for the journey. Integrates information from prior engagements and learnings to build an improved strategy.
• Contributes to the understanding of customer needs, gains internal customer alignment, and mobilizes partners to achieve the strategy.

Stakeholder Management:

• Drives identification of the appropriate executive-level stakeholder within customers to connect and work with, in cooperation with Business Development and in pursuit of new business generation.
• Drives the orchestration of sales or partnership pursuits with customers/partners.
• Acts as the voice for customers/partners within internal teams and across the organization to design, implement, and plans/programs. Drives customer awareness of and builds connections with key influencers/players, as well as Microsoft's value proposition, in order to create effective customer models and strategies.
• Drives creation and management of connections between necessary stakeholders within Microsoft and customers. Builds strategic connections with customers and partners across multiple engagements with Microsoft.
• Builds trusted advisor partnerships with cross-functional leaders and managers, representing the organization to area leadership.
• Begins to accomplish initiatives through influencing cross-functional (e.g., finance, engineering, legal, commercial, product, sales segments) and multi-country team members. Influences and deals with resource (e.g., cash) founding to ensure the availability of resources and appropriate resource allocation. Proactively identifies and drives cross-functional strategic and communication alignment to the customer/partner.
• Designs internal orchestrations and influences assurances, and contributes to internal feedback loops with stakeholders to align resources, plan up, and support strategic growth.
• Builds the internal strategy for orchestrating development of sales opportunities and across the organization, especially in solution sales management (e.g., cloud, data) to drive effective capabilities.

Deal Negotiation:

• Drives discussions with customers/partners to align and determine customer/partner and Microsoft needs and desired outcomes for the region.
• Negotiates with and influences existing and new customers/partners in long-term planning to form a strategically-driven deal. Identifies, engages with, acquires support from, and negotiates internally with key stakeholders (e.g., product, engineering, finance, legal, sales, marketing) to move forward with negotiations.
• Drives financial responsibility and alignment with profit and loss strategy. Contributes to driving awareness of the necessary protections, compliance, or security regulations within the market.

Closing the Deal:

• Finalizes mutually beneficial customer/partner deals by ensuring all portions of the strategy have been executed on, in participation with internal partners (e.g., Sales Team).
• Contributes to creating an action plan that spans across the end-to-end strategic landscape to ensure the deal is properly closed through the integration of reports, risk analyses, driving agreements, and assessing value in strategic deals.
• Contributes to the public relations and communications strategy of the deal. Coordinates and works with all necessary internal stakeholders in the deal (e.g., finance, engineering, legal, commercial, product, sales segments) to assure that the deal is closed successfully.
• Contributes to conversations and coordinates with Microsoft's legal team to ensure that contracts are signed, that the deal is effectively closed, and that there is compliance between teams.

Reporting:

• Interprets, adds to, and applies reports to add value in generating and executing communication plans. Interprets and provides suggestions for improvements on long-term strategies and outcomes of deals across portfolios or areas of focus.
• 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.

Other:

• Embody our culture and values.

Required / Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years Africa market exposure.
• 5+ years working with Multi-National organizations.
• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Finance, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field and 10+ years experience in business development, sales, consulting, or marketing
• OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years project leadership/management experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Business Administration, Finance, Computer Science, Law, or related field AND 8+ 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.
• 8+ years experience in a related business/ functional domain.