Commercial Manager, Financial Services

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us to achieve our mission. 

Do you want to be part of a commercial sales management team at one of the largest cloud companies in the world at the most exciting transformative times in the industry?   The UK Commercial Manager is sales leader and people manager with exceptional stakeholder relationships, commercial acumen and coaching skills who has a proven track record of building commercial proposals and negotiating complex and strategic deals. The Commercial Manager is a critical business role that provides coaching and guidance in the creation of sales opportunities through to customer signature. This role will be aligned to our Financial Services Segment. 

• Core Competencies:  Organizational Leadership, Strong Business & Commercial Accumen, Negotiation, Strategic Insights, Trusted Advisor, Commercial Team Leadership, Written Commnication 
• Professional Competencies: Adaptability, Customer Focus, Drive for Results, Creativity, Influencing Impact, Judgement, Collaboration, Executive Maturity/Presence,  Analytical Problem Solving, Risk Analysis
• Related experience in: Commercial or Sales Management Roles, Customer facing Negotiation,Opportunity/Deal Orchestration and managing/building a high performing team.  
• Excellent communication and analytical skills with the ability to distill complex thoughts and strategies into simple, actionable recommendation. 

People Management

• In this role you will be People Manager of up to 10 as part of a larger team of 40+ strong Commercial Executives.
• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Commercial and Deal management  

This is a high paced customer centric part of the organisation focused on our largest commercial and public sector organisations. As a people manager you will be helping your team create and deliver on some of the most exciting customer transformation with a focus to include:

• Coaching the team to build customer-centric offers, whilst negotiating the best commercial and contract structure to maximise revenue from Microsoft and accelerate the business.  
• Demonstrates customer understanding and connects with customers to understand business drivers impacting commercial needs (e.g., productivity gains, financial impact to a customer, Opex versus Capex). 
• The accountability of deal management tracking deals to close.  
• Driving the creation of best practices for deal making and building consistency across deals. 
• Coach your team to examine deals from different angles (e.g., year over year), modelling different variables to make the most effective deal.  
• Coaches team to ensure compliance is embedded in the deal making process.
• Bring strong communication skills with an ability to summarise complex scenarios and provide clarity.  In particular when explaining commercial structures, investment processes, T&Cs and briefing stakeholders in the business. 
• Coach the team to apply sales methodologies (e.g., Value Selling). Supports the design of the appropriate negotiation strategies.

Collaboration and alignment with teams across the UK business  

Microsoft is an exciting environment with many teams focused on the customer from Account Management, Specialist Sellers, Customer Success, Support Service, Finance and Legal teams to name a few. In this role you will bring the best of your collaboration skills to work across the organisation as your support your team shaping deals. This includes:  

• Demonstrates strong leadership and engagement with multiple stakeholders to ensure that all Microsoft solution capabilities are represented. 
• Assesses when executive engagement is necessary due to deal size, complexity, or strategic importance. 
• Work collaboratively with the partner ecosystem to drive successful business outcomes through partner commercial sales. 
• Partner closely with UK Finance, Sales teams, Business Desks, CELA and specialist sales team to all aspects of the deal creation.
• Feedback and Influence where the development of local programs are required.
• Foster sharing of best practices and strategies across internal teams

Building a Customer Centric Engagement

The commercial deal construct enables customers use of our technology to empower their organisations. As a Manager you will help your team build commercial proposals which enable technology across the customers business with the following areas:

• Coach others to orchestrate across a range of internal and external stakeholders at senior levels.
• Fosters alignment across teams, especially with regard to aligning Microsoft portfolio and customer business outcomes.
• Demonstrates customer understanding. Works within portfolio to gain strategic position.
• Build customer-centric offers. Oversee the building of the best contract structure to enable capitalization on opportunities.
• Presents and speaks at a C-level audience to understand business solutions outside of technology solutions (e.g., productivity gains, financial impact to a customer, Opex versus Capex and understands the terminology of working at this level.
• Lead you team to the desired outcome while anticipating potential escalations and customer reactions from an ethical selling perspective.