Senior Sales Specialist -cloud & AI Platforms

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · United States · Solution Area Specialists

This role is for a Senior Sales Specialist focused on Cloud & AI Platforms, specifically Azure. The primary responsibility is to lead AI transformation initiatives for customers, helping them modernize infrastructure, optimize operations, and drive innovation using Azure's AI capabilities. The role involves customer engagement, sales strategy development, pipeline management, and leveraging AI tools to identify and close sales opportunities. While the role is within an AI-focused company and heavily involves AI concepts in its sales strategy, the core craft is sales, not building or researching AI models.

What you'd actually do

  1. Assesses and qualifies sales opportunities following sales frameworks and guidelines, ensuring alignment with AI-enhanced sales methodologies and best practices. Participates in strategy development for driving and closing moderately complex, significant value opportunities. Collaborates across organizations (e.g., Account Team Unit [ATU], CSU, ISD, GPS) to contribute to deal orchestration and handoffs throughout the deal lifecycle. Utilizes best practices to earn customer buy-in, secure deals, and mitigate risks to facilitate sales activities across the solution area.
  2. Drives sales strategies tailored to each customer's security priorities, showcasing Microsoft's dedication to secure, AI-powered transformation and addressing their specific needs within the customer success plan. Reviews and translates customer and partner feedback to establish recovery action plans. Develops relationships with key customer and partner stakeholders to understand sentiment and satisfaction goals Drives partner teams, resources and relationships are activated, driving co-selling strategies and partner attach to each opportunity through every stage in the sales lifecycle. Drives partner organization connections (i.e. GPS) to drive share, partner health, that aligns with execution plans to accelerate customer value realization at scale.
  3. Analyzes business and emerging opportunities to improve the customer portfolio and encourage customer innovation. Leverages technology (e.g., AI sales agents, automation, Power Platforms) to drive growth within assigned domain. Utilizes propensity, renewal, consumption, and usage data to prioritize sales strategy. Optimizes partners assigned to each account and/or opportunity to facilitate handoffs with other teams (e.g., Global Partner Solutions [GPS], Customer Success Unit [CSU], Industry Solutions Delivery [ISD], Partner) throughout the deal lifecycle.
  4. Engages in sales pipeline reviews with internal stakeholders to drive forecasting accuracy and meeting sales targets, ensuring the use of AI-powered analytics and forecasting tools to enhance precision. Maintains sales and/or consumption pipeline hygiene to enable tracking to achieve assigned sales metrics using all available tools, resources, and processes Leads usage and/or consumption pipeline hygiene to actively monitor adoption trends, identify opportunities for intervention, enabling customers to realize the value of solutions purchased, drive expansion, and ensure healthier, more predictable renewals
  5. Evaluates solution area(s) and market and develops insights to align sales plays with customer business priorities and outcomes, incorporating AI-driven predictive analytics to forecast future market needs. Partners across teams to propose solutions and strategies that align with customer business objectives. Identifies and addresses gaps, driving market engagement and sales execution.

Skills

Required

  • Sales frameworks and guidelines
  • Consultative selling
  • Customer engagement
  • Pipeline management
  • Sales strategy development
  • Partner management
  • Business acumen
  • Technical selling skills

Nice to have

  • AI sales agents
  • AI-powered analytics
  • AI-driven predictive analytics
  • AI-driven market intelligence tools

What the JD emphasized

  • AI transformation
  • AI capabilities
  • AI growth
  • AI-powered transformation
  • AI sales agents
  • AI-driven predictive analytics
  • AI- and cloud-driven transformations
  • AI-driven market intelligence tools
  • artificial intelligence (AI) transformation