Director, Deal Desk
Primary stack
Job description
About the Position
Director, Deal Desk
New York Office
DDN is seeking a high-impact Director, Deal Desk to serve as a strategic Finance partner to our Sales organization. This individual will be instrumental in building out the Deal Desk function, driving deal velocity, and ensuring the commercial viability of our largest, most complex transactions. You will act as the "air traffic controller" for the deal lifecycle - balancing aggressive market share growth with long-term margin and revenue integrity.
Responsibilities
- Deal Structuring & Advisory: Act as the primary advisor to Sales for complex multi-product and multi-year deals. Build creative commercial structures (including ARR/Subscription models) that meet customer needs while protecting DDN margins.
- Commercial Guardrails: Help establish and enforce the global Approval Matrix.
- Cross-Functional Orchestration: Serve as the bridge between Sales, Legal, Finance, Operations to ensure seamless deal execution and revenue recognition.
- CPQ & Process Optimization: Partner with Sales Ops & IT to refine and scale our CPQ environment, implementing deal playbooks that reduce friction and decrease quote to booking timelines.
- Margin Analysis: Utilize robust modeling tools to evaluate deal profitability and determine approval eligibility.
- Dual-Track Negotiation: Manage high-stakes negotiations both internally with Sales and externally with DDN Customers, leveraging executive presence to challenge deal structures and defend company margins.
- Executive Engagement: Present large-scale transactions to the executive team, providing a clear rationale for exceptions, risk assessments, and strategic alignment.
Requirements
- Experience: 8–12 years in Deal Desk, ideally within a high-growth tech environment (Storage, Cloud, or SaaS experience is a plus).
- Modeling Skills: Expert-level Excel proficiency. You must be comfortable "reverse-engineering" deals and building models to solve for specific margin and revenue targets.
- Strategic Thinking: Proven ability to move beyond "policing" deals to active "deal making" - identifying levers like Support attach rates, ARR pivots, and multi-year commitments to bridge gaps.
- Communication: Exceptional ability to translate complex financial structures into simple, persuasive terms for both Sales reps and Executive leadership.
The "DDN Fit"
- Adaptable: You are comfortable ‘building the plane while flying it’ as we establish a new pricing methodology, formalize deal playbooks & enable the field.
- Analytical Rigor: You leverage data as your primary lever for influence. From modeling complex margin floors to authorizing high-value exceptions, every approval you grant is backed by a clear, data-driven business case.
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DataDirect Networks (DDN.com) is a world leader in massively-scalable storage platforms and solutions engineered for the Big Data and Cloud era. Our storage, processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high-data growth environments to achieve the highest levels of systems performance, scalability and efficiency.In solving today’s Big Data lifecycle management challenges at scale, DDN enables organizations to maximize the value of their information, everywhere. As the technology behind the world’s leading data-driven organizations, our customers include online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, financial services, media production houses and security and intelligence agencies.