A technical consultant, partner, and advocate.

I approach a sales conversation by defusing the bomb before the client can arm it. Most customers arrive with some frustration already in hand, such as a past vendor that let them down, a project that went badly, or a salesperson who talked over them. If I bring that up first, there is nothing left for them to use against me.

I introduce myself as a technical consultant, a partner, and an advocate, and I do not present myself as a know-it-all. That opening breaks the ice on any current or past frustrations and turns the meeting toward fixing the client’s problems. Clients do not expect it. I find it eases the tension in the room and builds rapport faster than a product pitch does.

I have spent 25 years on the delivery side: designing, installing, programming, and supporting systems, then taking the escalation when something breaks. As a director of integration services I set deployment strategy and vetted technology, and as the owner of a service-provider practice I was responsible for the work my team put into customers’ buildings. Today I manage and monitor 150+ IPsec VPN tunnels on FortiGate as the final escalation tier.

That is the Professional Services Engineer’s job: turn the design that was sold into a system that runs, cut over without surprises, document it, and leave the customer’s team able to own it. The same approach I use in a sales conversation applies here. I start by finding out what went wrong last time, so it does not happen again.