Technical Solutions Professional (Sales) - Dont do it
Pros
Lots of perks working for a big company like Microsoft; free Azure, MSDN access, discount on Microsoft hardware and software.
Cons
You don’t want to do technical sales at Microsoft. Technical sellers are the most undervalued roles in company. When its convent, management will speak of its technical sellers as “sales.” But when it comes to compensation, the technical seller is dead last. Technical sellers end up doing most of the sales motion (qualification, sales, licensing, pricing & solution estimation) but have little if any upside. As a technical seller, you can easily work 50+ hours a week with nothing more to show for it than a pat on the back. You’ll be carrying a “Account Executive” and “Sales Professional” and some other “semi-sales” individuals that make up what they call an “Account team”. However, seldom will any of those individuals say anything in a meeting other than to introduce themselves and say how they don’t know anything about the technology before passing the buck to the technical seller to run the show and all the follow-up. Your account team will make double what you make and work about ¼ as hard as you do. To make matters worse, 50% of your variable compensation will be at the discretion of your manager (no way shape or form dependent on your sales performance.) One of many problems with this is the turnover rate of managers in the organization. Microsoft has a very high turnover on their leadership teams (whether its new talent, RIF, change in business etc.) I’ve had 8 managers in 5 years. When it comes time to do our ranks (yes they do stack rankings behind closed doors despite what they will ever admit to) if you have a new manager or someone who isn’t networked well, you will likely get a low rating and low end of year payout. What this means, is that as a technical seller while you are supposed to be more insulated from variability in compensation, this model does the complete opposite. You’ll have huge swings in your pay from one year to another depending on who your manager is. In fact, as I write this, I’ve had a $43K swing in my pay (unfortunately down) all within a year where I was one of Microsoft’s top performers (even nominated for club.) Do yourself a favor, if you want to do technical sales, do not do it at Microsoft or look for a job title as a “SSP – Solution Sales Professional” or “AE – Account Executive” where you can make twice as much, have less variability/risk in your pay, and work far less hours with way better work life balance.