A Presales Engineer/Account Architect must have the following skills to do his/her job efficiently:

Listening – An Account Architect must have good listening skills that will help him/her to be helpful and insightful with your customers while clearly understanding their requirements. Nothing worse than someone cutting you while you speak and pushing his agenda against yours.

Knowledgeable – An Account Architect should be the knowledge repository of all sales solutions that his company has to offer. They need to know the product well along with the use cases and related operational and business value. Ideally, they should be technical enough to run workshops with the IT and network/security teams and implement POCs (Proof of Concept) to demonstrate certain requirements.

Presenter– An Account Architect must have excellent presentation skills. They must be good at understanding the audience and pacing themselves accordingly. They should be able to mange stress and exude confidence

Trusted Advisor – An Account Architect must strive to be a Trusted advisor for his/her clients. It takes time to gain someone’s trust. They must understand that just demonstrating proficiency and expertise is not enough to build trusting relationship with the customer but only through a continuous, genuine and empathetic interest for the customer’s success. There will be times when building trust might mean pulling off from a project in the absence of a right solution but will put them on top of the list for when a new project arises and their solution is a good fit.

Communication skills – An Important part of the Solution Architect’s skillset is communication. the lack of communication skills can create a real bottleneck bearing in mind that this role necessitates negotiating with stakeholders, understanding requirements, managing risks, and product delivery. The position requires working closely with enterprise architects, business analysts, and project teams. Therefore, an experienced solution architect should be able to listen, advise, empathize, and explain.

Deep analytical skills – Designing a solution requires understanding how different parts of the business work together. The architect must recognize the corporate strategy and realize all business processes that define how a company achieves its strategic goals. But, the architect must also understand tech specifics. As a result, solution architects constantly deal with analytical work and move between various business layers.

Project and resource management skills – While a solution architect doesn’t directly get involved in project management, accounting for deadlines and given resources is inevitable. Solution architects must be able to make decisions about which solutions are advantageous and which are worthless in the particular situation. They must be focused on business results and understand how to achieve them according to the given timeframes and resources.

Besides that, it is important that solution architects consider the project in a long-term perspective and understand that the solution might need to scale and adapt to possible changes in the future. So, being the one who knows the ultimate target, they guide the development process accordingly.