Professional Services Pre-Sales Specialist

Location: Remote UK, United Kingdom

Thales is a global technology leader with more than 83,000 employees on five continents. With over 7,500 people in the UK, operating across defence, space, aerospace, and digital security, we help build a future we can all trust. Thales supports the security and stability of our nation by providing extraordinary technology to our customers, as well as delivering social value to the UK with our products and services.

Thales' Cyber Security Products business line provides data protection, access management and application security solutions that help customers protect sensitive information and intellectual property, and secure access to applications and data.

Key responsibilities

Scoping, proposals and commercial support:

• Lead pre-sales discussions to understand customer objectives, technical environments, constraints and desired outcomes.
• Lead discovery and scoping workshops with customers and internal stakeholders to prepare the Statements of Work (SOWs).
• Develop effort and cost estimates with Delivery and relevant technical specialists.
• Support pricing and margin discussions in accordance with applicable commercial and approval processes.
• Ensure proposed services are clearly scoped, appropriately positioned and realistic to deliver.
• Define an appropriate services approach, including deployment strategy, project phases, timelines, deliverables and customer prerequisites.
• Balance customer requirements and budget with technical feasibility, delivery capacity and commercial objectives.

Delivery Readiness and Handover

• Coordinate structured handover meetings when opportunities move into delivery.
• Ensure the handover includes agreed objectives, contractual scope, estimates, dependencies, risks and outstanding actions.
• Maintain accurate opportunity status before transferring to the delivery phase.
• Incorporate lessons learned from completed engagements into future proposals, estimates and service offerings.

Business Development and Services Portfolio:

• Drive Professional Services opportunities across EMEA, working with sales teams to identify customer needs and position appropriate engagements.
• Adapt existing services offerings to local market requirements, customer expectations and business priorities.
• Propose new offerings based on emerging demand, customer feedback and delivery experience.
• Articulate the value of Professional Services in enabling successful deployment, integration, migration and adoption.
• Identify opportunities for additional services that address genuine customer requirements.
• Prepare and deliver webinars, presentations and enablement sessions for Sales and Sales Engineering teams on PS offerings and engagement approaches.

Pipeline Management and Revenue Forecasting

• Maintain accurate and up-to-date Professional Services opportunities in Salesforce throughout the pre-sales lifecycle.
• Monitor the pipeline proactively, tracking opportunity maturity, anticipated close dates, delivery timing and forecast revenue.
• Build and maintain PS forecasts for the assigned region or opportunities.
• Identify potential resource, capacity and skills gaps early, and communicate them to Delivery and management.
• Work closely with Delivery to support the conversion of opportunities into executable engagements and secure associated PS revenue.
• Provide clear reporting and analysis to support business planning and management decisions.

Qualifications and Experience

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Management or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Masters preferred.

Experience

• At least 10 years of relevant professional experience, ideally within IT security or cybersecurity services.
• Demonstrable experience in Professional Services, technical pre-sales, consulting or customer support operations.
• More than 5 years of project management experience, including collaboration with technical implementation, systems integration or solution delivery teams.
• Experience developing services proposals, Statements of Work and effort estimates.
• Experience managing customer relationships and complex opportunities in an international environment.

Security Clearance Requirement:

Due to the nature of the work that we do at Thales, many of our roles are su