Solution Sales Specialist

Roles & Responsibilities

Overview

Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their digital transformation goals by leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. To this end, Microsoft is scaling the Azure business that will help Microsoft customers successfully realize their business outcomes.

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 to achieve our mission.

The Azure Cloud business is one of the fastest growing businesses in Microsoft, addressing the increasing customer demand for extracting value and insights to enable businesses to digitally transform.

As the Data & AI - Sales Specialist you will be accountable for the Azure Data and AI business in your territory, and play a key role in driving sales, nurturing customer relationships, driving alignment and partnership with internal stakeholders (Account teams, Customer Success teams, Engineering and product leadership teams), and customer/partner stakeholders. You will lead the Azure Data and AI business transformation in your territory by creating and executing the Azure plan. Be a thought leader and build trust with key technical decision makers and influencers across customers and partners. You will be responsible to provide customers clarity on enterprise wide data estate migration, modernization, transformation with respect to enterprise data. Be comfortable addressing topics like information security, data governance, and compliance. Drive operational excellence, including pipleline management, accurate deal forecasts, and providing high-quality insights.

The Solution Specialist Data & AI Role is part of a sales team focusing on enterprise customers. We believe you have worked with sales for several years before, either as a pure sales role or trough ex advisory. This is a role who collaborates close with all other divisions within Microsoft, so you identify yourself as a stong team player who believes in tributing to others success.

Responsibilities

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Sales Excellence

• Engages with internal and external stakeholders on business planning, Rhythm of Business (ROB) meetings to review and plan for accounts in the assigned territory.
• Collaborates with partners and resources and leverages customer insights or industry knowledge. Contributes to exploring business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and support customer innovation.
• Collaborates with extended sales team, partners, and marketing to conduct business analysis (e.g., whitespace analysis, identify industry trends) to pursue high-potential customers and develop a target list of potential business.
• Manages the end-to-end business of the assigned territory. Conducts forecasting for accounts and develops a portfolio and territory plan to drive intentional selling aligned with strategic priorities.
• Reviews feedback report and coaches others on ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and decreasing dissatisfaction by establishing recovery action plans to improve clients' overall experience.
• Manages and/or orchestrates sales and delivery success through the account team and pursuit team.
• Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.

Sales Execution

• Identifies customer business needs and technology readiness. Contributes to the development of solutions in collaboration with internal teams, partners, and services. Proposes prioritized solutions that align with customers' needs. Articulates the business value of proposed solutions.
• Collaborates with team members to discover new opportunities. Drives incremental revenue growth through personal campaigns (e.g., portfolio analysis) or internal sources (e.g., Marketing).
• Collaborates with account teams, partners, or services to track and qualify new opportunities.
• Collaborates with other teams (e.g., account teams) and services to build pipeline. Interfaces with customers and builds relationships via social selling. Applies Microsoft's sales process (MSP) to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed.
• Implements strategies to accelerate the closing of deals. Contributes input on strategies to drive and close prioritized opportunities. Coaches less experienced team members in deal plan execution. Implements close plans (e.g., how to map timeline, engage the customer, get customer buy-in and commitment) to de-risk and drive predictable deal closure.
• Identifies opportunities to drive consumption and grow business with existing customers by initiating conversations, providing demos or quotes, and collaborating with partners or internal teams (e.g., Technical Sales Professionals, Global Black Belts. For licensing transactions and project engagements, ensures rapid and robust deployment plan at point of sale that is validated by services and partners.
• Proactively builds external stakeholders' mapping. Collaborates with account teams (e.g., Account Executives) to identify and engage senior business subject matter decision makers at the customer's/partner's business.
• Engages in conversations with customers aligned to their industry to introduce how other workloads could enable digital transformation areas that is aligned with the customer's industry and turns opportunities into deals. Initiates conversations with customers on digital transformation in one or more solution areas, in collaboration with partners and services. Creates guiding examples of digital transformation through seminars, workshops, webinars, and direct engagement.

Scaling and Collaboration

• Applies the orchestration model to leverage and expand relationships with internal stakeholders and partners (e.g., Enterprise Operating Unit). Navigates the MSFT organization to bring the best impact to the customer.
• Collaborates with One Commercial Partner (OCP) and with a network of partners to cross-sell and up-sell. Identifies new partners by researching and discussing with partners on customer scenarios.
• Develops joint proposal with partners. Contributes to developing partner strategies to address gaps in partner capabilities.

Technical Expertise

• Initiates conversations with prospective customers/partners at events to expand external network. Acts as a subject matter expert in one or more solution area(s).
• Leads conversations and sets up events within Microsoft. Mentors others and develops strategies for best practice sharing across subsidiaries. Contributes ideas that can be instituted across Microsoft.
• Collaborates with the 'compete' global black belts (GBB) to analyze competitor products, solutions, and/or services and implements strategies to position Microsoft against competitors in customer communication. Proactively provides analysis of the competitive landscape in supported solution area. Evaluates opportunities and makes recommendations on pursuit or withdrawal. Holistic value of MSFT platform versus single-point solution that positions MSFT favorably against competitors

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 6+ years technology-related sales or account management experienceOR 7+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.
• 5+ years Data & AI related sales or account management experience (Cloud based databases - SQL/NoSQL, datawarehousing, BI & Reporting , Real Time and Streaming Analytics systems, Big Data (Hadoop, Spark, Trino, Kafka, Flink), Machine Learning and AI Platforms)

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 6+ years solution or services sales experience.
• Master's Degree in Business Administration (i.e., MBA), Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technology-related sales or account management experienceOR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR 9+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.

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Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

Tell employers what skills you have

Machine Learning
Licensing
Azure
Big Data
Sales Excellence
Information Technology
Selling
Data Governance
Sales Process
Account Management Experience
Customer Communication
Orchestration
Business Transformation
Technical Sales
Databases

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