F5 202 Introduction
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**The 202 Pre-Sales Fundamentals Exam**
The F5 Pre-Sales Fundamentals Exam is focused on assessing a Sales
Architect/Engineer’s knowledge of sales motions and sales positioning of
F5 products.
This exam identifies individuals who have the skills and understanding
necessary for technical selling of F5 solutions. They will likely be a
sales engineer with a proven track record of successfully selling F5
solutions and typically have two years of sales experience. The Sales
Professional should have a working understanding of F5 solutions and the
ability to articulate its value to customers and prospective customers.
The majority of the content is found on the site links of the sections.
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Section 1 - Discovery
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Objective - 1.01 - Research the Company and Customer
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Understanding the customer’s company direction and initiatives can help
you understand their high-level IT infrastructure drivers. You can
gather this type of information from many different sources and a few of
them are mentioned in this section. Not every company is publicly
traded, so not all of this type of information will be available for you
to review for every customer. This is where building a relationship with
your customer comes into play. As a trusted advisor for your customer
you may be able to learn more about their needs and pressing
initiatives, when no other resource is available.
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**1.01 - Visit corporate website to gather information (investor
relations, board of directors, press releases, acquisitions, blogs, RSS
feeds)**
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**Investor Relations**
Most publicly traded companies will have an investor relations page on
their website that can give information on current financial
performance. This information can help you better understand their
ability to take on a new large project.
If your buyer works for a public company, it might be a good idea to
also check out its most recent financial reports on the SEC’s website.
This will give you an idea of how the company is performing, as well as
the problems it’s facing (check out “risk factors” sections).
Example: http://investor.apple.com __
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**Board of Directors**
Understanding who the influencers and decision makers are within the
organization you are trying to sell into can help you better understand
the decisions they make or may make.
Example: http://investor.apple.com/corporate-governance.cfm
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**Press Releases**
Scroll through the recent press releases and see if anything major has
been announced such as leadership changes, product releases, financial
statements, events, security concerns, or customer wins.
Example: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/
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**Acquisitions**
Acquisitions can sometimes accurately predict a company’s future
directions in a market space and can thus help you understand some of
their purchasing decisions or project demands.
Example: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/apple-acquires-shazam-offering-more-ways-to-discover-and-enjoy-music/
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**Blogs**
Read what your buyer reads and read what your buyer writes. If your
prospect maintains a blog, be sure to read at least the last few posts
and comment on them during your call or meeting. In addition, visit the websites of
popular industry blogs and peruse the latest posts to learn more about
the trends and challenges shaping the environment.
Example: http://investor.apple.com/corporate-governance.cfm
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**RSS Feeds**
RSS feeds are a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to
online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. You can look
up and subscribe to the RSS feed for each of your publicly held
companies in your territory.
- First look up the stock symbol `*https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/lookup.asp* `__
- Next subscribe to the RSS feed using the RSS feed reader of your
choice for each stock symbol
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**The Company’s Twitter and LinkedIn Account**
What kind of content and messaging has the company been promoting?
Understanding how the company is presenting itself to its customers can
help you better understand how to present yourself to your buyer.
https://twitter.com
https://www.linkedin.com/
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**AngelList**
If you sell to startups, AngelList is an essential researching tool. You
can see the company's funding history, including the timing, value, and
participants in each round; past and present employees; advisory team;
founders; products and launches; open jobs; and more.
https://angel.co
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**1.01 - Locate job postings to identify internal initiatives and
investments**
Some company initiatives can be seen in the type of job roles they have
open. As customers plan for projects they will typically make sure they
are hiring the expertise needed to get the job done or support the
initiative after implementation is complete. You can check a customer’s
Careers page to see what job role is in high demand.
Example: https://f5.com/careers
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Objective - 1.02 - Given a scenario, prospect customer opportunities
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**1.02 - Determine corporate challenges**
Many times, understanding the implications of the challenges that a customer/company is facing will help you pick the correct solution for that customer/company. Doing research when customer prospecting (hunting!) is very important. Other than having face-to-face meetings where information can be exchanged, understanding the customer’s mission, vision, and value statement will help align your efforts when introducing technology to solve a business problem. Most of the time, attempts to gather key information using email or “cold calling” activities will not be successful - unless you have made a time investment in understanding the corporate and technology infrastructure of the prospect. To earn the trust of a decision maker , you must understand their needs and budget so you can articulate solutions that meets those needs. Below are two examples of positioning F5 solutions to meet a company’s cloud and compliance challenges:
*Cloud Challenges*
If a company is trying to reduce capital expenditures (see section
3.02) and is not interested in buying any new hardware for their
data center because they are moving to the Cloud, F5 can help by
providing application services in the Cloud and thus moving the
costs of providing application services to operating expense.
Transition to the Cloud may not always be about CapEx vs OpEx. It
can also be about agility and speed to market. Many times, in the
rush of deployment/migration the necessary application services are
not at the top of mind of a DevOps team and it can be easy for
customers to just default to the built-in Cloud Service Provider
(CSP) application services regardless of capabilities. This can put
them in a hard spot if that application needs a function that the
CSP service can’t perform or if the application needs to move to a
different Cloud provider. F5 provides the same industry leading
application services across multiple CSP with consistency and
portability.
*Compliancy Challenges*
Security concerns are at the top of mind in many organizations and
F5 is there to help them with the application services that can
protect their mission critical Applications and data. Understanding
your customers business vertical can be critical to understanding
the challenges they face as a company. Certain business verticals
come with compliance regulations such as PCI and HIPPA that can
require more strict security policies.
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**1.02 - Correlate business and technical initiatives**
Understand the correlation between the needs of a customer’s business
areas and which types of technical initiatives can meet those needs.
Sometimes, when you meet with different business areas within a
customer’s organization, you can gain a broader understanding of the organizations future needs across the entire company. This information can allow you to see a clearer picture of what your customer needs and understand if you should perhaps position products that can grow their Data Center or if you should focus on Cloud enablement products. You will need to know all F5 products and the problems they can solve to prepare for this section of the exam.
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**1.02 - Determine technical organizational structure**
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_structure
**Organizational Structure**
Understanding your customers organizational structure for the company as
well as organizational structure within the technical departments can
help you understand who is driving requirements and budgeting for the
projects you are involved in.
Some organizations will be very structured and have a clear line of
authority and role, while others may be more loose and harder to clearly
understand but mapping this out with your account team will make your
opportunities more successful.
An organizational structure is a system that outlines how certain
activities are directed in order to achieve the goals of an
organization. These activities can include rules, roles and
responsibilities. The organizational structure also determines how
information flows from level to level within the company. For example,
in a centralized structure, decisions flow from the top down, while in a
decentralized structure, the decisions are made at various levels.
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Objective - 1.03 - Given a scenario, correlate which F5 products could solve issues or meet customer needs
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You will need to be able to use your knowledge of F5 product
capabilities to correlate to customer needs. This will be a wide range
of questions focused on product capabilities.
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**1.03 - Associate customer requirements to F5 solutions**
https://www.f5.com/solutions
https://partners.f5.com/solutions
When you do account discovery and discover the customer problems or
issues that need to be solved, your knowledge of the F5 product line
will allow you to find opportunities within the account. Understanding
the problems our products can solve will allow you to go deeper in the
account with F5 products. You will need to know all of our products and
the problems they can solve to prepare for this section of the exam.
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**1.03 - Align potential F5 solutions to business and technical
initiatives and challenges**
https://www.f5.com/solutions
https://partners.f5.com/solutions
Sometimes when you meet with different business areas within a
Customer’s organization you will learn the individual business areas
needs as well as direction. Many times, the funding of IT projects come
directly from the individual business areas budgets. When understanding
those needs you can overlap them with other projects needs within the
customer and provide F5 solutions that not only meet one projects needs
but multiple projects needs potentially expanding budget once multiple
projects are involved. Once again, you will need to know all of our
products and the problems they can solve to prepare for this section of
the exam.
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