Digital Solution Area Specialist IC4

We are seeking a highly skilled Cloud & AI Platforms (CAIP / Azure) Sales Specialist to drive customer success through Microsoft's cutting-edge cloud and AI technologies. This role is critical in helping businesses modernize their cloud estate, build intelligent applications, and leverage AI-driven insights to accelerate digital transformation. As a specialist, you will engage with customers, understand their business and technical challenges, and position Microsoft Azure services as the preferred platform for innovation and growth. This role requires a blend of technical expertise, strategic thinking, and customer-centric sales engagement to drive Azure adoption and consumption.

Responsibilities:

• Engage customers in strategic conversations to identify how technology and adjacent workloads can enable digital transformation aligned with their industry, business priorities, and desired outcomes.
• Develop a deep understanding of customers' businesses, strategic priorities, technology landscape, and transformation objectives to drive meaningful conversations across multiple solution areas.
• Translate customer business needs into prioritized solution opportunities and clearly articulate the business value and expected outcomes of proposed solutions.
• Discover, qualify, develop, and expand opportunities in collaboration with account teams, technical specialists, partners, services, marketing, and other stakeholders.
• Drive incremental revenue and pipeline growth through proactive account and portfolio analysis, targeted campaigns, marketing signals, and collaboration with account teams.
• Identify opportunities to increase adoption and consumption within existing customers through executive conversations, demonstrations, proposals, commercial discussions, and coordinated execution with internal teams and partners.
• Assess customer business needs, technology readiness, and solution fit, and collaborate with technical teams, partners, and services to develop solutions aligned with customer priorities.
• Identify and proactively remove business, technical, commercial, and deployment blockers by orchestrating the appropriate internal and external stakeholders.
• Ensure that opportunities involving technology deployment or transformation have robust adoption and deployment plans, validated in collaboration with technical, services, and partner teams.
• Build strong customer relationships through direct engagement, social selling, workshops, seminars, webinars, and other customer-facing activities.
• Develop stakeholder maps and proactively establish relationships with senior business and technology decision-makers, influencers, and subject-matter experts.
• Apply a disciplined sales methodology to assess opportunity quality, determine pursuit strategy, and focus resources on opportunities with the highest potential for customer impact and business growth.
• Develop and execute strategies to accelerate opportunities through the sales cycle and drive predictable deal closure.
• Create and execute close plans that establish timelines, stakeholder engagement, customer commitments, decision criteria, and actions required to de-risk opportunities.
• Coach and support team members in opportunity strategy, deal planning, execution, and closure.

Scaling and Collaboration:

• Orchestrate cross-functional teams across sales, technical, services, marketing, and partner organizations to deliver integrated customer solutions and accelerate business outcomes.
• Build and leverage a strong ecosystem of partners to support cross-sell, upsell, co-sell, implementation, adoption, and consumption opportunities.
• Develop joint customer proposals, solution strategies, and adoption or consumption plans with partners.
• Identify gaps in partner capability or coverage and collaborate with relevant stakeholders to onboard or enable partners capable of addressing priority customer scenarios.
• Provide actionable feedback on partner capability gaps and contribute to strategies that strengthen the partner ecosystem.
• Proactively align internal stakeholders and partners around customer priorities, opportunity strategy, responsibilities, milestones, and outcomes.
• Apply effective orchestration practices to accelerate deal progression, remove blockers, and improve execution across complex, multi-stakeholder opportunities.

Technical and Competitive Expertise:

• Maintain a strong understanding of the relevant technology landscape, customer scenarios, market trends, and competitive environment.
• Analyze competing products, platforms, solutions, and services and develop strategies that clearly differentiate the organization's value proposition.
• Collaborate with technical and competitive specialists to develop effective positioning for customer conversations.
• Proactively provide insights on the competitive landscape and its implications for customer strategy and sales opportunities.
• Evaluate opportunities based on customer need, competitive position, strategic value, and likelihood of success, and make recommendations on whether to pursue, reshape, or withdraw from an opportunity.
• Connect technology capabilities to tangible customer business outcomes rather than focusing solely on product features.

Sales Excellence:

• Use customer insights, industry knowledge, market trends, and business analysis to identify emerging opportunities and areas for innovation.
• Conduct whitespace, portfolio, and territory analysis to identify high-potential customers, workloads, and business opportunities.
• Develop targeted account and territory plans that translate strategic priorities into intentional selling motions and measurable business outcomes.
• Own the end-to-end business performance of the assigned portfolio or territory, including pipeline development, opportunity progression, forecasting, and revenue growth.
• Maintain accurate and disciplined forecasting while proactively identifying risks, gaps, and actions required to deliver business commitments.
• Partner with extended sales teams, marketing, services, and partners to create and execute plans for high-potential customers and opportunities.
• Participate in business planning and rhythm-of-business reviews with internal and external stakeholders to assess progress, prioritize investments, manage risks, and define next actions.
• Manage and orchestrate sales and delivery success through account and pursuit teams, maintaining accountability from opportunity identification through customer adoption and business outcomes.
• Monitor customer and partner feedback, identify areas of dissatisfaction or delivery risk, and establish recovery plans to improve the overall customer experience.

Qualifications:

• Candidates should meet one of the following:
• A Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field, plus 5+ years of experience in technology-related sales, solution sales, business development, or account management.

Additional / Preferred Qualifications:

• Candidates will ideally bring one or more of the following:
• A Bachelor's degree in Information Technology or a related field, plus 5+ years of experience in technology-related sales or account management; or
• A Master's degree in Business Administration (e.g., MBA), Information Technology, or a related field, plus 5+ years of experience in technology-related sales or account management.
• 5+ years of experience in solution sales or consulting-services sales, with demonstrated ability to translate customer business priorities into technology-enabled transformation opportunities.