5+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience
OR equivalent experience.
Additional or Preferred Qualifications
6+ years technical pre-sales, technical consulting, or technology delivery, or related experience
OR equivalent experience.
4+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
Certification in relevant technologies or disciplines (e.g., Office 365, Power BI, Azure Architect and Development exams, Cloud Platform Technologies, Information Security, Architecture).
Scale Customer Engagements
Engages with and reaches out to customers proactively and independently.
Uses knowledge of customer context, solution or portfolio expertise, and technical and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers.
Leads and ensures technical wins for core and adjacent technologies by leading technical discussions with customers and establishing rules of engagement (e.g., role boundaries, handoff strategies) for extended teams, leveraging knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider [MSP], Managed Certified Professional [MCP]), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack). Searches for customer references to use in engagements.
Leverages foundational knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites, Value Based Delivery [VBD], Customer Success Unit [CSU]) and proactively engages product teams (e.g., engineering) to remediate blockers by conveying impact.
Leverage Partner Ecosystem
Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by acting as liaison between the partner and team and facilitating partner resources and processes throughout the course of the project.
Supports partner technical capacity by identifying skill and resource gaps and providing feedback to internal teams (e.g., Global Partner Solutions).
Build Strategy
Captures core competitive knowledge and delivers back to product and engineering teams to enhance team capabilities and develop compete strategies for assigned customers.
Provides strategic, technical, and partner input based on Microsoft capability at the account level to contribute to strategy development, leveraging partner, competitor, or open-source knowledge.
Works with account and marketing teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailor Microsoft messaging to audience using knowledge of customer feedback, specific Microsoft solutions, and their context in a competitive landscape. Where applicable, builds consumption plans with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.
Solution Design and Proof
Demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and proof of concept [POC] sessions) of products, services, and integration through initial engagements. Leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment.
Presents and applies architecture patterns to partners or customers and drives cross-workload support for Microsoft Solutions.
Applies sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) and coaches team in addressing customer digital transformation and leveraging insights to align new or changing technology to customer business needs.
Education
Builds their own readiness plan and proactively identifies learning gaps. Grows domain knowledge and practices expertise by communicating with customers, partners, and senior colleagues to expand knowledge of architecture.
Demonstrates new and updated products to increase internal virtual teams' understanding of solutions and new opportunities.
Monitors and responds to internal tech community posts, attends community calls, sessions, hackathons, etc., and acts as a mentor for their technology area.