Microsoft is uniquely positioned to win “App Innovation” workloads to help with customer’s Digital Transformation journey. Microsoft apps portfolio spans Azure App Platform, PowerApps, GitHub/DevOps and Visual Studio. Azure App Platform is one of the fastest growing businesses inside the Azure platform and has tight integrations with developer tools.

The Azure Global Black Belt (GBB) Apps Innovation Specialist Manager is a senior leader within our enterprise sales organization. The GBB Apps Innovation Specialist Manager leads, develops, and manages a team of high performing Azure App Innovation Specialists to drive solution opportunity revenue and market share by executing the Apps Innovation sales priorities to modernize existing applications leveraging the Azure platform and services, and develop AI Cloud Native applications and solutions built using Microsoft Application innovation technologies.

This role is flexible in that you can work [up to 75%] 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

Leadership:

• The Specialist Manager is a senior sales leader with deep technical expertise coupled with rich business experience. The combination of this expertise and experience best enables our senior sales leaders to represent the opportunity and benefits of Microsoft’s App Innovation portfolio to customers, partners, and internal stakeholders.

• To enable the App Innovation business to truly grow to its potential, this role requires the ability to assess the marketplace, identify the unique business opportunity, develop a comprehensive sales strategy, and inspire the team to execute with excellence.

• As a market maker, has a broad understanding of technology trends, market forces and industry imperatives. Builds strong connections with priority partners to create a meaningful extension of the team’s sales and technical reach.

• Deep engagement with Area Sales and Marketing in order to create a unified and holistic sales approach. Drives growth planning for App Innovation, Digital Transformation and primary Area representative for App Innovation business discussions and Corp connections.

Sales:

• Lead sellers to drive the Apps Innovation Advanced Workload business to overachieve revenue, consumption, and scorecard targets.

• Develops their seller’s Solution Sales and technical skills to sell the business outcomes of the broader Apps Innovation Workload.

• Ensures orchestration among sales team and other teams engaging in the customer (e.g., partners, services, Customer Success, engineering support, etc.)

• Maintains the pipeline and the forecast to required operational standards.

• Drives new business opportunities to achieve targets contributing positively to relevant subsidiary scorecard metrics.

• Even higher levels of operational excellence. Ensure appropriate 4 quarter qualified pipeline in place by workload/solution.

People Management:

• Develops a high-performing team by hiring diverse talent, prioritizing development, leading by example and by preparing people for more senior positions in other parts of the organization.

• Coaches Seller’s with a “challenger mentality” by prompting Seller’s to engage early and lead with new insights on how to grow the customers’ business.

• Successful teams and team members are recognized and rewarded, both within the sales organization and at corporate levels.

Customer centricity:

• Lead from the front, personally engaging at CxO level to support and coach teams on opportunity discovery and acceleration

• Lead sellers to drive end-to-end business solutions, increasing customer and partner satisfaction and average deal sizes YoY

• Lead cross-team to ensure customer intent to consume cloud services

Partner Engagement:

• Bring together Microsoft solutions with Partner solutions, fully leverage the synergy effect with our partners, and co-sell with them to make deals bigger and faster. 

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a similar information technology-related discipline, or in Business Administration, or relevant job experience 10+ years’ experience in sales / sales management / sales operation / business strategy. Global/International experience to lead multi-cultural diverse and remote teams.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Certification in sales, sales management, complex sales training, sales methodologies, broad evangelism through events (presentation skills), and consultative selling preferred

• Additional training or education in Enterprise Architecture preferred

Professional Experience

•  5+ years of experience

• Demonstrated Sales and Sales Management experience in Enterprise sales.  Demonstrated people leader able to coach and inspire a diverse team of Sales and Pre- Sales Professionals

• Deep Understanding of:

• Apps Innovation Advanced Workloads and how they translate into business impact

• The enterprise customer needs of global customers

• Working knowledge of Microsoft’s commercial cloud offerings – including Azure App platform, Dev Tools, and Low code

• Competitors and related ecosystems

• The business values selling methodologies, practices and technologies that drive sales prospecting and sales management in complex solution selling environments

• Excels at developing strong relationships and leadership connections to understand customer needs

• Adept at challenging perspectives with new ideas that reframes thinking about deriving value from Microsoft solutions

• Very strong presentation, whiteboarding, and communication skills

• Strong negotiating skills

Technical

• Technical passion: Passion for and experience with App Migration/Modernization to cloud, architecture designs and technology management. Experience with one or more of the following is preferred:

• Application development platforms on public clouds and/or Azure

• Scalable architectures using PaaS/Managed services, serverless technologies, container orchestration, cloud native & microservice architectures and low code technologies

• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains such as GitHub

• Understanding of Data & AI technologies in context of app development

• Understanding of Low code platform and technologies such as Power Platform

• Competitive Landscape:  Knowledge of cloud development platforms

• Certifications:  Azure Architect and/or Azure Developer preferred

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 (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .