Azure Data & AI Specialist

The Data and AI team acts as trusted advisors and subject matter experts with core capability and expertise in Data Modernization, Analytics, and AI. We work with customers to leverage data and AI to help them achieve their business priorities and help guide customers’ journey through Azure Data transformation. We also support customers in evaluating their applications and business requirements, recommend solutions that meet their requirements, and demonstrate these solutions to win the business and technical decision.

As a Data & AI Specialist you will be a solution sales expert within our enterprise sales organization working with our most important customers. You will collaborate with a team of technical, partner, and consulting resources to advance the sales process and exceed quarterly Data & AI revenue targets in your assigned accounts.

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.

Responsibilities

• Engages in conversations with customers to introduce how our workloads could enable digital transformation areas that is 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.
• 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, architects, 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 Customer Engagement Methodology (MCEM) to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Effective territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation,  analysis, value engineering, services/partner engagement, opportunity management, pipeline management and deal negotiation.
• Problem Solver. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies.
• Business Value. Ability to utilize tools such as the Azure Pricing Calculator, Azure ROI Tool, and Azure TCO Tool to generate consumption project cost estimates and demonstrate Cloud economic value to customers, is preferable.
• Collaborative. Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence. 

Qualifications

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. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

Required Qualifications: 

• Experience in technology related Sales/Solution Sales in a reputable software company 
• A track record of meeting and exceeding revenue targets 
• Experience working with complex enterprise customers 
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 4+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR 5+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications : 

• Experience selling business solutions to global customers with a focus on data platform and Analytics & AI technologies  
• Experience working with Data solutions: Cloud-based Data Warehouse, Databricks, Hadoop, Spark, Data Lake, SQL; MySQL, PostreSQL, NoSQL (Mongo), PowerBI and/or Machine Learning solutions.
• Master's Degree in Business Administration (i.e., MBA), Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR 7+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.4+ years solution or services sales experience.