Cloud Solution Sales at Liquid Telecom South Africa

Job Purpose

The Cloud Solution Specialist (CSS) is a solution sales leadership role that is responsible for delivering sustainable new business growth across segments; providing thought-leadership; and driving customer acceleration to cloud across the enterprise sales and marketing teams. The Solution Sales is a great sales coach and leader, has a challenger mentality, is savvy in sales leadership practice, and contributes with vision and flawless execution of solution sales across workloads and solution areas.

Main Purpose

Cloud Solution Specialist (CSS) in the Complex Cloud Solutions team are responsible for the scoping of as well as the end-to-end design of solutions that are deemed complex or require customisation to meet the customer’s need. The team primarily scopes and designs solutions for Liquid Telecom’s Cloud strategic customers (large corporates, SoE). The inputs for these solutions are RFXs (request for: information; proposal; quotation) from the market or BRS (business requirement specification) from customers or partner e.g. OEM, System Integrator initiated.

The scoping responsibility entails engaging with our customers to develop a sound understanding of their current business and technical challenges as well as the current strategies (both traditional and digital) that are currently employed – these are all encapsulated in a problem statement. The team also must ensure that it has a firm grasp of the macroeconomic environment that customers are in – this understanding would include knowledge of (and is not limited to):

• Industry or segment specific technologies and services;
• associated disruptive technologies; and
• existing and potentially new competitors within their industries.

The insights gained through our scoping process enable the team to evolve into a business and technology advisor to customers and ultimately get involved in their strategy creation process. This evolution of the Cloud Solution Specialist (CSS) role allows for the proactive (or reactive via RFX) creation of customised (Liquid Telecom bundled or ad-hoc created solutions independently or with partner ecosystems) services/solutions designed to meet the customer’s business requirements. This will give our customers strategic and competitive advantage within their industries. Additionally, the team will lead proof-of-concepts and pilots to prove recommended solutions and services in innovative centres or within customers environments.

The overall objective of the team is to act as thought leaders and business partners to our strategic customer base. The intention is to design fully managed unique end-to-end solutions that are applicable to our strategic customers with the aim of ensuring their retention as Customers of Liquid Telecom.

Further capabilities of the team pertain to how relevant aspects of customised solutions can be used to enhance existing products/services or develop new ones, thereby increasing the level of innovation in the Liquid Telecom Cloud product/service offering for its wider customer base. Given the teams’ knowledge of digital technologies and services, it endeavours to act as a thought leader for digital transformation of Liquid’s Cloud provider and the launch of new digital services e.g. Azure , Microsoft 365, AWS, GPC

Minimum Job Requirements

Qualifications Required

• 3 or 4-year BSc Engineering or Computer Science degree
• Industry Specific Certifications i.e. Microsoft , AWS, GPC, VMWare etc.

Experience Required

5 years:

• Technical experience in Complex Cloud Solutions
• Experience in technical field of which to be operating in the capacity of a specialist: System Integration, Product Management/development, telecommunications, IT, Solution Architecture, Pre-Sales engineering etc.
• Solutions technical experience Security, Hosting, Data Centre, Cloud, SDWAN, Digital Technologies, etc.
• Complex Cloud Solutions design and architecture experience.
• Project Management experience including the development of project and simultaneously managing multiple projects
• Experience in developing business plans, programs and processes.
• Creation of short and long-term strategic plans.

Key Outputs:

Architecture

• Act as a member of an interdepartmental, highly skilled technical team responsible for all aspects of Complex Cloud Solutions designs from concept to development, implementation/integration, launch and on-going Cloud product management requirements.
• Provide technical leadership and personnel management for the development and support of Complex Cloud Solutions that will support all Sales segments.
• Assure that all Complex Cloud Solutions offerings integrate and interoperate according to the customer€™s requirements.
• Supporting Sales presentations, Bid Management, formulating business cases, and national/international industry conferences and actively participating in external standards/regulatory organizations/bodies.
• Participate with the Product teams and serve as a technical leader to assist in the development, implementation and integration of Complex Cloud Solutions and services.
• Drive the development and implementation of Liquid Telecom€™s Cloud short and long-term strategy related to Complex Cloud Solutions design and methodology and new technologies utilizing current and adhoc developed products and existing tools to rapidly deploy solutions.

Operations

• Drive the growth of Complex Cloud Solutions proposals and monitor their success and opportunities for enhancements.
• Improve the quality and success rate for complex cloud solutions and customer specific solutions and solution responses within defined timeframes.
• Recognises areas for internal improvement and suggest plans for implementation.
• Drive the Sales departments strategic objectives across all other departments, while ensuring all Complex Cloud Solutions are market leading. Regular meetings (weekly) and feedback from Sales on research and market opportunities.

Fulfilment

Ensure fulfilment of all aspects of complex cloud solution design process with focus on the following:

• Feasibility accuracy by managing the technical relationship with all partners and ensuring availability and integration.
• Key decision maker for Go/No-Go decisions for complex bids.
• Creation and management of a short business case and feasibility process to address short turnaround time for complex cloud Bids/RFPs/RFIs.
• Review and final signoff on Complex Cloud Solutions.
• Drive adhoc product development for cloud client specific solutions.
• Ensure service design fulfilment buy investigating and onboarding partners to effectivity design, deploy and managed solutions that Liquid cannot perform these roles.

Strategy

• Evangelist and driving adoption of new cloud technologies into Liquid Telecoms and strategic customers.
• Provide direction for new technologies, services and business models particularly relating to new services e.g. Cloud, Digital Technologies (i.e. IoT, Blockchain, etc.) for strategic customers and within Liquid Telecoms.
• Research technology direction, adoption and key vendor strategies and capabilities.
• Formulate mappings and matrices of customer requirements to cloud technology roadmaps.
• Serve as Liquid Telecom€™s subject matter expert in support of technical white paper development for new technologies and services.

Cross Functional Engagements

• Consultation with Strategy in understanding industry specific technology/digital trends including disruptive technologies and new business models.
• Consultation with Sales is critical to understand customer businesses, industries and segments, with the intention of defining future cloud concepts and services i.e. SmartLogistics, SmartBanking, SmartPorts, SmartMining, SmartCities, etc.
• Collaborate with Product for service and solution creation, process integration, billing methodologies, business models and lifecycle management.
• Defining and approving business cases with Pricing.
• Finally assisting Service Delivery in deploying and supporting these unique services.
• Outside Liquid, creating partner ecosystems for specified sales verticals to define and support the end-to-end managed services.

Equity Statement:

In line with our company transformation policies, preference will be given to EE candidates.