Azure Core Sales Specialist

Microsoft's Commercial Solution Area sets the sales strategy, lead technical sales, and operates as a hub for the Commercial Solution Areas and Support Services that power the Microsoft Cloud. We work closely with other Microsoft teams and partners, especially Customer Success, Marketing, and the STU, to ensure those solutions meet our customers’ need.
- 30% of your time will be spent with customers developing new Azure migration and modernization 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 business value and technical cloud leader with outstanding Cloud Economic knowledge, trusted advisor and influencer in shaping customer decisions to commit and adopt Microsoft Azure and Infrastructure solutions. You will win the customers’ technical and business decision for consumption projects and usage scenarios through tailored customer centered outcomes and value creation messaging, providing guidance on cost saving benefits with strong understanding of Microsoft pricing and licensing like Azure Hybrid Benefits (AHB) for Windows and Linux, technical discussions, and aligning the appropriate solutions partners, programs and resources to guide them in decision making and consumption plans. You will lead standard 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 with your Cloud Solution Architect counterpart the 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, business value, sales, professional skills and competitive readiness. You will therefore be required to attain and maintain required certifications.
- This is a customer facing sales role for Western Canada. Expectations are that work location will be prioritized at Customer location (50%), Microsoft location (25%) and Home office (25%).

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

**Responsibilities**:

- Create “buy-in” vision with key decision makers
- Build executive relationships with key decision makers and generate excitement around Microsoft solutions’ value to influence long-term strategic direction
- Understand customer’s cloud footprint, digital transformation needs, business and technology strategy and compete landscape to map customer’s current and desired state and expectations
- Collaborate with the customers to outline business priorities and understand the buying decision criteria and timeline
- Lead the solution design with technical acumen
- By collaborating with a team of technical resources (e.g., cloud solution architects and partners), conduct an architecture design session and build a Proof of Concept to showcase how solution meets customer’s requirements.
- Engage Partners to maximize business results
- Bring together and land Microsoft solutions with Partner solutions, fully leverage the synergistic effect with our partners.
- Share practical knowledge and co-sell with them to make deals faster and bigger.
- Build business cases to substantiate the value of the solution
- Leverage various commercial offers and programs to negotiate, close the deal and successfully displace competition.
- Lead multi-million-dollar deals requiring orchestration of virtual teams composed of industry, solution, technical, licensing & legal team members.
- Drive Sales Excellence: Exceed sales / cloud consumption quota by driving pipeline management and accurate forecasting.
- Be the Voice of the Customer: Share feedback, best practices to influence Microsoft Go-To-Market and product strategies

We encourage all our employees to continuously maintain and enhance their technical, sales, and profession