Solution Area Specialist - Public Sector at Microsoft

• Job number1241708
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• Date postedJan 20, 2022
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• Travel0-25 %
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• ProfessionSales
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• Role typeIndividual Contributor
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• Employment typeFull-Time

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.

The Small, Medium, and Corporate (SMC) team helps businesses achieve their digital transformation goals by matching customer challenges with Microsoft solutions. You will help our managed customers (SMC-Corporate) across industries, company sizes and territories to identify their needs and opportunities. One of the fastest growing customer segments in the technology industry, you will help customers get to the cloud across Microsoft solution areas like Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Applications and Infrastructure, and Data and AI.
 
The SMC-Corporate team has different roles that work together in an orchestrated manner and are located in our Digital Sales centers and local subsidiaries.
 
The Cloud Specialist role is focused on working with Microsoft’s account teams to identify and drive opportunities in targeted workloads.  The key goal of this role is to increase incremental sales volume of our cloud solutions, through the generation of new opportunities that result in additional customer revenue.  As a Specialist Sales Professional, you will work closely with Sellers and Partners to plan and execute account coverage actions to unlock new sales opportunities. A Cloud Specialist engages new customers, builds, identifies, drives, orchestrates and closes opportunities with customers that produce transformative business outcomes The role is adept at understanding the needs and process pains of customers to identify opportunities where Microsoft solutions can add long-term value. You will have the exciting opportunity to be responsible for driving cloud business and digital transformation for customers, fostering a positive and collaborative experience for prospects to evaluate, engage with and implement Microsoft products and partner solutions.

The cloud Speciliast will cover public sector accounts in East Africa. 

Responsibilities

As the Cloud Specialist, you will be responsible for working with Business Decision Makers to understand their unique business needs. You will be on point to orchestrate an extensive team covering multiple solution areas to find a solution that will empower their employees and drive their business and work in a team, enabling the customers through digital transformation by leveraging our cloud offerings.

• Engage with customers across industries, company sizes and types to determine needs and identify opportunities to help customers in their Digital Transformation journey
• Communicate effectively with line of business and IT decision makers effectively via different mediums.
• Work strategically to remove technical and business sales roadblocks and innovate to improve business development practices
• Develop a thorough understanding of solutions and relevant business pains, and become proficient conducting high-level demos of primary selling scenarios for cloud solution
• Understand competitor solutions and products and drive compete messaging to increase our cloud penetration
• Work in a fast-paced, collaborative, dynamic teaming environment with internal and external stakeholders
• Collaborate with the extended sales team, partners, and marketing to pursue high potential customers
• Generate new leads through territory planning, campaigns, events, and demos and engage directly with customers to to discover new opportunities
• Effectively turn prospects and qualified leads into opportunities and revenue pipeline by qualifying opportunities and selling with Microsoft partners
• Be the stewards of the business Programs delivering world class experiences as part of sales engagements.
• Ensure excellence in pipeline management, pipeline hygiene, and sales execution against targets
• Meet and exceed daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly targets, including pipeline generation and activity-based targets, accurately forecast pipeline generation
• Scale through partners by co-selling with partners by sharing opportunities to find the best solution for the customer.
• Leverage best-in-class sales and communication tools to accelerate sales, maintain high daily activity, minimum ~60-90 activities/day

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. 

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

The successful candidate is an experienced sales professional with deep customer insights, a track record of business strategy, sales leadership, and hands-on execution excellence. Specifically, this highly visible and sales role requires a candidate, who possesses the following characteristics:

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent work experience required: Computer Science, similar information technology-related discipline or Business Administration.
• MBA desired. 2-6+ years' experience exceeding quota by leading sales teams along complex sales cycles within a Partner ecosystem.
• 2-6+ years of technology related sales or business development experience, particularly cloud computing and management; experience working within a technical sales environment preferred.
• Complex sales training (e.g., Miller Hyman, Spin, Michael Bosworth, Challenger, Holden, Krauthammer, etc.), extensive presentation skills, effective marketing tactics, negotiation, financial analysis,
• Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies and expertise in 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.
• Exhibits outstanding operational excellence - building healthy pipeline, opportunity management and team orchestration
• Strong negotiation, organizational, presentation, financial acumen, written, and verbal communication skills.
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs
• Experience driving new sales and customers using innovative approaches, leveraging joint partnership events, social selling (Linkedln) and networking.
• M365 Fundamentals or prepared to attain certification within 3 months. Strong knowledge of the 3 Microsoft Cloud Solutions and their value proposition and differentiation
• Success-driven, works well in a diverse team and enjoy a dynamic and changing environment
• Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence