Leadership Spotlight on Enya O’Doherty: Connecting Client Ambition with Delivery Capability

Introduction

Presales is where a client engagement takes shape and ensures that what Alchemy puts forward is clear, credible, and honest about what can be delivered. Enya O’Doherty, Head of Presales, leads that capability at Alchemy, working across sales, delivery, marketing and partnerships.

This work sits within a larger picture. As a Global Centre of Excellence within NTT DATA's insurance practice, Alchemy brings global scale and expanded capabilities to clients while maintaining the specialist service. For presales, that means a wider pool of expertise to shape into a response and the reach to support clients closer to their own markets.

A Function Built Around Value

Enya turns complex client challenges into clear and credible opportunities for Alchemy. She shapes the service around the client’s problem, qualifies opportunity, challenges assumptions and makes the value clear before anything reaches delivery. The detailed technical design sits with the specialists - but Enya holds the thread between what the client wants to achieve, and the capability needed to deliver it.

“Alchemy’s presales team is built to generate value. I work closely with the sales team from the outset to qualify the opportunity and shape the service response. From there, I bring the right internal teams together and turn that thinking into a clear, credible proposition for the client. I’m the person who listens, connects the dots and makes sure the response is something we can stand behind.”

A Product of Alchemy’s Talent Model

Enya came through Alchemy’s Talent Engine and cross-trained from marketing, where she developed a strong sense of positioning, messaging and audience need. Moving into pre-sales enabled Enya to get closer to clients, hear their challenges directly - shaping responses around both what they ask for and what they need to achieve.

She is proof of how Alchemy develops talent: giving people room to evolve, play to their strengths and build capabilities the business did not previously have. Enya has not simply grown into a new role - she has shaped and established a pre-sales capability that now strengthens how Alchemy engages clients, supports growth and positions our expertise.

Over the past year, Enya relocated from Derry/Londonderry to London to further her career, a move the business actively supported. This move gave her the platform to broaden her client exposure and grow into a more commercially visible role.

Connecting Sales, Delivery and Client Need

A key part of Enya’s role is bringing different teams together around a shared view of the opportunity. She works closely with Sales, Delivery, Alliance, Marketing, and Senior stakeholders to keep Alchemy’s responses well-structured, commercially strong, and realistic to deliver.

In complex Insurance technology opportunities, generic answers rarely hold up. Clients need a partner who can understand their context, ask the right questions and challenge assumptions in a constructive way.

As Head of Presales, Enya brings structure to that early thinking. She helps shape discovery, define the right service response and turn complex client challenges into clear, purposeful proposals. Her role is not just to make Alchemy’s offer compelling, but to make sure it is grounded and deliverable.

That principle runs through her work. What Alchemy takes to market must stand up in delivery, not just in the room. By holding that line, Enya has become a trusted contributor across client conversations, internal planning and proposal development.

Her work is anchored in Guidewire, alongside Alchemy’s wider network of Global Specialty Market technology partners, helping clients see what can be delivered with confidence.

Building the Foundations of a Stronger Function

Alongside live opportunities, Enya has laid the foundations for a stronger function: reusable sales collateral, a sales library, improved go-to-market materials, and a more consistent approach to proposals and client messaging. The team has grown from a single person to five, reflecting the increasing demand for dedicated pre-sales support across the business.

Working with international NTT DATA teams has strengthened how Alchemy positions its expertise across markets. Enya has helped translate Alchemy’s specialist Guidewire and insurance technology capability into clear, consistent messages that land with client and partner audiences.

Supporting Others and Giving Back to the North West of Ireland

Insurance technology remains a sector where female representation can be limited, particularly in commercial and technical roles. Enya is a visible advocate for women supporting women, using her experience to help others build confidence and see a clearer route for their own progression.

That support comes through formal mentoring, her involvement in Alchemy’s graduate programme and the informal guidance she gives to colleagues who value her perspective on the industry and her own career path.

Enya is equally passionate about the North-West, having started her career there before moving to London, she is first-hand proof of what a career in technology can open up. She wants others from the region to see that they can build ambitious, meaningful careers without feeling they have to leave home to access opportunity.

For Enya, companies that create career paths in places like Derry/Londonderry are giving local talent a route into the industry and showing that opportunity in technology should not be limited to larger cities. “Growing up in Derry I know how important it is to see real career paths close to home. Technology has given me access to clients, markets and opportunities I would not have imagined at the start of my career. I want more people from the North West to see that this industry is open to them as a real career path they can build from.”

Looking Forward

Enya sees presales becoming even more important as Alchemy grows globally. The aim is not just to win more work, but to win the right work - the kind of opportunities where Alchemy understands the client’s problem and knows what they can deliver.

For Enya, success is closely tied to client success. Presales has the most value when it comes into conversation early, helping clients work through what they need, where they need support, and where new technology can make a real difference.

That includes being practical about new tools such as AI - for Enya, AI matters when it solves a real problem: removing repetitive work, giving teams more capacity or helping people spend more time on what they do best.

“Nobody wants to spend their career doing repetitive work. The opportunity is to use technology to remove the tasks that slow people down, so they can focus on the work that needs judgement, experience and human understanding. That is where good presales matters - understanding the client’s world well enough to know where technology will help and where people still make the difference.”

For Enya, that is where presales should sit: listening properly, understanding the client’s estate, and shaping a response that connects what the client wants to achieve with what can actually be delivered.