Country Pre-Sales & Sales Manager
Gulf Business Machines
Total years of experience :31 years, 1 Months
Formed in 2007, GBM Pakistan is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gulf Business Machines headquartered in UAE. With IBM, CISCO, VMware, Symantec, Microsoft, Oracle and other partnerships, it has become one of the leading Systems Integrators since its inception. Serving in the Pakistan operations as Technical Sales & Sales Manager reporting to Country General Manager.
Achievements:
• Strengthened GBM’s pre-sales (technical sales) department for medium sized business deals.
• Multiple high-end Power Systems and Enterprise Storage sales.
• Closed several mid-sized BladeCenter & Flex System deals.
• Enrolled GBM Pakistan in IBM Software Group’s SVI program fulfilling new requirements.
• Organized several self-development and motivational trainings for the entire team.
• Sales team increased focus on IBM SWG (WebSphere, Tivoli, Info Management and Lotus) business.
• Also pitched Microsoft and Symantec solutions.
Responsibilities:
• Responsible for entire country pre-sales activities and sales target (IBM HW, IBM SW, CISCO, Microsoft, Symantec, Services).
• Providing functional guidance to IBM & CISCO services & post-sales support teams.
• Ownership of technical architecture & design for customers.
• Mentoring and coaching the team members.
• Guiding branch operations in different areas. Helped document and develop several processes and quality procedures.
• Maintaining CRM and presenting pipeline reports for executive management and principal companies.
• Overview of RFI/RFP response documents.
• Ultimately responsible for entire sales cycle including order fulfillment.
Awards Won:
- System Storage Top Gun 2008
- GBM Hundred Percent Club for years 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 & 2008
- GBM Top Product Specialist Award for years 1999, 2000 & 2003
Achievements:
- Designed and configured virtualization solutions for customers including major server consolidation solutions for a petroleum company, a government department, a financial services company and a large retail bank.
- Demonstrated strong client facing skills, building successful working relationships with clients and peers.
- Lectured to young Bahraini IT graduate students as part of a mentoring program sponsored by Bahrain government and organized summer internship program for Bahrain University students at the company.
- Delivered iSeries training workshops for IBM customers on topics like Apache server/ digital certificates on iSeries, network security, TCP/IP, Client Access and System Operations.
Responsibilities:
- Serving as Solutions Specialist, Systems Integrator and Pre-Sales Expert for enterprise solutions.
- Spearheading operations across a territory of more than 100 existing customers in addition to all new iSeries, pSeries, xSeries and storage prospects in Bahrain.
- Identifying, qualifying and successfully closing technical deals in Bahrain by justifying investments on new product procurement through robust insight and market analysis.
- Serving in an advisory role for IBM Midrange Servers Technical Sales in GBM's Pakistan branch.
- Writing technical proposals and responses to government and private sector tenders.
- Maintaining complete sales cost/pricing worksheets.
- Planning and overseeing short- & mid-term Infrastructure projects. Maintaining short-term project cost sheets.
- Negotiating final contract in certain deals.
- Supervising order, delivery, and invoice processing.
- Conducting demonstrations for potential customers on various occasions thereby creating opportunities for references and provision of new solutions.
Awards Won:
- IBM Professional Excellence Award 1997
- IBM Informal Award for Outstanding Performance 1996
Achievements:
- Was the Team Leader for a 4-member Field Support team handling 40-plus AS/400 customers.
- Conducted a part time course on information processing techniques at the University of Karachi.
Responsibilities:
- Enhanced customer satisfaction by advising customers on preventive maintenance. Conducted performance tuning and capacity planning.
- Proactively responded to potential software issues to prevent unplanned interruption of clients' businesses.
- Composed service reports and formulated service procedures for repair, installation, maintenance and troubleshooting.
- Performed disaster recovery and release upgrades at various locations.
- Installed Netware on AS/400 and prepared other demo applications for conferences, forums and open days.