Solution Area Specialists

As an Azure Specialist covering our key accounts mainly in automotive and transportation industries, you are a solution sales leader with deep business expertise and technical knowledge within our enterprise sales organization, working with our most important customers. You will lead a virtual team of sales, technical, and services resources to help customers realize the digital transformation through cloud computing. A core competency of the role is to advance the engagement process to achieve/exceed quarterly Azure consumption targets for related workloads in your assigned accounts. You will be a trusted advisor and Azure subject matter expert with core capability and expertise in datacenter migration and modernization, security, Gen AI, Analytics etc., with Cloud economics.

You will work with customers to help them achieve their business priorities and help guide customer journey through AI and Digital transformation. You will help customers evaluate their applications and business requirements, recommend solutions that meet their requirements and demonstrate these solutions to win the technical decision. You will need to support customers to remove roadblocks to deployment and drive customer satisfaction. You will help our customers take advantage of our unique platform and lead entire Azure solutions to realize the value of digital and AI transformation.

Responsibilities

Sales Excellence

• Completes required training and obtains Azure solution and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.
• Leads your account team to explore business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and facilitate customer innovation to drive growth by leveraging technology, industry and partner expertise. Builds new market by leveraging deep technology expertise and resources.
• Proactively promotes development of deep and influential relationships with client contacts. Ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and facilitates the resolution of technical issues for strategic accounts. Establishes standards for customer/partner experiences. Ensures customers are made aware of new technology innovations.
• Lead whitespace analysis and collaborate the team to identify potential new business in your assigned territories. Aligns the analysis approach across teams. Acts as a thought leader and clears opinions and perspectives from business analysis.
• Oversees the end-to-end business across geographical regions (Business level Engish and Japanese speaking required).
• Drives and oversees integrated strategic planning to exceed cloud growth, drive consumption, and Support revenue and gain market share for Azure. Drives the integration of that all local, regional and corporate resources (e.g., Digital, Global Black Belts) into the strategic plan. Engages with executives to bring a more strategic perspective into the business plan.

Sales Execution

• Brings impactful industry insights with partners into customer engagements.
• Acts as a thought leader in digital transformation across Azure solutions to advise customers and represent Microsoft, and coaches others internally on how to do this.
• Leads transformational shifts to drive deployment and create business value for customers. Leads a virtual cross-organizational team on strategic projects and high impact solution sales deployments that enable digital transformation and deliver business value.
• Remove consumption blockers in pre-sales by collaborating with partners and other internal regional and global teams. Coaches your team how to engage customers to drive cloud services growth, support and consumption in accounts. Leads with technical insights on how to grow customer business.
• Plan and execute strategies for driving and closing opportunities. Drives the implementation of strategies and the collaboration with the account team to ensure alignment. Leads your team on ways to implement and share 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. Seeks alignment with all stakeholders and partners and guides team to work with internal stakeholders to remove blockers.

Scaling and Collaboration

• Apply the orchestration model. Facilitates and leads internal communication and collaboration by identifying resources and removing barriers. Cntributes to the development of the orchestration model.
• Build a network of partners to cross-sell and up-sell and drive usage. Leads the team to identify new partners and evaluate partner capabilities. Facilitates the development of partner strategies and ensures execution. 
• Drive end-to-end business solutions across solution areas, resulting in increased partner satisfaction and partner deal sharing year-over-year.
• Leads by example to be executive sponsor for Global Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Global System Integrators (GSIs). 

Technical Expertise

• Leverage your business and market knowledge. Reviews wins/losses with the team to determine how to identify systematic and non-systematic issues to resolve. Leads team's internal collaboration to position Microsoft Azure solutions, and/or services (e.g., cloud services and platforms) against competitors. Acts as a thought leader to help your team connect Microsoft solutions to customer business impact. Leverages deep technology knowledge and coaches team about Microsoft Azure technology differentiators/competitive advantage.
• Acts as the spokesman for Microsoft at external events. Provides expertise to customers/partners and shares knowledge on social media relevant for your market (e.g., LinkedIn). Establishes a sounding board of customers and partners related to technology innovation.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Business Administration, Analytics, Data Science, or related field AND 15+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR 15+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.
• Digital transformation in a solution area, in collaboration with partners and services. Shares learning on digital transformation through seminars, workshops, webinars, and direct engagement.
• 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.
• Identifies customer business needs and technical readiness. Collaborates with internal teams, partners, and services to propose prioritized solutions that align with customers' needs. Leverages the value propositions to communicate business impact of proposed solutions. Listens to customers to understand business outcomes.
• Develops an understanding of external stakeholders' mapping, including who the decision makers and influencers are. Participates with account teams (e.g., Account Executives) in communication with business or subject matter decision makers at the customer's/partner's business.
• Implements strategies to help accelerate the closing of deals in collaboration with other team members. 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.
• Effective territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation, analysis, value engineering, services/partner engagement, opportunity management, pipeline management and deal negotiation.
• Problem Solver. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies.
• Collaborative. Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence. 

• The ability to develop and maintain positive working relationships with supervisors, staff, managers, customers, and vendors. This includes expressing empathy and compassion when dealing with the needs and problems of others, being approachable, taking time to address the concerns of coworkers, and treating others with respect and dignity.

Conflict Resolution

• The ability to manage conflict, disharmony, and strife among people and situations, while recognizing and addressing sensitivities.

• The ability to understand customer needs through dialogue before recommending products/services.

• 7+ years senior technical sales leadership experience in cloud services growth and consumption.
• 10+ years solution or services sales experience.
• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Business Administration, Analytics, Data Science, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, Analytics, Data Science, or related field AND 12+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR 11+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.

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

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