What is a Cisco pre-sales engineer?

fmitawaps

Someone I know who was a network engineer just got a job as a Cisco pre-sales engineer. I was wondering what this is exactly.

From the title, my guess is that if a company wants to make a new network or add onto their old one, or replace equipment, these pre-sales engineers would go check the place out and find out what the company wants to do, and make sure they buy the items they need and not waste money on things they don't need.

Is this right?

Dojiscalper

Most Sales engineers at MSP's support the sales staff on the technical side and yes, they do spec out equipment though depending on the companies, the client, and the team it still may not be the "right" equipment.

aftereffector

Cisco calls them System Engineers or SEs (the acronym works for sales engineers as well, of course). The SE's responsibility is to support an Account Manager for a specific technology range and customer focus. For instance, a security SE for southeast SLED would represent all Cisco security products to all state, local, and educational (SLED) customers in the southeast region. Cisco being Cisco, the SE region would probably be subdivided into many smaller regions, each with their own account manager(s) and SEs, but you get the idea.

The account manager will usually make contact with the customer or potential customer and do a quick vetting process. The SE will then evaluate the customer's requirements and recommend a solution. This involves a lot of customer engagements, both in-person and remotely via WebEx or phone, to deliver presentations, provide white papers, draft designs, build bills of material (BOMs), and conduct proof of concept (POC)/proof of value (POV) demonstrations with the customer. Once the customer is motivated to purchase the product, the account manager would come back in and handle the financial side of the sale.

Again, this is extremely nonspecific and does not necessarily reflect the actual work that is often done. Many account managers can speak the technical details of their product(s) without needing to involve their SE, and many SEs assist their AMs with developing customers and working the sales end. However, the general idea is that the SE focuses on the technology (hence the "engineer" title).

Source: worked closely with many system engineers and several account managers, both from Cisco and from other vendors, over the past year.