Sales Plan Design & Implementation Strategy Director

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

22h

About The Position

Sales Design and Incentives (SDI) is the team at Microsoft responsible for the design, implementation, and operations related to sales and incentive plans across all of Microsoft, impacting over 40,000 employees. Our vision is to embody best-in-class, design-to-deployment incentive compensation that inspires sellers to maximize their success and rewards, and enables sustainable growth, share, and customer success. We are passionate about this mission and are looking for a Sales Plan Design & Implementation Strategy Director to be part of our Plan Design, Implementation and Planning Team. This team is responsible for the end-to-end lifecycle of Sales Incentive Compensation, from strategy and plan design through implementation and successful fiscal year rollout. The Strategy Director will possess business acumen, analytical skills, be entrepreneurial, curious, and have strong communication skills. They will be excited to apply their passion in designing, managing, and landing strategic projects and programs to accelerate our ability to drive the right behavior with the sales force to deliver Microsoft's commercial goals and objectives. Join us in being part of a team that will innovate, be a visible advocate for the field, and will be counted on to represent its voice and customers across our functions. Sales Design and Incentives (SDI) is responsible for helping Microsoft translate company strategy into seller behavior through compensation plans, quotas, earnings, incentives, and seller experiences. As Microsoft evolves its go-to-market motions, business models, and AI-first strategy, SDI continuously adapts how it designs, governs, and operates incentive compensation at a global scale. The Strategy Director serves as the strategic connective tissue between business strategy, operating model design, business processes, governance, and organizational execution.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration, Marketing, Finance, Engineering, or related field AND 5+ years experience in business consulting, sales, sales operations, information technology (IT), account management, business development, marketing, IT field sales, or a related field OR equivalent experience.
6+ years experience in Near Term Strategy (2 years out), Management Consulting, Sales, or Finance.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading business transformation, strategy, operations, consulting, business architecture, or operating model design.
Strategic thinking and structured problem-solving skills.
Experience influencing leaders and driving alignment across diverse stakeholder groups.
Ability to navigate ambiguity and define direction where none exists.
Communication, storytelling, and executive presence.
Experience in sales compensation, sales operations, finance, revenue operations, or large-scale business transformation.
Experience defining operating models, business capabilities, governance structures, or organizational design.
Familiarity with Microsoft sales motions, incentive compensation, or go-to-market strategy.

Responsibilities

Shape Future Business Strategy: Translate Microsoft and SDI priorities into future-state business capabilities and operating models. Help leadership define how incentive compensation should evolve to support changing seller motions, business models, and growth objectives. Develop strategic recommendations and business frameworks that guide investment and prioritization decisions. Identify opportunities to simplify processes, reduce complexity, and improve business outcomes.
Project Leadership and Cross-Functional Alignment: Bring together stakeholders across SDI, Finance, HR, Sales, GTM, and Operations to align and drive strategic projects and align on priorities and outcomes. Facilitate business decisions involving competing priorities, tradeoffs, and stakeholder interests. Resolve cross-functional challenges that span organizational boundaries. Help leaders make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Develops, drives, and executes multiple projects/programs and teams across organizational boundaries as a project lead through defining plans, goals, deliverables, feedback, resource balancing, and timing expectations; proactively identifies complex roadblocks and addresses them. Identifies, evaluates, and proposes new transformation project work/deals based on unmet needs.
Improve the Operating Model: Assess how work flows across teams, processes, and functions. Recommend organizational, governance, and process improvements that increase efficiency and accountability. Establish frameworks that clarify ownership, decision rights, and performance management.
Executive Thought Partner: Create executive-ready business content, decision frameworks, and recommendations. Lead structured problem solving on ambiguous, high-impact business issues. Anticipate downstream impacts of strategic decisions and help leaders navigate tradeoffs. Influence without authority across a highly matrixed environment towards a common goal and challenges status quo. Leads, manages, and adjusts plans and projects to achieve desired outcomes in partnership with functional partners, field and corporate leaders. Collaborates to identify focus areas. Demonstrates influence through partners across multiple divisions. Influences for impact by motivating others to buy into vision and execution.
What Success Looks Like: Leadership has a clear, shared view of the future-state SDI operating model. Complex business decisions are made with greater speed and clarity. Business processes become simpler, more scalable, and easier to operate. Stakeholders align around common objectives and priorities. Investments across people, process, policy, and technology support a coherent long-term direction. Plan Design, Implementation lead to positive seller outcomes and business outcomes improved through simplification and better business design.