Microsoft’s inside sales org in Irving, TX is called Digital Sales within Microsoft’s Small, Medium & Corporate business segment.
When I joined Microsoft, I expected a world class and extremely formalized training program since the company was so large and talks about digital transformation with their customers. Microsoft was the worst and most impersonal onboarding I’ve ever had. They had you do a quick 2 hour meeting with an HR rep, and from there, you’re released to your manager. On day 1, I had boxes of equipment at my desk and was left to unpack and set up all my equipment myself. No one helped me get up and running to ensure I had a successful first day in role.
Outside of the standard education videos, which are all more Microsoft and product focused, there was no formalized training to set external hires up for success within Microsoft digital sales.
It surprised me that for a tech company, the sales tools available are very archaic and systems do not talk to one another. For example, I spent the first 2-3 weeks of my job entering Help Desk tickets with India just to wait on various system access and tools needed to perform my job. This added to what’s already a stressful time starting a new job. Dynamics is a very antiquated CRM tool (basically an electronic filing cabinet) & was cumbersome to maintain accurate sales records in the tool.
Management within the org was highly political and would impose constantly shifting priorities that worked well for those in leadership to meet their scorecard metrics by creating business rules that forced reps to sell certain products for a management scorecard and jump through countless internal approval hoops if the product was not included in a deal. This led to many reps selling through discounting versus solution selling - setting a bad precedent for future deals.
There was also a shift in how the specialists teams interact with the digital Account Executives. Some of the specialists used to be AEs and work as field-based resources, while other AEs have 100% inside-based specialists supporting their accounts. Seems like eventually Microsoft will pivot to eliminating either one group of resources or the other in the future. As a result, mandates come down for the AEs to upskill by taking various certification exams to achieve deeper proficiency in the workloads. This is fine, but it makes you wonder if the goal is eventually to try and eliminate some of the specialists. Often, it felt like they were trying to pile as much on the AE as possible when the AE role was explained to me as a generalist sales role.
Many of the managers within digital sales are extremely duplicitous and political, which created a hostile work environment. Policies would be implemented very haphazardly without the proper training and context for the AE community to fully understand the new policies and adhere to them.
Since it’s Microsoft, there are also a TON of resources (usually contractors) reaching out internally asking you to intro them to your customers or bothering you constantly to let them engage in your accounts. The issue is many of these resources are also inconsistent and not showing value, so you are having to filter through a ton of internal noise and requests for introductions on top of your daily work.
The majority of the folks there seemed to be hanging on from when Microsoft first opened this sales org due to the relatively high pay for inside sales; however, many of these employees lack the basic skills and Microsoft knowledge to effectively do their job and take care of their customers - they are just there riding the wave.
I’d advise against the Digital Sales AE role and Specialist roles in Las Colinas unless you’re have worked heavily in the Microsoft ecosystem and come to the role with that background and knowledge of what you are getting into. If you come from another software company, you will likely not get the enablement your need to effectively navigate the complexities of Microsoft and management’s constantly shifting priorities.
