Pre-sale engineer - personal psychologist of Sale or a person on the border of money and technology

One of the rather interesting vacancies in the labor market in the field of IT is the position of a pre-sale engineer (unfortunately they often write a pre-sale manager). And very often in relation to this profession, you can hear the question: "What is the responsibility of this specialist?". This post in the form of one very ordinary working day will tell you what the pre-sale engineer is doing and why it is incorrect to call him a pre-sale manager.

Before plunging into a working day, I suggest looking at the average list of responsibilities from job profiles for a pre-sale engineer position from a headhunter site.

Duties:
')

• Manage sales support projects from a potential transaction to the preparation of a business proposal and the signing of a contract;
• To analyze the technical requirements, problem areas of the customer. Develop and propose optimal solutions in accordance with the analysis performed;
• To analyze the cost of the proposed solution / service and the use of appropriate pricing models;
• Work in a team with technicians and sales managers.

Immediately make a reservation: in the description I take the current day (April 2, 2018, Monday) with its main current and new projects / tasks. And most importantly, all this is done applies to any day of the week, and sometimes even to weekends.

So monday. The day promises to be difficult not because it is Monday, but because today the results of participation in the tender for the supply of switching equipment to a large customer must be summed up and the “struggle with objections” stage does not want to end, and you have to get every 2-3 hours rapier and in a beautiful lunge do a shot in the direction of competitors, responding to the next pack of questions. And it seems from the outside that the task here comes down to two things:

• Find the pros of your decision
• Find the minuses of competing solutions

However, in the word “competitors”, the plural transforms the simple task of comparing two solutions into a real hell of digesting the datasheets of manufacturers and technical comparison of all solutions, and also it should be noted that from the initial information about competitive solutions you are given only information about vendors, but not about models , and it sends you back to the technical specifications for the competition, where you first select the optimal solution for the technical specifications, but then you can already compare the key points of the decisions. But for the sake of justice, I want to note that by this day this work has been done and the matter remains quite small:

1. Open sites 5 vendors;
2. Open the workpiece 30 tabs datasheets (6 different models of equipment in the same project at different levels of the network);
3. And now you can safely compare (well, within the framework of those 15 minutes that the Customer has given you in response).

But the most funny thing about this situation is that the plans for the day didn’t have a study of this solution at all, since you thought last week that, after writing a comparative analysis of the solutions in 4 sheets, I put all the points once and for all.

In the meantime, this is what was on the plans for Monday (the calculation from my diary is given):

1. Complete the Technical and Commercial Proposal for building the ICT infrastructure of a small plant:
   
   
   • describe the solution to build telephony;
   • prepare an estimate of the cost of the decision;
   • prepare a table of basic technical requirements.
   
   
2. Prepare an alternative telephony solution to reduce the cost of the project;
3. Work out a solution based on Cisco ISE;
4. Discuss with the customer and adjust the core redundancy solution based on new input data (make changes to the TAP).

And so, from the very early morning you did a comparative analysis, kept in your head a to-do list, the time was inexorably ticking, and after pressing the cherished “send” button, after solving the first task, you pay attention to the Inbox, and there are 2 unread messages. messages. And here let us remember that we are recommended by the books “Manage Your Time”, “Digital Diet” and other books from the category of personal effectiveness: “... do not pay attention to new incoming tasks yet do not complete the current task”. Good, so we do. And just trying to take on the tasks scheduled for the day, like on the phone - either in the Telegram, or in Whatsapp - a message comes from the sale (and when the salesman needs you as the last breath of air, believe me, he can even write to the iphone that sat down and the battery will find the last strength to show you the notice): “Colleague, have you seen? An urgent need to respond to the customer! ".

And if we again resort to books and their recommendations, we simply ignore the messengers. And here you are already immersed in the writing of the TKP, but at that moment that same sale ran up to you, but the hanging question drastically changed its wording: “Have you already called the customer and sent the edited specification?”. If you do not resist the charm of Sale, you open the mail (having noticed that in the "inbox" there are already 3 messages), under his close all-wishing look at the message, where the first thing you see is “FYI”. In the attachment 4 pdf file, and below in the text from the customer: “I ask you to find a solution on the equipment XXXXX instead of the equipment specified in the project documentation, on 4 nested sheets. I ask you to send a commercial offer before 14:00 today (at least for the main positions). ”

In this formulation, the words “basic” positions on the project are very popular. The life cycle of most large projects is about 3 months or more. Usually, at least 5-10 people puff over such a project, and all the pledged solutions are usually basic, even essential, so that the equipment can simply be turned on and tied, but this is an ideal option. Given all these factors, as well as evaluating the specification and availability of network core equipment, aggregation, a large number of access equipment and the average price of a single piece of hardware at $ 7,000 in the GPL, it is very difficult to identify the main positions. And you are trying to convey this to the manager in exactly the same form. After 5 minutes of listening to an emotional outburst about the fateful project of the entire life of the company, that while office staff in lacquered sneakers are sitting and doing nothing, the sales staff dig the ground in an open field, you realize that it is at such moments that the Pre-sale engineer becomes a non-technical with the right hand of Sayle, and his personal psychologist, who must catastrophically quickly find words of comfort, inspiring not only to calm down, but also to believe that the time of 14:00 is unreal, that the specification will be made only when it appears squeeze out of the design documentation, which appears above the iron, and at the same time to put in it, as in the movie "The Beginning", the idea that for you, this problem is not just a priority, but the mission of your life. And since the company is not one manager, you can imagine how many such missions you have.

