Technology Specialists Director

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Date posted

Dec 19, 2024

Job number

1796525

Work site

Up to 50% work from home

Travel

0-25 %

Role type

People Manager

Profession

Technology Sales

Discipline

Technology Specialists

Employment type

Full-Time

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. Growth mindset encourages each of us to lean in and learn what matters most to our customers, to create the foundational knowledge that enables us to make customer-first decisions in everything we do. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.

The Technical Specialist Manager is responsible for leading a team of customer-focused Technical Specialists.

The Technical Specialist Manager has demonstrate essential leadership behavior that can deliver two joint outcomes: better business performance and stronger teams that drive growth by coaching.

The Technical Specialist Manager should exemplify a growth mindset, be a teacher, coach, and champion, and be committed to the long-term development of their team and the Azure business.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business or related field AND 6+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
  • OR equivalent experience.

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.

Scale Customer Engagements

• Acts as a representative for technology domain to all C-suite leaders within local market while engaging with and leveraging local Microsoft senior leadership as appropriate. Coaches and enables team to identify and proactively engage with key customer technical decision makers and influencers to unblock technical and business obstacles.
• Uses broad, in-depth Digital Native industry, technical, and professional knowledge, and leadership skills to build credibility with customers and is sought after for expertise.
• Enables and empowers team to influence customer decisions, and ensure technical wins by streamlining processes and managing the flow of wins, leveraging deep knowledge of processes, tools, and programs. Aligns goals across workloads and facilitates cross-selling with various worldwide teams.
• Leverages in-depth knowledge of resources and owns resolution of highly complex, escalated technical and non-technical blockers by engaging other teams and conveying impact. Leverages insights and knowledge of blockers to anticipate market needs and contribute to global strategy. Identifies patterns of blockers within area of expertise and reaches out across geos to consolidate patterns into a business case to accelerate escalation.
• Ensures consistency and quality through capturing, sharing, and adherence of standards and best practices in customer engagements by scaling implementation of cross-functional initiatives across channels at the global level to drive consistency in technical approach and ensure customer technical experience across teams.
• Orchestrates team resources and coaches team to maximize impact of customer engagement and drive long-term global strategy through global capacity planning, prioritization, and utilization of resources. Proactively plans team resources and engages corporate teams to influence maturation and presales. Qualifies and prioritizes opportunities, and holds team accountable for maximizing selling time to achieve scorecard objectives and subsidiary strategy.

Leverage Partner Ecosystem

• Maximizes national/international-level capacity and capabilities and influences future potential partner models by coaching team to grow partner network, identifying gaps, and promoting Microsoft within the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., account teams). Raises escalations or alleviates blockers through collaboration with manager-level counterparts in cross-functional groups.
• Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build global strategy.

Build Strategy

• Generates new compete strategies and builds competitive knowledge of team by enabling competitive learning and identifying experts to share knowledge. Enables team to share compete knowledge with internal teams and global communities, influence compete strategies, and highlight Microsoft advantages during architecture and capability discussions. Acts as a subject matter expert on a particular competitive discipline(s).
• Coaches and provides support to team and across internal teams to define and execute strategy. Drives repeatability of strategy. Proactively approaches customers to understand and identify global/cross-area strategy opportunities, aligning strategy with industry insights. Engages internal teams to ensure capability to execute strategy.
• Maintains communications with internal partners on highest potential customers to pre-align technical resources to customer and customer cases based on account planning and priorities, with the flexibility to realign to minimize orchestration and enable proactive engagements as needed.
• Works with global account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailor to audience for the global or area markets using knowledge of Microsoft offerings, their context in the competitive landscape, broader market trends, and in-depth industry knowledge. Prepares teams for future market and opportunities. Ensures execution of compete strategy across teams, collaborating with cross-functional groups as needed. Where applicable, directs teams in the building of consumption plans with complex requirements in coordination with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.

Solution Design and Proof

• Oversees highly complex demonstrations of end-to-end Microsoft solutions and architectures based on multiple products and positions solutions against competitors. Ensures demonstrations enable customers to identify and resolve technical issues with clear criteria and next steps that guarantee deployment of Microsoft technology.
• Promotes leveraging of reference architectures and provides validation input to establish programmatic frameworks for use by the business.
• Applies advanced sales methodologies and coaches team to lead and inspire global customers in digital transformation solutions and shape and enable scalable change across subsidiaries.
• Coaches team to envision new and innovative solutions that use Microsoft technology to meet customer needs. Supports team in coordinating with other stakeholders to develop solutions for complex sales scenarios. Ensures subsidiary level capabilities to execute on those solutions.
• Identifies new technical and business trends and needs, and identifies ideas that can be transformed into solutions that benefit customers/partners, serving as the voice of the customer (VOC) to Microsoft. Ensures input is utilized and solutions for the customer are established at the worldwide level.

Education

• Enables and empowers team to develop technical expertise and provide technical insights to internal teams. Acts as a role model by increasing own technical knowledge and serving as a respected technology leader to broader organization. Provides insight onto Corporate, business and product groups, sales strategy, and business reviews for impact.
• Acts as a technical thought leader by sharing best practices and regularly delivering content at Microsoft events. Provides insight into how to identify and win opportunities to increase solutions/portfolio understanding and capabilities.
• Ensures team members participate in tech communities and drives feedback to improve overall team member experience and effectiveness at global level.