Senior Director, Pricing & Commercial Excellence

Job description

From the beginning, our goal was to establish an advisory firm that stands apart from the rest – one that is grounded in our Core Values and dedicated to creating a positive experience not just for our clients, but for our people too. We firmly believe in the strength of collaboration, enthusiasm, generosity, and perseverance as the driving forces behind our success. With advisory solutions spanning accounting and risk, technology-enabled transformation, and transactions, we partner with our clients to solve today’s challenges and deliver present and future value. Our commitment to our people has earned us numerous awards including Inc5000's Fastest Growing Companies and Glassdoor's Best Places to Work. Explore what our employees have to say about our unique culture by clicking [here](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CrossCountry-Consulting-Reviews-E610881.htm). The Senior Director, Pricing & Commercial Excellence is the firm's senior commercial strategist — owning the pricing frameworks, commercial policy, and deal governance that shape how CCC sells, and directing the revenue technology, data, and process infrastructure that make commercial performance measurable and repeatable at scale. This leader chairs the Pricing Committee, sets the strategic direction for the Salesforce-anchored revenue technology stack and serves as the primary commercial thought partner to the CFO, co-CEOs, Head of Marketing, and Practice Leaders. The role is firmwide in scope and reports directly to the CFO. A consistent design principle for the function: pricing constructs, KPIs, and operating cadences must be configurable by service line, market, and team, given that CCC's practices operate quite differently from one another. ### What You'll Do: ### **Pricing Strategy & Fixed-Fee Model Transition** - Own the firmwide shift from time-and-materials to fixed-fee, including phased rollout by service line, offering, and client segment. - Design fixed-fee pricing frameworks (i.e., scope-based, outcome-based, subscription/retainer, hybrid) with defined margin floors and contingency mechanics. - Build price-setting methodologies: bottoms-up cost build, value-based benchmarks, effective rate targets, and risk-adjusted pricing for scope volatility. - Partner with Practice Leaders to translate offerings into productized, repeatable pricing constructs. - Evolve pricing methodology and cost models to support AI-enabled solutions and products, reflecting a cost base that now includes non-labor components such as technology, platform, and per-token consumption charges alongside traditional employee cost. ### **Pricing Committee & Deal Governance** - Chair the Pricing Committee; set cadence, thresholds, escalation criteria, and decision rights. - Operate the deal desk: review non-standard pricing, discount requests, margin exceptions, and multi-year or master-agreement commercial terms. - Establish delegation of authority for pricing decisions by deal size, margin variance, and risk profile. - Maintain the record of committee decisions and a precedent library to drive consistency across deals. ### **Commercial Policy, Enablement & Legal Partnership** - Develop and maintain the firm's commercial policy: pricing principles, discounting rules, change-order economics, scope-creep protocols, and fixed-fee overage/underage treatment. - Communicate policy across the firm through playbooks, office hours, targeted enablement, and Partner/MD training. - Build proposal and pricing tools (i.e., calculators, templates, guardrails) natively within the Salesforce-anchored stack rather than as bolt-on systems. - Partner with Legal on commercial contract terms tied to fixed-fee delivery, including acceptance criteria, milestone structures, and T&C standardization. ### **Revenue Intelligence, Forecasting & Commercial Analytics** - Define and own the firm's commercial KPI framework: pipeline health, bookings, win rates, price realization, fixed-fee margin vs. plan, effective bill rate, leakage, utilization, revenue concentration, and client retention — configurable by service line, market, and team. - Build and maintain a weekly pipeline reporting cadence covering pipeline by stage/practice/owner with week-over-week delta, days-in-stage vs. historical benchmarks with stale-deal flagging, win/loss trends, and coverage ratios by market and service line. - Design and own a calibrated forecasting model that replaces gut-check processes with stage-weighted, practice-specific probability models — reflecting that CCC's service lines have fundamentally different deal cycles — with stagnation flags, coverage targets by practice, and AI-assisted forecast commentary. - Build post-sale margin tracking on fixed-fee engagements and close the loop back to pricing assumptions, surfacing systemic issues (e.g., underpriced offerings, chronic overruns) for remediation. - Build advanced analytics across client revenue retention, BD effectiveness by deal origin and dual-origination, buyer persona and price sensitivity by market and service line, and structured win/loss intelligence. - Lead quarterly and annual revenue forecasting processes in close partnership with FP&A, ensuring Salesforce pipeline data is the authoritative source of commercial truth. - Deliver executive-grade dashboards and quarterly commercial performance reporting to the Executive Committee, Board, and PE sponsors. ### **Go-to-Market Process Design & Best-Practice Benchmarking** - Own the design and governance of end-to-end commercial processes: opportunity management, pipeline stage definitions with clear entry criteria and exit actions, win/loss definitions, account segmentation, and territory alignment. - Establish a structured deal close-out process so every won and lost opportunity generates a searchable, Salesforce-linked record capturing why we won or lost, who was involved, client pain points, service line, and referral or incumbent dynamics. - Partner with Practice Leaders, the CEO, and Marketing to define sales plays, target account strategies, and pipeline generation