Senior Sales Specialist - Data & AI

We are currently looking for Senior Sales Specialist - Data & AI professionals to join our teams across various business groups, for varying customer sizes, in our enterprise, regulated, and partner services organizations. By applying for this role, you will be considered for multiple opportunities within Microsoft across the United States, including locations beyond where the role is posted. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home. Travel percentages will vary according to role.

As a Senior Sales Specialist - Data & AI, you will be a senior solution sales leader within our enterprise sales organization, working with our most important customers.  You will lead a virtual team of technical, partner and consulting resources to advance the sales process and achieve/exceed quarterly Data & AI revenue and usage/consumption targets in your assigned accounts. 

You will be a trusted advisor and an Analytics, Data & AI subject-matter expert with core capability and expertise in Data Modernization, Analytics and AI.  You will work with customers to leverage data to help them achieve their business priorities and help guide customer’s journey through Analytics-led Azure Data 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.

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.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 4+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 9+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
  • OR Master's Degree in Business Administration (i.e., MBA), Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.
• 6+ years solution or services sales experience.
• 6+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 6+ years experience leading technical projects.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, certifications).
• Data & AI Platform. Understanding of Microsoft Azure Data & AI products. The position requires the ability to articulate and demonstrate the business value of Microsoft's solutions and have a firm understanding of Microsoft's strategies and products relative to major Microsoft competitors.
• Expertise in two or more data estate workloads like Microsoft’s Data & AI Platform (Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Databricks, CosmosDB, Azure SQL, HDInsight, etc.), AWS (Redshift, Aurora, Glue), Google (BigQuery), MongoDB, Cassandra, Snowflake, Teradata, Oracle Exadata, IBM Netezza, SAP (HANA, BW), Apache Hadoop & Spark, MapR, Cloudera/Hortonworks, etc.
• Certifications with Azure Data Engineer, Azure AI Engineer or equivalent industry certifications.
   

Sales Execution

• Engages in conversation with customers aligned to their industry and collaborates with account and partner team to drive and qualify new opportunities and build pipeline. Initiates conversations with customers on digital transformation in one or more solution areas in collaboration with partners and services. Drives incremental revenue growth through personal campaigns or internal sources.
• Identifies customer business and technology readiness, proactively builds external stakeholders' mapping, implements strategies to accelerate the closing of deals, contributes input on strategies to drive and close prioritized opportunities, coaches other team members in deal plan execution, and implements close plans.
• Introduces how other workloads could enable digital transformation areas that are aligned with the customer's industry and turns opportunities into deals.

Scaling and Collaboration

• Collaborates with Global Partner Solutions (GPS) 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.
• Applies role orchestration model and navigates the Microsoft organization to bring the best impact to the customer.

Technical Expertise

• Leads conversations and sets up events within Microsoft, mentors others and develops strategies for best practice sharing
• 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).
• Collaborates with partners and internal ecosystems to analyze competitor products, solutions, and/or services and implement strategies.
• Translates complex technology concepts into business value to customer c-level executives. Builds business cases that quantify the value for the customers.

Sales Excellence

• 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.
• 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.
• Delivers Results Through Teamwork - Drives the execution of projects, partners and collaborates with other teams on related deliverables, and leverages others in relevant work streams.
• Engages with internal and external stakeholders on business planning. Establishes recovery action plans to improve clients' overall experience, orchestrates sales and delivery success through the account and pursuit teams, and drives intentional selling aligned with strategic priorities

Other

• Embody our and