Solution Area Specialist - Cloud Application Development at Microsoft

Responsibilities

Sales Execution

• Brings impactful industry insights into customer engagements and closes deals with customers. Acts as a thought leader across solution areas to advise customers across business functions on digital transformation. Leads virtual transformational shifts to drive deployment and create business value for customers. May lead partner integration into account/territory planning and customer engagements. Provides thought leadership.

• Orchestrates with team members on conducting personal campaigns to discover new opportunities and generate new leads. Leads conversations with strategic/high-potential customers (e.g., high budget, global account, highly competitive) along with account teams or partners. Facilitates the account team unit (ATU) and/or Specialist Team Unit (STU) to build pipeline in collaboration with partners and services. Guides others on social selling. Applies Microsoft's sales process (MSP) to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed, and educate the customers on how to best address their needs.

• Drives consumption and grow business with existing strategic customers by initiating conversations, guiding others on demos or quotes, and the collaboration 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.  Drives advanced workloads and usage.

• Explores and assesses the needs of strategic/high-potential customers. Articulates business value and long-term implications for customer business. Collaborates with internal teams, partners, and services to lead the proposal or development of solutions that align with customer and Microsoft priorities. Analyzes market trends to identify opportunities for new solutions.

• Proactively builds and governs external stakeholder network and leverages internal partners to engage external stakeholders. Acts as a thought leader and subject matter advisor to the executive-level business decision makers at the customer's/partner's business. Guides others on identifying and engaging decision makers and stakeholders to expand the relationship with customers/partners.

• Develops strategies for driving and closing strategic and/or prioritized opportunities. Collaborates with account teams to ensure alignment with the account strategy and plan. Leads deal execution with the deal teams across the organization. Coaches others on the implementation of 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

• Leads the planning and execution on opportunities with resources and partners to cross-sell and up-sell. Identifies, leverages, and coordinates partners and resources across solution areas. Validates partner solution relevance for customers. Provides input and feedback to One Commercial Partner (OCP) on developing partner strategies and connects the partner ecosystems to scale business results.

• Leads the sales orchestration with internal stakeholders and partners (e.g., Enterprise Operating Unit). Applies a holistic approach to build network across territories. Positions opportunities to promote collaboration and participation.

Technical Expertise

• Leads conversations and sets up events within Microsoft. Mentors others and develops strategies for best practice sharing across subsidiaries. Contributes ideas that can be instituted across Microsoft.

• Posts information or speaks at external events, drives conversations with prospective customers/partners as a thought leader across solution areas.

• Leverages and shares competitor knowledge across solution areas as a subject matter expert to inform decisions on pursuit or withdrawal. Collaborates with the 'compete' global black belts (GBB) to proactively provide analysis of the competitive landscape in supported solution area. Leads the communication to provide feedback to other teams (e.g., sales, marketing, engineering) on future product trends or sales blocker.

Sales Excellence

• Builds and transforms new markets by leveraging technical and industry expertise, partners, and resources. Leads a team to explore business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and facilitate customer innovation.

• Reviews feedback report and sets long-term strategies aimed at maintaining levels of client satisfaction. 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.

• Engages with internal and external stakeholders on business planning, Rhythm of Business (ROB) meetings to review and plan for strategic accounts across territories.

• Collaborates with extended sales team, partners, and marketing to lead business analysis (e.g., whitespace analysis, identify industry trends) to pursue high-potential customers and develop a target list of potential business. Acts as a thought leader and clears opinions and perspectives from business analysis.

• Manages the end-to-end business for strategic accounts across the organization. Leads forecasting for accounts and develops a portfolio and territory plan to drive intentional selling with on-strategy engagements in high propensity accounts. Mentors junior team members.

• Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry. Proactively seeks training, including information that adds to the understanding of customers' business, and shares it with team members

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Professional

• 10 years experience selling cloud services or application development services to large/global enterprise customers with a focus on cloud application development 

• Effective territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation, stakeholder and executive communication, needs analysis, services/partner engagement, opportunity management and pipeline management

• Experience and expertise selling to LOB decision makers, technical decision makers & enterprise solution architects by aligning & reinforcing the value of the solution to the customer’s overall business pain and/or strategic opportunities and decision criteria

• Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies, specifically solutions related to cloud native apps – containers & serverless, microservices, developers tools and DevOps, low code, migration to cloud 

• Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence 

Technical

• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management. Subject matter expertise in one or more of the following: 

  • Application development platforms on public clouds and/or Azure in development languages such as Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, C#, Node.JS targeting Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, public clouds or Azure.

  • Scalable architectures using Azure App Service, API management, serverless technologies, container orchestration (e.g.  AKS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift etc.), microservice frameworks etc.

• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, GitHub)

• Understanding of Data & AI technologies in context of app development (e.g. SQL and NoSQL Databases, Big Data, Cognitive Service, Machine Learning etc.).  

• Understanding of Low code platform and technologies such as Power Platform. 

• Knowledge of cloud development platforms 

• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs 

Education

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience 

• Certification in the following technologies preferred: Cloud, mobile, web application development, cloud-native application architecture (i.e. containers, microservices, API management), modern software development techniques like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure developer services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub), Low Code (Power Platform).

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.