Solution Area Specialist - App Innovation at Microsoft

About the job

Microsoft is uniquely positioned to win “App Innovation” workloads to help customers’ Digital Transformation journey. The Microsoft Application Innovation business is one of the fastest growing businesses within with a portfolio of products spanning across Managed/PaaS services of Azure Platform, PowerApps and Developer Productivity tools like GitHub and Visual Studio. Microsoft is hiring Specialist sellers for Application Innovation business to deliver sales goals in this dynamic and fast-growing enterprise market.

As an Application Innovation Specialist, you will be a senior solution sales leader, with technical acumen, selling the Microsoft Application innovation portfolio to our largest enterprise customers. You will manage CxO level business relationships, understand customer challenges and priorities, identify modernization opportunities across the customer's application estate, build a business case for innovation, lead an architectural design session, close the business, and build a plan for deployment of app modernization/ innovation projects. You will do this with your deep Industry knowledge, technical acumen and by leading a virtual team of resources across Microsoft and Partner ecosystem. You will spend 70% of your time on customer-facing activities driving sales and technical conversations, 15% in internal meetings for collaboration and 15% to maintain business hygiene like reporting and managing pipeline. This role is flexible in that you can work [up to 50%/up to 100%] from home.

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.

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 application 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 (e.g., 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 Partner 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 App Innovation business case 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 and accurate forecasting.
• Be the Voice of the Customer: Share feedback, best practices to influence Microsoft Go-To-Market and product strategies

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.

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
• Master's degree in Business Administration (i.e., MBA), Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience OR 7+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience
• Certification on any public cloud and anything specific to cloud-native or Low Code technologies
• Certification/Training in sales, business value selling and consulting selling methodologies