Imported from previous forum
[ original email was from james gunsalus - james.gunsalus@huffmanassociates.com ]
james@huffmanassociates.com
Position: Manager, North America Pre Sales Team
The Pre-Sales Manager will be responsible for day-to-day management of the North American Pre -Sales team, reporting to the Director of Professional Services for North America. This individual will be responsible for providing leadership and guidance to the team in conjunction with supporting sales activities including but not limited to: RFP responses, solution demonstrations, subject matter experts in Our Clients core solutions and functional streams of risk management industry. You are expected to be hands on in terms of providing clients and Sales representatives with business analysis and solution/product assistance during the sales process. This individual will be expected to understand client challenges and current processes and then define, validate and document client needs, objectives and success criteria
The Pre-Sales Manager will develop and manage all aspects of the North America Pre-Sales team including mentoring staff, monitoring their performance, evaluating their skill levels, and providing constructive feedback. The Presales Manager is responsible for ensuring the team maintains a solid knowledge of the industries’ Algorithmics serves including business issues and trends and competitive products. This position requires cooperation with Sales, Professional Services, Solutions Management and Product Management representatives in analyzing opportunities and developing account strategies and matching solution value to business value for the client.
This individual must be an excellent communicator, thus be able to command the respect of both business oriented and technically oriented clients, colleagues and direct reports. The Pre Sales manager will perform administrative duties related to the Region and their employees such as time tracking, resource allocation forecasts, revenue forecasts, project summaries, project terms of reference and functional discovery documents. This individual will participate in seminars, trade shows, and other marketing activities in order to promote awareness of Our Client and their applications.
This position will require travel anywhere from 30%-50%, and will be based in New York.
Qualifications:
Competencies and Skills:
• Experience in risk management industry, financial applications and trading systems
• Good understanding of financial economics, financial mathematics, statistics, and optimization theory
• Perform tailored on-site solution/product demonstrations. Target audiences may be any combination of end users, IT staff, business analysts, quantitative analysts, and executives.
• Business analysis and specification preparation activities
• Gather and analyze business requirements
• Ability to map prospect’s business requirements to Algo solution functionality
• Convey prospect’s requirements to appropriate Algorithmics’ teams (i.e. Sales, Solutions Management)
• Prepare proposals that outline potential offering for the prospect.
• Respond to functional elements of RFIs/RFPs
• Participate and/or lead on functional discoveries with prospects.
• Provide reports on project status, provide additional documentation as needed
• Ability to handle multiple, competing objectives
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills involving technical and management-level audiences
• Excellent listener
• Strong presence
• Strong presentation skills
• Strong organizational skills
• Self motivated without the need to be managed closely on a daily basis
• Experience handling difficult situations
• Demonstrates initiative, teamwork and problem solving skills
• Personal commitment, energy and inner drive for excellence
Work Experience:
• 7+ years pre-sales experience in the financial services industry covering risk management or related areas (e.g. portfolio/asset management, investment finance)
• 3+ years management experience
Education: B.S degree a must, advanced degree desirable