Solution Area Specialist – Azure Education at Microsoft Nigeria

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. 

At Microsoft our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Solution Area Specialist – Azure Education

Job Number: 1295769
Location: Lagos
Employment type: Full-Time
Profession: Sales
Role type: Individual Contributor
Travel: 50-75 %

Job Description
As an Azure Specialist, you will be:

• Expanding strategic education customer relationships to drive larger impact and targeted business growth and drive the jointly agreed customer multi-year Digital Transformation business strategy through articulating Microsoft’s Azure Infrastructure offerings, delivering agreed outcomes while leading a virtual internal and external team with the customer and partners
• Disrupting the mindset of customers and sales teams by bringing innovative ideas that showcase case for change and Microsoft’s unique value proposition for education with Azure Infrastructure offerings
• Mobilizing, orchestrating, mentoring and leading the Microsoft Account Team, partners and customer in order to help solidify the path to the complex yet exciting journey that is Digital Transformation
• Selling education services and solutions that:
• Drive Azure as the cloud for education, especially in academic research by establishing strategic design wins across top research institutions.
• Grow awareness/usage of the Microsoft Cloud to close talent gap of students, researchers and faculty/instructors on Azure/Cloud
• Ensuring customers have a cloud infrastructure modernization strategy and their technical environments are “Cloud Ready”
• Establishing Microsoft as a leader in education transformation and future ready skills championing Microsoft’s mission to empower every student by supporting education future-ready skills focus across the spectrum of our audience engagements, from high level conversations on skills/employability with leaders, to getting students excited about computer science, and empowering students to graduate with industry recognized skills
• Remaining focused on customer facing time by running a healthy and predictable business that delivers on a jointly agreed customer Digital Transformation strategy maintaining rigorous sales process compliance
• Continuously nurturing and expanding your technical, sales, industry and competitive knowledge and capabilities
• Providing insight and feedback from customers and partners to the Microsoft Worldwide Industry Teams to help learning and improvement in industry solutions and digital transformation offerings.

Responsibilities
Sales Execution:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Proactively builds external stakeholders’ mapping. 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.
• Implements strategies to accelerate the closing of deals. Contributes input on strategies to drive and close prioritized opportunities. Coaches junior 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.

Scaling and Collaboration:

• Collaborates with One Commercial Partner (OCP) and with a network of partners to cross-sell and up-sell. Identifies new partners by researching and discussing with partners on customer scenarios. Develops joint proposal with partners. Contributes to developing partner strategies to address gaps in partner capabilities.
• 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 the customer.

Technical Expertise:

• Leads conversations and sets up events within Microsoft. Mentors others and develops strategies for best practice sharing across subsidiaries. Contributes ideas that can be instituted across Microsoft.
• Initiates conversations with prospective customers/partners at events to expand external network. Acts as a subject matter expert in one or more solution area(s).
• Collaborates with the ‘compete’ global black belts (GBB) to analyze competitor products, solutions, and/or services and implements strategies to position Microsoft against competitors in customer communication. Proactively provides analysis of the competitive landscape in supported solution area.
• Evaluates opportunities and makes recommendations on pursuit or withdrawal. Holistic value of MSFT platform versus single-point solution that positions MSFT favorably against competitors.

Sales Excellence:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience

OR

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 4+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience.

Key Experiences, Skills and Knowledge:

• Strong solution sales background, with 5-8 years of technology-related experience, with a focus on cloud infrastructure technologies preferred
• Experience in leading and driving solutions, orchestrating virtual selling teams where necessary, leveraging repeatable offerings
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs
• Possess executive maturity, presence and experience in building trust with education business decision makers articulating and demonstrating solution propositions, specifically solutions related migration to cloud, hybrid cloud, datacenter infrastructure modernization and DevOps/DevTest on how education institutions can digitally transform teaching and learning/student outcomes with Microsoft solutions both in small groups and large audiences
• Ability to drive digital transformation in a highly competitive environment with proven ability to successfully anticipate market changes to drive industry-relevant solutions, with an understanding of competitive technologies to address competitive threats and navigate complex customer environments
• Ability to learn quickly, adapt, and master new concepts and technologies to be able to impact their adoption and usage.

Application Closing Date
Not Specified.

Method of Application
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online

Note

• 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.