Chapter 8

Working for a Networking Solutions Provider

In This Chapter

  • Pitching products and services as a pre-sales engineer
  • Implementing your company's products
  • Helping your customers with difficulties

As an employee in a network solutions company, you'll have a role in the sales, support, implementation, or management of your company's products or services (or both). Most of these positions are “customer facing,” meaning you'll be working with customers in person or by phone. You'll need above-average people skills because you'll be representing your company in front of customers and prospective customers, often with a sales executive but sometimes alone.

In this chapter, you find out about a variety of networking-related roles in network solutions provider organizations.

Working in Sales as a Pre-Sales Engineer

As a pre-sales engineer, you accompany sales executives on sales calls to clients and prospective clients, explaining the wondrous features of the hardware products, software products, consulting, and other services that your company provides. You'll be looked upon as the expert in the room who can take your salesperson's comments deeper with real-life examples about how your company made other clients successful.

This job, however, entails a lot more than just smiling, nodding, and tossing in an occasional tale or two:

  • Conducting product demos: You might conduct a demonstration of your company's product or provide a depiction of its operation. You describe in technical terms what your product is doing and explain what the customers are viewing. In some cases, you set up a demo, also called a POC (proof of concept), in the customer's environment. When this is the case, you'll have limited time and possibly operational limitations. However, a POC will give an organization a good understanding on whether your product will actually work for them.
  • Designing solutions: You design solutions that will work in your customers' environments. You select one or more products, create configurations or specifications related to sizing or other characteristics, and create documents or drawings to depict how your company's solution will work in the customer's network. The documents that you create may be part of a formal statement of work or proposal, which you might write on your own or with others in your company.
  • Creating price quotes: You may be responsible for creating price quotes that your customer will use to make a purchasing decision. These price quotes include all hardware or software components necessary for the product to work correctly in the customer's environment. A quote might also include installation, integration, and training services. Often, you have to estimate the level of effort (LOE) and hourly consulting rate required for each of these.
  • Creating consulting proposals: You may be creating consulting engagements for other networking experts to perform device or system health checks, compliance reviews, architecture reviews, or the development of new architecture. You may need to get information from your customer so that you can estimate the level of effort required for the consulting engagement. You might be the lucky person who gets to write the proposal and determine final pricing, although with most solutions providers, others will double-check your work and help you finalize all pricing.
  • Developing architectures: You may work alongside experts in the customer's organization to develop an architecture — which could be a drawing, a technical specification, or both — that depicts your company's product in their environment. The plan to use your product in the customer's environment may necessitate changes to the customer's environment and additional equipment from other vendors.

For more information on the role of a networking consultant, see Chapter 12.

As a part of the sales organization, you'll probably have a sales quota, a commission, or other incentives such as spiffs (cash or non-cash rewards) to help your sales executive sell as much product or service as possible.

If you work with more than one sales executive, you'll have to decide who to help when two sales executives want you to attend a sales meeting at the same time in different locations. Even when everyone in a company can view their coworkers' appointment calendars, sometimes conflicts are unavoidable. Good negotiation skills are required so that you can artfully explain why you are attending one salesperson's meeting instead of another.

You'll also need to attend training sessions about your company's products (including new features and information on size, scope, and price). These sessions will add to your expertise and give your customers confidence that you really do know what you're talking about when you help them imagine success with your products.

If you work for a value-added reseller (VAR), you need to gain expertise in each of the products that your company sells. In larger companies, you might have to be familiar with products from dozens of different manufacturers!

Rolling Up Your Sleeves as an Implementation Engineer

As an implementation engineer, you install and configure your company's product in the customer's environment. Often, you visit the company's headquarters or other locations where the product will be installed or used. For a cloud-based product, you may still be on-site to work face to face with the customer's employees to get the product up and running correctly and perhaps provide informal training.

