Executive Director, Deals Center of Excellence
ICON plc
Summary
The Executive Director, Deal Center of Excellence leads a focused global commercial capability that improves ICON's approach to winning, structuring, negotiating, and expanding its most strategic customer partnerships across the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device sectors. The role is a trusted commercial advisor to business development, strategic accounts, operations, finance, proposals, and executive leadership, bringing customer insight, competitive intelligence, delivery considerations, and economic objectives together in clear deal strategies. The position strengthens opportunity management, increases preferred-provider conversion, improves decision quality and speed, and creates repeatable approaches that support sustainable revenue and margin growth.
Job description
Responsibilities
- Define and lead the global Deal Centre of Excellence strategy, operating model, governance, performance measures, and implementation.
- Prioritize and support strategically important pursuits, preferred-provider opportunities, complex renewals, and other major deals.
- Lead structured pursuit strategy workshops that establish customer objectives, win themes, stakeholder plans, competitive positioning, risks, investment choices, negotiation goals, and clear ownership across the deal team.
- Shape commercial solutions and partnership structures that balance customer value, competitive positioning, operational feasibility, pricing discipline, risk, and sustainable economics.
- Direct executive deal reviews by presenting evidence-based recommendations on probability of success, strategic value, commercial options, required investments, key risks, and negotiation guardrails.
- Partner closely with Commercial Finance to ensure that commercial strategy is robust while financial governance and control responsibilities remain independent and effective.
- Lead negotiation of identified strategic pursuits in collaboration with business development, operations, and commercial finance.
- Build and maintain reusable playbooks, customer and competitor insights, win-loss learning, deal benchmarks, negotiation approaches, and post-award reviews to improve future pursuits and commercial capability.
- Develop a high-performing specialist team and influence broader commercial, operational, proposal, and leadership communities through coaching, training, data-driven insights, and continuous improvement across the opportunity lifecycle.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Life Sciences, or a related discipline.
- Significant experience in commercial strategy, proposals, pricing, strategic deal management, or related commercial leadership roles.
- Demonstrated success developing and executing commercial strategies for large, complex RFPs, strategic partnerships, or enterprise-level pursuits.
- Strong financial acumen with deep understanding of pricing methodologies, business case development, profitability analysis, and financial modeling.
- Experience influencing and partnering with senior leaders across finance, operations, commercial, and executive teams.
- Proven ability to evaluate customer requirements and translate them into differentiated commercial solutions.
- Strong negotiation support experience, including bid defense participation and commercial term development.
- Excellent executive communication and stakeholder management skills.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Life Sciences, or a related discipline.
- Significant experience in commercial strategy, proposals, pricing, strategic deal management, or related commercial leadership roles.
- Demonstrated success developing and executing commercial strategies for large, complex RFPs, strategic partnerships, or enterprise-level pursuits.
- Strong financial acumen with deep understanding of pricing methodologies, business case development, profitability analysis, and financial modeling.
- Experience influencing and partnering with senior leaders across finance, operations, commercial, and executive teams.
- Proven ability to evaluate customer requirements and translate them into differentiated commercial solutions.
- Strong negotiation support experience, including bid defense participation and commercial term development.
- Excellent executive communication and stakeholder management skills.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary
- Performance related incentives
- Medical, Dental & Vision
- Retirement and pension plans
- Life assurance and disability coverage
- Employee assistance programmes
- Wellbeing resources
- Learning and development opportunities
Company overview
ICON plc is a global leader in clinical research and healthcare intelligence, founded in Dublin, Ireland in 1990. As one of the world's largest contract research organizations (CROs), ICON provides comprehensive outsourced development services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies worldwide. The company operates in 55 countries with approximately 41,900 employees, offering end-to-end solutions that span the entire product development lifecycle. ICON's service portfolio includes clinical research services, adaptive trials, biosimilars, commercialization and outcomes consulting, medical imaging, laboratory services, and strategic support for traditional and digital health technologies. The company specializes in therapeutic areas such as oncology, cardiovascular diseases, central nervous system disorders, rare diseases, and women's health. With its 2021 acquisition of PRA Health Sciences, ICON significantly expanded its capabilities and market position, becoming a dominant force in the global CRO industry. The company is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the ticker ICLR and reported $8.28 billion in revenue for 2024.