Strategic Account Technology Strategist

The Strategic Account Technology Strategist (ATS) collaborates with clients within Microsoft's Enterprise Commercial customers. For those passionate about technology, the AI era presents an exhilarating opportunity to work alongside our largest Enterprise customers to deliver safe, secure and reliable digital experiences.

As an integral part of the account team, the ATS facilitates interactions between strategic clients and Microsoft, fostering new opportunities, demand generation, market share growth, digital transformation, and aligning industry/business scenarios with technological solutions. Serving as the "Chief Technology Officer," the ATS nurtures established, long-term relationships with technical and business decision-makers at the C Suite (Chief X Officer CXO level). The ATS engages in discussions with clients to deeply understand their mission and objectives, highlighting as appropriate the strategic benefits of Microsoft and our partner ecosystems' capabilities. The Strategic ATS serves as a reliable technology advisor, both within Microsoft and to clients. The ATS gains a profound understanding of the client's business and devises modern architectural strategies to fulfill Microsoft's commitments to the clients.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

Customer and Industry Insights

• Synthesises and combines business and industry insights, global best practices, proof points from experience / case studies within Australia New Zealand, across regions, and globally, together with deep industry expertise (e.g., level 200) related to customers and their competitors.
• Builds strategic account plans reflecting Microsoft priorities, aligned to the customer objectives, ensuring that all levels of the organisation engage with customers proactively to shape strategies, plans, business models, and solutions designed to achieve impact and mission value.
• Orchestrates cross-regional teams to gather information, collaborate on key performance measures for the customer and for Microsoft, and identify potential risks in customer accounts. Lead technical teams to drive opportunities, bringing in business and industry insights to address the broader business challenges for the customer.
• Articulates and understand specific industry-related market trends, as well as customer threats, opportunities, and barriers to growth as they relate to the customer's broader industry. Leverage industry trends from other industries to gather insights and develop an informed perspective on similar issues that may occur within their industry/industries. Apply industry knowledge to support customers in solving issues.

Trusted Advisor

• Provides account (customer) thought leadership across information technology (IT), business strategy, and the broader technology landscape. Share best practices internally while providing coaching to Microsoft and partner resources and teams.
• Leverages account thought leadership in partnership with account executives to set strategy, own accountability for outcomes, and lead extended teams. Provides technical guidance to internal teams to position technology that responds to the customer landscape and requirements.
• Creates enduring connections and feedback loops with Product and Engineering teams.
• Creates security thought leadership with the customer's executives (e.g., technical decision maker [TDM]/business decision maker [BDM]) leveraging the Secure Futures Initiative, instilling a security mindset in all aspects of the customer's technology landscape.
• Uses deep understanding of the customers' technology and security needs to establish Microsoft's security credentials and to build opportunities to improve the customer's security posture; orchestrates execution through security specialists and partners.
• Leverages a broad knowledge of Microsoft's product landscape, solutions, and strategy to address customer's needs. Proactively coordinates with internal and external network of industry experts (e.g., Regional Experts, industry-specific partners) to build strong knowledge of the industry and the competitive landscape.
• Drives and leverages leaders from the partner ecosystem to bridge process gaps. Leverages deep understanding of their customer to share knowledge with extended team and leverages advanced knowledge of competitors to promote customer business perspectives.
• Acts as the voice of the customer, industry, and internal advocate by providing insights, feedback, and challenges from the customer to internal teams (e.g., product groups, engineers) across all levels of the organisation. Drives action to ensure that internal teams understand and respond to insights. Articulates the business opportunity for Microsoft based on product gaps.

Technology Strategy Formulation

• Leads analysis of overall customer business needs, desired outcomes, and operating environment (challenges / opportunities). Determines key stakeholders for driving execution on the largest and/or most complex accounts. Partners with global executives to lead overall strategy development (e.g., identify and manager blockers and risks, develop partner strategy) to drive end-to-end solutions.
• Creates mid- and long-term (e.g., 12 or more months) multi-horizon technology and business roadmaps for highly prominent, challenging, and/or strategic accounts based on a deep understanding of business and technology priorities and industry landscape.
• Challenges and validates the strategy and plan with customer stakeholders and drives envisioning and articulates business and program changes in the roadmaps around new and groundbreaking capabilities. Leads the translation of the customer's business objectives in conjunction with Industry Sales Kits and Solution Plays (including consumption-heavy workloads and cloud services) to develop effective Industry Technology Architecture to plans for and drives consumption and adoption of Microsoft cloud and a higher share of customer potential and propensity (CPP).

