For most of a decade now, I’ve been in a pre-sales capacity in my work life. I’ve found the work amazingly rewarding, and intellectually challenging. I’ve been associated with some awesome salespeople, some incredible customers and have had a fair degree of success. At each successive role, I’ve taken on new responsibilities, and new technologies. The learning that I’ve assimilated within this period has been constant, and exciting. In addition, I’ve made some great connections with wonderful people, and through that social media bent, I’ve also had the opportunity to expand my own blog by becoming a blogger at Tech Field Day, and associate with some of the largest IT vendors in the world. I’ve traveled, written, and enjoyed practically every new experience.

In addition, I’ve left and lost jobs. Once, even, because I was not a good fit for the organization, but in other cases due to large changes in corporate policy, regime change, economics, or product focus. I regret very little, other than maybe accepting a role at a company I should have researched better, and quite frankly should not have taken the role.

My role, as I’ve said, has been primarily in a pre-sales capacity. This is a specific role within every organization. Different in many ways, and the same in others. I’ve always seen it as a customer advocacy role. Essentially, my architectural assistance providing a service to the internal IT organization, as an adjunct to their own team. What I was able to bring to these conversations, unlike their internal staff, as they’ve been caught up in their own day-to-day and putting out the very consistent fires they’d all come to anticipate, was an outsider’s perspective, with broad spectrum industry knowledge. My conversations have been as much about the product speeds and feeds, which are quite important, but as well, the potential pain point resolutions to real business problems, with an eye to all the needs my customers have had. These have been as often as not financially motivated, but as well, IT directional, cloud motivated and have always had to take into account not only where the organization is going, but where they’ve been in the past and in the current. Every org grows in a slightly different path. Their IT decisions have been made in their own bubble. Fulfilling their requirements at the time, and satisfying whatever needs they may have had when these decisions were made.

I now get to take this perspective to the next level with Connection Enterprise Solutions. In my new role, I will focus in much the same way philosophically, having similar conversations with my designated customer base, but in a slightly different way. As a Technical Sales Executive, I will become a much more integral member of my customer’s advocacy group, hoping to become a team member in as many cases as possible. Certainly, my hope is to continue to benefit my customers, but in a much deeper relationship. I see the role as somewhat a TAM relationship, in which architectural decisions, vendor, and channel agnostic, take place with my presence and advice holding value to the customer. At the same time, working directly with my own sales organization, and having the opportunity to alert Connection’s org to new projects as they progress.

I truly couldn’t be more pleased to take on this new challenge, being able to work with larger and more dynamic customers, with the potential to have personal impact on so many IT directions.