Solution isn't just a word.

I had a conversation a week ago with an acquaintance.

“I don’t get pre-sales. Are you technical or are you sales? Are you just an engineer that’s just pretending to be in sales?”

I paused for a moment. And I told him the “Solution” in front of my position means alot of things. And I told him a story.

No, I won’t dwelve into any deal size or numbers here. All that becomes irrelevant when a new quarter (or redundancy) comes around.

Not too long ago, I was asked to handle a Proof Of Concept (POC) for an opportunity (opp). Multiple teams across from Taiwan, China and the US. 

Trailing end of the pandemic, so everything has to be done remote. They’re keen to buy, but need something to prove purchase to their exec management.

Most people at this point in LinkedIn will talk about how they got this and rock star it out. Not so fast buddy, there’s a reason why I deserve a pay check.

Had an introduction call, and was given the team dynamics. Devops infrastructure/IT systems management in Taiwan, the development team is based in China, and the project management team is based in the US.

When Maverick in Top Gun went ‘That’s alot of push ups, guys”, I went to ’That’s alot of time zones..’. 

I had a separate call with the system admin  in Taiwan, where I demo-ed quickly how the product works and how to employ it in a virtual CI/CD quick tear-down agent based set up. Seems good. Red-hat linux based, good hardware specs and ability to create virtual environments.  Duly told him so, and sat back.

He pauses.

“You know about the terminal, how do I exactly go into that? And how do I install the packages or set up a VM?”. Turns out he’s a new hire. A straight forward POC isn’t so straight forward anymore , when you suddenly had to teach a prospect’s system admin Linux and Docker 101. 

Add in the fact that you have to translate English docs to Chinese. Can’t just pass the links to open source docs.

Installed the packages, and gave instructions to the development team how to install the plugins to their up to date IDEs. Ran the license management application on the Devops side, where the dev’s machines are suppose to retrieve a copy from the license pool. 

Dev machines..can’t see the license server at all. 

Suddenly teaching Linux 101 turned into Networking 101..having to look through their subnets, routing tables, reverse proxy etc plus not break their security apparatus and apps. And deal with the Great Firewall Of China. We’ve got it done near 12 midnight AEDT, though I won’t tell how we got it done.

Licenses? Checked. And the development team then fed back the plugin won’t run on their IDEs. I thought we had this checked out on the first day? Turns out that the project they wanted to do an analysis on is legacy, and is so old that it compiles on Windows 7.

Ran back to the technical support team to try and retrieve legacy versions of the product, way past the Long Term Support (LTS) enterprise agreements. Set up another VM for Windows 7, helped the system administrator re-install all the dependent components. Because there was no documentation on the prospect side how to actually set up the build environment, things broke and they had no idea how to get it back up.

Looks like I’m going to lose this one, as I had to break the sombre news to the IT and project management. And that’s when I learnt through my work ethic and services, I built up a champion or two that actually (quietly) believed.

They gave marching orders to the dev teams recompile the project code into the latest build environment specs in a matter of 3 days, with all the relevant documentation. Within 2 days , we were up and running and the development team were learning the value of our product through their IDEs; and the project management were generating reports through our product dashboards.

 Within a week or two, they were ready with go ahead with a PO. Time to hand over the commercials to the right person involved, after being questioned gently for weeks what is the progress of this particular opportunity.

When I finished the story, that acquaintance was rubbing his palm on his forehead and muttering that sounds like alot more work than its worth. 

I smiled “ That’s why the name ‘Solutions’” is very profound.” You have to be an expert firefighter as well, and alot of times in POCs the problems are out of your control. You still have to solve them and help close the deal.

More often it’s not about killing it, and sometimes your work hours are flexible too and not always 9 to 5.  And yes, it is alot of work than it seems to be worth; so you have to love what you do. 

And that’s a life in pre-sales, one year in and a year out.

#presales #presalescollective #opentowork #techlayoffs #opportunity #APJ #APAC #therealdeal