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. The Senior Director, Deal Strategy & Enablement leads the global commercial center of excellence responsible for cradle-to-grave management of deals across the Opportunity-to-Cash (O2C) process.

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.

• Co-own the Commercial Transformation alongside the VP, Revenue Operations and the broader GTM Operations leadership and VP, Commercial Finance, ensuring the function delivers against the strategic shifts (capacity allocation, list pricing, approval governance, demand shaping).

• Build the function's brand internally — make Deal Strategy & Enablement the team Sales asks to be staffed on their deals!

• Deal orchestration and cycle acceleration
  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.

• Deal Governance ownership
  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.

• Productized enablement
  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.

• Pricing Inspection and Insights
  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)

• Cross-functional partnership
  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.

• Salesforce-native operating knowledge. Can design and validate Salesforce 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.