Director, Solutions, US

Company: Aera Technology
Location: Mountain View
Posted on: February 20, 2021

Job Description:

At Aera, we deliver the cognitive technology that enables the Self-Driving Enterprise---: a Cognitive Operating System--- that connects you with your business and autonomously orchestrates your operations. Aera's Cognitive OS leverages the best of artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, big data, and enterprise domain expertise to deliver Cognitive Automation at scale for some of the world's largest companies. We are looking for a talented individual to join our team to lead our pre-sales solutions team in the Americas. This will require developing and delivering compelling stories to accompany Aera marketing content that brings to life the power of the Aera platform and the accompanying solutions. These solutions will span the domains of supply chain, revenue management (pricing, promotions, etc.) and finance. This individual will structure and create client presentations and proposals, architecture and write narratives for demo's of the platform and solutions, and deliver these to clients in an engaging and personalized manner. The intent is for this individual to build a team over the next year to support the commercial efforts of the Americas' client partners (sales). Leading candidates will demonstrate their ability to think strategically about how to better persuade customers to try Aera, to dive into customer conversations themselves and convince them to move forward with Aera, and to lead and develop a talented team. Responsibilities

• Work with Americas leadership and other regions to define and continuously improve Aera's approach to pre-sales--
• Define the roles necessary to build a world class pre-sales team for Aera and hire talented professionals into the organization
• Manage the professional development of the members of the pre-sales team
• Lead and manage America's pre-sales activities through collaborative interactions with the America's general manager and the Client Partners (sales)--
• Present Aera capabilities in initial and ongoing meetings and discussions with both prospective and existing customers
• Deliver standard and custom demos during client meetings, live in Aera's demo environment
• Develop a robust understanding of Aera's primary Cognitive Skills (see description at aeratechnology.com ) such that you can enable customers to visualize the art of the possible
• Use energetic storytelling to convey the value and power of Aera's Cognitive Operating System (COS)--
• Take the lead to create custom demos by working with offshore delivery (skill builders) and data science teams in India and Romania. Create requirements for demos as well as writes demo narratives to effectively deliver the Aera value propositions
• Helps Client Partners in discovery workshops to channel customers to existing skills and solutions
• Collaborate with Client Partners CPs to draft Statements of Work (SOWs) for prototypes, pilots and implementation work that meet customer requirements and match Aera's capabilities
• Provide holistic view of what is possible to CPs across previously implemented skills and in-flight customer conversations
• Participate in design sessions and in UI mockups for pilots. Participate in developing ROI arguments for new customers and expansion at existing customers
• Respond to RFP/RFIsDefine and design the necessary tools, technology and process that is required to scale the team along with counterparts from the other regions
• Work closely with product management to provide input into the product roadmap where appropriate About You
  • Prior experience in a pre-sales role at an enterprise software company selling complex analytical solutions
  • Engaging and charming presentation style. Need to build excitement in the audience
  • A people oriented person. Someone who loves interpersonal interactions, debates and real time problem solving. A good listener, able to discern customer needs and connect them astutely to Aera solutions
  • Credibility in particular domains so that clients feel that he/she understands their issues. Today our primary functional domain is supply chain with secondary domains of finance and revenue management. Other key domains are analytics and data science--
  • Technical familiarity with data engineering. Not to perform it but to talk about the realities of data integration, ETL, table level detail of the primary applications (SAP, ORCL, JDA, JDE, SFDC)
  • Applied experience that can be referred to in order to build capability. Most likely operating, technology delivery or consulting experience
  • Comfort with powerpoint creation
  • Ability to pick up technology quickly to inform demos and discussions about competitive differentiation
  • Ability to tell stories and write meeting and demo narratives. A good writer/communicator with a clear sense of structure
  • Detail oriented. Follows up with customers and CPs, does what he/she says they will get done More About You
    • Experience in B2B SaaS enterprise sales environment--
    • Ideally pre sales with another SW company, potentially in the supply chain, analytics or data science spaces. Need to be open to new approach being driven by Aera
    • Ideally will have operator, delivery, and/or consulting experience in their background. Ideally 10+ years
    • Strong educational background. Bachelors required, masters a plus

Keywords: Aera Technology, Mountain View , Director, Solutions, US, Executive , Mountain View, California