Azure Solution Area Specialists

**Overview**:
At Small Medium Enterprises and Channel (SME&C), we are leading a high-growth, AI-powered global sales team—one that is deeply connected to our partners and driven by customer success. By uniting our Small Medium Business, Corporate, Strategy, and Partner teams, we are unlocking the largest customer opportunity, backed by the industry’s most significant investments. Leveraging the power of AI and our extensive partner ecosystem, we are redefining how businesses of all sizes adopt technology to drive growth and innovation.

SME&C is more than a sales organization—it’s a culture of innovation, opportunity, and inclusivity. Here, you’ll be part of a diverse, high-performing, and customer-obsessed team where collaboration, connection, and continuous learning fuel everything we do.

As an Azure Infrastructure Specialist, you are a business leader with technical expertise working with our most important managed customers. You will lead a virtual team of sales, technical, and services resources to help customers realize digital transformation through cloud computing achieve/exceed quarterly Azure consumption targets for related workloads in your assigned accounts.

If you thrive in a fast-paced, digital-first environment and are eager to make a meaningful impact, explore how SME&C can be the next step in your career. Together, we are shaping the future of business.

**Responsibilities**:
Sales Excellence
- Engages with internal and external stakeholders on business planning, Rhythm of Business (ROB) meetings to review and plan for accounts in the assigned territory.
- Collaborates with partners and resources and leverages customer insights or industry knowledge. Contributes to exploring business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and support customer innovation.
- Collaborates with extended sales team, partners, and marketing to conduct business analysis (e.g., whitespace analysis, identify industry trends) to pursue high-potential customers and develop a target list of potential business.
- Manages the end-to-end business of the assigned territory. Conducts forecasting for accounts and develops a portfolio and territory plan to drive intentional selling aligned with strategic priorities.
- Reviews feedback report and coaches others on ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and decreasing dissatisfaction by establishing recovery action plans to improve clients' overall experience. Manages and/or orchestrates sales and delivery success through the account team and pursuit team.
- Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.

Sales Execution
- Identifies customer business needs and technology readiness. Contributes to the development of solutions in collaboration with internal teams, partners, and services. Proposes prioritized solutions that align with customers' needs. Articulates the business value of proposed solutions.
- Collaborates with team members to discover new opportunities. Drives incremental revenue growth through personal campaigns (e.g., portfolio analysis) or internal sources (e.g., Marketing). Collaborates with account teams, partners, or services to track and qualify new opportunities. Collaborates with other teams (e.g., account teams) and services to build pipeline. Interfaces with customers and builds relationships via social selling. Applies Microsoft's sales process (MSP) to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed.
- Implements strategies to accelerate the closing of deals. Contributes input on strategies to drive and close prioritized opportunities. Coaches less experienced team members in deal plan execution. Implements 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.
- Identifies opportunities to drive consumption and grow business with existing customers by initiating conversations, providing demos or quotes, and collaborating with partners or internal teams (e.g., Technical Sales Professionals, Global Black Belts. For licensing transactions and project engagements, ensures rapid and robust deployment plan at point of sale that is validated by services and partners.
- Engages in conversations with customers aligned to their industry to introduce how other workloads could enable digital transformation areas that is aligned with the customer's industry and turns opportunities into deals. Initiates conversations with customers on digital transformation in one or more solution areas, in collaboration with partners and services. Creates guiding examples of digital transformation through seminars, workshops, webinars, and direct engagement.

Scaling and Collaboration
- Applies the orchestration model to leverage and expand relationships with internal stakeholders and partners (e.g., Enterprise Operating Unit). Navigates the MSFT organization to bring the best impact to