Senior Director of Solution Sales - Data & AI

We envision a world where passionate innovators come together to collaborate taking the business to the next level and taking their careers to places, they simply couldn’t do anywhere else. This is a world of more possibility, more innovation, more openness, and sky’s-the-limit thinking – a cloud-enabled world.

The Azure Data & AI Commercial Solution Area (CSA) Team positions the value of our best-in-class Database, Analytics and AI solutions and services to enable customers accelerate their data-driven digital transformation.

The Senior Director of Solution Sales - Data & AI acts as the singular voice across Microsoft for both the Small, Medium and Corporate (SMC) and Small and Mid Sized Business (SMB) segments across all time zones.

This senior sales leadership role requires extensive experience in customer and partner C-Suite engagement, with a proven record of accomplishment for driving revenue and growth. Having the capability to lead scale across large, global sales teams and have familiarity with Microsoft solutions, our Partner and Channel Ecosystem, and the ability to orchestrate across the company and partners. This role will be creating and leading transformation and strategic planning, along with systems thinking, while focusing on resources, talent, and top opportunities.

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

People Management

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.
  
  

Build leadership capability in the field – Establish and role model the standard for Area leadership, offering direction, feedback, and coaching to support their development .

Sales Execution

• Brings impactful industry insights into customer engagements and helps close deals with customers and coaches and influences others internally on how to do this. Influences Microsoft's strategic direction across various markets. Acts as a thought leader in digital transformation across solution areas to advise customers. Leads a virtual cross-organizational team to drive strategic projects and high impact solution sales deployments that enable digital transformation and deliver business value. May lead partner integration into account/territory planning and customer engagements.
• Leads a team to support the account teams and drive conversations with strategic/high-potential customers. Facilitates stakeholders to build pipeline across territories. Sets best practices on social selling and guides others on how to do this, and drives consistency across domains/regions. Applies Microsoft Customer Engagement Methodology to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed, and educate the customers on how to best address their needs.
• Coaches their team to collaborate with partners and other internal teams. Leads with technical and industry insights on how to grow the strategic customer business.
• Guides their team on communicating with customers to understand their business needs or facilitates customer interactions to assess customer needs. Provides direction/guidance on the development of solutions across regions. Helps the team create vision for the customers and develop plans to drive sales.
• Coaches their team and/or other teams on identifying and engaging decision makers and stakeholders to expand the relationship with customers/partners. Engages C-Suite decision makers for strategic customers to support teams on opportunity discovery and acceleration. Represents their team internally at Microsoft as they engage other internal stakeholders.
• Leads their team to develop strategies for driving and closing strategic (highly complex, high value) opportunities. Drives the implementation of strategies and the collaboration with the account team to ensure alignment. Leads their team on ways to implement and share 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.
  
  

Scaling and Collaboration

• Guides their team to build a network of partners to cross-sell and up-sell. Leads the team to identify new partners and evaluate partner capabilities. Facilitates the development of partner strategies and ensures execution. Leverages global resources to help connect the partner ecosystems to form new market opportunities.
• Guides their team to apply the orchestration model. Establishes approach and practices to promote communication and collaboration across functions. Contributes to the development of the orchestration model and drives consistency across territories.
  
  

Technical Expertise

• Supports their team on participating in Microsoft events. Contributes to setting up the events and promoting best practice sharing across subsidiaries.
• Coaches their team on business and market knowledge. Develops strategies to position Microsoft products, solutions, and/or services against competitors. Initiates discussions to share industry trends and insights across the organization.
• Identify patterns, insights and market inputs to develop an SMC plan to execute the next high growth workloads for the solution area.
  
  

Sales Excellence

• Builds and transforms new markets by leveraging technical and industry expertise, partners, and resources. Leads a team to explore business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and facilitate customer innovation.
• Lays out customer satisfaction long-term strategies. Proactively promotes development of deep and influential relationships with client contacts. Guides their team on ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and facilitates the resolution of sales/delivery issues for strategic accounts. Establishes standards for customer/partner experiences.
• Participates in regular strategic planning for their assigned territory. Reviews plans via Rhythm of Business (ROB) meetings and aligns the plans of their team across departments. Guides team to align their approach with sales excellence team. Engages with external executives to bring a more strategic perspective into the planning portion of account planning.
• Guides their team in whitespace analysis and supports the team to identify potential business in the assigned territory. Develops and aligns the analysis approach across the organization. Acts as a thought leader and clears opinions and perspectives from business analysis.
• Oversees the end-to-end business across geographical regions. Ensures their team meet sales targets and operational standards and maintains the health of metrics within the assigned territory. Interacts with Corporate leadership and executive-level stakeholders to get support for their team and the geographical regions.
• Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry. Mentors/coaches the team on growing knowledge on sales or products and ensures the team complete training and obtain certifications as required. Seeks additional learning opportunities and prioritize to enhance effectiveness.
  
  

Other: Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• 9+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience.
• 4+ years of technical sales experience in cloud services.
• 4+ years people management experience, including managing and coaching high performance sales or technical-specialist teams, solution specialist or similar
• 4+ years of sales leadership at the C-Suite level along with extensive experience with customer and partner C-Suite engagement, along with a proven record of accomplishment of driving revenue and growth
  
  
Additional Or Preferred Qualifications

12+ years technology-related sales or account management experience

• OR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND 10+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
• OR Master's Degree in Business Administration (i.e., MBA), Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technology-related sales or account management experience
• 6+ years of sales leadership at the C-Suite level along with extensive experience with customer and partner C-Suite engagement, along with a proven record of accomplishment of driving revenue and growth
• 6+ years technical sales experience in cloud services preferably in Data & AI
• 10+ years of services sales or account management experience.
• 5+ years years people management experience, including managing and coaching high performance sales or technical-specialist teams, solution specialist or similar.
• 2+ years manager of managers experience.
  
  

Solution Area Specialists M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $155,000 - $243,000 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $198,800 - $267,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until Aug 25, 2024

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.