In SMC and Digital Sales, we have set out with the purpose of empowering our customers through the unique value of the Microsoft cloud by building a globally led, digital-first scale organization aligned with partners. Dedicated to one of the fastest growing customer segments, the Small, Medium, Corporate (SMC) and Digital Sales organization is on pace to be Microsoft's next $100 billion-dollar business - this is where you come in.

As an Azure Data App & AI 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 Infrastructure consumption targets for related workloads in your assigned accounts. You possess both a high EQ with executive presence, able to engage with senior decision makers to uncover digital transformation initiatives, and a passion to learning how Azure cloud services can deliver digital transformation. You will develop and maintain an Azure Infrastructure expertise, able to identify projects, build a compelling business case, and drive the consumption project to production. You will build and maintain relationships with customers, influence long-term strategic direction and act as a trusted advisor driving engagement at the CXO level with technology decision makers. You will help customers evaluate their cloud strategy, determine approaches to application and data migration and modernization, and recommend solutions that meet their requirements.

This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your solution sales and collaboration skills, and deepening your cloud expertise. This role is flexible in that you can work up to up to 50% from home.

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

• Customer First Mindset - Engage with and enable our customers and key decision-makers, delivering a connected customer engagement experience and driving customer satisfaction, through digital sales excellence, empowered by world-class data, marketing systems and platforms.
• Be the key trusted advisor and influencer in shaping customer decisions to buy and adopt Microsoft Azure solutions by winning the customers’ technical decision for consumption projects and usage scenarios through tailored messaging, technical discussions, and aligning the appropriate solutions partners, programs and resources to guide them in decision making and consumption plans.
• Collaborates with Digital Specialists, extended sales team, partners to conduct business analysis (e.g., whitespace analysis, identify industry trends) to pursue high-potential customers and develop a target list of potential business. Elevate team capabilities and focus on working smarter and more effectively. Prioritizing time with customers and partners, leveraging tools and processes to run and grow the business and build a stronger team.
• Lead technical demonstrations of Azure solutions to explain and prove the capabilities of Microsoft Azure relative to the customers business and technical objectives. Collaborates with account teams, partners, or services to track, qualify, and expand 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 to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed.
• Engages in conversations with customers to introduce how other workloads could enable digital transformation areas that is aligned with the customer's industry and turns opportunities into deals. Has a deep understanding of customers' business and its priorities to drive conversations with customers on digital transformation across multiple solution areas, in collaboration with partners and services. Creates guiding examples of digital transformation through seminars, workshops, Webinars, and direct engagement.
• Build relationships with leadership and field stakeholders to enable team success across internal and external stakeholders. Collaborates with account teams (e.g., Account Executives) to identify and engage senior business subject matter decision makers at the customer's/partner's business and maximize scale through partners; work with technical specialist/CSA to secure commitment.      
• Applies the orchestration model to proactively drive deal closure by identifying and aligning internal stakeholders and leveraging and expanding relationships with partners, creating demand leading with industry use cases

Qualifications

• Experience with technology-related sales or account management experience
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND strong technology-related sales or account management experience.
• Fluent in German

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Business Administration (e.g., MBA), Information Technology, or related field 

Subject matter expertise in any of the following is preferred:

• SQL including OSS (Postgres, MySQL etc), Azure SQL
• NoSQL Databases including OSS (Maria, Mongo etc), Cosmos DB
• Big Data including SQL DW, Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift
• Advanced Analytics including Azure Data Bricks, visualization tools as PowerBI, Tableau
• Data Governance
• Data Engineering
• Data Science
• Machine Learning including Azure ML, ML Server
• Artificial Intelligence including BOT framework, Cognitive Services, Cognitive Search
• Expertise in data estate workloads like HDInsight, Hadoop, Cloudera, Spark, Python
• Competitive Landscape - Knowledge of cloud development platforms.
• Partners - Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs.

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.

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