All this time you kept in your head the topics of the two remaining messages, where in one task it turned out just to read TK (25 pages) and find evidence why it’s better not to go to this tender, since everything is “stolen” before us, and The second letter was the vendor’s answer to a technical question about the equipment that you had to give the customer by Wednesday morning last week (and by the way for some vendors, this indicator can be equated to lightning speed).

And now, having fought off these tasks by one o'clock, you can already proceed to the actually planned tasks. Of course, during this time you have been distracted more than once by other projects, but to be honest, you don’t change this in the work of the Pre-sale engineer: if everything is clear on the horizon, it means someone has stopped digging in the open field, but this song is worse all

And it would be possible to describe everything that you encounter even before the end of the working day, but I will not deceive you, you can take the working day home with you, and often not because you want it, but because other decisions you have to read and read, going far beyond those with which you are familiar and have already encountered. Sometimes it seems that managers really believe that Pre-sale knows the equipment of all vendors about A to Z, considering, of course, any directions, as well as the memory from the configurator can call the list price, the nearest competitor and, of course, the level discounts.

And no matter how you try to reduce the flow of incoming information, no matter what time management books you read, the work of a pre-sale engineer is very much built on a bundle of customer / project manager / engineer of specialized areas, and any link in this chain can easily and easily rebuild your plans are not only for 1 day, but even for a week.

Finishing this working day, I can definitely say that it was a good, productive day, with two unfinished tasks. But the choice - to make these 2 tasks at night or transfer them to tomorrow - will depend only on your psychologist's skills and communication skills with sales.

Sometimes in the description of the duties of a pre-sale engineer you can find the item “equipment setup”, and here I would like to note that maybe at first, during the trial period, you will be able to touch the good old pieces of iron, but after a while equipment you will encounter only in datasheets on manufacturers' sites, and sometimes, as a bonus, you can even watch the delivery of this equipment in boxes as part of the project and, if the equipment setup engineer takes a selfie with this equipment, then but even see almost a live piece of metal.

But what you have to really work with is (the average statistics is also shown):

A laptop

A laptop is not just a laptop, this is your companion in life, well, almost like a wife / girlfriend, with the only difference that for your other half of March 8, you choose flowers and decide to take a bouquet for 1500 or 2000 rubles, and in choosing the SSD disk for the laptop, you do not blink and stop at 8 with an eye in choosing between 6000 or 8000 thousand.

Outlook

Outlook is a nightmare for a pre-sale engineer. The average number of working letters per month ranges from 600 to 1000, namely workers, but if you count with advertising and reminders, you can reach 1500 pieces. and try not to sort such mail at least a week.


Excel

Excel - it will be so much in your life that in time all the project management systems, time managers will seem to you as powerless to the power of Excel and some of the things you will write right there. The average number of rows processed in the tables with the description of positions, part numbers, quantitative indicators, as well as input and retail prices is approximately 4000 lines, but I will emphasize that the average value depending on the number and scale of projects may vary by times.

Word

Word - the second important tool in which you will hang, and hang for a long time, making out:

• Technical and commercial proposals;
• Technical tasks;
• Development concepts;
• Test test plan;
• Comparative analysis of solutions;
• And many other documents.

Configurator

The manufacturer configurator is an excellent tool that helps to quickly select solutions, to get a certain estimate of the project cost. Unfortunately, all vendors have very different configurator configurations, both in quality and content, which in turn can become a very dangerous tool that you seem to completely trust (because the manufacturer cannot take it, and make a mistake), but in reality you carry a mistake in the project that costs money. And the best bunch of the engineer is the manufacturer configurator and, of course, the ordering guide.

Search engines

Well, the most important tool in the work is a search engine in which you will spend a lot of time searching for those or other complex infrastructure solutions, but you will spend even more time searching for partner numbers for a single position in the specification that is in its designation may be generally useless.

After reading the article up to this point, it generally seems that you need to be a masochist to go to work as a pre-sale engineer, and perhaps this is true, but it can be said that there are a lot of advantages even in this work. I note, perhaps, the main ones:

• Work with a team of professionals, and just with great people;
• Each new project is a completely new experience, knowledge, tasks;
• And, probably, the coolest moment is the moment of victory in the project, and the more difficult was the pre-sale stage, the more you get pleasure.

*** forgot to answer, so why is it not a pre-sale manager, everything is simple, if a pre-sale engineer in projects is more interested in choosing technical solutions and by pure chance he just knows the depth of discounts, this does not make him a manager, but let's be clean, managers do not do and 1/5 of what is described above, but no one writes the same on hh: “We are looking for idlers”;)