Director Pre Sales

Business Solutions and Research team is a cross-functional team that acts as an enabler that ties together sales, engineering, account management, horizontal technical capabilities and marketing.

This is a lead level role within the team and you will be expected to play a key leadership role in:

• RFP Solutions (including Bid Management, Problem Statement Definition, Solution Story

Definition)

• Supporting sales teams on Account mining/growth hacking strategies
• New account opening
• Sales and Pre-sales Collateral repository development and management
• Provide organization support from a leadership perspective for other cross-functional initiatives from time to time

You will NOT be:

• Owning any account PnL or annual/quarterly revenue numbers.
• Day to day client relationships except for new accounts until a client partner is assigned (a few days).
• Owning engineering and delivery of technology projects and products.
• Owning any hunting or prospecting activity for new accounts

Value You will Deliver

RFP Responses/Solution Proposals:

1. Own Bid management for selected clients and domains end-to-end.

2. Write out clear client problem statements based on inputs from Account and Sales teams, Engineering Leaders and available documents such as RFPs.

3. Define the value proposition, win themes and key tenets driving a proposal solution.

4. Conceptualize, templatize and communicate the end-to-end proposal including the targeted value story at an early stage for other teams to contribute on their specific areas.

5. Validate inputs and contributions from engineering, architecture and other capability teams to ensure that these are in line with the client needs, win themes and value proposition.

6. Review and validate estimations and delivery plans/commitments received from engineering to ensure that resource plans and delivery commitments offer the right balance between of commercial consideration for win probability and execution considerations for delivery risk.

7. Work with finance teams (where needed) to price proposals.

8. Take ownership of the quality of the final document including:

a. Engaging design and marketing teams wherever needed in a timely manner to ensure the final output is reflective of the brand.

b. Ensuring all the essential aspects such as assumptions, caveats, boundaries etc. are clearly and concisely covered.

c. Organizing the end-to-end proposal document and supporting presentation(s) and supporting internal reviews with other stakeholders.

9. Control and drive the overall proposal presentation with clients with support from specific experts as needed for their respective sections.

10. Work with the client partner and engineering leader to define requirements for any demo (if needed) to accompany the proposal and follow up with the demo development teams to ensure it is done in a timely manner and is reviewed before client presentation.

11. Ensure timely submission of proposals and follow up with the account owners/client partners to close the loop until contract is signed.

New Account Opening Enablement:

1. Support a deeper early understanding of the client through competitive and business research

2. Be a custodian of the corporate positioning and ensure effective representation of the organization with prospective clients by matching their context with our capabilities, offerings and partnerships.

3. Work with the assigned client partner to put together an account plan for the new account as part of the hand-off to steady state.

4. Participate (and drive) meetings with prospects where needed including temporarily taking on a role in the discovery/assessment team to where necessary to successfully drive growth.

Account Mining Support:

1. Leverage available research into industries and clients (including requesting for research and/or performing own research where feasible) to identify emerging patterns in the industry, place of the prospect within the same and type of positioning that will strike a chord in the first few of meetings.

2. Understand from client partners on the status of account relationships, footprint etc. and help chart a way forward for expansion and better realization of potential value.

3. Review account plans and targets for assigned accounts/regions with account

leaders and support in execution through wherever needed.

4. Package outputs from our business and industry research group by matching to our engineering and technology capabilities for client partners/account managers to circulate and evangelize with clients quarterly or annually.

Presales Repository Management:

1. Frequently liaise with account teams across accounts to:

a. Understand the work being done, successes seen and create case studies on the same

b. Identify innovative solutions and value delivered and highlight the same as a success story and/or potential accelerator/component for harvest

c. Chronicle successes into a learnable way for other accounts and engineering teams to understand where it makes sense for them.

d. Work through available channels to help disseminate success to a wider internal audience.

2. Support management of presales/sales content repository to ensure:

a. Only latest content is available for sales, marketing and account teams to use

b. Ease of use is maintained (cross-format, easy to find, referenced)

3. Support various account teams with different collateral needs and feed back into the repository if new presales collaterals are created as part of this.

Organizational Support:

1. Write blogs and whitepapers demonstrating thought leadership and new insights into existing industry and technology challenges or emerging patterns in usage of technologies by businesses.

2. Support marketing by providing clear and complete inputs for collateral creation such as marketing flyers, website case studies, brochures and success stories

3. Coordinate organizational presence in industry events (along with marketing) including

a. Ensuring that the right experts are identified for the right events and their expertise is

appropriately showcased.

b. Moderate panels of internal experts during discussions.

c. Conduct activities (such as quizzes, polls etc.) ensuring that these are relevant to the

purpose of our participation in the event and the brand profile we want to build.

d. Support marketing in preparing materials tailored to specific events

4. Support CXO/board leaders with specific needs for information and narrative preparation for external facing content from time to time as and when needed.

Our Ideal Candidate comes with

1. Excellent communication skills

a. Written

b. Story-telling

c. Business presentations

d. Convincing articulation

2. Some background in project and/or program management including sound understanding of Agile engineering frameworks, product engineering delivery models and engagement pricing models.

3. Exposure and good conceptual understanding of DevOps, Data/Advanced Analytics, Microservices, Cloud, AI and multiple technology stacks and associated tools and frameworks to the extent needed to have a meaningful conversation with technical and engineering personnel.

4. Understanding and ability to articulate emerging technologies and concepts in the context of client problem statements clearly including why the recommended technology is the right fit for the situation.

5. Some understanding of design thinking as applied in bids and proposals.

Preferred Experience level

Technical background earlier in career (development and/or solutions architecture) is essential – must still be able to use the conceptual knowledge and think like an lead engineer or architect when the situation demands.

Some experience as a business analyst (including demonstrable skills in requirements analysis and engineering) – must be able to read between the lines and understanding potential and underlying client needs, roadmap definition.

Past experience in a client facing role as a relationship manager or account manager or equivalent as part of a technology services company liaising with senior client stakeholders.

Behavioral Competency

• Willingness to take end to end ownership of tasks and activities within area of responsibility.

• Ability to reliably work with tight deadlines in the face of constant change.

• Collaboration and influencing skills to help drive consensus and convergence quickly.

• Strong interpersonal skills including mentoring junior team members and leveraging relationships to accelerate delivery of artifacts where needed.

• Analytical mindset focused on continuous improvement.

• Highly organized with the ability to self-plan and work against multiple tasks without loss of focus.

• Very detail oriented and able to take a clear line on governance needs without alienating others.

Preferred Educational Background

• Must have either a technical (engineering/technology) degree or a quantitative analysis degree.