Solution Area Sales Specialist

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.

In SMC and Digital Sales, we have set out with the purpose to empower our customers through the unique value of the Microsoft cloud by building a globally-led, digital-first scale organization aligned with partners. Dedicated to one of the fastest growing customer segments, the Small, Medium, Corporate (SMC) and Digital Sales organization is committed to delivering the global digital scale engine for our business
- this is where you come in.

As part of local subsidiaries or Digital Sales centers around the world, you will support a dedicated set of customers in identifying and achieving their business objectives through best-in-class digital engagement and partner co-selling. You will also have an opportunity to work cross-collaboratively while living our shared SMC and Digital Sales Culture priorities: Diverse and Inclusive, Wellbeing, Sustainability, Giving and Learning. If you have been described as customer obsessed and have a passion for digital-first solutions, we invite you to learn more about the SMC and Digital Sales organization and the value we deliver to our customers, partners, and one another, every day.

**Responsibilities**:
**Sales Execution**
- Engages in conversations with customers to introduce how other workloads could enable digital transformation areas that is aligned with the customer's industry and turns opportunities into deals.
- Has a deep understanding of customers' business and its priorities to drive conversations with customers on digital transformation across multiple solution areas, in collaboration with partners and services. Creates guiding examples of 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, account teams). Collaborates with account teams, partners, or services to track, qualify, and expand 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 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 [GBBs]); for licensing transactions and project engagements, ensures rapid and robust deployment plan at point of sale that is validated by services and partners. Identifies, articulates, and facilitates the removal of blockers to consumption by partnering with internal and external stakeholders.
- Identifies customer business needs and technology readiness. Contributes to the development of solutions in collaboration with internal teams, partners, and services.
- Proposes prioritized solutions that align with customers' needs. Articulates the business value of proposed solutions.
- Implements strategies to accelerate the closing of deals. Contributes input on strategies to drive and close prioritized opportunities. Coaches junior team members in deal plan execution. 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.

**Scaling and Collaboration**
- Collaborates with One Commercial Partner (OCP) and with a network of partners to cross-sell, up-sell, and co-sell.
- Identifies and supports on-boarding new partners by researching and discussing customer scenarios.
- Provides feedback to OCP on partner gaps.
- Develops joint proposals and consumption plans with partners. Contributes to developing partner strategies to address gaps in partner capabilities.
- Applies the orchestration model to proactively drive deal closure by identifying and aligning internal stakeholders and leveraging and expanding relationships with partners.

**Technical Expertise**
- Analyze competitor products, solutions, and/or services and implements strategies to position Microsoft against competitors in customer communication.
- Proactively provides analysis of the competitive landscape in supported solution area.
- Evaluates opportunities and makes recommendations on pursuit or withdrawal.

**Sales Excellence**
- Collaborates with partners and resources and leverages customer insights or industry knowledge.
- Contributes to exploring business and emerging opportuniti