Solution Design Specialist

Job Description

Career Grade: D

Why Business

Our aim is to create a world-class BT Business unit that delivers long-term value for our customers, colleagues, partners, investors and other stakeholders, both in the UK and internationally, across a full range of business segments from small businesses to governments and multinational companies. This includes:

• Driving full integration of channels and products to best serve our business, government and wholesale customers in the UK and internationally.
• Investing strategically in present and future needs of customers, aligned behind common digital, network and security platforms.
• Accelerating our transformation plans and delivery of next generation products and services, making it easier for customers to do business with BT and for BT to transact more profitably with customers; and
• Continuing to invest in the skills, technology and partnerships required to return to growth and become the leading provider of secure multi-cloud connectivity.

Why this job matters

The Solutions Factory Specialist provides support for our UK field-based sales specialists and account managers through taking ownership of specialist product and solution design, pricing and where appropriate ordering. The solutions factory team will help facilitate sales that are originated by account owners and Business Development leads, helping to qualify customers’ requirements, turning broad discussions about desired business outcomes into a service design based on a mix of BT’s products and services. This involves working with colleagues in BT who manage and visit customers in public sector organisations, multinationals and large corporate UK businesses. The Solutions Factory professionals support a broad range of BT’s products and services including networking, security, IT Services, Data Centres and Mobile technologies. The role will focus on combining the right mix of BT’s products and services to deliver a competitive and compelling technical solution to address a defined set of needs. This means that each role within the factory will have a defined area of the solutions portfolio to work within, however will be expected to have a good general understanding of how their own technology area relates to the broader solution set available. The Solutions Factory will take accountability on behalf of UK Business for designing, pricing and “solutioning” to support success in sales performance whilst delivering a brilliant customer experience. The role involves helping field salespeople to expand our business with existing customers through selling up and across our portfolio towers, and acquisition support. Working with colleagues in the team and various stakeholders across BT, the role will prioritise delivering a highly responsive specialist design and solutions pricing function that delivers high quality sales output to help account managers and specialists to close profitable business for BT. The Solutions Factory Specialist role will support sales to both UK public sector and private sector organisations, accommodating the different buying processes and will need to maintain adherence to Public Contracting Regulations where they apply.

What you’ll be doing – your accountabilities
Pre-Qualification & Qualification
• Support deal qualification activity with Sales Specialist and Account Owners for a defined set of products and services within a technology area e.g. Wide Area Networking, LAN or Mobile communications
• Understand design brief / tender requirements, including high level business outcomes, to enable creation of a statement of requirements from which to build a solution
• Assessment of Product Suitability including identification of core products to meet the requirement and any technical constraints that need to be addressed
• Review current customer inventory / specifications to ensure suitable knowledge of customer environment to be accounted for in the solution creation/design/pricing
• Identify suitable BT vendors/partners that BT can work with to deliver solutions as and when required
• Requesting Deal Registration with vendors to secure preferential pricing and/or terms
Develop Solutions
• Engage with BT colleagues and/or customers as appropriate to ensure full understanding of the design briefs
• Design High level core solutions for the relevant product towers with ability to produce budgetary pricing to support deal qualification
• Ensure understanding of any design principles or financial guardrails to ensure solution compliance within BT
• Check Network or Service access availability / coverage to identify how the solution will be delivered and identification of potential challenges
• Create a detailed low-level design for suitably qualified opportunities including pricing of all elements
• Build solution pricing (to produce pricing capable of customer acceptance) through a mix of the following: inputting deal parameters into appropriate pricing tools, following Salesforce and other online processes, deal registration, submitting front door requests, attending and following relevant governance steps
• Ensure the production of technically appropriate and commercially viable proposals using approved products
• Ratify designs with external partners / account teams and customers as required
• Follow approved governance processes including seeking relevant pricing sign off’s using processes/forms/meetings
Presentation/Deal Closure
• Create proposal documentation and/or input to customer presentations for the designed solutions
• Produce bid text input for formal bid questions relating to the technology area that you support
• Re-work designs/pricing/proposal documentation following customer feedback
• Prepare customer order forms and CRF’s including eSigning

Handover to Delivery
• Prepare for handover into delivery
• Assist with order input as required into various BT systems
Technical Expertise
• Maintain expertise in your chosen technology area to keep up to date with technology developments, market movement, regulation and competition

Skills required for the job

• Knowledge of Communications and/or IT Services industry knowledge for networking, IT, mobile communications, Unified Communications or adjacent technologies gained through working in one of these sectors
• Ability to lead in collecting, validating, and vetting with customers the deal-specific technical, functional, and non-functional requirements
• Strong verbal and written communication skills focused on needs analysis, solution design and positioning, and business justification
• Ability to develop/write and present to end customers high quality technical solutions linked to the customers agreed business criteria
• Ability to develop non-binding budgetary estimate solution proposals to include costs/work breakdown structures, draft deployment timelines, technical/operational dependencies, draft architectures, outcomes and any related KPIs
• Excellent presentation and communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Highly organised strong problem solver
• Ability to challenge where required

Desirable
• Technical skills gained through Industry Accreditation such as Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Fortinet Certified Associate (FCA), Juniper Networks Certified Internet Associate (JNCIA), CompTIA Network+ or equivalents
• Technical skills gained through a degree level qualification related to IT/ICT/Telecommunications
• Appreciation of BT and competitor offerings, emerging technologies, market conditions, industry standards and UK communications related regulations

Qualifications:
• Degree in a relevant subject
• Postgraduate qualifications preferred. Sales, Marketing, Research and Insight qualifications preferred

Experience:
5+ years of experience in a specialist product or technical role or sales engineering, preferably in the communications or IT Services industry
• Bachelor’s degree in IT, ICT/Telecommunications, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience in analysing the needs of prospective customers against an existing product set, and providing advice on how solutions can be delivered using those products
• Experience working with one or more industry partners and/or vendors within the telecommunications and IT sectors
Key Decisions
• Leads on building solution designs and making product choices from the available portfolio to meet customer needs
• Manages own priorities across simultaneous customer opportunities working with multiple stakeholders
• Inputs into customer opportunity qualification, technology decisions and vendor choices
• Inputs into process improvement discussions as and when required

Our leadership standards

Looking in:
Leading inclusively and Safely
I inspire and build trust through self-awareness, honesty and integrity.
Owning outcomes
I take the right decisions that benefit the broader organisation.

Looking out:
Delivering for the customer
I execute brilliantly on clear priorities that add value to our customers and the wider business.
Commercially savvy
I demonstrate strong commercial focus, bringing an external perspective to decision-making.

Looking to the future:
Growth mindset
I experiment and identify opportunities for growth for both myself and the organisation.
Building for the future
I build diverse future-ready teams where all individuals can be at their best.