Strategic Customer Solutions Architect – Managed Services

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Customer Solutions Architect BENE

Location: BEL - Zaventem | Job-ID: 221086 | Contract type: | Business Unit: Sales & Pre-Sales & Alliances

Life on the team

Managed Services Sales is a specialist sales function accountable for securing and growing services revenue and the contract base. Customer Solutions Architects work across industry sectors and the services portfolio, bringing the voice of the customer into campaign strategy and ensuring proposed outcomes are aligned to customer goals, market direction and organisational strengths.

What you will do

Shape strategic opportunities

• Engage early, before solution decisions are fixed, to maximise the team’s ability to influence customer strategy, broaden the opportunity and differentiate the proposition
• Work with the opportunity owner to define campaign strategy, strengthen qualification and set the overall direction of new business, renewal, complex growth and service-extension opportunities
• Own the strategic solution narrative and integrated service direction, working with the opportunity owner and specialist leads to shape a differentiated, commercially viable and deliverable proposition
• Understand the customer’s business priorities, operating context, desired outcomes and constraints, then translate them into a coherent service-led solution direction
• Help customers connect their current operating environment to a credible future service model, identifying the transformation, transition and organisational implications of the proposed direction
• Join the dots across customer needs, market trends and internal capabilities to identify opportunities, challenges, dependencies and areas of value creation

Guide, advise and influence

• Act as a senior customer-facing advisor and articulate Managed Services strategy, vision and value propositions to executive and C-suite stakeholders
• Guide customers and internal teams through complex choices using clear, straightforward and outcome-focused communication
• Influence opportunities towards strengths that are valuable to the customer, commercially viable and operationally deliverable
• Provide thought leadership on service evolution, innovation, technology trends and changing market expectations
• Bring together Technology Sourcing, Professional Services and Managed Services capabilities into an integrated campaign and solution strategy
• Work across Workplace, Applications and Data, Cloud and Data Centre, Networking and Security, drawing on specialists for detailed expertise
• Act as the senior technical and service context lead, connecting the right architects, service designers, commercial teams and delivery specialists at the right time
• Maintain a broad view of the end-to-end customer environment and ensure that each workstream remains aligned to the agreed outcomes

Strengthen solution confidence and governance

• Challenge assumptions and ensure solution direction is complete, consistent and aligned to customer requirements, standards and governance
• Provide senior solution governance across the campaign, ensuring that domain, service, commercial and delivery workstreams remain aligned to the agreed customer outcomes and integrated solution direction
• Identify and communicate material commitments, risks, dependencies and commercial exposures early enough for action
• Escalate material divergence from the agreed solution direction, customer commitments, standards or commercial guardrails through the appropriate campaign governance
• Work with technical, service, commercial and delivery leaders to ensure the proposition can be delivered efficiently within contractual expectations
• Enable effective knowledge transfer from campaign shaping into bid, transition and Managed Services teams
• Capture and share relevant campaign insight, reusable collateral, market intelligence and lessons learned

Grow customer and account value

• Build trusted relationships with customer decisionmakers and influencers, account teams, service managers and internal capability leaders
• Attend customer opportunity and strategy sessions and help identify service evolution, innovation and pipeline opportunities
• Use awareness of emerging technology and industry developments to explain practical customer benefit, rather than promoting technology for its own sake
• Work with customer, commercial and specialist teams to articulate the expected business, service and financial value of the proposition, supported by clear assumptions and credible measures of success
• Contribute to stronger win rates, healthy margin,