Fresh Opportunities at Thales

Job Description
We are looking for someone enthusiastic and ambitious to join our Pre-Sales team to work with our Identity and Data Protection portfolio. In this position, you'll be working closely with the Sales team to respond to partner and customer needs for our solutions. The job is half about the soft skills and half about the technical skills; so you'll need to have both. Encryption and Cryptography underpin everything that we do, and so the more you understand about that, the better. Any experience in the field of Smart Cards, IAM, Hardware Security Modules and Key Management Solutions is a significant benefit, but not necessarily mandatory. We're more than happy to help you to get familiar with our products and provide you with all the knowledge that you need for your day to day work.

You'll first work closely with our prospects to gather information on their use-case, application environment and data flows to understand their needs fully. Once discovery is complete, you will be actively involved in the Proof of Concept phase of the sales engagement. Often, we need to provide assistance and advice on configuration or customisation to meet the prospects' needs with our very flexible solutions, and so you'll need to be hands-on. We interface with hundreds of 3rd-party applications and solutions, and you will undoubtedly come across many applications, integrations, features and APIs which aren't familiar. It's is both the excitement and the challenge of this position - the role suits someone keen to learn and interested in technology; the ability and desire to 'learn something new' will help.

The position is based in South Africa. You will need to be mobile as we have customers across the territory, we expect you'd be travelling approximately 50% of the time, but it will vary; some weeks more, some weeks less. Travel will be mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and less frequently within the Middle East.

Experience

• 5+ years' experience in a customer-facing pre-sales capacity in Information Security or a related field and skilled in presenting to both management (C-level) and technical personnel (developers, IT teams, etc.) with excellent verbal and objection-handling skills
• Technically hands-on with skills in problem-solving, architecture design and exposure to solution design
• Experience with crypto, data protection and identity access management solutions
• Experience with public and private cloud services, ideally across multiple CSPs (Azure, AWS, etc.)
• Technical bachelor degree (Comp Science/Engineering IS, Maths or similar) or equivalent work experience

Requirements

• Experience of Cryptography & Security; PKI, digital signatures, certificates, TLS, encryption and hashing techniques, ideally working knowledge of APIs such as PKCS #11, REST, Microsoft CSP/CNG, OpenSSL, Java JCA/JCE
• Experience with Identity Protection, Authentication solutions, Smartcards, or other Identity Management and Security products and solutions (Access management, single sign-on, identity federation, Multi-factor authentication)
• Experience with data discovery and classification solution when it comes to databases, file servers, network shares, big data
• Experience with data encryption and crypto key life cycle management when it comes to data at rest environments like databases, file servers, storage, hybrid cloud, big data.
• Experience with data in motion solutions when it comes WAN and SDN networks
• Experience with scripting and software development on both Windows and Linux systems
• Awareness of virtualisation products and cloud service provider offerings such as VMWare, HyperV, Xen, KVM, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Docker, CloudFoundry, or similar

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Job Description:

Responsible for building financial and commercial offers.  Selling Thales portfolio of solutions to new and existing customers and to capture Order Intake (Sales) and relationship building in the Civil Markets within SADC countries. Responsible for Order Intake (Sales) for Airspace Mobility Solutions, broader CyberSecurity and Satellite business underpinned by Services and Support business by negotiating a full value chain up to closing the deals.

KEY PERFORMANCE AREAS AND JOB DETAILS

• Business development: promote Thales products in the civil domains of Airspace Mobility Solutions, broader Cyber-Security, and Satellite.
• Take ownership of sales activities with limited supervision to deal closure however in compliance to Thales ethical rules
• Register and update order intake CRM systems, through actions ranging from pre-sales up to the end stages of sales finalization
• Define the sales strategy, the sales approach in relation to a specific account in a target country – report/share up to date quality of information to the Country and respective Business Line to ensure consistency of information to build a winning offer
• Ensure preparation of Key Account Management Plans and maintenance of the information with the respective Business Lines
• Ensure customer satisfaction through appropriate initiatives, addressing problems and complaints on a case-by-case basis
• Contribute to promote upsell or market penetration opportunities for revenue growth
• Able to successfully negotiate the terms of an agreement and close sales in line with expectations in local and international environment
• Capture information on aspects such as risks and opportunities, tenders, marketing and sales to share with respective GBU (Global Business Units)and Bid/project teams as well as develop awareness of customer environment
• Ability to anticipate forecast; summarizes and monitors sales forecast and input to the weekly or monthly or Quarterly BOR (Business Operations Review and SITCOMS)
• Ensure that the necessary interactions take place with the Countries, in particular through opportunity pipeline Reviews, Sitcom meetings and Business Forums

Sales Management

• Provide leadership to achieve annual order intake targets
• Take ownership of all Sales activities with respective Global Business Units / Business lines
• Identify and generate new business from existing clients in area of responsibility
• Achieve assigned annual sales and profit targets
• Provide leadership to the solution development effort with respective Business Lines to address customer needs
• Update the CRM management systems and ownership thereof
• Participate in Global Business Units and Business Lines
• Sales management meetings and reporting of quality of information on Order Intake focus

Key Account Management/Plans

• Formulate key account plans to Thales standards with respective Global Business Units and Business Lines
• Professional interfacing between Country and respective Global Business Units and Business Lines
• Coordinate the involvement of all necessary Thales personnel towards providing customer solution in area of responsibility
• Lead the effort to achieve customer satisfaction and problem resolution with various technical divisions in Thales
• Build effective and trustful relationships with customers
• Ensure customer needs and expectations are met by the company
• Proactively assess, clarify and validate that customer needs on ongoing basis
• Proactively address customer issues and make sure they are closed to the customer satisfaction.
• Maintain high customer satisfaction ratings to Thales standards

Education, Skills and knowledge

• Background in the Civil industry.
• Minimum 5 years Sales experience.
• B-Degree.
• Relationship building and Customer focused
• High quality decision in customer industry
• Expert in analytics and sales automation tools (sales analytics, sales tracking, reporting, performance…) and problem-solving skills
• Manages risk taking and fosters entrepreneurship
• Leadership/ Ability to reassess strategy (strategic thinking) and champion innovative approaches and initiatives
• Promotes diversity and creates an inclusive environment
• Strong communication skills, partner relationship skills, and team leadership skills
• Technical skills