Azure Specialist Sales Manager

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As an Azure Specialist Sales Manager, you will build, develop and lead a team of Azure Specialists to identify and win over the technical decision makers within our diverse set of Corporate customers. You and your team will drive technical evaluations and decisions that help them achieve measurable outcomes with the Microsoft Azure Platform, thereby securing long-term sustainable growth for Microsoft. Your team will enable and advance customer maturity through direct customer engagement, Pilot deployments, and solution and architectural guidance, while developing deep engagement with internal teams and channel partners to bring holistic relevance and value to our customers. The Azure Specialist Sales Manager is a great coach, mentor, and leader, has a deep affinity for cloud technologies, and loves working closely with their team, their peers, and their customers to deliver success.

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.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

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

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
  • OR Master's Degree in Business Administration (i.e., MBA), Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.
• 6+ years solution or services sales experience.
• 3+ years people management experience.

Responsibilities

People Management

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Sales Execution

• Brings impactful industry insights into customer engagements and helps close deals with customers. Acts as a thought leader in digital transformation across solution areas to advise customers and represent Microsoft, and coaches others internally on how to do this. Leads transformational shifts to drive deployment and create business value for customers. Leads a virtual cross-organizational team on strategic projects and high impact solution sales deployments that enable digital transformation and deliver business value. May lead partner integration into account/territory planning and customer engagements.
• Leads their teams to identify and track new opportunities. Leverages stakeholders (e.g., Customer Success team unit, account-aligned team unit, Specialist Team Unit, One Commercial Partner organization) to build pipeline within the territory. Coaches team members on interfacing with prospective customers to build network. Applies Microsoft's sales process (MSP) to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed, and educate the customers on how to best address their needs.
• Coaches their team to collaborate with partners and other internal teams (e.g., Technical Sales Professionals, Global Black Belts) and to engage customers to drive consumption. Leads with technical and industry insights on how to grow customer business.
• Guides and orchestrates their team on communicating with customers to understand their business needs or facilitates customer interactions to assess customer needs. Provides direction/guidance on the development of solutions across solution areas and support areas. Helps the team create vision for the customers and develop plans to drive sales.
• Coaches their team and/or other teams (e.g., ATU, STU) on identifying and engaging decision makers and stakeholders to expand the relationship with customers/partners. Engages C-Suite decision makers to support teams on opportunity discovery and acceleration. Represents their team internally at Microsoft as they engage other internal stakeholders.
• Leads their team to develop strategies for driving and closing opportunities. Drives the implementation of strategies and the collaboration with the account team to ensure alignment. Leads their team on ways to implement and share 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

• Guides their team to build a network of partners to cross-sell and up-sell. Leads the team to identify new partners and evaluate partner capabilities. Facilitates the development of partner strategies and ensures execution.
• Coaches their team to learn about and apply the orchestration model. Facilitates and leads internal communication and collaboration by identifying resources and removing barriers. Contributes to the development of the orchestration model.

Technical Expertise

• Supports their team on participating in Microsoft events. Contributes to setting up the events and promoting best practice sharing across subsidiaries.
• Acts as the spokesman for Microsoft at external events. Provides expertise to customers/partners and shares knowledge on a specific platform or market.*
• Coaches their team on business and market knowledge. Leads team's internal collaboration to position Microsoft products, solutions, and/or services against competitors. Acts as a thought leader to help their team connect Microsoft solutions to customer business impact.

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.
• Lays out customer satisfaction long-term strategies. Proactively promotes development of deep and influential relationships with client contacts. Guides their team on ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and facilitates the resolution of sales/delivery issues for strategic accounts. Establishes standards for customer/partner experiences.
• Participates in regular strategic planning for their assigned territory. Reviews plans via Rhythm of Business (ROB) meetings and aligns the plans of their team across departments. Guides team to align their approach with sales excellence team. Engages with external executives to bring a more strategic perspective into the planning portion of account planning.
• Guides their team in whitespace analysis and supports the team to identify potential business in the assigned territory. Aligns the analysis approach across teams. Acts as a thought leader and clears opinions and perspectives from business analysis.
• Oversees the end-to-end business across geographical regions. Ensures their team meet sales targets and operational standards and maintains the health of metrics within the assigned territory. Interacts with Corporate leadership and senior-level stakeholders to get support for their team and the geographical regions.