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Day
in Life of - IT Services Pre Sales Manager
UT Career Desk, [
Thursday, Mar 24, 2008 ]
The most
important element of the sales function is the sales person’s time. Greater the
number of hours a sales person spends on customer focused activities and
initiatives, greater is the prospect of generating increased sales and thereby
revenues. Assisting a sales person clock greater productive hours is one of the
primary and most important elements of a pre sales function.
It is with this aim in mind,
that I start a typical day in my life as a pre sales manager of a top Indian IT
services firm. I chose this role, with an intention to move into the business
development focused initiatives in my career. Having spent close to half a
decade in the delivery or software development space and subsequently armed with
a management degree, I find myself having just the right blend of skills needed
for such a profile. Couple of certifications in the financial domain have helped
me bring in the crucial functional aspect needed in my role.
My day usually begins at around
9-00 AM with checking up on my mails over the previous day. Being at offshore in
Bangalore, I usually receive a plethora of mails from multiple sales guys based
at various customer geographies. Majority of the mails relate to various RFI’s
(request for information) and RFP’s (request for proposal) in various stages of
their lifetimes.
As pre sales manager, I am the
focal point in the sales life cycle leading a team of 10 pre sales consultants.
I take the ownership of successful delivery of all sales related deliverables,
which include various collateral, responses to RFI’s/RFP’s etc.
We have two new RFP’s, I see, as
I scan my mails apart from few requests for collaterals from various sales
person. I assign the RFP’s to the appropriate team members who’d take them to closure. The
collaterals deal with providing insights of our capabilities and experiences in
relevant areas of customers’ business. These would be handled by various other
members of my team.
At 10-00 AM, I participate in
the review of an RFP. Collating inputs from various teams such the legal, HR,
Finance and most importantly the teams from the delivery/development and
business analysts, the RFP is finally in shape to be shipped to the content
writers and graphics teams. All our RFP’s undergo a round of review by the
content writers who polish the language of the document to conform to
professional business standards. They then undergo an upheaval or transformation
of sorts under the graphics team which ensures that the document looks appealing
to its audience, before being shipped out to the sales person for submissions.
By 10-30 AM, I am back at my
desk to plan for an upcoming customer visit. The visit, which would involve the
CIO of one of our customers, is crucial and would involve senior management from
our side as well. I review the agenda of the visit along with another of my
team member, ironing out certain loopholes.
This is the fourth visit in as
many weeks this month. Ensuring participation of appropriate members from
different functions from our side in the visit to meet the objectives is
crucial. We pore through the expectations of the customer’s CIO as communicated
by the sales, to decide on the relevant participation.
The visit is four days down the
lane, by when we would have the presentations of the various participants ready
for the sessions. A visit sometimes can make or break months of prior efforts
and therefore deserve the necessary attention and bandwidth from all concerned.
The visit planning takes about
an hour of my time. After grabbing a quick cup of coffee, I head into a training
session on the best way to handle responses to customer proposals which lasts
until lunch.
Post lunch, I closet myself with
few of my key team members to plan for sales strategy in various accounts that
we own. As a pre sales team supporting the front ending sales persons, we have
aligned ourselves into a structure similar to the sales, with members owning
accounts mapped to sales persons.
Each account owner within my
team is responsible for mining the account helping the sales person achieve his
targets. This is achieved through account maps which are our capabilities mapped
to the customer’s lines of business along with relevant case studies to help
direct the sales persons to the right people with right content.
Today, we take stock of the
status’ of the various initiatives within different accounts and relevant
collaterals that need to be sent out. Through these pro-active initiatives we
help sales persons save time by a considerable amount and more importantly
expand our sales offerings. Moreover, since most of pre-sales consultants
graduate to business development managers in the organization, these activities
ensure the right mindset right from the onset.
Some of our strategic
initiatives are driven from a business unit or the organization level
perspective. These include planning for increasing our brand recall through
participation in industry forums/events, creation and publication of
advertisements in various business journals such as the WSJ or the Bloombergs of
the world, profiling of companies for potential alliances/partnerships/M&As,
entry strategies for various new geographies in which we don’t have presence and
many more.
By now its almost 4-00 PM in the
evening, and time for me to get into a meeting with a senior product manager
within the organization to help shape the strategy and approach for the sale of
a new product that we have developed. This involves considering all aspects of
positioning the product in the market from a branding, launch and sales
perspective.
Finishing off with the meeting,
I head back to my office for a couple of interviews of the interns that we plan
to hire for the summer sessions. We usually have interns joining us from various
business schools in the country every year. Internships are instrumental to
establish our brand in the various campuses where we go for recruitments and
also help us in identifying the right personnel that we could hire.
By the time the interview
finishes, it’s the fag end of the day, the time I usually reserve for an hour in
the gym. Keeping track of multiple tracks with multiple deliverables and
interacting with multiple people every day takes its own toll. Keeping myself
fit through such regular workouts helps me come back daily with renewed vigor
and focus.
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