Solution Area Specialist

As an Azure Infrastructure Specialist, you are a senior business leader with deep 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 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 both a high EQ with executive presence, able to engage with senior decision makers to uncover digital transformation initiatives, and a passion to learning how Azure cloud services can deliver digital transformation.

You will remove roadblocks to deployment and drive customer satisfaction.

Primary accountabilities for this role include:

- 40% of your time will be spent with customers developing new Azure consumption engagements which align to the customer’s technical and business strategy. You will work with partners and others at Microsoft, as well as use our core tools and 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 a strong and active business network.
- 50% of your time will be spent on being the key technical leader, trusted advisor and influencer in shaping customer decisions to buy and adopt Microsoft Azure and Infrastructure solutions. You will win the customers’ technical decision for consumption projects and usage scenarios through tailored messaging, technical discussions, and aligning the appropriate solutions partners, programs and resources to guide them in decision making and consumption plans.
- 10% of your time will be spent on influencing the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure go-to-market strategies by providing feedback to sales, marketing, and engineering on current and future product requirements and sales blockers. 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, sales, professional skills and competitive readiness. You will therefore be required to attain and maintain required certifications.

**Responsibilities**:
*** 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. Initiates conversations with customers on digital transformation in a solution area, in collaboration with partners and services.
- Collaborates with team members to discover new opportunities. Collaborates with account teams, 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 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.
- 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 One Commercial Partner (OCP) and with a network of partners to cross-sell and up-sell products, solutions, and services. Identifies new partners by researching and discussing with partners on customer scenarios. Develops joint proposal with partners. Implements partner strategies to scale the business.
- Applies the orchestration model to leverage relationships with stakeholders and partners (e.g., Enterprise Operating Unit).

**Technical Expertise**
- Extends relationships with peers and senior team members across solution areas. Creates connections at technical community events.
- Researches competitor products, solutions, and/or services and collaborates with the 'compete' global black belts (GBB) to implement strategies to position Microsoft against competitors