VP Sales Engineering

The Ideal Candidate

The VP of Sales Engineering is a pivotal role responsible for leading and managing a team of sales engineers who provide technical expertise and support to the sales department. This role combines the need for strong sales abilities, technical acumen, leadership, and effective communication skills to drive successful collaborations with prospects and partners. The end goal is to ensure the delivery of effective solutions to prospects and partners while meeting our organizational sales targets.

The Role

This role will require leading a team that serves as trusted technical advisors to help the prospects make key technical decisions. The Sales Engineering group works closely with the Entersekt sales team to effectively position the technical platforms and assist with closing deals as the technical expert. This group will also assist, where needed, in managing technical relationships with partners and resellers, by ensuring the value proposition is well understood, and that the partners are appropriately skilled and equipped.

The Sales Engineering group will be responsible for effective handoff to the Solution Delivery teams for the solution design and go-live phases. Additionally, post go-live engagement will be required to confirm that our solution works as expected and identify any upsell opportunities.  

Responsibilities

• Engage with prospects’ technical stakeholders to understand pain points, identify use cases, articulate key differentiators of our solution, and address technical objections
• Analyse customer requirements to make sure that their needs are met by the solution proposed
• Produce white papers to both demonstrate industry leadership as well as to address pertinent questions from prospective customers
• Host technical deep-dive workshops and training sessions with customers’/partners’ technical resources, providing them with an in-depth understanding of the operation of the product and how best to utilize it within their organization
• Work with the Sales Engineering team to make a significant contribution to the customer’s overall solution design through review and consultation (network design, enterprise service design, mobile application design, and business process design)
• Join the project manager in partaking in customer project progress meetings to provide risk mitigation support and best practice guidance.
• Engage with Entersekt Product leadership to discuss required features and functionality to continue driving effective value proposition into the market. 
• Own the development of user assistance material to accelerate the adoption of new features
• Work with the Sales Engineering team to produce solution designs and specifications detailing product configuration, integration points, custom interfaces and technical risks and complexities.

Skills and Experience

Successful candidates for this role will generally possess the following qualifications and skills:

• Engineering, Computer Science or relevant IT degree.
• 15+ years’ experience in a software development environment, preferably in a customer-facing role
• Experience leading Sales Engineering teams, as well as successful partnership with sales teams to assist with quota attainment and market expansion. 
• Hands-on technical expertise: the ability to engage at a technical level with developers and system analysts on subjects such as networking, system-to-system API, mobile application development and business process design
• Experience in financial services, authentication, payments and fraud prevention industry beneficial
• The ideal candidate will need to have North America experience as an added advantage
• Ability to understand and lead presales engagements.
• Systems engineering and/or requirements management exposure will be an advantage
• The ability to understand technology and business strategy, with the keen interest to move between both worlds
• Strong customer focus and push for value & improvement.
• Successfully self-motivated and self-managed.
• Ability to translate user requirements into technical solutions that drive up differentiation or quality of marketing

Personality Attributes

• Team player, self-starter, having an entrepreneurial mindset, and the ability to work in a matrixed organisation. 
• Ability to work in a fast paced Fintech environment filled with ambiguity, thus flexibility and an adaptive approach is key
• Strong technical communication skills: the ability to articulate the key differentiators of our solution and engage in technical discussions with customers. 
• Ability to host workshops and training sessions. 
• Unwavering focus for enabling each prospect/customer to get the most from our solutions.