requirements by service line. - Continuously research and benchmark external pricing and commercial practices across peer professional services firms and adjacent industries (e.g., Big 4, boutique consulting, legal, technology services); track buyer and procurement dynamics among PE portfolio, Fortune 1000, and regulated-industry clients; feed insights into offering design, go-to-market motion, and pricing refresh cycles. ### **Revenue Technology Strategy & Ownership** - Own the long-term strategy and roadmap for the firm's revenue technology stack, anchored by Salesforce (Sales Cloud), Kantata, Introhive (or comparable relationship intelligence platform), and integrated marketing and finance platforms. - Lead evaluation, selection, and implementation of new RevOps and pricing tools, ensuring fit with enterprise architecture, security requirements, and ROI thresholds; capabilities should build on existing platforms rather than require wholesale new tooling. - Serve as the executive sponsor for Salesforce governance — setting standards for object architecture, data model integrity, user roles, permission sets, and integration standards — with a strong Salesforce team executing day-to-day administration and configuration. - Partner with IT, Finance, and external vendors to manage system integrations, API connections, and data flows between Salesforce, Kantata, ERP, and BI platforms. ### **AI, Automation & Innovation** - Lead identification, evaluation, and deployment of AI-enabled and automation capabilities within the commercial and revenue operations function, in alignment with CCC's AI Governance framework. - Apply AI to workflows including AI-generated pipeline narrative commentary, AI-assisted forecast summaries, AI-generated first drafts of deal close-out records (human-reviewed by opportunity owners), AI-generated outreach rationale for flagged target accounts, and AI-assisted pricing scenario modeling. - Champion intelligent automation of repetitive workflows (e.g., data enrichment, pipeline alerts, forecast variance notifications, margin exception routing) to increase team leverage and data quality. - Partner with the AI Governance & Steering Committee to ensure commercial-facing AI initiatives meet security, data privacy, and professional standards requirements. ### **M&A Commercial Integration** - Assess acquired firms' pricing models, rate cards, commercial policies, and revenue technology as part of diligence and integration. - Harmonize commercial constructs post-close and migrate acquired portfolios to the CCC pricing framework and Salesforce-anchored stack on a defined timeline. - Lead RevOps support for M&A integration, including system consolidation, data migration, and commercial process harmonization. ### **Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Engagement** - Lead, mentor, and develop a combined Commercial Pricing and Revenue Operations team; set priorities and capacity allocation across pricing analytics, deal desk, Salesforce administration, reporting, and strategic initiatives. - Build a high-performance culture grounded in data accountability, commercial rigor, and cross-functional service excellence; define competency models and career pathways for the function. - Act as the primary commercial operations business partner to the CFO, co-CEOs, Head of Marketing, Sales Operations leadership, and Practice Leaders. - Represent the function with the ELT and other leadership forums; drive alignment with FP&A and Finance on forecasting, revenue recognition, and working capital. ### What You'll Bring: - 15+ years of progressive experience spanning Revenue Operations, Sales Operations, Pricing, or Commercial Strategy in professional services or comparable people-intensive B2B environments, with material time in a senior leadership role. - Direct experience leading a time-and-materials to fixed-fee (or equivalent productization) transition at scale, including pricing committee or deal desk leadership in a partnership or PE-backed environment. - Deep fluency in the unit economics of consulting delivery: utilization, leverage, realization, and margin architecture. - Working fluency with Salesforce as a strategic platform owner — sufficient to set architecture direction, govern the data model, and challenge implementation trade-offs — with hands-on configuration and administration delivered by a certified team. Salesforce certifications not required. - Demonstrated experience building calibrated forecasting models and pipeline reporting infrastructure in multi-practice or multi-segment environments; executive-level reporting in Salesforce and/or BI tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI, or similar). - Track record leading commercial operations through periods of rapid growth, M&A integration, or PE-sponsored transformation, and building and scaling high-performing teams. ### Skills & Capabilities: - Commercial acumen: connects operational data to revenue outcomes, cost implications, and investor-level narratives. - Executive presence and influence sufficient to chair a committee of Partners and MDs, drive change without direct authority, and present to ELT, Board, and PE sponsors. - Systems thinking: designs scalable, integrated processes and technology architectures; a builder who extends existing platforms rather than defaulting to new tooling. - Analytical rigor: strong command of Excel-based modeling, comfort with CRM/CPQ-adjacent tooling, working knowledge of SQL or BI query tools a plus. - Change management: proven ability to drive adoption of new pricing constructs, systems, and standards across a distributed, matrixed organization. - AI fluency: practical familiarity with AI and automation applied to commercial workflows — including generative AI for commentary, deal coaching, pricing scenarios, and outreach — with judgment to sponsor responsible adoption within a governance framework. ### Qualifications: - Bachelor's degree required; degree in Business, Finance, Economics, or a related field preferred. - MBA or advanced degree preferred but not required in lieu of demonstrated experience and impact.