Senior Solution Area Specialist

As an Senior Solution Area Specialist covering our Enterprise accounts, you will be a solution sales leader within our business, leading a virtual team of technical, partner and consulting resources to advance the sales process and achieve/exceed quarterly Azure revenue and usage/consumption targets in your assigned accounts. You will be a trusted advisor and a infrastructure subject matter expert with core capability and experience in server migration and modernization, networking, storage, security, etc., with Cloud economics. You will work with customers to help them achieve their business priorities and help guide customer’s journey through infrastructure modernization and provide oversight towards application development, AI & data modernization tracks as well. 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 leading infrastructure solutions to realize the value of digital transformation. You have to possess both a commercial drive, while having a high degree of strategic thinking on building long term cloud roadmap, strategic partnership and commitments with customers.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.ResponsibilitiesSales Execution

Manage your territory as a business and investing in your own skills to remain top of your Infrastructure game. You will be recognized for sharing, learning and driving work that results in business impact for customers, partners and Microsoft. We encourage thought leadership, and we encourage all our employees to continuously maintain and enhance their technical, business value, sales, professional skills and competitive readiness. You will therefore be required to attain and maintain required certifications.

Scaling and Collaboration

Ability to collaborate with a network of partners and internal stakeholders to cross-sell and up-sell. Skilled in researching and discussing with partners on customer scenarios, developing joint proposal with partners, and contributing to developing partner strategies to address gaps in partner capabilities.

Technical Experience

Being the key technical leader, with an outstanding Cloud Economics knowledge, trusted advisor and influencer in shaping customer decisions to commit, architect and adopt Microsoft Infrastructure and security solutions. You will win the customer’s decision for sales opportunities and consumption scenarios, through tailoring your message, bringing ideas to customers, engaging with them to show our technology differentiation, and guiding them in decision making. You will lead presentations, demonstrations, brief architecture design sessions to explain, demonstrate, and prove to our largest customers the capabilities of Microsoft Azure Infra and Security Services, and how we can make their businesses more successful.

Sales Excellence

Spend time with customers identifying and surfacing new engagements that align with the customer’s business strategy. You will work with partners and others at Microsoft, as well as use our core tools, targeted account lists to identify and engage prioritized customers. You will be required to be disciplined in business-management, adaptable to a culture of accountability and build an active business network.

Deliver Results Through Teamwork

Ability to identifying customers and operational needs in partnership with other teams. Skilled in setting priorities, removing barriers and obstacles, and allocating resources.

First glimpse of role responsibilities

Engages in conversations with customers to introduce how our workloads could enable digital transformation areas that is aligned with the customer's industry.

Initiates conversations with customers on digital transformation in a solution area, in collaboration with partners and services. Shares learning on digital transformation through seminars, workshops, webinars, and direct engagement. 

Able to build cloud onboarding and modernization roadmaps for large complex organizations. 

Collaborate 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, architects, 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.

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.

Business Value. Ability to utilize tools such as the Azure Pricing Calculator, Azure ROI Tool, and Azure TCO Tool to generate consumption project cost estimates and demonstrate Cloud economic value to customers, is preferable.

Collaborative. Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence.

Other: Embody our Culture (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/about/corporate-values) and Values (https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/culture)QualificationsRequired/Minimum Qualifications

7+ years technology-related sales or account management experience

OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 6+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with building strategic transformation roadmaps, solution selling in infrastructure, Hybrid AI, DC migration, security.

Experience leading large cloud engagements, especially those involving cross-solution workloads including infrastructure, data migration and application modernization projects.

Azure Infrastructure and Security Services. Understanding of Microsoft Azure Cloud platform with emphasis on Microsoft Infra services, hybrid cloud technologies, developer tools and services and/or complementing solutions.

Consumption Project Management. Experience leveraging cloud adoption methodologies and frameworks to structure application migration projects - is nice to have.

Prior work experience in a Consulting/Solutions Sales position working with Infra solutions.

Ability to leverage technical frameworks such as the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure to guide customers and partners through the cloud adoption journey.

Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of enterprise software solutions and cloud and datacenter infrastructure competitor landscape.

Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs.

Solution Area Specialists IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,000 - $217,600 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $168,600 - $237,500 per year.Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-payMicrosoft will accept applications for the role until September 2, 2024.Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, 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 (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .