How do I prepare for a job as an Implementation Consultant?

R&D ML software dev --> Implementations Consultant seems like a pretty drastic change in roles. You're going from a very technical role to something that is very fundamentally soft-skills based. You'll be a communication pipeline between your company's sales and product teams, and your clients. You'll need to learn how to deeply investigate a client and figure out their needs, in a short amount of time, and then translate that foreign data into your internal company "language" and goals framework. You'll be dealing with two sets of politics at once, and be expected to move and translate seamlessly between the two. You're fundamentally a diplomat. Your technical background will help you establish authority for what you're talking about, and your problem-solving skills will be invaluable when investigating new clients.

(disclaimer: This is all assuming that "implementations" works the way it has at the several B2B software companies I've worked at as a developer. It sounds the same from the short description given, but you never know with a new employer.)

My recommendation is to hone your "soft skills": make sure you're on top of communication (be quick to respond to clients and don't let emails sit for more than 24 hours), be patient (working with clients means a wide variety of team dynamics and work paces), be humble yet confident (clients like help but they also want to "be right"), and prepare for the politics inevitably dumped onto outside consultants (consultants often are called in to make hard calls that internal teams don't want to make for political reasons).

Go round up every elderly family member you have and teach them and all of their friends. Tell them you have a work project they can help you with. Interview them to see if there's some new capability they would want their phone to have. Then teach them how to use the new app or solve their issue. Try to do this all over the phone (don't give your elderly family the COVID) and guide them through it without being able to look at their phone screen. I give this advice because you are already highly technical and communicating with the engineers should be pretty easy for you.

This might sound a bit silly, but there's a significant overlap with your new role. You'll be needing to work with a lot of people with a vastly different level of technical knowledge. You'll need to do this without a guarantee that you'll get much face to face time with them at all. There will be limits to your client's attention span and willingness to participate. Your patience will be tested. You will be doing your best to communicate with each other, but it will be like ships passing in the night.

It's also a hugely rewarding role, in my opinion, since you will be helping to shape a client's future success with the product in a big way. Congratulations!

Realise that you will be a translator who is paid to understand the technical enough and the business enough that the project can have a conversation.

As far as tools and methodologies - you have to use what your customers use to communicate. It may just be emails as some of the other commenters have said - have a meeting, write up the notes, email the notes.

Once you are past design stage and into user acceptance test and go live you will need an issue tracking tool. Maybe your customer’s IT department has a help desk system that you can integrate with. Be very cautious of using unsecured SAAS products - only document security issues about your implementation on Google sheets if you are 100% confident of who can see it. I am never that confident and want to work somewhere the customer’s IT security is happy with.

I would recommend the book Flawless Consulting by Peter Block. It’s about management consulting at a more senior level than implementation consulting but the points about agreeing with the customer what they need to provide to you for you to do your job are very valuable.

You need to explain to your customer the consequences of choices. Sales are often happy to say “yes we can build that”. But really the standard configuration takes 1 month to implement, 30 custom features take much longer.

Disclaimer I moved from functional into implementation (accountant into implementing finance systems) which is different from technical into implementation.

So this is a pretty wide-ranging role, although that's not unusual for small companies/startups.

Typically the skillsets for a sales engineer/consultant and a post-sales engineer/implementation consult are overlapping but different.

In many organizations the pre-sales engineers are there to answer technical questions during the sales process - "will this integrate with X?" "can I solve Y problem?" "how many concurrent users does this support?"

The post-sales consulting team is there to actually wire up the integration with X, solve Y problem, and tune the performance to support Z concurrent users.

The challenge with a hybrid role is balancing zooming out to being aware of the strategic "making the sale" parts of being a sales engineer to the super low-level nuts and bolts connecting things together of post-sale consulting.

In either case clear communication and listening are the key skills I would work on. The ability to actually hear what a customer wants, and clearly communicate that you understand what they want and can deliver it is a difference maker on either side of a sale.

I've worked in both roles, both are rewarding and frustrating for their own reasons - good luck!

One thing I've learned about startups is that things are always in flux. I would expect your responsibilities to move and shift with time and with different clients.

The position sounds like it will lean heavily on communication and social skills. You will likely want to build a strong relationship with your sales staff and your client.

If in the course of work changes arise make sure you coordinate with your company and do not over promise or move too far from the core solution.

The best thing that will prepare you is to go in with an open mind and do your best. Try not to stick to preconceived ideas of what the job is.

And most of all, be prepared to work hard.

