A day of Pre-Sales Architect
Pre-sales is one of the most exciting roles in the sales process
My Pre-sales architect colleagues and I work on various cases with many different customers. No two cases are similar. That is one of the things that makes this role so enjoyable.
In this blog, I briefly tell you about the Pre-sales architect’s average day and some of the exciting tasks we do.
The central part of our work is working together with sales on sales cases. Pre-sales architects are part of the sales team from quite early on.
In the sales process, our main task is to help customers to understand the value add of Frends iPaaS and how it can resolve the customer’s integration use cases challenges. This is achieved through demonstrations and proof of concept cases.
Proof-of-Concepts and story telling
For me, demonstrating a product is more of storytelling than just showing the features of the product. Telling stories from the role perspective and how the role benefits of the Frends capabilities for me is the key of the demonstrations. It makes it also more fun than just walking through the features.
The Proof-of-Concept (PoC) cases are small cases we work on together with customers to solve an agreed use case. During PoC the aim is to pragmatically and in real life show the value of Frends and also how the integration magic is done.
For a person eager to learn and try new things, this phase is fun; as I mentioned, there are no two similar customers and use cases. They all are different, and there is always something new to learn.
And yes, it brings great satisfaction to present the customer with a working integration solution that resolves the use case with success!
What else does the role include?
In addition to demo presentations and PoC cases, we Pre-sales architects participate in offering material preparation, for example, in RFx cases, especially from a solution perspective. We also create supporting material like new demo set-ups, how-to videos, blog postings.
And of course, last but not least, I enjoy that we have an own, professional pre-sales team at Frends. We like to share ideas and use cases and learn from each other. This is a valuable thing to myself - especially since my teammates are also great personalities.
Summarizing best aspects in Pre-sales architect work
- you get close to the customer,
- you see a lot of different kinds of use cases,
- you have many compact and shorter cases to work on, which fits in my personality very well,
- you always have something new to learn,
- you are there resolving customer’s integration cases first-hand and
- you quite quickly see the results of your work.
Written by: Mika Haikonen, Pre-sales architect, Frends.
How does the role sound? Why not give a try?