Pre-Sales Business Consultant

Our company vision - a digital world you can always trust - is essential to achieving just and sustainable societies. We believe it is our responsibility to deliver on that vision by innovating sustainable security technologies, diversifying cybersecurity talent, and promoting responsible business across our value chain.

Fortinet Germany is outperforming the Security Market since several years, contributing consistent and high profitable revenue streams to Fortinet’s global success. One of the key differentiators in the market is the Pre Sales organization. The coverage and security technology competence level are outstanding and clearly above average vendor presence with the security industry.

Objective:

In this key role a Business Consultant will work closely with a sales representative in Retail & Media (Pharma & Chemical). The Business Consultant's main mission will be to build and maintain trusted technical and business advisor relationships with relevant customer stakeholders for assigned strategic accounts or establish a value proposition for Retail & Media (Pharma & Chemical) market. The major responsibility is demonstrating the business value of Fortinet Services, Solutions, and Architectures to help address their challenges, strategic priorities, and operational objectives. The result is ensuring that this architectural vision addresses the desired new outcomes and capabilities that the customers need to support their business and enable significant investments in Fortinet.

Responsibilities:

• Create and nurture consultative relationships with the customer and its stakeholders on a technical and business level, collaborating with Product-, Services- and Solution Architect Teams to develop customer focused architectures driving industry-wide innovation.

• Lead the architectural design associated with Fortinet's technology strategy in alignment with key business drivers, solving customer business problems and market issues by creating a journey how individual projects and initiatives contribute towards that to-be future state architecture.

• Understand your customer's or vertical business strategy, success criteria, challenges, and strategic alliances and how Fortinet can demonstrate business relevance to executive stakeholders.

• Ensure awareness of Fortinet's corporate strategy and directions for key solutions and services offerings.

• Deliver and/or support presentations to customers, as well as deliver architecture selling concept and methodology enablement to Sales, Pre Sales, and Fortinet partners.

• Identify top opportunities and support building a business case.

• Manage and lead all technical aspects of a sales cycle from general queries to demos, RfX, and PoC’s when required. This includes project management and active participation in PoC’s in partnership with the relevant teams both internally and externally.

• Maintain solution, industry, and regulation knowledge how Fortinet can benefit from trends and differentiate from key competitors.

• Collaborate with peers, Consulting System Engineers (CSE’s), Solution Architects, System Engineering Subject Matter Experts, Professional Services and/or Partners on complex opportunities. Capture and manage customer requirements through the Consulting System Engineering Team to Product Management.

Required Skills:

• Minimum of 7 years’ experience in cyber security, networking, solution architecture field experience with proven success.

• Senior customer focused, technical engineering sales professional with knowledge of customer specific business initiators and their networking and security platforms, including adjacent technology and solution areas.

• Strong collaborator, self-motivated, and a great communicator with a “whatever-it-takes” mentality and an entrepreneurial mindset.

• Proven ability to work independently and lead a team in a collaborative environment.

• Good understanding of assigned customer's/vertical industry: Retail & Media (Pharma & Chemical) and its trends, influences and relevant regulations (e.g. EU-DSGVO, BDSG, NIS-2/KRITIS) at a global level with minimum foundational knowledge of

• Datacenter architectures (e.g. ACI, NSX-T)

• Security Architectures (e.g. Zero Trust, SASE)

• Modern Software Architectures (e.g. DevOps, IaC)

• Cloud Architectures with at least one public cloud specialization

• Security Operations (e.g. Orchestration, Automation, SIEM Tools)

• IT Security standards (e.g. BSI 200-x, ISO2700x, COBIT, NIST) and/or relevant regulations (EU-DSGVO, BDSG, NIS-2/KRITIS).

• Excellent German and English language skills.

• Ability to interface with senior levels of internal and external organizations is required.

• Excellent verbal & written communication, presentation, prioritization, and interpersonal skills to executives and individual contributors.

• Good knowledge level in networking (LAN, WIFI, WAN, SDN, routing, switching), and network security (Next-Gen Firewalls, Intrusion Detection, encryption protocols).

• Willingness to travel 20-50% of time.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. Graduate degree preferred.

• Significant industry certifications (SANS, CISSP, CCIE, etc.) preferred.

Fortinet is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity in our company, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics in the location in which the candidate is applying.