Data & AI Solution Leader

at  Microsoft

As a Data & AI Solution Leader, you will be the senior solution sales leader accountable for the overall performance of the sales region’s Data and AI Business. You will lead a team of technical, partner and consulting resources to plan, execute and support the sales process to achieve/exceed quarterly Data & AI revenue and usage/consumption targets across the sales region.
In this role, you will be a trusted advisor and an Analytics, Data & AI subject matter expert with core capability and expertise in data modernization, advanced analytics, and AI. You will work to help customers best leverage data to achieve their business priorities while also helping guide customer’s journey through Analytics-led Azure Data transformation. You will help customers evaluate their applications and business requirements, recommend solutions that meet their requirements and demonstrate these solutions to win the customer’s business and technical decision.
The Data & AI Leader is not designed to be “only” a managerial or supervisorial function, but rather a “business expert” function providing leadership, business insight and strong individual contribution to both the challenges and opportunities in the local business. In this role you will be expected to get into the details and be hands on in the business to support the local sales teams and ensure the region is achieving its overall business objectives. The successful candidate will be an experienced (cloud) business sales leader who has a demonstrated ability in strategic sales planning, exceptional customer/partner relationship management, sales talent assessment/development and sales execution. The ability to hold others accountable and demonstrate impact and influence without direct control while maintaining excellent cross-boundary collaboration are critical success factors for the role.
You will need to support customers to remove roadblocks to deployment and drive customer satisfaction. You will help our customers take advantage of our unique hybrid data platform and leading Analytics & AI solutions to realize the value of digital transformation.

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.

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.
• 10+ years services sales or account management experience.
• 5+ years people management experience.
• 2+ years manager of managers experience.
• Data & AI Platform. Understanding of Microsoft Azure Data & AI products. The position requires the ability to articulate and demonstrate the business value of Microsoft’s solutions and have a firm understanding of Microsoft’s strategies and products relative to major Microsoft competitors
• Expertise 18 months experience selling business solutions to enterprise or mid-market customers with a focus on Analytics & AI technologies (i.e. - Teradata, Oracle Exadata, IBM Netezza, SAP (HANA, BW), HDInsight, Hadoop, Cloudera/Hortonworks, Apache Spark, Snowflake, MapR, AWS (Redshift, Glue), Google (BigQuery), MySQL, PostreSQL, NoSQL, Machine Learning solutions and/or other comparable solutions)
• Account Management. Effective territory/account management: planning, opportunity qualification and creation, stakeholder and executive communication, needs analysis, value engineering, services/partner engagement, opportunity management, pipeline management, large dollar licensing and deal negotiation
• Problem Solver. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies
• Collaborative. Orchestrate and influence virtual teams to pursue sales opportunities and lead v-teams through influence
• Leadership. Experience leading large cloud engagements especially those involving Strategic Analytics & AI solutions, Data Platform modernization and migration and related
• Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of enterprise software solutions and platform competitor landscape
• Partners. Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs
• Certifications with Azure Data Engineer, Azure AI Engineer or equivalent industry certifications preferred

Solution Area Specialists M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across Canada is CAD $178,300 - CAD $303,000 per year.
Find additional pay information here: Canada pay information | Microsoft Careers
Microsoft will accept applications for the role until February 7, 2025
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

Sales:

• Lead managers & sellers to drive the Azure Data and AI business to exceed revenue and scorecard targets
• Develops their seller’s Solution Sales skills to sell the business outcomes of the broader Azure Intelligent Cloud platform
• Ensures orchestration among sales team and other teams engaging in the customer (e.g. partners, services, 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 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 sold.

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.