Sales Specialist, Data & AI

Responsibilities

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. Shares learning on digital transformation through seminars, workshops, webinars, and direct engagement.
• Collaborates with team members to discover new opportunities. Drives incremental revenue growth through personal campaigns (e.g., portfolio analysis) or internal sources (e.g., Marketing). 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 (MSP) 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.
• Develops an understanding of external stakeholders’ mapping, including who the decision makers and influencers are. Participates with account teams (e.g., Account Executives) in communication with business or subject matter decision makers at the customer’s/partner’s business.
• 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.
• Initiates conversations with prospective customers/partners at events to expand external network. Acts as a subject matter expert in one or more solution area(s).
• Researches competitor products, solutions, and/or services and collaborates with the ’compete’ global black belts (GBB) to implement strategies to position Microsoft against competitors in customer communication.

Sales Excellence

• Collaborates with partners and resources and learns about customer business. Supports senior team members to explore business and emerging opportunities.
• Seeks client feedback (both formal and informal) to identify and understand the drivers of satisfaction and execute plans to maintain and continue to build on it, and to identify and understand the drivers of dissatisfaction, determine the root cause of problems, and establish recovery action plan to improve clients overall experience. Shares feedback with account teams.
• Collaborates with extended sales team, partners, and marketing to conduct business analysis (e.g., whitespace analysis, identify industry trends) to pursue high-potential customers and develop a target list of potential business.
• Manages the pipeline of the assigned territory. Conducts forecasting for assigned accounts and develops a portfolio and territory plan with guidance.
• Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.

Qualifications

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience of technology-related sales or account management experience
  • OR Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND some technology-related sales or account management experience.

• 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.
• Data & AI Platform.Understanding of Microsoft Azure Data & AI products. The position requires the ability to articulate and demonstrate the business value of Microsoft’s solutions and have a firm understanding of Microsoft’s strategies and products relative to major Microsoft competitors
• Expertise in two or more data estate workloads like Teradata, Oracle Exadata, IBM Netezza, SAP (HANA, BW), HDInsight, Hadoop, Cloudera/Hortonworks, Apache Spark, Snowflake, MapR, AWS (Redshift, Glue), Google (BigQuery), MemSQL, MarkLogic, Qubole, Pivotal (Greenplum), Actian (Avalanche), Alibaba (MaxCompute)
• Account Management. Effective territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation, stakeholder and executive communication, needs analysis, value engineering, services/partner engagement, opportunity management, pipeline management, large dollar licensing and deal negotiation
• Problem Solver. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies
• Collaborative.Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence
• Leadership. Experience leading large cloud engagements especially those involving Strategic Analytics & AI solutions, Data Platform modernization and migration and related
• Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of enterprise software solutions and platform competitor landscape
• Partners.Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs
• Certificationswith Azure Data Engineer, Azure AI Engineer or equivalent industry certifications preferred