Senior Specialist Manager - Business Applications at Microsoft

About the Job

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 achieve our mission.

Are you ready to join and lead a double-digit growth cloud business?  Microsoft Business Applications cloud is recognized by analysts as a leader in the CRM, ERP and application platform space.  Trusted by global businesses as their platform of choice, Microsoft Business Applications uniquely enables customers to optimize their operations, engage their customers, empower their people and transform their products.  It’s a new data-driven world, and Microsoft is the only platform in the industry built from the ground with data and intelligence at the center. Microsoft Business Application solutions include virtually unlimited data sources from customers’ applications including legacy, first and third-party, vendor, customer and many more. This unified approach to data and intelligence enables customers to make informed proactive business decisions with deep insights powered by AI and industry-leading analytics (Power BI) resulting in the following key customer benefits:

• Create impact faster: Deliver more impact in less time by quickly deploying solutions, or augmenting existing ones, to enable teams to accelerate business results and increase time to value.

• Break through barriers: Taking a data-first approach with unified data that leverages Microsoft AI to deliver insights & actions that help create better customer experiences.

• Adapt to anything: agility to react and respond to new business priorities, market conditions and customer opportunities with rapidly deployable solutions.

• Innovate everywhere: Solve problems with powerful solutions only possible with the Microsoft Cloud enabling interoperable solutions across multiple lines of business. 

As a Business Applications Sales Specialist Manager – you will recruit, hire and retain diverse world class industry-aligned and outcome-driven business process transformation sellers within the Microsoft sales organization. Working with our most important customers you will help them with their end-to-end business transformation needs by envisioning solutions and mapping capabilities with associated business value to business decision maker persona pains/needs.  You will model the team by setting the tone on leadership & Microsoft culture and values, act with integrity and be accountable to deliver business results with high levels of sales discipline and business forecast accuracy, remove blockers & bring execution clarity to the team on overachieving business goals. You will coach the team by clearly defining strategy, team objectives and outcomes, bringing clarity out of ambiguity, helping the team learn and adapt to ever-changing product innovation and customer business transformation needs.

By making team readiness a priority and coaching them to take all required readiness you will empower your team to be highly successful and productive as they work across organizational boundaries within Microsoft and the partner & independent software vendor channel. You will care for your team by being inclusive, without bias, knowing each individual’s capabilities and career aspirations and invest in the growth of your team.

Responsibilities

As a Business Application Sales Specialist Manager, you are a strategic thinker and purposeful planner who accelerates business by building ambitious sales plans to capitalize on transformational shifts occurring in the marketplace. You will be a market-influencer able to leverage a strong and active Business Decision Maker network and challenge your team of sellers with insights and perspectives that empower them to adopt new practices, think differently and accelerate business growth. You are disciplined in business management, have experience in business rhythms, managing up and down the hierarchical chains and have experience in modelling, coaching and caring for a team of high performing outcome-driven business process transformation sellers who thrive and succeed in a complex solution selling world. You have experience working across organizational boundaries, both internal and external, forging relationships with a shared vision of success.
To excel in the Business Applications Sales Specialist manager role, you must have the following key traits and abilities:

People Leader

• Diverse team-builder, creating an open and trusting environment where people can thrive and possess a sincere interest in the wellbeing, aspirations, growth, and success of others.

• Role model of culture, values, integrity, and leadership protecting individuals and the company, helping the team and others develop a sense of shared purpose through a deep understanding of the broader company context, objectives, and opportunities while creating an environment of empowerment that enables others to succeed and thrive.

• Develops a high-performing team by hiring diverse talent, prioritizing people development, leading by example and preparing people for more senior positions within the organization.

• Develops teams’ Solution Sales skills to deliver the business outcomes of the broader Business Applications platform in an ever-changing landscape of customer transformation needs and solution innovation.

• Coaches sellers with a “challenger mentality” by prompting them to proactively lead with customer-relevant insights on how to grow and transform their business.

• Ensuring your team and its members are recognized and rewarded for their success across both local sales and corporate organizations.

Strategic Thinker

• Proactive leader who is agile embracing mistakes and setbacks, is course correcting, prepared for worst-case scenarios and uses discomfort and ambiguity as a catalyst for strategic thinking bringing clarity to the team.

Purposeful Planner & Executor

• Delivers business impact with intentional planning, driving clarity to the team with consistent coaching rhythms, removing blockers and ensuring quarterly business budget goals are met.

Disciplined Operator

• Maintains excellence in pipeline management, forecasting and driving integrated territory and budget achievement planning.

Lead sellers to overachieve sales targets

• Lead and manage sellers to drive Business Applications objectives to overachieve revenue, customer add targets, customer satisfaction and scorecard metrics.

• Ensures orchestration among sales team and others engaging with the customer (e.g. partners, services, Engineering support, etc.)

• Ensures pipeline hygiene and discipline, delivers on forecast with high level of fidelity and accuracy

• Drives new business opportunities to achieve targets positively contributing to subsidiary scorecard metrics

• Achieve and maintain high levels of operational excellence. Ensure appropriate four-quarter qualified pipeline in place by workload/solution.

Customer centricity:

• Lead from the front, personally engaging at CxO level to support and coach teams on opportunity discovery and acceleration.

• Lead sellers to drive end-to-end business solutions that solve customer problems, deliver tangible value, increasing and average deal sizes YoY and customer and partner satisfaction.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Requirements:

• Extensive experience leading multi-million-dollar business application deals requiring orchestration of large, dispersed, virtual teams composed of industry, solution, technical, licensing & legal team members.

• Leading, managing, and coaching sales teams to overperform against targets.

• Selling CRM, ERP, or similar business applications.

• Selling software-as-a-service or cloud-based business applications to enterprise customers.

• Identifying unique and complex business challenges and solutions.

• Carrying and exceeding a large sales quota by driving and closing enterprise deals.

• Demonstrated sales and sales management experience in Enterprise sales.

• Work closely with the customer success organization and deployment team to ensure solid implementation plans are in place aligning to the customer’s business objectives resulting in the successful consumption of cloud services sold.

Deep understanding of:

• Business solutions, ERP & CRM and how they translate into business impact.

• Commercial cloud offerings, ideally including Microsoft’s cloud platform as well as competitors and related ecosystems.

• Business value selling methodologies, practices and technologies that drive sales prospecting and sales management in complex solution selling environments (e.g. Design Thinking, Business Value Engineering, Challenger sales etc.).

• Expert understanding and selling into one of the following industries: Financial Services, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail and Government.

• The security, regulatory and compliance needs of global customers. 

Partner Engagement:
Fully leverage the synergy effect by co-selling with our partners and independent software vendors to proactively identify and engage early in the sales process, combining Microsoft technology with partner expertise and intellectual property to grow and accelerate deals delivering optimum customer value.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. 

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.