Senior Solution Architectat CDW Careers (UK)

Description

CDW is a leading technology solutions provider to business, government, education and healthcare organisations in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Our fingerprints can be found on technology in workplaces of more than 250,000 companies: from start-ups to international conglomerates. With the breadth of products and services we offer, there is no request too big or too small.

CDW prides itself on being ‘People Who Get IT’ and ‘People who get People’. Our relationships are fuelled by our deep expertise and grounded in the CDW Way. Our empowering leadership makes things happen and inspires their teams to do the same. From the teammates beside us to the leaders who guide us, we move forward together. At CDW, you’ll work with people who inspire you. People with positive, success-driven attitudes who you will learn from and forge strong relationships with. Bring your best true self—and your best ideas—to CDW. Because diverse perspectives bring forth better problem solving—and better solutions for our customers on a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

Job Summary

CDW’s fast paced and growing Retail focussed team is continuing to expand.  We are looking for a Senior Solution Architect who has experience in working with retail customers, in the retail market and knowledge of retail trends. In this role there will be a requirement to obtain a working knowledge of CDW’s Integrated Technology Solutions (ITS) practice disciplines, (Hybrid Platforms, Modern Workspace, Security and Digital Enablement) to work collaboratively with these specialist teams on opportunities to create end to end solutions and manage presales opportunities on defined retail engagements.

CDW’s Solutions Integration practice consists of a group of highly skilled Solution Architects a that form part of the presales technical group. This role is to:

• Provide our retail customers with industry specific solutions to address their business and technical challenges.
• Support the Sales teams in breaking into new accounts, demonstrating the experience, expertise and strength of opinion that proves credibility in industry
• Lead Retail aligned presales opportunities from inception through to handover into delivery
• Act as a Senior Solution Architect, using a combination of your own depth of technical and industry expertise as well as the wider team to own opportunities, engage with customers and win profitable business
• Develop and maintain your own skills and technical/industry knowledge through research, attending events self-guided learning, lab time and formal training/accreditation
• Support the development of the team and the wider department by contributing to team projects as well as helping team members with customer engagements and mentoring to help them achieve their own goals and career aspirations

Key Responsibilities

• Customer Opportunities - Work with Retail customers, salespeople and BDMs to qualify opportunities, understand business and technical requirements to design the most appropriate solutions whilst maintaining accurate and up-to-date information within CDW’s CRM system to support sales forecasting and pipeline management.
• Documentation - Produce high quality documentation from solution designs and RFP responses to TCO models, business cases, HLDs and SoWs
• Develop Go to Market Plan – Build out the retail store architecture framework we have created around Store Foundation, Store Fabric, Store Optimisation and Store Futures
• Upsell - Identify potential to expand opportunities where possible and engage and coordinate resources from other teams to support
• Handover – Support the smooth handover of projects into the delivery teams and acting as an escalation point during their life and transition into service
• CDW Evangelist - driving and evangelising CDW capabilities to our customer base in a credible, friendly and relatable way. Differentiating CDW through its productised services, consulting capability and security expertise
• SME Evangelist - Explain and evangelise the features, benefits and technical specifications of your subject matter and adjacent technologies, solutions, and services to internal and external audiences
• Internal Collaboration – Build and develop strong relationships across the business, including with Sales, Professional Services, Managed Services and the wider presales community to draw upon as the need arises. Support the documentation and adoption of agreed standards and practices within our deployments and work to ensure a high-quality engagement for every customer
• Repeatable Solutions – Support making what we do more repeatable, more profitable and less risky by helping to identify and build standardised offerings, boilerplate content and packaged services.
• Partner Engagement – Cultivate strong relationships with CDW’s partner community to stay up to date with offerings and roadmaps and leverage this knowledge as an agnostic advisor to customers. This may involve identifying new partners who are needed to enhance our retail portfolio, boarding them and integrating them into the retail solutions.
• Sales Enablement - Assist CDW sellers with technical guidance on retail technology and CDW offerings across a range of customer sizes and types and evangelise the team’s capabilities
• Customer Retention - Act as a trusted adviser to key customers through building knowledge of their environments
• Accreditation – Attain and maintain the highest level of relevant accreditations in key areas as required

Qualifications, Skills and Experience

• A demonstrable understanding of the Retail Industry, challenges being faced and key priorities, trends
• Independent and relevant certifications are advantageous
• Experience working with Retail Clients and engaging around digital transformation

Essential Attributes

• Self-driven and self-motivated
• Ability to lead customers and articulate the CDW Retail GTM to deliver tangible benefit quickly whilst maximising the scope and potential of an engagement
• Commercial acumen with an awareness of the financial implications of design decisions across Capex and Opex budgets and how they affect TCO and ROI
• Experience and ability to develop and build relationships with a range of stakeholders, including C-suite
• Previous experience in a channel presales role or similar including leveraging partner resources, incentives and teams during presales engagements
• Experience selling both professional and managed services
• A demonstrable track record of getting stuff done whilst managing competing pressures and deadlines whilst retaining an eye for detail and quality
• A passion for technology and its ability to have a positive impact on business
• Quality focused with excellent attention to detail producing high quality documentation from solution designs and RFP responses to TCO models, business cases, HLDs and SoWs

Customer Focus and Ways of Working

• Each coworker is accountable for their actions and is required to exercise good judgment in everything they do. Part of that responsibility includes ensuring that you understand and live up to the values and standards we set for ourselves in the CDW Way, the CDW Way Code (our code of ethics and business conduct), the Information Management System (IMS), and all other policies and procedures relevant to your role.
• Each coworker has a responsibility to ask questions when they are unsure of CDW’s values, standards, and policies, and to act if they believe someone else is not acting consistently with those values, standards, and policies.
• Each coworker is responsible for maintaining customer focus and for periodically reviewing the Circle of Service Philosophy and the Quality Policy to understand CDW’s commitment to excellent client service and continual improvement. Coworkers must report any customer problems, feedback, service outages, and service improvement suggestions to management.
• Each coworker is required to comply with CDW’s policies relating to Information Security and Data protection, specifically to:
  • Protect all information assets from unauthorised access, disclosure, modification, destruction & interference
  • Treat the security of all information assets according to their designated information security classification
  • Ensure that they only access information assets that they are authorised to do so.
  • Adhere to the procedure for reporting any security weakness or event
  • Commit to, and participate in, personal development of information security awareness & knowledge
  • Comply with all laws and contractual obligations regarding the protection of data