Solution Area Specialists - Azure Infrastructure

As an Azure Infrastructure Specialist, you are a senior business leader with deep business and technical 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 realize the digital transformation through cloud computing. A core competency of the role is to advance the engagement process to achieve/exceed quarterly Azure Infrastructure consumption targets for related workloads in your assigned accounts. You possess a high EQ with executive presence, able to engage with senior decision makers to uncover digital transformation initiatives, and a passion for learning how Azure cloud services can deliver digital transformation. You will develop and maintain an Azure Infrastructure migration and modernization expertise, able to identify projects, build a compelling business case, and drive the consumption project to production. You will build and maintain relationships with customers, influence long-term strategic direction and act as a trusted advisor driving engagement at the CXO level with business and technology decision makers. You will help customers evaluate their cloud strategy, determine approaches to application and data migration and modernization, and recommend solutions that meet their requirements. You will remove roadblocks to deployment and drive customer satisfaction.

Sales Execution

• Engages in conversations with customers to introduce how other workloads could enable digital transformation areas that is aligned with the customer's industry. Has a fundamental understanding of customers' business to initiate conversations with customers on digital transformation in a single solution area, in collaboration with partners and services. Shares learning on digital transformation through seminars, workshops, Webinars, and direct engagement.
• 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, account teams). Collaborates with account teams, partners, or services to track, qualify, and expand 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 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 [GBBs]); or licensing transactions and project engagements, ensures rapid and robust deployment plan at point of sale that is validated by services and partners. Identifies, articulates, and facilitates the removal of blockers to consumption by partnering with internal and external stakeholders.
• 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.
• 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.

Scaling and Collaboration

• Collaborates with Global Partner Services (GPS) and with a network of partners to cross-sell, up-sell, and co-sell products, solutions and services. Identifies new partners by researching and discussing with partners on customer scenarios. Develops joint proposals and consumption plans with partners. Implements partner strategies to scale the business.
• Applies the orchestration model to support deal closure by identifying and aligning internal stakeholders and leveraging relationships with partners.

Technical Expertise

• Researches competitor products, solutions, and/or services and collaborates with the "compete" global black belts (GBBs) to implement strategies to position Microsoft against competitors in customer communication.

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. Collaborates with partners and resources and learns about customer business. Supports team members to explore business and emerging opportunities.
• Participates in rhythm-of-business (ROB) meetings to review and plan for accounts in the assigned territory.
• 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.