Azure Infra Specialist Manager

Acts as a thought leader in digital/AI transformation to advise customers and represent Microsoft, and coaches others on how to do this.In addition to achieving immediate sales goals, the team must understand the challenges of automotive, transportation, telecommunications and information services customers and help them achieve your business transformation agendas more rapidly while promoting the differentiators and competitive advantages of Microsoft technologies.

In particular, This role will be expected to remove the inhibitors to consumption in pre-sales, help the team develop a vision for the customer and a roadmap to achieve it, work with customers as well as Microsoft partners, and apply an orchestration model that takes into account the unique characteristics of the platform business. The team must be able to learn and apply the orchestration model based on the unique characteristics of the platform business.

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Required and Critical/Important capabilities and skills are

Account ManagementKnowledge of and ability to manage individual customer/partner accounts or a portfolio of aggregate account pipelines by developing and maintaining relationships with existing customers/partners, tracking account status, and ensuring the health of account metrics.
Business AcumenThe ability to understand the parts of the business and your interrelationships. This includes skill in understanding the industry, competition, and expected future developments and challenges, the business's competitive strengths and weaknesses, opportunities to grow the business and reduce operating costs; and awareness of the environment for opportunities.
Business KnowledgeThe ability to appreciate the technical nature of the business, as well as how a particular function relates to that industry and the competition.
Change ManagementThe ability to define and implement procedures and/or technologies to deal with changes in the environment. This may include adapting to change, controlling change, and/or affecting change.
Competitor IntelligenceKnowledge of competitors and your products or services in the market; this includes the understanding of the relative advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft's products or services.
Conflict ResolutionThe ability to manage conflict, disharmony, and strife among people and situations, while recognizing and addressing sensitivities.

Responsibilities

Sales Excellence

• Completes required training and obtains Azure solution and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.
• Mentors/coaches the team on growing knowledge on sales or Azure Infra solutions and ensures the team complete training and obtain certifications as required. Seek additional learning opportunities and prioritize to enhance effectiveness.
• Leads your team to explore business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and facilitate customer innovation to drive growth by leveraging technology, industry and partner expertise. Builds new market by leveraging deep technology expertise and resources.
• Proactively promotes development of deep and influential relationships with client contacts. Guides your team on ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and facilitates the resolution of technical issues for strategic accounts. Establishes standards for customer/partner experiences. Ensures customers are made aware of new technology innovations.
• Guides your team in whitespace analysis and supports the team to identify potential new business in your assigned territories. Aligns the analysis approach across teams. Acts as a thought leader and clears opinions and perspectives from business analysis.
• Oversees the end-to-end business across geographical regions (Business level Engish and Japanese speaking required). Ensures your team meet targets (e.g., sales, usage, customer acquisition) and operational standards and maintains the health of metrics within the assigned subsidiary/area. Interacts with Corporate leadership and senior-level stakeholders to get support for your team and the geographical regions.
• Drives and oversees integrated strategic planning to exceed cloud growth, drive consumption, and Support revenue and gain market share for Azure. Drives the integration of that all local, regional and corporate resources (e.g., Digital, Global Black Belts) into the strategic plan. Discusses progress against plan in rhythm of business (ROB) meetings and aligns the plans of your team across departments. Engages with executives to bring a more strategic perspective into the business plan.

Sales Execution

• Brings impactful industry(Automotive, transportation, teleco and Information services) insights with partners into customer engagements.
• Acts as a thought leader in digital transformation across Azure solutions to advise customers and represent Microsoft, and coaches others internally on how to do this.
• Leads transformational shifts to drive deployment and create business value for customers. Leads a virtual cross-organizational team on strategic projects and high impact solution sales deployments that enable digital transformation and deliver business value.
• Guides your team on communicating with customers, leveraging your business language, to understand the business needs and connect the need to Microsoft technology. In partnership with internal teams, reviews account strategies and plans in order to facilitate customer interactions to assess customer needs. Accelerates customer value realization through cloud services consumption across solution areas. Provides direction/guidance on the development of solutions across solution areas, including support. Helps the team create vision for the customers and develop plans to drive sales. Leverages partners (e.g., Global System Integrators, Global Independent Software Vendor [ISV], industry) added value to increase customer outcomes.
• Coaches your team to remove consumption blockers in pre-sales by collaborating with partners and other internal regional and global teams. Coaches your team how to engage customers to drive cloud services growth, support and consumption in accounts. Leads with technical insights on how to grow customer business.
• Leads your team to plan and execute strategies for driving and closing opportunities. Drives the implementation of strategies and the collaboration with the account team to ensure alignment. Leads your team on ways to implement and share 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. Seeks alignment with all stakeholders and partners and guides team to work with internal stakeholders to remove blockers.

Scaling and Collaboration

• Coaches your team to learn about and apply the orchestration model. Facilitates and leads internal communication and collaboration by identifying resources and removing barriers. Cntributes to the development of the orchestration model.
• Guides your team to build a network of partners to cross-sell and up-sell and drive usage. Leads the team to identify new partners and evaluate partner capabilities. Facilitates the development of partner strategies and ensures execution.
• Coaches the team to drive end-to-end business solutions across solution areas, resulting in increased partner satisfaction and partner deal sharing year-over-year.
• Leads by example to be executive sponsor for Global Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and Global System Integrators (GSIs).

Technical Expertise

• Coaches your team on business and market knowledge. Reviews wins/losses with the team to determine how to identify systematic and non-systematic issues to resolve. Leads team's internal collaboration to position Microsoft products, solutions, and/or services (e.g., cloud services and platforms) against competitors. Acts as a thought leader to help your team connect Microsoft solutions to customer business impact. Leverages deep technology knowledge and coaches team about Microsoft technology differentiators/competitive advantage.
• Acts as the spokesman for Microsoft at external events. Provides expertise to customers/partners and shares knowledge on social media relevant for your market (e.g., LinkedIn). Establishes a sounding board of customers and partners related to technology innovation.
• Supports your team in participating in Microsoft events. Contributes to setting up the events and promoting best practice sharing across subsidiaries and the adoption from other subsidiaries. Actively participants in the Specialist Sales Leader community. Leads by example to show the learning culture across the organization

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Business Administration, Analytics, Data Science, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR 9+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.
• People manager experience is not mandatory, but need to certify your people manager capability.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 5+ years people management experience, including managing high performance sales and technical-specialist teams, coaching solution specialist and account development strategies, and/or leadership roles in multi-tiered large organizations.
• 7+ years senior technical sales leadership experience in cloud services growth and consumption.
• 10+ years solution or services sales experience.
• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Business Administration, Analytics, Data Science, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, Analytics, Data Science, or related field AND 12+ years technology-related sales or account management experience OR 11+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.

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.

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