Principal Solutions Engineer

Company Overview

Based in Silicon Valley, Bridgepointe was founded in 2002 on the principle that businesses need a strategic partner and advocate when procuring, implementing, and maintaining IT services and infrastructure. The Company’s IT Strategists offer business leaders direct access to a large portfolio of vendor-agnostic solutions, employing a six-step model that starts with getting to know a client’s business, challenges, and goals and culminates in recommendations and support around supplier selection. Bridgepointe’s expert IT Strategists help clients achieve optimal IT results without costly consulting agreements.

Job Description

The Principal Solutions Engineer (SE) plays a pivotal role acting as the primary representative of Bridgepointe’s Delivery team to customers in the pre-sales cycle. The Principal SE works with clients, stakeholders, and internal team members to elicit, document, and prioritize business, functional, and system-level requirements for the development of Statements of Work (SOW). The Principal Solutions Engineer will have a strong command of Bridgepointe products and ecosystem and be responsible for management of customer expectations and satisfaction leveraging your expertise in contact center as a service (CCaaS), pre-sales activities, project management, and your business acumen to drive revenue growth.

Role Responsibilities

Sales

• Serve Sales to increase services win rate and reduce time to close, ensuring achievement of Delivery billing targets.
• Support Sales teams in pre-sales activities including RFP responses, proposal development, and customer requirement discovery, with a focus on capturing customer objectives and expectations.
• Collaborate with Sales to assess customer readiness, recommend service options and pricing, develop project plans, kick-off lead time, and services stakeholder mapping.
• Lead scoping sessions with customers to earn their trust, understand their business objectives, user stories, use cases, technical requirements, constraints, and change management, develop detailed project scopes, statements of work (SOW), and joint execution plan.
• Deliver compelling value-based presentations of solutions that are reliable, scalable, reportable, and supportable and aligned with customer goals.
• Evaluate and negotiate customer requirements against budget, timeline expectations, and business priorities.
• Negotiate MSA and/or SOW redlining with customer stakeholders, procurement, and legal teams, obtaining final approval on scope, deliverables, pricing, and terms.
• Price and recommend ongoing support, customer success, custom engineering, and consulting services offerings as applicable.
• Develop OLAs with Sales on RFP, SOW, and other artifact turnaround times.
• Generate services quotes in CPQ, maintaining accuracy and consistency.
• Create, maintain, and update Delivery collateral (SOWs, MSAs, etc.) for pre-sales use, ensuring consistency with company style guide.
• Conduct gap analysis and produce data and process flow diagrams as needed to support project planning and implementation.
  
  
  

Delivery

• Serve Delivery with accurate scoping, pricing, and clear contracting documents.
• Secure adequate budget and time for Delivery to execute contracted scope.
• Identify and mitigate pre-sales project risks.
• Collaborate with Delivery on POCs and unfunded pilots.
• Address project challenges, including risks, time, resources, and scope constraints.
• Assist in refining implementation methodologies and driving operational efficiencies.
• Work with Delivery leadership on opportunity pipeline for resource capacity planning and lead time(s), work breakdown structure (WBS), labor rates for Delivery pricing calculator(s), customer change order requests, and project retrospectives for continuous improvement of presentation collateral, pricing calculator(s), contracting templates, and sales-to-delivery handoffs.
• Conduct internal project kick-off (KO) with Sales and Delivery team (Project Manager and CX Solutions Consultant) and participate in external customer KO to elegantly transition the customer from pre-sales to Delivery without disruption; share and explain Delivery pre-sales collateral collected from and provided to the customer; handover the customer’s project charter to ensure focus on and fulfillment of customer objectives.
  
  
  

Other

• Represent Bridgepointe with professionalism, inspiring confidence in selecting our services.
• Maintain a solid understanding of CCaaS platform features, functionality, and APIs.
• Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices, and contribute to the development of reusable assets, methodologies, and tools.
• Partner with various teams: Legal team for customer-facing agreements; Proposals team for RFPs; Deal Desk for services quotes; Commercial Finance for any non-standard services terms; and Marketing to ensure consistent services collateral.
• Adhere to document management policies for centralized access to Solution Engineer artifacts.
• Contribute to knowledgebase for increased efficiency and accuracy.
• Identify and collaborate with internal teams to address risks, costs, inefficiencies, and product/service gaps during pre-sales.
• Provide thought leadership on pre-sales streamlining and new services offerings based on customer feedback.
• Deliver enablement to internal teams to enhance the customer journey.
• Define team goals aligned with the company's strategic objectives.
• Develop Solution Engineer playbook for review, process improvement, and onboarding.
• Mentor internal resources for future Solution Engineer roles.
• Update Solution Engineer reports for managerial oversight and prioritization.
• Respond promptly to internal and external stakeholders.
• Contribute to business profitability by reducing costs (using AI where possible and appropriate), escalations, and churn while increasing revenue, renewals, expansion, and customer satisfaction.
• Participate in trade shows and marketing activities as needed.
  
  
  

Experience

QUALIFICATIONS & PROFICIENCIES

• 10 years of consulting or customer engagement experience, solutions engineering experience, and contact center experience.
• 7 years in a partner or direct pre-sales role, selling SaaS solutions and concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executive leadership.
• Familiarity with MEDDIC/MEDDPICC, BANT, JOLT, etc. qualifying methodologies and pipeline and forecasting tools.
• Skills: strong leadership, presentation, communication, selling, negotiation, prioritization, planning, analytical, and problem-solving abilities, and understanding of business processes and best practices.
• High performer with focus on achieving results while managing multiple concurrent projects with aggressive deadlines.
• Ability to work effectively, independently, and with team members to add value.
• Experience with data migration and integration strategies and risks.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and meticulous attention to detail.
• Aptitude to learn legacy, contemporary, and emerging technologies.
• Proficient with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office products, and project management software.
• Experience with SaaS accounting (MRR/ARR, NRR, ACV, ARPA, CLTV, CAC, etc.).
• Deep experience with CCaaS technologies (ACD, IVR, IVA, Speech Analytics (NLP/NLU, data models, categories, etc.), Omnichannel, integrations (CRM, ERP, etc.), predictive dialer, Workforce Management, Quality Management, Performance Management, reporting, etc.).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business Administration, or related field.
• MBA or comparable graduate degree required.
• Project Management Professional (PMP) and Agile certification (e.g. CSM) required.
• Experience leading pre-sales Solution Engineers on enterprise programs.
  
  
  

Bridgepointe Technologies, LLC is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

For more information, please send an email to [email protected], or visit https://www.bridgepointetechnologies.net/ to learn more about Bridgepointe.