Business Development Manager – Gaming

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.

The Gaming Business Development team is responsible for cultivating and managing partnerships, shaping and executing deals and negotiations, and finding opportunities across Microsoft for the Xbox platform. In particular, we are responsible for driving partnership strategy, planning, and execution across functional teams in Xbox including engineering, marketing, finance, legal, and others, as well as a broad set of stakeholders across Microsoft.

This role will focus on creating opportunities for product groups and studios. The ideal candidate will translate core priorities into new exploratory opportunities and sell in the ideal to the identified stakeholders. Possible areas of focus could be growth through partnerships for Xbox studios, Blockchain/NFT explorations, new business model development, and valuations of potential partnerships.

The ideal candidate will have business development and management experience and possess excellent collaboration and analytical capabilities with a passion for consumer technology.

Responsibilities                                                                                                          

Customer and Partner Focus

• Maintains and develops internal and external relationships with business and technical peers for assigned accounts.
• Develops understanding of customers and partners business and strategy and relevant industry trends through research (reading industry research reports, attending internal/external conferences, SME/mentor feedback, leveraging internal resources, talking with partner directly, gathering third party resources). Develops understanding of Microsoft point of view/landscape. Applies understanding in execution of deal/plan.

Partnership Strategy

• Supports senior colleagues in articulating partnership opportunities for Microsoft to drive business value propositions with assigned customers and partners.
• Researches technology, industry, and competitive trends, and works internally to understand how Microsoft is positioned. Consolidates information into reports to present and share insights with their team.
• Works with stakeholders to support development of target customer/partner list to close high-priority gaps across technology, product, business, and/or geography.
• Utilizes process to support development and maintenance of pipeline; prepares information for reporting to key stakeholders. Escalates to manager as needed.

Negotiation

• Supports deal opportunities across deal stages (e.g., Strategic Approval (SA), Approval to Negotiate (A2N), Final Go-no-go (FGNG)) contributing to materials and analyses, for executive reviews, etc. Supports deal process by tracking deal issues, supporting operational tasks, and escalating as appropriate. Closes opportunities using predefined program frameworks or templates, as applicable.

Deal Management/Governance

• Assists with execution and deal management by communicating and reporting with Microsoft stakeholders. Tracks blocking issues and works with deal stakeholders to drive resolutions.
• Supports post-deal governance and execution plans by working with internal and partner stakeholders across business and technical and operational teams. and supports measurement results by assessing progress against KPIs defined success metrics (e.g., revenue, volume of opportunities in the pipeline/channel). capture and report on issues.

Other

• Embody our culture and values                              

                                                                                                     Qualifications                                                                                                          

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Liberal Arts, Sciences, or related field
• OR equivalent experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Liberal Arts, Sciences, or related field AND 2+ years relevant work experience (e.g., investment banking, consulting, finance, marketing, corporate strategy, sales, venture capital, legal, business development, product management, project management, software development, or related field)
• OR equivalent experience.
• Knowledge of the Blockchain and Metaverse concepts

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