Incubation Business Development Lead

 The Business Development team at Microsoft is responsible for accelerating the company’s growth through the identification and execution of inorganic growth strategies including complex strategic partners, investments, and acquisitions. 

The Incubation Business Development Lead is responsible for driving and delivering innovative, first to market channel and marketing partnerships of Microsoft’s products across our portfolio of products including Copilot/AI services, M365, Outlook, etc. This role will lead partnerships across a variety of channel and other marketing partners identifying new integrations and opportunities to drive awareness of our key services through net-new experiences.

This role is entrepreneurial in nature requiring the ability to identify first to market partnerships that drive awareness, reach, and innovation, working closely with our product/engineering teams to collaborate and iterating quickly to drive results.

Responsibilities

Partner & Customer Focus

• Leverages internal and external relationships as a trusted advisor to advise complex (e.g., large, high impact) customers and partners in future strategic direction as a sought-out resource across multiple lines of business, geographies, and cultures, as appropriate. Advises partners and decision makers on industry and company insights. Drives internal strategy and identifies innovative, first-to-market partnership opportunities,
• Drives large scale (e.g., high impact, high profile) customer and partner business initiatives by promoting and enabling joint-value creation, and selling of creative solutions for multiple lines of business. Looks across accounts and geographies to identify and address broad issues and trends. Drives strategic thinking among the team and cultivates a culture of customer and partner focus. Shapes industry-wide initiatives and norms.

Partnership Strategy

• Creates business value propositions based on company, partner, and/or customer needs on tight timelines, and in constantly evolving market dynamics. Drives support and action by influencing internal stakeholders and partners and promoting the value of opportunities.
• Anticipates the Microsoft value proposition versus competitors and works with stakeholders to influence the build/buy/partner decision to meet customer needs, leveraging knowledge in conjunction with product/industry teams to establish a foundation for future opportunities in competitive situations through collaboration. Provides subject matter expertise on the industry and competitive trends, and drives recommendations based on those insights. Maintains a large industry network and may represent Microsoft externally by speaking at industry conferences and/or participating in industry groups. Drives knowledge sharing across teams and develops infrastructure to foster knowledge sharing across the organization.
• Leverages relationships with a diverse set of stakeholders and knowledge of customers, partners, and the business to seek out unique opportunities (e.g., whitespace opportunities, category creation) that cross business areas or target high-priority gaps in prominent industries, products, or accounts (e.g., high profile, high impact, large). Leverages trends in data to inform decisions across deals and maximize opportunity. Drives deals to increase awareness and achieve desired outcome across partners and deals. Anticipates potential issues, raises visibility, and leverages executive relationships to resolve escalations. Provides input into recommendations on partners.
• Develops overarching strategies to address gaps and gains agreements on the opportunity pipeline. Drives development of broad initiatives across organizational functions. Orchestrates processes for pipelines and opportunities that deliver results and optimize resources. Coordinates on pipeline across teams, sharing insights and signals and drawing connections across groups. Leads pipeline reviews for the team. Prepares information for reporting to key stakeholders, including synthesizing key work for executive consumption.

Negotiation

• Represents Microsoft in key customer and partner interactions, and determines the deal structures for scalable and durable solutions in custom and complex business opportunities. Develops and implements strategic engagement models that achieve business opportunities from the largest customers and partners, manage the customer and partner interface, and provide deal structure to close complex global deals. Represents Microsoft as a role model. Resolves deal issues as an escalation point for less e