Careers at Microsoft

Responsibilities

• Deep Proactive Engagement
• Develops talent and coaches others to optimize workload related to sales execution. Ensures programmatic alignment and oversees execution of escalations correctly. Frequently collaborates with internal sales and management teams through sales process optimizing for the right level of investment and customization. Ensures tasks are accomplished across stakeholders with appropriate breadth and depth.
• Reviews and leads the presentation of deals that will process, including any standard or custom amendments and documentation and proactively provides feedback to teams. Secures and leverages internal resources for teams to assist with customer queries regarding contract terms. Refines and validates legal amendments reflecting operational and other requirements granted in specific customer situations. Serves as an executive sponsor and leads negotiations on deal escalations.
• Promotes the development of unique deal strategies to present offers to clients. Demonstrates strong leadership and engagement with all stakeholders to ensure that their teams are executing effectively while reaching milestones and that all internal stakeholders are aligned on closing to avoid deal delay. Coaches and leads own team through the lifecycle management planning and Microsoft Selling process to ensure that all sales motions include checkpoints on deployment and consumption.
• Leverages deep knowledge of sales science and operational acumen (e.g., pipeline metrics, closed rates, competitive selling) to lay out a strategic sales execution framework. Analyzes and synthesizes multiple data inputs quickly and drives strategic decision making and consistent visibility to ensure the best sales and revenue production and velocity through management team. When applicable, collaborates with sales excellence and sales leadership on forecasting process to drive alignment and accuracy.
• Provides strategic alignment for business opportunities which vary based on deal lifecycle and artificial intelligence (AI) (e.g., upsell/cross-sell, expanding footprint, transformational). Uses knowledge of both customer and Microsoft commercial strategies to seize new opportunities that grow the Microsoft annuity footprint. Establishes and fosters working relationships with internal partners (e.g., account team unit [ATU], specialist team unit [STU], customer success unit [CSU]) to maximize pipeline conversion. Promotes upsells that aligns to proven value across teams and provides strategic direction across teams to secure upsells. Works with account teams to identify growth opportunities and solutions. Coaches others to evaluate and verify multiple equivalent offers (MEOs) that advances internal alignment and maximize business outcomes.
• Oversees offers. Demonstrates deep subject matter expertise in how our solutions work and applies that knowledge to help teams understand how to monetize products and solutions. Coaches others on limitations on deal making with peers (e.g., understands when it is appropriate and not appropriate to follow through with a deal). Demonstrates expertise of industry knowledge and industry trends.
• Drives strategic insights into deal making by leveraging audience understanding and knowledge of decision-maker buying criteria. Influences teams. Recognizes and acts on trends across deals to guide teams toward new best practices. Builds customer-centric offers. Drives collaboration with account team to determine how they can best monetize opportunities that are included in the account plan. Serves as a subject matter expert and coaches account and v-teams on complex, compete, and tops deals. Identifies and removes obstacles and realigns to best commercial program.
• Leverages expertise of customer business needs and desired outcomes and implements and proactively monitors use of new tools and processes to achieve revenue goals using ethical selling methods. Mentors others on developing pricing scenarios and proposals. Leads and oversees the analysis of competitive analyses and provides strategic direction to align results to substantially shape commercial solutions. Acts as a trusted advisor both internally and with customers in the sales process. Develops and deploys appropriate monetization of commercial solutions.
• Provides strategic and operational direction during early engagement, planning and ideation process. Serves as an expert and advises on account territory planning. Develops and aligns novel and innovative close plan strategies across teams. Approves language of renewal or negotiation to customer's understanding. Serves as an expert and resources on customer understanding. Works within portfolio to gain strategic position.
• Develops and shares best practices for deal making. Coaches teams to build consistency across deals. Examines deals from different angles (e.g., year over year), models different variables to make the most effective deal. Presents and speaks at a C-level audience to understand business solutions outside of technology solutions (e.g., productivity gains, financial impact to a customer, Opex [operational expenditure] versus Capex [capital expenditure]) and understands the terminology of working at this level.
• Leads and coaches customer/partner support/account teams to set expectations on value delivery and ensures that they all teams are aligned on customer/partner priorities, strategies, and budget to better structure deals that drive annuity and cloud growth. Identifies opportunities for teams to develop challenger relationships with customers/partner to understand their priorities and strategies, and structures deals that drive value and contribute to Microsoft growth through attainment of revenue-based, share-based, and/or consumption-based quota. Demonstrates empathy with high-level customers and partners.
• Grows share and adoption while simultaneously driving business value for customers. Works collaboratively within the customer/partner ecosystem to balance customer/partner and Microsoft needs when crafting value-based solutions. Represents customer and partner requirements in proposals. Translates requirements into proposals. Collaborates with internal stakeholders to solve customer/partner issues. Serves as a subject matter expert on customer/partner priorities and industry challenges and provides guidance to others to solve problems. Validates and implements commercial strategies for customers and partners.
• Orchestrates critical resources to solve customer/partner issues in deals. Fosters and grows senior leader trusted relationships with customers and partners. Strategically engages with partners (e.g., licensing solution partner [LSP], cloud solution provider [CSP]) on effective ways to establish customer solutions for the benefit of all parties.
• Develops and communicates tactical direction and strategies to various sellers and business stakeholders in order to achieve revenue targets. Coaches others to secure and deploy critical resources (e.g., deal desk, sales support, partners, finance) to drive business outcomes. Provides direction and guidance for high levels of strategic conversations internally or externally. Serves as an expert and resource for others and aligns commercial strategy to customer needs. Drives the planning and execution of strategies with partners to ensure that solutions are aligned to customer commercial strategic needs.
• Advises and leads cross-functional teams on solution assessment and expected outcomes within local or regional segment/organization to determine how commercial licensing and contracting should be changed to best meet customer needs. Resolves cross-functional issues to successful conclusion. Integrates unique solutions, approaches, or techniques in feedback loop to corporate to improve/simplify contractual commercial to meet business needs or market opportunities.
• Actively promotes and reinforces cross-group collaboration with prioritization to ensure proper balance of demands. Actively shares knowledge across teams and creates a common or shared vision across a highly matrixed organization (across other Microsoft functional areas).