A job as an implementation engineer is great when things go well, but sometimes you will have unanticipated challenges, such as the following:

  • Functionality gap: Sometimes salespeople are overzealous when pitching the product. When customers discover that the product does not in fact take out the garbage or create lattes, they may display their dissatisfaction and ask you to move heaven and earth to make it right.
  • Product DOA (dead on arrival): It can be embarrassing when a product simply doesn't work! Your problem-solving skills will be put to the test as you plead with people in your organization to get replacement hardware shipped to the customer as soon as possible. You'll need to make good use of your time (which may be billable), or leave and then return when the replacement product arrives.
  • Product undersized: The product may be too small (not enough storage, or network throughput, for instance) and not work well in the customer's environment. Perhaps the sales engineer did not correctly size the product, or the customer was unaware of relevant environmental conditions.
  • Missing components: The pre-sales engineer might not have included all necessary components for the product to work properly. You'll have to work with others in your organization to get replacement components shipped right away.
  • Licensing issues: Sometimes there are difficulties activating a license that's required to get a product running. You'll need to know who to call to quickly get sticky license issues fixed.
  • Underqualified customer personnel: Sometimes the customer's organization doesn't have a person with the necessary skills and knowledge to successfully operate the product after you've set it up. You'll need to tactfully bring up this situation without offending the customer. You need to inform your own management as well (and maybe they'll inform the customer and take the heat for you).

These situations will draw on your relationship and negotiation skills. You'll need to stay cool, help your customer separate emotion from fact, and keep your customer at ease and give him or her confidence in your ability to solve the problem. You are, after all, the expert in all things about your product and your organization — but make sure that you know who in your organization can help you in a crisis.

Helping Customers in Technical Support

As an expert in one or more of your company's products (or other companies' products if you work for a value-added reseller), you receive calls for assistance from a customer who is having some kind of difficulty.

Like an automobile mechanic whose customer complains vaguely about a rattle, your customer's call for help may include imprecise or ambiguous descriptions of a problem. Your skills as a kind, empathetic, expert listener and troubleshooter will guide you as you ask key questions to get to the root cause of the problem.

Customers are not often in a good mood when they're having difficulty with a system. What's more, they may be under pressure to get systems up and running again, and your product's problem may be standing in the way. You'll need to stay cool and collected, keeping the customer confident in your company's ability to stand behind them and solve their problem.

If you're in luck, your company will have good information to help you troubleshoot your customers' problems, with a knowledge base (KB) or other references to guide you. As you gain expertise, you may be contributing to the knowledge base, helping your colleagues and those who follow you. If your company doesn't have a good KB, you might struggle for a time in your support role until you gain more knowledge and expertise in the inner workings of the products you support for your customers.

Watching the Fort for a Managed Service Provider

A managed services provider (MSP) is an organization that provides services to customers who do not have the resources to perform these services on their own. An MSP will provide one or more of the following services to its customers:

  • Monitoring: You use systems or network monitoring tools to observe the general health of a customer's critical systems or support the network infrastructure or both. When alarms (visual alerts indicating a malfunction or security issue) are displayed, you'll follow procedures specific to each type of problem. These procedures could also vary from customer to customer.
  • Systems management: You manage network devices, servers, and storage infrastructure for multiple customers. You make configuration changes, upgrade device software, and watch the health of the infrastructure.
  • Incident response: You monitor systems and networks for security incidents. When an incident is detected, you use tools to drill into affected systems to begin isolation, containment, and recovery operations. You participate in conference calls with affected clients to listen to their needs and inform them of your company's efforts.

A position in an MSP is a great place to start a networking career because you are exposed to enterprise tools and mature processes, and are surrounded by networking and security experts with a lot more experience than you.

“When it rains, it pours.” This saying by a table salt manufacturer applies to the MSP business. Boredom can give way to frantic intensity when two or more customers have serious issues simultaneously. This type of job can be a bit like that of an airline pilot: interesting and challenging at takeoff and landing but boring in between. But in an MSP, as when flying an airplane, constant diligence is key.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset