His badge was turned around, so I couldn't tell where he was from.

He asked what we did. I asked what he did instead. Twenty minutes later I knew his bank's authentication platform was falling over, and three weeks after that we signed the contract — no demo, no proof of concept.

I've spent thirty years in pre-sales. This is the book I wish someone had handed me in February 1990.

Read Chapter 1

Architecting Influence Mastering the Art of Technical Pre-Sales

Mark Perry · Seventeen chapters · Out February 2027

Your technical knowledge is the price of admission. It gets you in the room. But it's not what keeps you there.

Who I wrote it for

If you're a solutions engineer, a pre-sales architect, a solutions consultant, a technical account manager or a developer advocate, this is for you. So is it if you manage a team of them, or if you're sitting in engineering, DevRel or professional services wondering what the move across would actually be like.

You're good at what you do. You know your technology inside out. But you've noticed that the people in your company with the most influence and the most interesting work are the ones sitting between the technology and the customer — and from the outside that looks like a gift you were either born with or you weren't.

It isn't. It's a set of skills. They can be learned, practised and mastered like any language or methodology you've picked up already, and this book is my attempt to write them down in the order that makes them learnable.

The Influence Architecture

The framework has four stages,
and you can't skip one.

The Influence Architecture is the model I've been building for thirty years — a way to think about the skills that turn a technical expert into the person customers ring before they've finished writing their requirements.

Each stage sits on the one below it, like the floors of a building. Skip one and the structure is unstable. Build all four and you get something that lasts longer than any job you hold.

It works at two scales. Across the arc of a career, and inside a single meeting: a ten-minute conversation at a trade show runs through all four stages the same way a year-long enterprise campaign does.

Anchor
Enduring Partnership
Delivering on promises. Integrity under pressure. Building relationships that compound over years and follow you across your career.
Elevate
Influence & Connection
Simplification, storytelling, and adaptive delivery. Translating knowledge into communication that moves people.
Orient
The Outside-In Pivot
Listening, discovery, and empathy as practice. The moment you stop thinking about what you know and start thinking about what the customer needs.
Ground
Foundation
Product mastery, industry currency, business fluency, and self-knowledge. What you bring to the room before you open your mouth.

Every chapter starts with something
that actually happened to me.

Sometimes a win. More often a failure I'd rather not have on paper. Then it gets practical: how to explain what your product does in thirty seconds without jargon, the Carrot and Stick framework for talking about business outcomes, the seven questions I ask in discovery, how to map stakeholders by influence and favourability, the five principles of demo delivery, and what to do when the demo breaks in front of forty people.

Part I — Foundations

Part II — Ground

  • Ch. 3 — Know Your Product
  • Ch. 4 — Know Your Industry
  • Ch. 5 — Know Yourself

Part III — Orient

  • Ch. 6 — The Art of Listening
  • Ch. 7 — Discovery
  • Ch. 8 — Reading the Room

Part IV — Elevate

  • Ch. 9 — Simplification & Storytelling
  • Ch. 10 — Presentations & Performance
  • Ch. 11 — Demonstrations
  • Ch. 12 — Written Communication

Part V — Anchor

  • Ch. 13 — Delivering on Promises
  • Ch. 14 — Working with Your Team
  • Ch. 15 — Customers, Partners & Competitors
  • Ch. 16 — Public Speaking & Events

Part VI — The Long Game

  • Ch. 17 — Building Your Career
  • Quick Reference Card

Three questions I ask
every SE I mentor.

If any of those made you pause, you're the reason I wrote this. Every chapter ends with a handful more like them.

A worksheet from the book

Print it, fill it in, and keep it next to the deal.

  • Stakeholder map Who has influence in the deal, and how they feel about you. From Chapter 8. A4 PDF US Letter PDF

About me

Mark Perry
Author

I've spent just over three decades in IT, most of it in digital identity and cybersecurity. IBM, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Ping Identity, Biza.io — as an application support engineer, a pre-sales engineer, a consulting architect and a regional chief technology officer. I still build demos and write POC code, and I still work hands-on with OIDC, OAuth and SAML.

I speak at industry events around the world, and I'm a founding member of IDPro, the professional body for identity management. Almost everything in this book I learned the slow way: mentorship, watching people who were better at it than me, practice, and a decent number of spectacular failures.

I live in Melbourne. When I'm not helping customers solve problems I'm usually behind a vintage synthesiser, or working on my next novel.

Chapter 1 is here, in full.

It's about the trusted advisor: the trade show, the bank, and the sales rep at IBM who told me to stop talking about Unix. Read it and decide for yourself whether the rest is worth your time.

The book ships in February 2027. If you'd like to know when it does, leave your email.

If you want this for your team

I run half-day and full-day workshops built around the four stages, in person or remote, and I give keynotes at conferences and sales kickoffs. Bulk copies for a team are straightforward to arrange once the book is out.

Email me at [email protected] and tell me what you're trying to fix.

You don't have to become an extrovert to excel in pre-sales. You have to become yourself — and learn to bring that into the room.