Solution Area Specialist

**Responsibilities**:
Primary accountabilities for this role include
- 30% of your time will be spent with customers developing new Azure consumption engagements which align to the customer’s technical and business strategy. You will work with partners and others at Microsoft, as well as use our core tools and targeted account lists to identify and engage prioritized customers. You will be required to be disciplined in business-management, adaptable to a culture of accountability and build a strong and active business network.
- 60% of your time will be spent on being the key technical leader, trusted advisor and influencer in shaping customer decisions to buy and adopt Microsoft Azure and Infrastructure solutions. You will win the customers’ technical decision for consumption projects and usage scenarios through tailored messaging, technical discussions, and aligning the appropriate solutions partners, programs and resources to guide them in decision making and consumption plans. You will lead technical demonstrations of Azure solutions to explain and prove the capabilities of Microsoft Azure relative to the customers business and technical objectives. These efforts will accrue to developing minimum viable product (MVP) solutions which will accelerate deployment to Azure with support of other technical roles including Azure Partners.
- 10% of your time will be spent on influencing the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure go-to-market strategies by providing feedback to sales, marketing, and engineering on current and future product requirements and sales blockers. You will be recognized for sharing, learning and driving work that results in business impact for customers, partners and Microsoft. We encourage thought leadership, and we encourage all our employees to continuously maintain and enhance their technical, sales, professional skills and competitive readiness. You will therefore be required to attain and maintain required certifications.

**Qualifications**:
**Professional**
- Account Management. Effective territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation, stakeholder and executive communication, needs analysis, value engineering, services/partner engagement, opportunity management, pipeline management, large dollar licensing and deal negotiation required
- Executive Presence. Experience and expertise selling to senior business decision makers by aligning & reinforcing the value of the solution to the customer’s overall business pain and/or strategic opportunities and decision criteria.
- Problem Solver. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies required
- Business Value. Able to utilize tools such as the Azure Pricing Calculator, Azure ROI Tool, and Azure TCO Tool to generate consumption project cost estimates and demonstrate economic value to customers
- Collaborative. Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence

**Technical**
- Technical Dialog. Lead technical sessions making use of whiteboards or other resources to drive solution discussions leveraging published solution architectures for common infrastructure implementations required
- Technical Demonstration. Ability to demonstrate Azure solutions leveraging pre-packaged Azure demo environments and live demos from the Azure Resource Manager showcasing relevant Azure infrastructure solutions required
- Technical Frameworks. Ability to leverage technical frameworks such as the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure to guide customers and partners through the cloud adoption journey preferred
- Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of enterprise software solutions and cloud and datacenter infrastructure competitor landscape including AWS and GCP
- Partners. Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs
- Certifications. Azure Admin Associate or Architect required

**Education**
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a similar information technology-related discipline, MBA preferred, or equivalent experience

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