Microsoft is laying off salespeople as it revises its strategy for selling AI tools. The layoffs, impacting around 9,000 employees, focus on replacing traditional sales roles with technical salespeople or solutions engineers. This shift aims to enhance the sales team's technical understanding and to respond to customer feedback for quicker access to technical demonstrations. Microsoft has confirmation of fewer traditional specialists being retained in favor of roles that facilitate a faster technical engagement early in the sales process due to competitive pressures from OpenAI and Google.
"The customer wants Microsoft to bring their technical people in front of them quickly. We need someone who is more technical, much earlier in the cycle."
"Microsoft plans to replace many traditional salespeople, often called 'specialists,' and replace them with 'solutions engineers' who can show customers actual demos earlier on in the sales process."
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