Strategic Deals Specialist, Global Security Sales Organization

Job description

Meet the Team Cisco Security empowers customers to protect their most critical assets across users, applications, networks, data, and AI-driven environments. As a Strategic Deals Acceleration Desk Specialist, you will collaborate with account executives, specialist sellers, solution engineers, and regional sales leaders. You will also partner closely with Sales & Commerce, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Pricing, Product Management, Customer Experience, Partner teams, and Competitive Intelligence. You will be engaged in opportunities that are strategic, highly complex, competitively intense, or forecast-critical, as well as those hindered by legal or commercial blockers, new product constructs, non-standard terms, Leave of Absence (LOA) coverage, or the need for creative financial modeling. Your Impact In this role, you will serve as a "deal quarterback," positioning yourself at the center of our most significant security opportunities to help field teams remove friction, establish viable commercial paths, and close complex deals with confidence. Your primary responsibilities include: Support Complex Deals: Orchestrate resources across sales, legal, finance, pricing, operations, product, and partner teams to operationalize and finalize deals. Pipeline Validation and Risk Analysis: Collaborate with field leaders to inspect assigned pipelines, validate deal health, test close plans, identify slippage risks, document blockers, and recommend actions to ensure forecast accuracy. Close Big Deals: Run deal rooms, coordinate cross-functional follow-through, and develop escalation packages to drive forecast-critical opportunities to completion. Deal Financial Modeling: Structure pricing, terms, ramp models, enterprise agreement options, consumption constructs, and financing scenarios to ensure deals are competitive, compliant, and commercially viable. Win/Loss Analysis: Analyze closed deals to identify trends in wins and losses, capture competitive signals, pricing themes, and process blockers, and relay these insights to Competitive Intelligence, Product, Pricing, and Enablement teams. Commercial Execution: Develop Letters of Intent, Statements of Work (SOWs), and approval packages while reducing ambiguity in non-standard requests to improve turnaround times. Field Partnership: Co-own late-stage strategic opportunities with account teams while maintaining clear accountability for seller ownership, customer engagement, and internal approvals. Product Feedback Loop: Document recurring blockers related to emerging or immature offers and provide prioritized feedback to product, pricing, support, and enablement teams. Operating Field: Track desk engagement metrics, including cycle-time impact, exception cycles, bookings influenced, win-rate lift, forecast movement, and field satisfaction. Minimum Qualifications 5+ years of experience in enterprise sales, specialist sales, deal desk, commercial finance, pricing, revenue operations, sales operations, legal operations, contracting, or a related B2B technology function. Shown experience supporting complex enterprise technology deals involving pricing, discounting, legal review, non-standard terms, finance approvals, or executive issue. Strong financial modeling, analytical, and business case development skills. Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across sales, finance, legal, product, operations, and executive partners in a matrixed environment. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to produce executive-ready critical issue summaries and deal narratives. BA/BS degree or equivalent practical experience. Preferred Qualifications Experience in Cybersecurity, SaaS, software subscriptions, or the Cisco Security portfolio. Proficiency with Salesforce, Clari, Gong, quote-to-cash tools, pricing workflows, pipeline dashboards, or deal approval processes. Experience structuring enterprise agreements, consumption-based offers, ramp deals, financing options, or multi-year commercial constructs. Familiarity with driven deal strategy, win/loss analysis, objection handling, and field enablement. Comfortable leading quarter-end customer concerns, forecast-critical opportunities, and time-sensitive executive requests. Ability to travel as needed (estimated up to 20%). Flexibility to work varied hours to support global geographic locations (AMERICAS, EMEA, and APJC). Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.