Solution Area Sales Specialist

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 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.

As an Azure Core Specialist, you are a senior business leader with technical and business expertise 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 realise the digital transformation through cloud computing.

**Responsibilities**:
**Sales Execution**:

- Brings impactful industry insights into customer engagements and closes deals with customers. Acts as a thought leader across solution areas to advise customers across business functions on digital transformation. Leads virtual transformational shifts to drive deployment and create business value for customers. May lead partner integration into account/territory planning and customer engagements. Provides thought leadership.
- Orchestrates with team members on conducting personal campaigns to discover new opportunities and generate new leads. Leads conversations with strategic/high-potential customers (e.g., high budget, global account, highly competitive) along with account teams or partners.
- Drives consumption and grow business with existing strategic customers by initiating conversations, guiding others on demos or quotes, and the collaboration with partners or internal teams. For licensing transactions and project engagements, ensures rapid and robust deployment plan at point of sale that is validated by services and partners. Drives advanced workloads and usage.
- Explores and assesses the needs of strategic/high-potential customers. Articulates business value and long-term implications for customer business. Collaborates with internal teams, partners, and services to lead the proposal or development of solutions that align with customer and Microsoft priorities. Analyzes market trends to identify opportunities for new solutions.
- Develops strategies for driving and closing strategic and/or prioritized opportunities. Collaborates with account teams to ensure alignment with the account strategy and plan. Leads deal execution with the deal teams across the organization. Coaches others on the implementation of 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.

**Scaling and Collaboration**:

- Leads the planning and execution on opportunities with resources and partners to cross-sell and up-sell. Identifies, leverages, and coordinates partners and resources across solution areas. Validates partner solution relevance for customers. Provides input and feedback to Global Partner Solutions (GPS) on developing partner strategies and connects the partner ecosystems to scale business results.
- Leads the sales orchestration with internal stakeholders and partners. Applies a holistic approach to build network across territories. Positions opportunities to promote collaboration and participation.

**Technical Expertise**:

- 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.
- Posts information or speaks at external events, drives conversations with prospective customers/partners as a thought leader across solution areas.*

**Sales Excellence**:

- Builds and transforms new markets by leveraging technical and industry expertise, partners, and resources. Leads a team to explore business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and facilitate customer innovation.
- Reviews feedback report and sets long-term strategies aimed at maintaining levels of client satisfaction. 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.
- Engages with internal and external stakeholders on business planning, Rhythm of Business (ROB) meetings to review and plan for strategic accounts across territories.
- Collaborates with extended sales team, partners, and marketing to lead business analysis (e.g., whitespace analysis, identify industry trends) to pursue high-potential customers and develop a target list of potential business. Acts as a thought leader and clears opinions and perspectives from business analysis.
- Manages the end-to-end business for strategic accounts across the organization. Leads forecasting for accounts and develops a portfolio and territory plan to drive intentional selling with on-strateg