Solution Area Specialist

Overview

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be, and take their careers to levels they can't achieve anywhere else. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and sky's-the-limit thinking -- a cloud-enabled world. At Microsoft we have unique capabilities to meet the needs of both individuals and organizations. We care deeply about taking our ideals and vision around the globe and making a difference in peoples' lives and organizations in all corners of the planet. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

The Technology for Social Impact Team is chartered with the mission of bringing the power of technology to every non-profit and humanitarian organization to accelerate Social Good. This organization will bring together our donation and grants programs, industry solutions, commercial sales efforts and partner ecosystems to empower non-profits globally to address the world’s most pressing needs. Profits generated from this business will be reapplied to scaling operations and investments for Microsoft’s public good investments. This is a dynamic and fast-growing business focused on helping organizations on the front line of change to do their best work to create inclusive and enduring positive impact throughout our communities. Find out more about Technology for Social Impact Team at: &

Microsoft's Commercial Solution Area sets the sales strategy, lead technical sales, and operates as a hub for the Commercial Solution Areas and Support Services that power the Microsoft Cloud. We work closely with other Microsoft teams and partners, especially Customer Success, Marketing, and the Specialist Team Unit (STU), to ensure those solutions meet our customers’ needs.

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 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, data, applications, and security 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 a holistic Azure 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 lead customer cloud decisions on the Microsoft Azure platform. You will champion the Microsoft platform across Azure, Modern Work, Dynamics, and Security to ensure our customers are best served. You will remove roadblocks to deployment and drive customer satisfaction.

30% of your time will be spent with customers developing new Azure migration and modernization 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. 60% of your time will be spent on being the key business value and technical cloud leader with outstanding Cloud Economic knowledge, trusted advisor and influencer in shaping customer decisions to commit and adopt Microsoft Azure and Infrastructure solutions. You will win the customers’ technical and business decision for consumption projects and usage scenarios through tailored customer centered outcomes and value creation messaging, providing guidance on cost saving benefits with strong understanding of Microsoft pricing and licensing like AHUB (For Windows and Linux), technical discussions, and aligning the appropriate solutions partners, programs and resources to guide them in decision making and consumption plans. You will lead standard technical demonstrations of Azure solutions to explain and prove the capabilities of Microsoft Azure relative to the customers' business and technical objectives. These efforts will accrue to developing with your Cloud Solution Architect counterpart the minimum viable product (MVP) solutions which will accelerate deployment to Azure with support of other technical roles including Azure Partners. 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, business value, sales, professional skills and competitive readiness. You will therefore be required to attain and maintain the required certifications.

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.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 3+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience; OR 5+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

Professional

Experience. experience selling business solutions to large/global enterprise customers, focused on cloud technologies Account Management. Effective territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation, stakeholder and executive communication, analysis, value engineering, services/partner engagement, opportunity management, pipeline management, large dollar licensing and deal negotiation Executive Presence. Experience and expertise selling to senior business decision makers by aligning & reinforcing the value of the solution to the customer’s overall business pain and/or strategic opportunities and decision criteria. Problem Solver. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies Business Value. Able to articulate business value and cost savings. Leverage 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. Collaborative. Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence Consumption Business Strategy / Project Management. Experience leveraging cloud adoption methodologies and frameworks to structure application migration projects Language. Fluent in German and English

Technical

Customer Outcome / Value Selling . Able to listen deeply to understand customer business objectives to drive value-based decisions at speed leveraging cloud technology. Technical Frameworks. Ability to leverage technical frameworks such as the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure to guide customers and partners through the cloud adoption journey Leadership. Experience leading large cloud engagements, especially those involving Infrastructure migration and application modernization projects Cloud Platform. Understanding of Microsoft Azure Cloud platform, or other public cloud platforms, including IaaS and PaaS technologies. Versed in cloud migration and modernization. Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud Infrastructure, Identity and hybrid Datacenters, security, management and automation. Subject matter expertise in one or more of the following: Azure Infrastructure Design, Migration and operational Excellence Cloud ROI (Return on Investments) and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis Ability to qualify opportunities to help and match customers projects to different Azure Infrastructure, Application, and security services.  Expertise in two or more data estate workloads like Azure VMWare Solution, Azure Virtual Desktop, Site Recovery, Storage, Virtual Machines, Azure ARC, Spring Apps, AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), Azure Sentinel Understanding of licensing of Azure Infrastructure and Application services along with Capacity Reservations, Savings Plans and Azure hybrid benefits (AHUB) Dynamic Solutioning / Technical Dialog. Activates/drives technical sessions to drive education, understanding, and design appropriate solution architectures to meet the customers business and technical requirements Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of enterprise software solutions and cloud and datacenter infrastructure competitor landscape including AWS and GCP Partners. Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs Certifications. Azure Fundamentals and Azure Administrator Associate certifications are required (within 6 months of hire)

Responsibilities

Create “buy-in” vision with key decision makers Build executive relationships with key decision makers and generate excitement around Microsoft solutions’ value to influence long-term strategic direction Understand customer’s cloud footprint, digital transformation needs, business and technology strategy and compete landscape to map customer’s current and desired state and expectations Collaborate with the customers to outline business priorities and understand the buying decision criteria and timeline Lead the solution design with technical acumen Strong presentation and communication skills with ability to demo and whiteboard application architectures By collaborating with a team of technical resources (, cloud solution architects and partners) , conduct an architecture design session and build a Proof of Concept to showcase how solution meets customer’s requirements. Engage Partners to maximize business results Bring together and land Microsoft solutions with Partner solutions, fully leverage the synergistic effect with our partners.  Share practical knowledge and Co-Sell with them to make deals faster and bigger. Build business cases to substantiate the value of the solution Leverage various commercial offers and programs to negotiate, close the deal and successfully displace competition. Lead multi-million-dollar deals requiring orchestration of virtual teams composed of industry, solution, technical, licensing & legal team members. Drive Sales Excellence: Exceed sales / cloud consumption quota by driving pipeline management/Hygiene and accurate forecasting. Be the Voice of the Customer: Share feedback, best practices to influence Microsoft Go-To-Market and product strategies. Lead the Azure deal structure during agreement renewals or new deals. 

We encourage all our employees to continuously maintain and enhance their technical, sales, and professional skills. You will be recognized for thought leadership, sharing, learning, and driving business impact for customers, partners, and Microsoft.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.Industry leading healthcareEducational resourcesDiscounts on products and servicesSavings and investmentsMaternity and paternity leaveGenerous time awayGiving programsOpportunities to network and connect

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