Certified Cloud Pre-Sales Cloud Solutions Architect (CCPSA)

Explore customer management fundamentals for pre-sales, including customer acquisition, engagement, events, and discovery to identify the right buyer and foster a win-win solution selling mindset.

Learn to manage customers as a pre-sales sales engineer by aligning with your company's customer management strategy, leveraging crm tools, training, and internal processes to guide the customer journey.

Explore customer acquisition for cloud services, from acquisition lifecycle to channels and metrics such as customer acquisition cost that drive revenue opportunities for pre-sales teams.

Enhance customer engagement by prioritizing superior customer service, brand loyalty, and employee experience, and track success with CLV, churn, and retention across reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty.

Attend customer events as a solutions architect by engaging with customers, gathering information, presenting demonstrations, and whiteboarding solutions to address challenges.

Identify and qualify opportunities through a sales opportunity analysis using the Bant framework, evaluating the right customer, segment, budget, and solvable problems from lead to opportunity, as logged in Salesforce.

Develop a solution selling mindset that delivers value by assembling security tools and services to meet a customer's corporate goals and required transactions per second.

Explore becoming a trusted advisor by building trust, handling objections, and presenting business use cases. Tailor messaging for executives, tell stories that sell solutions, and use enablement tools daily.

Learn how a trusted advisor collaborates with clients to form strategic partnerships, understand needs, and deliver long-term value with direct insights, exceeding requirements, and enabling mutual success.

Explains what a business use case is, why it matters for cloud pre-sales, and how it visualizes costs, risks, tco, and roi to help decision makers approve procurement.

Explore sales enablement tools, from CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot to collaboration apps like Miro and MS Teams, plus ROI and TCO calculators for SaaS deployments.

Apply customer management in the sales cycle, covering acquisition, trusted advisor collaboration, qualified opportunities, business cases with metrics, and objection handling using the four P's and storytelling for decision makers.

Explore the role of sales engineering and pre-sales, clarify differences with solutions engineering, and build cloud fundamentals—service models, compute, network, security, APIs—plus where the cloud fits and customer types.

Explore cloud fundamentals, define cloud as a utility, and compare service models (infrastructure, platform, software as a service) and deployment models (private, public, hybrid, community) with virtualization as the backbone.

Explore cloud infrastructure decisions by choosing resource locations across regions and zones to optimize performance and cost. Understand edge locations and local zones for multi-region deployments and high availability.

Learn how cloud APIs connect services and on-premise systems, discuss rest, open, and proprietary api types, gateways, and the meaning of cloud native and cloud first.

Discuss cloud considerations, including privacy concerns, cost models, and deployment and service models. Identify low ops and no ops options, governance requirements, development needs, migration strategies, and shared security model.

Develop a technical response to rfps by collaborating with sales and technical writers, tailoring the proposal to the customer, and asking the right questions to avoid a black hole.

Lead proposal teams in federal RFP responses by aligning pre-sales engineers and a solutions architect with pink and green team roles and clarifying technical, cost, and review responsibilities.

Master handling sales engineering activities for product or solution deals through a clear process. Set customer-focused meeting agendas and leverage proofs of concepts, demonstrations, whiteboarding, and vendor cost optimization awareness.

Define and document customer expectations, distinguishing which a sales engineer can meet—primarily technical or trusted advisor roles—and escalate pricing or deal items to sales, then commit to meeting them.

Define the customer discussion agenda to set expectations and address questions in a pre-sales meeting, using chit chat to break the ice and build rapport.

Reinforces cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), deployment models (private, public, hybrid, community), POC planning with the EA, and API basics (specification and interface), with region and detailed information emphasis.

Delve into domain three sales and financial skills, outlining SE or SAR expectations, value creation, sales team structures, the sales cycle, and key financial terminology.

Explore the sales process and become a trusted advisor by delivering customer value, leading conversations with relevant questions, identifying client needs and goals, and highlighting value propositions and opportunities.

Create value as a presales engineer by listening, researching, and acting as a trusted advisor, rather than selling, aligning SaaS or hardware solutions with ROI and customer goals.

Lead the conversation by listening to the customer, clarifying the meeting objective, and confirming the client's ask; acknowledge, repeat back, and follow up as a trusted advisor.

Ask the right questions to understand the customer, engage effectively, and establish trust as a trusted advisor by being direct, clear, and jargon-free for non-technical audiences.

Explore the proposal team structure for RFPs, including capture manager, coordinator, SMEs, and content manager, and differentiate RFI, RFQ, and RFP processes for exams.

Explores inside sales and how reps follow up on leads from events and cold calls. Validated leads go to AES for in-person contact; SEs may work these leads remotely.

Explore the deals desk, a key sales resource that provides discounts, reviews legal terms, and coordinates cross-functional support to close deals efficiently while ensuring compliance.

Explain CapEx and OpEx by contrasting ownership with paying for services, and show how cloud computing shifts information technology procurement from upfront infrastructure to ongoing OpEx funded services.

Learn how key performance indicators measure cloud service success, including availability, uptime, workloads, scalability, utilization, and response time, and how these KPIs influence compensation and managed services.

Learn how pre-sales compensation varies by vendor and region, including base salary, commissions on software and hardware, stack bonuses, regional bonuses, and certification incentives.

Review the module's handling of sales meetings, understanding client needs, and leading conversations with a clear agenda, while distinguishing qualitative versus quantifiable results and ROI, TCO, CapEx, and OpEx.