Solutions Engineer - Enterprise Accounts

The Solutions Engineer – Enterprise Accounts (SE) is a sales and technical role, part of a Territory-focused sales team, working with F5 end-user customers and partners.

The high-level objective is, together with a Solutions Engineer, Enterprise Accounts and the region’s channel partners, achieve the allocated sales target to a pre-defined set of customers in the assigned region, more specifically, Enterprise (a limited number of selected) accounts. Critical to the success in this objective is the SE’s ability to work with F5 channel partners, building with them a regional sales eco-system by enabling them to independently drive F5 solutions sales to their customers, and to operate as an extension of F5's sales team through effective sales and technical training, demand generation efforts and mutual business planning.

The SE primary responsibility is to develop and deliver her/his sales team’s technical strategy for the region, ensuring that the best matching and business effective F5 solutions are driven to our customers with the help of the region’s channel partners.

In customer engagements, supporting their partners’ SEs, the F5 Enterprise Accounts SE should always engage customers with a Consultative Sales approach, helping the partner SE but, most importantly, enabling them to become autonomous in their sales calls. This approach requires that the SE works to proactively learn and fully understand the business and technical solutions that the customer has implemented to be able to identify the customer’s key “pain points”, their business and technical challenges, and the gain achieved by implementing a F5 solution. The SE should be able to discuss both technical and business benefits and not just technical features, establishing a value relationship so she/he becomes a trusted advisor to her/his partners.

Teamwork is key to success, hence the SE should jointly, and as a means to develop the region’s channel partners, the SE should jointly, in support of the partner sales team, support the sales process. Also, as we always sell through our channel partners, the proposed solutions should be jointly defined with the partner sales team’s close participation so that together we can create business value propositions which address and solve real customer’s needs.

In terms of knowledge, the SE needs to have solid technical skills on F5 key solutions’ use-cases and the broader ecosystem that we work with. But, while the SE is expected to be able to handle requests around the whole set of F5 solutions, we expect that she/he works towards building deeper expertise only in a very reduced set of use-cases (Prime Solution), becoming the regional expert for the chosen use-cases, supporting other SEs just like she/he will also be supported by other experts in other key use-cases. Strong technical skills are a pre-requisite and should continuously be enhanced as F5 provides training and certification opportunities.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Understand the customer’s needs and business goals, and then design a technical solution which can create a new customer service or solve customer business problems

• As a trusted advisor, provide Technical expertise through sales presentations, Solution designs, Solution demonstrations, Proof of Concepts

• Design differentiating solutions and articulate business value of F5 Solutions

• Provide solution designs, and systems engineering configurations

• Participate in the development and support of content (presentations, VP’s, use cases…) for customers and partners

• Develop and maintain a high level of technical knowledge of F5, the relevant industry and Sales aptitude

• Foster a collaborative, team-based environment, sharing best practices and success and building lasting relationships

• Maintain knowledge of competitive landscape and share knowledge

• Actively utilize SE tools: Salesforce.com, Hive, email groups, and other SE Readiness programs

• Understand and effectively utilize F5 organizational resources

• Effectively negotiate and pursue conflict resolution

• Uphold F5’s Business Code of Ethics; promptly reporting violations of the Code or other company policies

Channel Partner support activities include:

• Work in collaboration with Channel and Sales management to establish channel partners and to qualify partner’s ability to sell F5 solutions

• Influence Sales strategy, by recommending the most appropriate technical strategy for each partner

• Help establish and execute on partner’s Business Plan previously agreed upon

• Develop and maintain trusted advisor relationships with partner technology staff and management

• Support F5 channel partner sales initiatives

• Provide channel partners technical expertise and oversight as required

• Provide channel partners recurrent training on selected, focus, F5 solutions

Customer support activities includes:

• Can articulate the F5 Sales Strategy, Messaging and Positioning F5 solutions and their value proposition that address customer business objectives

• Can deliver sales pitch/whiteboards at CxO level.

• Can identify and qualify technical opportunities

• Can help determine viability of opportunity and map out political structure.

Post sales activities include:

• Understand and follow F5’s support case escalation process

• Partner with the F5 Technical Support, guiding customers and partners on how they can more quickly resolve their cases

• Always keep a “Customer first” mentality and attitude

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Expert written and oral communication skills

• Expert presentation skills

• Demonstrate expert knowledge of:

• Industry and F5 Networks-targeted technologies

• Network & Multi-Cloud Design

• Networking technologies (switching & routing), SNMP, and syslog

• Identity Management and Federation technologies (AD, Radius, TACACS+, LDAP, SAML, OAuth)

• Network Security (Firewall,IDS/IPS)

• Application Security (WAF)

• DNS, HTTP, SSL & TLS, TCP/IP

Demonstrate proficiency in:

• Configuration and troubleshooting of servers

• Network and Server Virtualization Technologies

• Active Directory & Domain Design

• Programming/scripting languages such as Python, TCL, Java, Perl, C/C++, etc.

• Automation and Orchestration tools, such as Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, etc.

• AWS, Azure & Google Cloud Platform

Qualifications:

• 5+ years related industry experience

• 3+ years pre-sales experience, specially through reseller channels

• BS/BA or equivalent work experience

PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT:

• Job may be performed on-site at a customer facility or data center, or in an office environment sitting at a desk or computer table

• Duties require the ability to utilize a computer, communicate over the telephone, and read printed material

• Duties require the ability to travel up to 80% via automobile and/or airplane, and may require being on call periodically and working outside normal working hours (evenings and weekends)

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