Storage Software Sales Specialist, East Africa

The Storage Software Sales Specialist will provide subject matter expertise on the IBM Storage Software solutions portfolio to a broad spectrum of clients and partner. This role will be responsible for proactively reaching out to clients and their partners to understand the data protection needs of their clients, providing solution approaches to meet those needs, and teaming with the local sellers to gain customer concurrence for sponsorship of a solution purchase. During this sales cycle you will be responsible for delivering presentations, negotiating deals, and providing high level Total Cost of Ownership(TCO)/Return on Investment (ROI) engagements. You will also provide leadership by working the extended IBM Systems team and partnering with other sales leaders on key account strategies and competitive positioning, teaming with field enablement teams and the technical community as a whole. 

The solutions that you would be positioning and supporting are in the IBM Storage Software solutions portfolio including but not limited to Tivoli Storage Manager solution family including Virtual Environments, Databases, Mail and IBM Flash Copy Manager, as well as IBM Virtual Storage Center solutions such as Tivoli Productivity Center and San Volume Controller. 

Candidates should have demonstrated confidence in positioning storage infrastructure including but not limited to storage area networks, disk subsystems, various tape technologies and software related technologies such as data replication, archiving, deduplication and storage virtualization.

Key activities and responsibilities include:
• Articulating the business value of our solutions and products to senior managers and technical decision makers.
• Positioning our solutions in competitive scenarios.
• Identifying, developing and closing opportunities in the territory, whether sourced by IBM sellers or resulting from a direct customer engagement.

• Working within a matrix environment with IBM client teams and business partners to span the entire trajectory from opportunity identification to deal closing.

• Building, managing and progressing a pipeline to achieve sales objectives.
• Maintaining an accurate forecast and an up-to-date status of deals in progress.

Qualifications and Requirements:
• Must be self-motivated and have the ability to network across a broad team.
• Must be comfortable in both a technical dialogue (understanding the customer’s IT infrastructure and technical objectives) as well as a business dialogue (explaining the TCO reductions or ROI benefits of our solutions).
• Familiarity with Software environments is a strong plus (TSM, VSC, SVC, RTC, TPC).
• Must have strong familiarity with one or more vertical markets. 

Required

• Bachelor's Degree
• At least 6 years experience in Information Technology and Sales
• At least 3 years experience in Experience in Software Sales
• English: Fluent

Preferred

• Master's Degree
• At least 8 years experience in Information Technology and Sales
• At least 5 years experience in Experience in Software Sales

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

Storage Software Sales Specialist, East Africa