I'm considering a similar opportunity. The implementation role I've been offered will be crucial in securing longer-term contracts for my employer. I'm curious what variable-compensation structures others have seen for this sort of position. Is it reasonable to expect a percentage of successfully secured longterm contracts, or something based on retention? Aside from an equity package, how can someone in this position be incentivized in a way commensurate with their value?

Hey OP,

I'm a technical account manager / CSM and your role honestly sounds a lot like mine. Did a writeup of my role here: https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/customersuccessmanager

Hope you find it useful. Lmk if any questions :)

You are switching from a technical to a non-technical job. your job role and responsibility will be fully changed. communication skills(Kindness, Politeness, Empathy) will play a key role here. But as you are from a technical background this is a plus point with you.

The best person to answer that question is your future manager.

how did you get the job without really knowing how you were going to fulfill the requirements?

so you're essentially going to become a Technical Project Manager. that's interesting - i'm searching for TPM jobs, maybe i should include implementation consultant postings as well.

qualifier: i don't know anything about anything.

that said, here is my _expert_ advice:

* no, you do not need to prepare. if you have a heartbeat and a tiny bit of common sense, you can do this role extremely well. and most other roles. it's glorified customer service, with some extra nerdiness thrown in. not hating - some roles do require special skill sets outside of the obvious - this role is not one of them. i mean, there are non-proactive folks littering every position in the enterprise -- which cracks me up -- but i'm assuming that you are not stupid and/or lazy.

* there are some sales and even sales engineering books/course/etc. out there. most are terrible, or worse, especially the ones that people 'highly recommend', but i do feel like learning to sell/sales is double-plus-good. one core aspect is learning to ask good/probing questions, and then learning to shut up and listen. ask follow-ups. rinse/repeat. asking about 'business goals' to the higher-ups is generally a good-ish thing. and you can't avoid nerding out with the nerd team from the other side - but that's easy/fun, and they will dig that you are technically sound. but the business folks won't necessarily care about bits/bytes -- learning their actual uses cases, business model, etc. will go a long way towards earning their respec/trust.

* like hostage negotiations, 'no' is generally a word you want to avoid. better: "I don't know if we can do that out of the box, but I will check into that and get back to you." basically, don't throw your salesperson under the bus. you might see some stuff about the importance of qualifying leads to make sure you don't sell to the wrong customer, etc. -- ignore it -- it's just puritanical, nonsensical grandstanding.

* don't slack/teams/email/text to folks (like a teammate) during a demo -- because.

* being responsive is really cool, but like any position, be careful of burnout.

* i think having realistic expectations about what you can get Engineering to do in terms of easing onboarding is important. e.g. 15 min of ENGR time can cut your customer onboarding time from 2 weeks to 2 hours? yeah, don't count on it happening. else, you'll pretty quickly mentally check out. lobby and document, make your case, but stay measured. find a way to tie the shorter onboarding time to increased revenue, etc., and now you got something.

* if you can get access to and own the documentation/training process, you will actually save yourself tons of time. at least the API/dev/integration docs. you want to be able to go to the source doc and fix something immediately without overhead process. kind of obvious, but....same thing, temper your expectations. if you have to do some things manually with each install, you're not going to die. even small improvements will keep you motivated/hopeful.

* assuming you do get a new customer up and running -- it would be nice to survey them and get their feedback on what could have been better. yeah, asking for work, and i've never done it, but...i feel like most people are lazy idiots. and/or scared. so it prob won't happen unless you do it, or unless you have a competent customer success department already (do they exist?).

* with your documentation, spell it out. you're _right there_. your 'customer' is 'in market'. just tell them how to use your stuff. in detail. if you want to link out to supporting docs, fine. but why deliver them only 73% of the way to the promised land? take them all the way there.

* i like the idea of filing feature/change requests, especially for usability things. Product Managers have 8 trillion things to worry about, and even if they're geniuses, they are going to lose the ability to see the product with fresh eyes. they will _not_ be able to comprehend how _anyone_ could possibly not understand exactly how to fill out fields x, y, and z on some page - that's ok - you can fill the gap. this doesn't really matter except that it will annoy your PM and make your product a lot better. kind of up to you if you want to go that route. helpful to have these conversations offline before you document, in the (virtual) coffee room, if you can, b/c once you file a Jira - it's like an affront to the PM. not sure why - it just is. in fairness to the PM, they've usually considered a feature request from 20 diff angles, so even if they have an obvious blind spot, their expertise/experience can help you clarify your own thinking.

best of luck! please give yourself a calendar reminder for 1 year from now and tell us how it's going! :-D