Technology Sales: Demand Generation and Orchestration

• Creates, develops, and drives opportunities based on industry best practices, presents opportunities to the customer, and creates demand. Develops a plan, within a broader strategy, to create and qualify a set number of opportunities for product and solution sales and consumption.
• Leverages partners and multiple channels (e.g., social media) to create demand. Orchestrates efforts to drive MCEM lifecycle and stage progression. Leverages experience and strategic foresight to lead technical teams by driving opportunities with Specialist Team Unit (STU), Customer Success Unit (CSU), Industry Solution Delivery (ISD) and others, as necessary.
• Leads efforts to reach out to key stakeholders through a lens of customer-obsession to drives customer reach together with the account executive to generate new demand. Uses advanced technical knowledge of products to determine feasibility of technical customer requirements requests and works with core engineering teams to prepare solutions.
• Leads Account Strategy Envisioning (ASE) with the extended account team, customer, and partner to deliver the outcomes for the customer through joint envisioning, as a vehicle for Industry Sales Kits and Solution Plays.
• Creates new Stage 1 opportunities, both billed and consumed, with technical decision maker (TDM) customer stakeholders, managing consumption pipeline with extended team to maintain velocity, and unblocking issues. Coaches peers (often as a mentor across a region or country) on how to create and maintain an opportunity pipeline and how to map Microsoft priorities to opportunities. Defines the blueprint for opportunity initiation and sets and shares standards and best practices for others to follow.
• Leads the customer journey into the era of AI Transformation by creating a targeted approach tailored to their current business requirements and positions Microsoft as a leader for the future, both for accelerating productivity as well as helping the customer create new capabilities to drive growth and to expand to new frontiers / operating models.
• Leverages expertise of current technology landscape and understanding of AI and Industrial Digital Twin capabilities to plot the foundational elements on the technology roadmap that need to be in place to realise value for the customer. Builds a mid-term strategy for AI projects as well as an immediate opportunity pipeline and orchestrates execution through the appropriate technical teams from the Specialist Team Unit (STU) and with appropriate Partners.

Differentiated Value Proposition

• Acts as the customer's Technology Mentor in established relationships with a line-of-business leader or senior executive, including technical decision makers (TDMs) and/or Business Unit leaders at the C-level (e.g., HR, Risk, Finance leadership). Develops extended relationships beyond core customers, advises on solutions, and aligns Microsoft capabilities with customer needs. Drives market share (e.g., cloud, collaboration, AI).
• Leads customer business transformations through digital technologies to drive business outcomes and create business value for customers by understanding customer industry and position to provide guidance and to challenge customer thinking with innovative ideas that showcase the need for change and new strategic direction, and proactively involves corporate and cross-industry resources to drive customer transformation. Ensures line-of-business wins are captured and shared (e.g., customer write-ups) as reference for scale.
• Partners with a line-of-business leader or senior executive within a large-scale or high-impact customer organization to articulate how complex Microsoft technology/services will meet future business needs better than the competition and will enable the achievement of long-term growth and success. Provides an outside-in view around existing and emerging compete or other solutions that are also a requirement for the customer.

Mapping and Account Planning

• Helps customer technical specialists build the message to sell Microsoft offerings to other parts of their business or end users. Creates stakeholder maps for accounts, determines, and orchestrates a coverage plan, and builds out an execution framework across multiple "Rooms of the House" of the enterprise.
• Orchestrates internal teams and local partners (including global systems integrators and consultancy partners) to ensure sufficient technical resources for demand generation, when appropriate.
• Establishes best practices and standards around account planning for budgeting, quota attainment, consumption goals, and customer consumption gaps to inform quarterly and fiscal objectives. Coordinates highly complex extended account teams (e.g., spanning complex technologies, geographies, functions) and drives forecasting and tracking of the business. Owns the technical portion of the account plan and leads the customer plan delivery for large, critical, and/or strategic accounts. Captures all Account Planning input in the MSX D365 Account Plan.

Education and Thought Leadership

• Leads customer technology engagement by engaging and influencing technical resources of customer, partner, and Microsoft towards customer's business transformation.
• Uses existing and new readiness resources and demonstrates expertise in creating enablement plans for large and high-stakes customers, and all-up Microsoft business.
• Drives innovations to help customers meet capacity and capability goals, maximize reach, and impact and drive long-term engagement and thought leadership on the Microsoft platform, and influences large customers to see and adopt the strategic value. Drives customer skilling initiatives and execution.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 7+ years technical consulting, technical consultative selling, practice building, or related technical/sales/industry experience OR equivalent experience.
• Experience leading technical, support, and/or partner teams
• Experience in business consulting, consultative selling, or change management
• Experience in digital transformation or using technology to drive customer business outcomes.

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 ) .