Pre-Sales Solutions Engineer
Applicant must be based in South Carolina or North Carolina
Role Summary
The Pre-Sales Solutions Engineer is a customer-facing overlay role that partners with salespeople to increase win rates, shorten sales cycles, and improve deal quality for managed IT services, cybersecurity, AI-enabled solutions, and document management.
This role serves as the technical and strategic advisor during the sales process, helping sales representatives accurately qualify and close deals by validating requirements, shaping solutions, leading discovery and demonstrations, mitigating risk, and ensuring solutions sold can be delivered profitably and successfully.
Key Responsibilities:
- Sales Overlay & Technical Close
- Co-own technical strategy and deal execution with sales professionals to increase win rates, shorten sales cycles, improve deal quality, and reduce post-sale delivery risk while driving activity and support opportunities involving Managed IT, Cybersecurity, and AI solutions.
- Lead technical discovery sessions to assess customer environment, risks, constraints, and objectives.
- Validate technical fit, scope clarity, and delivery feasibility before pricing is finalized.
- Serve as the technical authority in customer meetings, building executive and technical confidence with IT leaders and executives.
- Help sales reps overcome technical objections and security concerns.
- Participate in late-stage deal strategy to ensure technical alignment before contract execution.
- Solution Design & Scoping
- Translate discovery findings into clear, defensible solution recommendations.
- Define scope, assumptions, prerequisites, exclusions, and success criteria to prevent downstream issues.
- Provide technical input for proposals, scopes of work, and security narratives.
- Ensure proposed solutions align with company standards, margins, and operational capabilities.
- Collaborate with service leadership to validate implementation readiness and handoff expectations.
- Demonstrations, Workshops, & Proof-of-Concepts
- Deliver tailored demonstrations of managed IT, cybersecurity, and AI solutions.
- Facilitate workshops or whiteboard sessions to clarify architecture, security posture, or automation approach.
- Assist with RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires when required.
- AI Advisory
- Identify practical AI use cases relevant to SMB and mid-market clients (automation, support, security, productivity).
- Assess customer AI readiness, including identity, data quality, governance, and security considerations.
- Position AI as part of an integrated managed services strategy with clear ROI, risk controls, and operational alignment.
- Partner with sales to articulate business value without overpromising technical maturity.
- Document Management
- Support pre-sales discovery, positioning, and demonstrations for document management.
- Identify workflow inefficiencies and map automation opportunities tied to business outcomes.
- Assist sales in framing document management and workflow automation in business outcome terms.
- Coordinate technical validation and expectations as needed.
Core Deliverables:
- Technical qualification and risk assessment (go/no-go guidance)
- Technical discovery summaries
- Solution recommendations and architecture overviews
- Clearly defined scope and assumptions
- Demo/workshop agendas and outcomes
- Clean implementation handoff notes
Success Metrics:
- Accelerated pipeline volume while increasing win rates on supported opportunities
- Reduction in sales cycle time for complex deals
- Improved gross margin and deal quality
Required Qualifications:
- 5+ years' experience in IT sales, solutions engineering, or technical consulting
- Strong working knowledge of:
- Microsoft 365
- Networking fundamentals (DNS, DHCP, firewalls, switches)
- Virtualization and cloud fundamentals
- Comfortable presenting to both technical and executive audiences
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to manage multiple simultaneous opportunities
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in a pre-sales, solutions engineering, or technical consulting capacity
- Cybersecurity knowledge (EDR/MDR concepts, identity security, backups, incident response)
- Microsoft 365 / Azure familiarity
- Exposure to AI tools, automation platforms, or AI governance concepts
