Solution Sales Specialist

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