Solution Area Specialist - Azure Infrastructure at Microsoft

Job Description

• Engages with and guides customers toward technical decisions to purchase and use Microsoft technology. Leverages sales strategy to address customer digital transformation and align technology to customer business needs.
• Understands customer needs, collects customer feedback, and provides strategic input to customers.
• Demonstrates Microsoft solutions to prove capabilities, applies architectures to client scenarios, and engages in partner sell-with scenarios to scale through partners.
• Acts as an orchestration point for technical resources and works to resolve blockers in order to achieve solution implementations.

Responsibilities
Scale Customer Engagements:

• Engages with and reaches out to customers proactively and independently.
• Uses knowledge of customer context, solution or portfolio expertise, and technical and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers.
• Leads and ensures technical wins for core and adjacent technologies by leading technical discussions with customers and establishing rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams, leveraging knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider [MSP], Managed Certified Professional [MCP]), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds [ECIFs]). Searches for customer references to use in engagements.
• Leverages foundational knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center [MTC] [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites) and proactively engages product teams (e.g., engineering) to remediate blockers by conveying impact.

Scale Through Partners:

• Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by acting as liaison between the partner and team and facilitating partner resources and processes throughout the course of the project.
• Supports partner technical capacity by identifying skill and resource gaps and providing feedback to internal teams (e.g., One Commercial Partner [OCP]).

Build Strategy:

• Captures core competitive knowledge and delivers back to product and engineering teams to enhance team capabilities and develop compete strategies for assigned customers.
• Provides strategic, technical, and partner input based on Microsoft capability at the account level to contribute to strategy development, leveraging partner, competitor, or open-source knowledge.
• Works with account teams to shape strategic win plan and tailor Microsoft messaging to audience using knowledge of customer feedback, specific Microsoft solutions, and their context in a competitive landscape.

Solution Design and Proof:

• Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and proof of concept [POC] sessions) of products, services, and integration through initial engagements. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment.
• Presents and applies architecture patterns to partners or customers and drives cross-workload support for Microsoft Solutions.
• Applies sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) and coaches team in addressing customer digital transformation and leveraging insights to align new or changing technology to customer business needs.

Education:

• Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers, partners, and senior colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.
• Demonstrates new and updated products to increase internal virtual teams' understanding of solutions and new opportunities.
• Monitors and responds to internal tech community posts, attends community calls, sessions, hackathons, etc., and acts as a mentor for their technology area.

Other:

• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology.
• 6+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• 4+ year(s) experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• Certification in relevant technologies or disciplines (e.g., Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture).