Solution Area Specialist at Microsoft

Job number: 1326318
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Travel50-75 % 
Profession: Sales 
Role type: Individual Contributor 
Employment type: Full-Time

Job Summary

• This is a critical role focused on delivering digital transformation and cloud services to our customers (Public Sector) working closely with several stakeholders. it will involve Face to face customer engagement to complement Account Executive remote engagement to develop faster relationships & trust, gather insights and enable deeper engagement on large transformational projects within the Mordern Work worklaod.

Description
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. 
• 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   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.

Responsibilities

• Expanding strategic education customer relationships to drive larger impact and targeted business growth and drive the jointly agreed customer multi-year Digital Transformation business strategy, delivering agreed outcomes while leading a virtual internal and external team aligned to key audience and stakeholders.
• Identify decision makers and influencers to carry your short-term and long-term digital strategy forward across, including but not limited to system leadership, building/institution leader, IT decision makers, campus administrators, faculty, instructional technologists, educators, and professional development partners.
• Disrupting the mindset of customers and sales teams by bringing innovative ideas that highlight case for change and Microsoft's differentiated value proposition for education.
• Delivering Education Transformation Framework narrative and leveraging it to deepen success engagements with customers.
• Developing account engagement, consumption strategies, customer training, and change management (Professional Development) plans to support best practices and capacity building that:
  • Drive student and educator usage by focusing on strategic workloads in Microsoft 365 
  • Grow usage of integrated learning solutions on the Microsoft platform 
  • Grow and retain Windows 10 device share, by creating demand for experiences specific to Windows, including new device activations 
• Establishing Microsoft as a leader in education transformation and future ready skills championing Microsoft’s commitment to empower every with Career Coach, Minecraft: Education Edition, certifications, and more.
• Support education life-long learning and future-ready skilling focus across the spectrum of our audience engagements, from high level conversations on skills/employability with leaders, to getting students excited about computer science, and empowering students to graduate with industry recognized skills and ongoing learning and certification.
• Remaining focused on customer facing time by running a healthy and predictable business that delivers on a jointly agreed customer Digital Transformation strategy maintaining rigorous sales process compliance.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 6+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience.
• 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.