Director, Deal Desk

FreeWheel, a Comcast company, provides comprehensive ad platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers. Powered by premium video content, robust data, and advanced technology, we’re making it easier for buyers and sellers to transact across all screens, data types, and sales channels. As a global company, we have offices in nine countries and can insert advertisements around the world.

Job Summary

FreeWheel, a Comcast Company, is looking for a strategic leader for our expanding Deal Desk function. The Director, Deal Desk will be a data-driven leader, responsible for leading the Deal Desk team across our supply and demand verticals. This will be a high visibility role working with various internal customers including FreeWheel’s senior leadership team, and will report to the Executive Director, Revenue Optimization. The ideal candidate will have experience working in a fast-paced environment and collaborating with cross-functional teams to achieve revenue goals. It is critical that this candidate be able to balance between managing the team’s tactical support of the pipeline (deal flow) with strategic / portfolio level improvements to the deal desk process as we seek to scale this function across the company.

Job Description

Core Responsibilities

• Partner cross-functionally with Sales, Finance, Sales Strategy, Product Marketing, and Legal to design, negotiate and sign better deals that grow revenue and/or margins, through:
  • Enhancing configurable deal model templates to optimize results for each deal type, compare different scenarios, and evaluate vs. historical / similar deals
  • Measure initial baseline and establish targets for net revenue margin (eCPM) for each customer segment and/or deal type, taking into account market dynamics
  • Expand support for new types of commercial structures, including margin-based deals, working with Sales and Sales Strategy to develop a playbook for consistent execution
  • Partner with Revenue Operations to measure and monitor deal performance (results) vs. expectations, and establish a feedback loop for future deals and rate card evolution

• Define, implement, and optimize the end-to-end Deal Desk process to accelerate time-to-close for all FreeWheel new business, renewals, and up-sells, by:
  • Streamlining deal review framework for more repeatable deal support and review with minimum standard checklist(s) and executive summary memos for decision making
    • Wherever possible, these processes should be implemented within Salesforce to phase out any offline / manual tracking in place
  • Partner with Revenue Operations to digitize, and automate wherever possible, the end-to-end deal process from proposal through to close, inclusive of intake/prioritization, internal review and approval, negotiation, and deal execution
  • Automate the sourcing of operational data inputs for deal models to reduce time spent building deal models, and drive consistency with subsequent deal performance tracking

• Expand the Deal Desk’s support to additional internal customers across the supply and demand verticals, balancing deal/pipeline coverage relative to opportunity size and risks
  • Centralize deal governance for consistent checks and balances, while tiering level of review/approval required based on the size of the deal and/or associated business risks
  • Based on that same tiering, standardize the level of Deal Desk support to be provided, such as proposal structure, modeling, internal approval support, and contracting
  • Partner with Revenue Operations to establish centralized tracking of deal intake/prioritization, pipeline, and approval queues
• Lead day-to-day management of the Deal Desk team with clearly defined goals and expectations, and coach and develop the team to maximize both performance and career growth

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Economics, Finance or a related field
• 8+ years of experience in deal desk, revenue operations, sales, or related field
• Self-motivated, execution-focused mindset with a high degree of urgency to help the business drive towards and exceed its revenue goals
• Strong analytical skills including proficiency with Excel (Looker experience also preferred), with the ability to identify and articulate key business trends and insights
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to lead effective meetings and presentations with sales and senior leadership as needed
• Team-player with cross-functional team experience and ability to provide excellent service to internal customers - including sales, finance, marketing, as well as executive leadership