We are currently looking for Sales Specialist - Data & AI professionals to join our teams across various business groups, for varying customer sizes, in our enterprise, regulated, and partner services organizations. By applying for this role, you will be considered for multiple opportunities within Microsoft across the United States, including locations beyond where the role is posted. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home. Travel percentages will vary according to role.

As a Sales Specialist - Data & AI, you are responsible for supporting the senior team and members to advance the sales process and achieve/exceed quarterly Data & AI revenue and usage/consumption targets in your assigned accounts.

You will be a trusted advisor and an Analytics, Data & AI subject-matter expert with core capability and expertise in Data Modernization, Analytics and AI. You will work with customers to leverage data to help them achieve their business priorities and help guide customer’s journey through Analytics-led Azure Data transformation. You will help customers evaluate their applications and business requirements, recommend solutions that meet their requirements, and demonstrate these solutions to win the technical decision.

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us to achieve our mission.

Responsibilities

Sales Excellence

• Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.
• 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 partners and resources and learns about customer business. Supports senior team members to explore business and emerging opportunities.
• Manages the pipeline of the assigned territory. Conducts forecasting for assigned accounts and develops a portfolio and territory plan with guidance.
• 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.
  
  

Scaling and Collaboration

• Applies the orchestration model to leverage relationships with stakeholders and partners (e.g., Enterprise Operating Unit).
• 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.
  
  

Technical Expertise

• Extends relationships with peers and senior team members across solution areas. Creates connections at technical community events.
• 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.
• 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).
  
  

Sales Execution

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• Engages in conversations with customers to introduce how other workloads could enable digital transformation areas that are 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.
  
  

Embody our Culture and Values

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 2+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.
  

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications

• 4+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
• 2+ years solution or services sales experience.
• 3+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 3+ years experience leading technical projects.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, certifications).
• 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 Microsoft’s Data & AI Platform (Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Databricks, CosmosDB, Azure SQL, HDInsight, etc.), AWS (Redshift, Aurora, Glue), Google (BigQuery), MongoDB, Cassandra, Snowflake, Teradata, Oracle Exadata, IBM Netezza, SAP (HANA, BW), Apache Hadoop & Spark, MapR, Cloudera/Hortonworks, etc.
• Certifications with Azure Data Engineer, Azure AI Engineer or equivalent industry certifications.
  

Solution Area Specialists IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $85,300 - $146,400 per year.

There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $111,700 - $161,700 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.