Your Role and Responsibilities

• Technical Sales Specialists are the technical experts and advisors to clients, IBM sales teams and/or IBM Business Partners.
• As a Technical Sales Specialist, you understand the client’s business requirements, technical requirements and/or competitive landscape.
• You apply your business insights, build and maintain client relationships, incorporate IBM Data & AI portfolio into client-valued solutions and ensure client readiness for the implementation of technical solutions.
• Data and AI Technical Sales Specialist will be a technical sales consultant and trusted advisor to IBM clients.
• Understand the client’s business requirements and technical requirements,
• Apply industry-specific knowledge and experience, as well as deep product skill and competitive knowledge to bring new business and technology insights to assigned clients, in order to help drive revenue for the Data & AI Solutions portfolio.

Additional Responsibilities

• Actively develop and progress opportunities within the Data & AI and Cloud Pak for Data portfolio, mainly around Artificial Intelligence Apps
• Provide strategic direction to Executive decision-makers related to their Information Architecture to support business transformation and their journey to AI.
• Deliver solution workshops, product demonstrations, technical education, and Proof of Concepts while articulating business value for our Data & AI solutions.
• Enable, support and work with the Business Partner ecosystem.
• Develop re-usable industry-specific assets and demonstrations.
• Collaborate with other internal IBM teams to drive unmatched customer satisfaction.
• Establish deep technical account relationships at each client site.
• Maintain an understanding of the clients industry, including industry trends, industry business processes
• Collaborate with IBM sales teams to define, design, and detail the technical aspects and feasibility of proposed solutions.
• Support customer technical escalations, on-site health checks, best practice sharing, designing solutions; and answer technical questions throughout the sales process in order to identify/progress/close sales and develop customer relationships.
• We are open to consider Cape Town as a location with occasional travel to Johannesburg.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• Skilled in AI Apps eg Watson Studio, Watson Discovery, Watson Assistant, Watson Machine Learning, Azure AI, OpenAI tools, SAS, Data Robot, Data Iku.
• Understanding of AI platform, Foundation models and AI solutions
• At least 2 years’ experience in Artificial Intelligence tools, scripting, Cloud environments, and hands-on engineering or field technical sales experience
• Knowledge in the Business Automation (e.g. robotic process automation, workflow automation, process mining, etc.) market to quickly become a trusted client advisor
• English fluent
• We are open to consider Cape Town as a location with occasional travel to Johannesburg.

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• Demonstrated level of business acumen as it applies to the client’s business
• Skilled in consultative selling, with an understanding of the client’s needs and IBM capabilities
• Commercially minded and capable of supporting end-to-end sales engagements with the ability to think, plan and act strategically
• Extensive networking and interpersonal skills in complex environments
• Self-starter with eagerness to seek and build new skills