Solutions Sales Professionals Business Strategy Manager The Solution Sales & Strategy team drives key global initiatives and programs that are foundational across Microsoft’s solution areas, such as overall Solution Sales strategy, annual go-to-market planning and landing, partner strategy, sales model design and strategy, recognition programs, and career development and leadership programs. The team also forms the interface between the WW field-based solution leads and Microsoft corporate functions.
This business program manager role will be responsible for several critical areas to enable business growth. As a global leader on the corporate team with a perspective across the Microsoft solutions portfolio, you’ll be a critical and visible leader inside of a WW strategy team and will have the opportunity to collaborate and influence and work with senior leaders across the business. In this role, you will work across corporate functions to helping to drive the short, medium, and long term evolution of the Solution Specialist and Technical Specialist sales and manager roles to help accelerate business results and enable better customer outcomes and business results. This includes a strong interaction with field sales teams to understand their needs, identify best practices, competitive insights, bring insights into the Corp team to then evolve our strategy and plans to be more efficient and impactful.
This role will be responsible for the following:
• Solution Sales and Technical Sales Discipline role design
o Defining the role: role design, excellence in role design, role seniority differentiation, priorities and success indicators.
o Role Enablement: all role guidance, onboarding, training.
o Tools, reports, processes: all tool, report and processes required for the field and corp needs for the role.
o Projects to increase the impact of the role.
• Enablement & Readiness: Support field and partner sales enablement resources including programs, offerings, and readiness activities including solution opportunity activation & execution guidance
• Driving Strategy for Solution Sales: as this role is a core part of the strategy team in a dynamic organization, new projects/programs will require leadership and collaboration to build and execute.
• Collaborating with people across the Worldwide Commercial Busines, the field, and other parts of the company such as Enterprise, Services, Partner, Customer Success, Finance, Marketing and Operations and HR to achieve goals and meet objectives and key results on time.
• Finding, evaluating, engaging and working with specialized vendor organizations to support business objectives.
Who We Are Looking For
Experience Required
• 5 years minimum demonstrated work experience combining people, field and program management skills.
• Creative thinker who can see ‘the big picture’ and unite new and disparate ideas with practical plans, working comfortably in the face of ambiguity.
• Comfortable being simultaneously self-driven and collaborative, and able to drive clarity out of complex situations.
• Excellent project management skills, including proven ability to sort through competing demands, establish a work plan and collaborate with appropriate parties to execute the plan
• Strong problem solving and decision-making skills to evaluate business insights and implement improvements as appropriate. Aptitude for framing, analyzing, and solving complex problems.
• Able to achieve results through influence across multiple organizations. Strong networking and interpersonal skills – ability to build positive working relationships with senior leaders and peers
• Excellent executive verbal and written communication skills with the ability to communicate complex work projects in simplified terms
• Must be able to work independently and proactively, handle multiple projects in a fast-paced environment, negotiate and collaborate effectively
• Strong data analysis skills. Must be highly analytical, able to understand business metrics, customer and market trends
• Solid understanding of Microsoft’s business units and solutions.
• Detailed understanding of complexities of leading and enabling field sales roles and organizations.
Solutions Specialist, Global Blackbelt Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be, and take their careers to levels they can't achieve anywhere else. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and sky's-the-limit thinking -- a cloud-enabled world.
At Microsoft we have unique capabilities to meet the needs of both individuals and organizations. We care deeply about taking our ideals and vision around the globe, and to make a difference in peoples' lives and organizations in all corners of the planet. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet.
Are you insatiably curious? Do you embrace uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from your mistakes? Do you collaborate well with others, knowing that better solutions come from working together? Do you stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve, and are you motivated every day to empower others to achieve more through technology and innovation? Are you ready to join the team that is at the leading edge of Innovation at Microsoft?
To learn more about Microsoft’s mission, please visit: https://careers.microsoft.com/mission-culture
Check out all our products at: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us
The Impact You’ll Be Making
As a Solution Specialist Global Black Belt, you will be a solution sales leader within our enterprise sales organization working with our most important customers, ISVs and system integrators. You will partner with a virtual team of technical, partner and consulting resources to advance the sales process and achieve/exceed Azure sales and usage/consumption targets for application and infrastructure workloads. You will build and maintain relationships with Microsoft account teams, STU, CSU, Engineering, Azure Global, Fast Track, customers and partners to influence near term customer success and long-term strategic direction. You will build and curate an ecosystem of customers and partners who are critical to the successful implementation of Application and infrastructure workloads. You will also be vital to ensuring our technical resources are deployed to the most impactful opportunities. This includes proper qualification, interaction with customers and sales teams on technical and non-technical issues and guiding sales teams to the proper internal resources required to fulfill the solution for the customers.
Who We Are Looking For
Experiences Required: Education, Key Experiences, Skills and Knowledge:
Professional
• Experience. 2-5 years experience selling cloud services, storage or application development services to customers with a focus on cloud application development, infrastructure technologies and data storage technologies preferred.
• Account/Partner Management. Effective partner/territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation, stakeholder and executive communication needs analysis, value engineering, services/partner engagement, opportunity management, pipeline management, and large dollar licensing and deal negotiation required.
• Executive Presence. Experience and expertise selling to selling to technical decision makers & enterprise solution architects by aligning & reinforcing the value of the solution to the customer’s overall business pain and/or strategic opportunities and decision criteria preferred.
• Problem Solver. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies, specifically solutions related to, migration to cloud, Hybrid cloud, datacenter infrastructure modernization, big compute, DevOps/DevTest required.
• Collaborative. Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence required.
Technical
• Cloud Platform. Understanding of cloud platforms and infrastructure including Azure platform services, hybrid cloud technologies, big compute, developer tools and services and data storage. Requires the ability to engage with developers and IT architects as trusted advisors. Requires the ability to articulate and present the business value of Microsoft's Azure apps and infrastructure related cloud solutions and have firm understanding of Microsoft's strategies and products relative to major competitors required.
• Leadership. Experience in assessing opportunities and leading large cloud deals, especially those involving application portfolio modernization and migration, big compute and related preferred.
• Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of enterprise software solutions, cloud platform competitor and storage providers preferred.
• Partners. Understanding of storage and big compute partner ecosystems, business models, go to market planning, pipeline management and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs required.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field preferred
Education
• Bachelor's Degree required. Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field preferred. MBA preferred.
Company Description:
Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture embraces a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and a passion for encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that affect billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission. Customer Success: Microsoft aspires to assist our customers achieve their digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. To this end, Microsoft invests in a dedicated Customer Success team that will help our customers successfully realize their business outcomes Microsoft's Global Account Management Delivery (GAMD) is a fast-paced, growing global organization that focuses on scalable deliveries and cloud consumption with Small-Medium Enterprise Commercial, State Local Government, Education, and Non-profit customers. We are customer-obsessed As a Customer Success Account Manager; you are the primary customer-facing role responsible for customer success by managing program deliveries and strong customer relationships. Our priority is the customers' successful adoption and productive use of Microsoft cloud technologies. You are front and center with our customers supporting their digital journey and empowering them to achieve more!
