Solution Area Specialist

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.

Overview

The role of the Solution Area Specialist (SAS) is to engage with customers to introduce digital transformation solutions aligned with their industry, and initiate conversations on solution areas in collaboration with partners and services. The SAS is required to collaborate with team members to discover new opportunities, drive revenue growth through campaigns, and build relationships via social selling. The SAS would also need to drive consumption and business growth with existing customers by providing demos, quotes, and ensuring robust deployment plans validated by services and partners as well as identify customer business needs and technical readiness, propose prioritized solutions, and communicate the business impact effectively. The SAS wouls also need to implement strategies to accelerate deal closure, including developing close plans and engaging with decision makers and influencers.

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

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• A few years of technology-related sales or account management experience.
• OR a Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND a few years of technology-related sales or account management experience.

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