Azure Sales Director - Retail & Manufacturing Corporate Accounts

Microsoft•Chicago, IL

About The Position

Are you passionate about AI and eager to transform the IT landscape? Join our dynamic Cloud & AI team as we lead the charge in AI transformation! As trusted advisors, we help customers modernize their infrastructure, optimize operations, and drive innovation with Azure's cutting-edge AI capabilities. Whether it's migrating and modernizing estates to be AI-ready, accelerating innovation with AI agents and platforms, empowering development teams with AI, or unifying and modernizing data estates, we help customers build technology solutions to achieve their business needs. As part of the US Industry organization, you will lead a team of Azure specialists focused on driving innovation and growth across for Manufacturing and Retail. At Small Medium Enterprises and Channel (SME&C), we are leading a significant-growth, AI-powered global sales team—one that is deeply connected to our partners and driven by customer success. By uniting our Small Medium Business, Corporate, Strategy, and Partner teams, we are unlocking the largest customer opportunity, backed by the industry’s most significant investments. Leveraging the power of AI and our extensive partner ecosystem, we are redefining how businesses of all sizes adopt technology to drive growth and innovation. SME&C is more than a sales organization—it’s a culture of innovation, opportunity, and inclusivity. Here, you’ll be part of a diverse, significant-performing, and customer-obsessed team where collaboration, connection, and continuous learning fuel everything we do. In the Cloud & AI team, we are looking for passionate, experienced, and credible specialist leaders who will follow the model | coach | care approach to developing and winning team sales strategy that will deliver on the Security Solution Area goals. As the Azure Sales Director - Retail & Manufacturing Corporate Accounts, you will lead transformational shifts to drive deployment and create business value for customers. You will provide direction/guidance on the development of solutions across solution areas and support areas. You will lead a team to develop strategies for driving and closing opportunities. You will facilitate the development of partner strategies and ensure execution. You will contribute to setting up the events and promoting best practice sharing across subsidiaries. You will oversee the end-to-end business across geographical regions. You will ensure the team meets sales targets and operational standards and maintains the health of metrics within the assigned territory. You will interact with Corporate leadership and senior-level stakeholders to get support for their team and the geographical regions. You will act as a thought leader to help their team connect Microsoft solutions to customer business impact. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your solution sales and collaboration skills, and deepening your cloud expertise. 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.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field AND 7+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience OR 9+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience.

Nice To Haves

Master's Degree in Business Administration (e.g., MBA), Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, or related field AND 10+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience OR 11+ years of technology-related sales or account management experience.
6+ years of solution or services sales experience.
3+ years of people management experience.

Responsibilities

Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring. Model: Live our culture. Embody our values. Practice our leadership principles. Coach: Define team objectives and outcomes. Enable success across boundaries. Help the team adapt and learn. Care: Attract and retain great people. Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations. Invest in the growth of others.
Participates in regular strategic planning for their assigned territory; review plans via rhythm-of-business (ROB) meetings and aligns the plans of their team across departments; guides team to align their approach with sales excellence team; engages with external executives to bring a more strategic perspective into the planning portion of account planning.
Builds and transforms new markets by leveraging technical and industry expertise, partners, and resources; leads a team to explore business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and facilitate customer innovation.
Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry; mentors/coaches the team on growing knowledge on sales or products and ensures the team complete training and obtain certifications as required.
Oversees the end-to-end business across geographical regions; ensures their team meet sales targets and operational standards and maintains the health of metrics within the assigned territory; interacts with Corporate leadership and senior-level stakeholders to get support for their team and the geographical regions.
Guides their team in whitespace analysis and supports the team to identify potential business in the assigned territory; aligns the analysis approach across teams; acts as a thought leader and validates opinions and perspectives from business analysis.
Lays out customer satisfaction long-term strategies; proactively promotes development of deep and influential relationships with client contacts; guides their team on ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and facilitates the resolution of sales/delivery issues for strategic accounts; establishes standards for customer/partner experiences.
Coaches their team to collaborate with partners and other internal teams (e.g., Technical Sales Professionals, global black belts [GBBs]) and to engage customers to drive consumption; leads with technical and industry insights on how to grow customer business and remove blockers to consumption.
Leads their team to develop strategies for driving and closing opportunities; drives the implementation of strategies and the collaboration with the account team to ensure alignment; leads their team on ways to implement and share close plans (e.g., how to map timeline, engage the customer, get customer buy in and commitment) to de-risk and drive predictable deal closure.
Guides and orchestrates their team on communicating with customers to understand their business needs or facilitates customer interactions to assess customer needs; provides direction/guidance on the development of solutions across solution areas and support areas; helps the team create vision for the customers and develop plans to drive sales.
Coaches their team and/or other teams (e.g., account team units [ATUs]) on identifying and engaging decision makers and stakeholders to expand the relationship with customers/partners; engages C-Suite decision makers to support teams on opportunity discovery and acceleration; represents their team internally at Microsoft as they engages other internal stakeholders.
Leads their teams to identify and track new opportunities; leverages stakeholders (e.g., account-aligned team unit) to build pipeline within the territory; coaches team members on interfacing with prospective customers to build network; applies Microsoft's sales process (MSP) to determine the quality of the opportunity and whether to proceed, and educate the customers on how to best address their needs.
Brings impactful industry insights into customer engagements and closes deals with customers; acts as a thought leader in digital transformation across solution areas to advise customers and represent Microsoft, and coaches others internally on how to do this; leads transformational shifts to drive deployment and create business value for customers based on specific business needs and priorities; leads a virtual cross-organizational team on strategic projects and high-impact solution sales deployments that enable digital transformation and deliver business value; may lead partner integration into account/territory planning and customer engagements.
Guides their team to build a network of partners to cross-sell, up-sell, and co-sell; leads the team to identify new partners, evaluate partner capabilities, and supports on-boarding new partners; facilitates the development of partner strategies and ensures execution; provides input and feedback to One Commercial Partner (OCP) on developing partner strategies and consumption plans, and building partner capabilities.
Coaches their team to learn about and apply the orchestration model; facilitates and leads internal communication and collaboration by identifying resources and removing barriers; contributes to the development of the orchestration model.
Supports their team on participating in Microsoft events; contributes to setting up the events and promoting best practice sharing across subsidiaries.
Coaches their team on business and market knowledge; leads team's internal collaboration to position Microsoft products, solutions, and/or services against competitors; acts as a thought leader to help their team connect Microsoft solutions to customer business impact.