Senior Director, Deal Strategy & Enablement

About the role

Equinix is in the middle of a Commercial Transformation built to support 3x growth into 2027 and beyond. The transformation is reshaping how deals are scored, governed, structured, priced, and shepherded — with new capacity allocation logic, single-list-price economics, a new approval hierarchy, and a consolidated deal-governance operating system.

Key Responsibilities

• Function leadership and transformation
  Lead the global Deal Strategy & Enablement organization (~40 people across five regional pods) through the announced transition from Commercial Solutions to Deal Strategy & Enablement — moving from approvals to strategic orchestration.

• Empower bid management team supporting complex, high-value deal pursuits across all regions, standardizing the end-to-end proposal and RFP response process to improve win rates, accelerate deal velocity, and ensure pricing and commercial terms aligned with strategic growth targets.

• Own end-to-end deal-cycle accountability from qualified opportunity through booked. Publish weekly velocity dashboards covering days-to-booked, approver-stage cycle time, win rate on enablement-supported deals, and enablement-asset adoption.

• Drive each significant deal through the new approval hierarchy on behalf of Sales — proactively, with pre-modeled scenarios and pre-prepared approval packages and playbooks.

• Stand up and chair standing operating cadences with cross functional partners in Finance, Legal, Global Markets to remove approval friction at source.

• Partner with Sales leadership in their new role as primary deal approvers — preparing approval-ready packages, modeling commercial scenarios, and removing administrative drag from approver time with key insights to drive their decisions.

• Own and chair the consolidated Deal Governance operating system with ownership of continued evolution and key learnings to keep improving.

• Ensure approval decisions are documented, traceable, and consistently applied across regions; identify systemic patterns that warrant policy evolution.

• Maintain and evolve the CAPI (Capacity Allocation Prioritization Index) scoring model in partnership with Commercial Finance and Product. Drive CAPI maturity from Stage 0/1 (current) toward Stage 2 (Deal Benchmarking) and Stage 3 (Scaled Deal Scoring) as the Lead-to-Cash technology stack progresses.

• Own the Commercial Summary One-Pager, the Capacity Prioritization Template, and the broader library of standardized deal-review templates.

• Help drive automation / operationalization of deal guardrails in Salesforce — moving the team away from queue-based manual approvals where the policy can be embedded in tooling.

• Chair the monthly / quarterly Pricing Inspections as a strategic steering body — setting agenda, surfacing deal patterns and pricing analytics and recommendations that should help Commercial Finance to drive list-price calibration and discount-threshold evolution.

• Translate observed pricing behavior, win/loss patterns, and competitive dynamics into actionable input for Commercial Finance and Sales leadership.

• Serve as the senior commercial subject matter expert in pricing reviews, surfacing deal patterns that warrant list price or discount threshold change.

• Continuing Sales Support functions: The team retains the following functions but increasingly delivers them through productized policy and self-serve tooling rather than queue-based approvals:

  • ETF (Early Termination Fee) waivers and concession credits
  • Channel program and parity support aligned to our new Channel Strategy
  • Complex customer negotiations support
  • Business-related terms and conditions
  • Approvals for GTCs, MCAs, DSAs, and SOs
  • Sales enablement and deal structuring
  • Pricing agreements (transitioning from Siebel to Salesforce)
  • Broadly commercial engagement on special programs (Nvidia Fully Managed DGX, Liquid Cooling, Negotiated Price Increases, Power Price Program, Managed Services, Currency Conversion, Capacity Prioritization, JPS Private Offers, Comm Acceleration / GTG)

• Operate as a peer partner to Sales leadership (CRO, Sales SVPs), Commercial Finance, Legal, Operations, Regional Presidents, GTM Strategy & Transformation, and Product. Influence without authority. Represent Deal Strategy & Enablement at the Commercial Operations Leadership Team and serve as the deal-cycle voice in the Lead-to-Cash transformation steering.

• Partner closely with Commercial Finance on pricing realization, governance, deal-economics analytics, and drive thought leadership for capacity portfolio optimization.

Required Competencies

• Transformational leadership. Demonstrated experience leading a team through a redefinition of mandate and operating model. Track record of taking institutional change from concept to operationalized practice.

• System-design leadership. Designs the operating model, the templates, the governance, and the team structure — not just opining on individual deals.

• Builder, not opinion-giver. Cross-functional executive influence. Track record of operating effectively with Finance, Legal, and senior P&L owners (CRO, CFO, Regional Presidents) without formal authority. Earns credibility through outcomes.

• Enablement product mindset. Treats enablement as a product — with users, adoption metrics, and a roadmap — not as ad-hoc support. Has shipped templates, playbooks, or tools that other teams adopted at scale.

• Analytics fluency. Comfortable building and reading cycle-time, velocity, and conversion analytics. Can self-serve in Salesforce reporting. Translates data into commercial action.

• Coaching and reskilling. Experience moving an existing team into a new operating model without losing institutional knowledge. Has built and operationalized career ladders.

• ServiceNow-native operating knowledge. Can design and validate ServiceNow workflows, approval routings, and reporting. Comfortable in CPQ environments.

• Bias to action. Self-starting; works upstream of problems; does not wait for top-down direction to remove friction.

• Pricing and commercial sophistication. Deep working knowledge of pricing governance, discount frameworks, deal economics (margin, yield, IRR, NPV, cash impact), and commercial structuring across complex multi-product deals.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in deal desk leadership, commercial operations, revenue operations, pricing strategy, or strategic sales operations — with significant time in a transformation or system-design context.

• 5+ years leading global teams (40+ people across multiple regions) through an operating-model change. Demonstrated success operationalizing a new way of working, not just announcing one.

• Direct experience with Deal Governance, deal scoring or capacity allocation frameworks, and pricing committee operations.

• Proven track record influencing C-suite and senior cross-functional stakeholders without authority (CRO, CFO, Regional Presidents, General Counsel).

• Expert command of Salesforce and CPQ environments, including approval workflow design, reporting, and integration patterns.

• Familiarity with Lead-to-Cash transformation programs (Siebel-to-Salesforce migration experience a plus).

• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to brief executive audiences on commercial outcomes with clarity and rigor.