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business Management, Information Technology, Law, Marketing, Finance, Communication, Education (or equivalent) or related field AND 8+ years sales and negotiation experience or related work or internship experience OR 12+ years sales and negotiation experience OR equivalent experience. 3+ years sales management or sales executive leadership experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Master's Degree in Business Management, Information Technology, Law, Marketing (or equivalent) AND 10+ years sales and negotiation experience or related work OR Bachelor's Degree in Business Management, Information Technology, Law, Marketing, Finance, Communication, Education (or equivalent) or related field AND 12+ years sales and negotiation experience or related work or internship experience OR 15+ years sales and negotiation experience OR equivalent experience. 3+ years second level management experience. 4+ years sales team management or sales executive leadership experience. 3+ years people management experience.

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Responsibilities

• Advance qualified pipeline revenue by demonstrating solution capabilities, addressing technical proof requirements, and securing the customer’s solution design endorsement.
• Engage with the account team to land solution envisioning sessions and business value assessments.
• Proactively deliver compelling customer centric solution demonstrations based on technical workload expertise while building Business Decision Maker/CxO/Technical Decision Maker connections.
• Address solution architecture considerations and competitive objection handling.
• Assist in formalizing the customer proposal.
• Collaborate with Partners and Customer Success to align on agreed upon deployment plan and Key Performance Indicators.
• Lead discovery sessions in each opportunity, yielding output of customer-agreed business challenges and win themes prioritized with business value.

Required/minimum qualifications

• 6+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
• OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 7+ years of technical pre-sales or technical consulting, or related experience OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years' experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
• 7+ years of related experience:
• Solution pre-sales for business applications and/or SaaS-based company or similar technology.
• Solution pre-sales of complex business application deals requiring orchestration of large, dispersed, virtual teams composed of industry and solution team members.
• Solutions pre-sales best practices including but not limited to; discovery, building and crafting solution strategies that differentiate from the competition, value-based selling, identifying, and expanding product opportunities.
• Successful track record of competitive displacement.