Sales Engineer Guide

Sales Engineer Guide#

Step 2 of the Hub Rollout Process

Your Role#

You are the technical voice in the sales call. Your job is to provide expert guidance, not to close the deal (that’s BD). You’re there to make the community feel confident that 2i2c understands their problem and can solve it.

What You Need to Do#

Listen first, then guide#

  • Understand the community’s objectives — what are they trying to accomplish with interactive computing?

  • Identify who the users are (researchers, students, analysts) and how many.

  • Let the community describe their X (what they want) and their Y (how they think it should work). Your value is validating that approach or proposing a better Z that fits 2i2c’s platform.

Gather key technical context#

  • Hubs: Does this community need one hub or many? What workloads (notebooks, RStudio, GPUs, large datasets)?

  • Cloud provider: Which is appropriate — AWS, GCP, Azure, JetStream2, OVH? Consider cost, data locality, and institutional constraints.

  • Authentication: How will users log in — CILogon, GitHub, Google Auth, institutional SSO?

Solve the XY Problem#

Communities often arrive with a preconceived solution. Your job:

  1. Validate if their approach works on 2i2c’s platform, or

  2. Propose an alternative that better fits their actual need

Be direct but collaborative. The goal is upstream technical judgment — “Are we building the right thing the right way?”

What Success Looks Like#

By the end of the call:

  • The community walks away feeling that 2i2c will be a trusted expert partner.

  • You have enough context about the community to deploy a hub if BD closes the contract.