The following practice and process are lead by the Solutions Architects during pre-sales:
Business value consulting is a practice and approach that a Solutions Architect (SA), in collaboration with the sales team, can engage with the customers to
Focus on customer challenges and required GitLab DevSecOps capabilities to address the challenges Quantify values of GitLab DevSecOps solution with performance improvements and measurable business outcomes The practice should usually start at the discovery and scoping stages. The output of the business value discussion can be Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Solutions Architect Office hours to educate and build relationships with Account Executives, Customer Success Managers and Solutions Architecture team
Every company is developing software. Whether it is external facing applications, or internal applications, or both. Every company wants to be more efficient at developing software, as it has a direct correlation with the company’s success. GitLab is positioned to help every company create better applications by providing capabilities throughout the application delivery process including development, operations and security. In the past, there was not one solution to help companies develop software from idea to deployment.
They say that practice makes perfect. While it’s true that practice is important to hone one’s skills, it’s how you actually do that practice that matters. Deliberate Practice is a particular way of practicing that is persistant and intense. When one practices deliberately, they are stretching beyond their normal comfort level and they are focusing on a particular piece of their routine or demonstration to work on with a specific goal of improving performance.
Effective Objection handling skill is critical to becoming a trusted advisor in our respective sales/customer success roles. Objection handling means responding to the customer in a way that changes their mind or alleviate their concerns. Objections typically fall into these categories.
Objection Handling Process The Objection Handling Process can be broken down into the following steps:
Listen Active listening is a key part of effective objection handling. Use methods like nodding and physically showing interest.
The purpose of this page is to hopefully help an SA onboards when they onboard a new Dedicated Customer, what are the considerations and preparation material during the onboarding/discovery phase. Based on past interactions with existing GitLab Dedicated customers and due to the usually longer nature of onboarding customers, a collaboration project is recommended to keep all stakeholders aware and engaged.
A collaboration template specifically for dedicated customers is available as a template here (https://gitlab.
Enable SAs and the larger CS team on new and existing features with a monthly quiz event
This is a practice guide for a Solutions Architect (SA) to position Professional Services to a customer during the sales cycle and gather the appropriate information to provide to the Professional Services Engagement Management Team for custom scoping, if necessary. The overall workflow for selling Professional Services is defined in the Professional Services Handbook - Selling Professional Services page.
See the Positioning Professional Services Class on LevelUp for an overview. Types of Services GitLab provides a wide array of Professional Services offerings to accelerate the customer’s time to value in GitLab platform adoption and maturing DevOps practices.
This is a collection of best practices collected from working with customers on each stage of the Software Development Lifecycle
The worldwide Solution Architecture team, as a learning organization believes that we can be more successful by receiving feedback. Feedback is a two-way street. It is important that SA management takes the time to provide feedback on a regular basis to their individual team members, but simoultanously GitLab team members should share their feedback with management and peers. During this two-way feedback exchange, it provides SAs insights into their activities working with customers and internal processes as well as the SA management insights into their leadership skills.
The Subject Matter Experts Program is an initiative designed to help solutions architects (SAs) provide better support to customers. The program will identify and onboard subject matter experts in key areas, such as AI, security, and agile planning.
SMEs are Solutions Architects who will help SAs in their region to answer more-in-depths questions, provide deep technical expertise, and assist with customer demos and presentations when needed.
Goals The goals of the SME Program are:
Ride alongs allow for Solutions Architects to learn from one another through shared customer experiences.
This is a practice guide for a Solutions Architect (SA) to engage enterprises for driving a strategic solution during discovery and scoping stage, which can lead into the technical evaluation.
A strategic solution is aimed to provide a customer the DevOps capabilities for delivering software better and faster with an organizational wide impact and aligned with the enterprise transformational intiatitives. The SA will assess and provide the solutioning as the right fit for the enterprise from the business and technical perspectives.
A Technical Close Plan is an internal strategy that Solutions Architects can use to secure a technical win for a given opportunity. It is built off the information in the Command Plan and expands on it by including the customer’s desired business outcomes, notional architectures of the current and proposed states, key stakeholders, and known risks. This strategy can also be a subset of the Opportunity Plan created by AEs or live on its own.
When working with GitLab, many prospects and customers have software delivery performance improvements as critical business outcomes. Unfortunately, due to the inherent and increasing complexity in the software delivery process, an organization’s software delivery value streams often consist of dozens, if not hundreds, of manual configuration touch points and handoffs. Typically, there is a lack of visibility and understanding into the current process, making it challenging to identify and measure software delivery improvements.
Learn about Cognitive Bias and how to facilitate Cognitive Bias exercise.
