
Founding Account Executive
CareerVillage.org
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Alabama • Arizona • United States
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Salary
💰 $95,000 - $105,000 per year
About the role
- Own top deals: Lead discovery, demo, negotiation, and contracting for high-value partnerships that anchor our GTM strategy.
- Build and manage the pipeline: Oversee outreach, qualification, and forecasting. Maintain strong Salesforce discipline and ensure consistent visibility into performance metrics, with a focus on growing the number of active partner deployments and learners using Coach through those partners.
- Spearhead the sales motion: Set weekly cadences, coach on discovery and objection handling, and model commercial excellence through hands-on selling.
- Integrate AI and automation: Leverage AI to improve productivity, accelerate research, and test new approaches to prospecting and engagement.
- Run rapid market experiments: testing segments, messaging, target profiles, and partnership models, then codify what works into clear, repeatable playbooks that reveal where the strongest traction exists.
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with Product, Engineering, and Impact teams to feed insights from the field back into the roadmap, messaging, and evidence-building.
- Measure and optimize performance: Track conversion, cycle time, CAC, ROI, and scale metrics such as partners launched and active learners per deployment. Use data to guide resourcing and prioritize opportunities.
- Drive GTM strategy: Help define market segmentation, ICPs, pricing logic, and value propositions across key buyer segments (job training, higher ed, corporate L&D). You’ll help decide where we bet next (by segment) and design experiments to prove or disprove those bets.
- Guide/Develop assets: Partner with Impact and Marketing to create early case studies, ROI models, and success narratives that drive credibility and scale.
Requirements
- Have previous startup experience (ideally early stage but at a company you brought above $1M ARR)
- 6-8 years of hands-on execution style experience in business development, partnerships, or sales, ideally in the tech sector or the workforce innovation.
- Experience as an entrepreneurial sales leader with past experience as a zero-to-one or founding account executive, skilled at experimenting across markets to find traction and shape our go-to-market path.
- Proven ability to experiment across markets with a builder’s mindset, shaping and refining GTM systems in ambiguous, high-opportunity environments where no finished playbook exists.
- Commercial rigor: you can talk pipeline math, pricing, payback periods, and win rates with confidence.
- Accountability for hard numbers: you’ve previously been on the hook for concrete targets (e.g., deals closed, accounts launched, or users activated).
- Technical fluency - you can demo AI products, discuss integrations or APIs with technical stakeholders, and translate technical features into business value.
- Data-informed storytelling - you pair narrative with measurable outcomes and know how to build referenceable pilots that scale.
- Mission alignment - you care about equity, career mobility, & using tech for social impact.
Benefits
- Healthcare and dental benefits
- 401K matching
- $1,500 annual professional development budget
- Generous vacation and wellness policies
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard skills
business developmentpartnershipssalesGTM strategypipeline managementAI integrationdata analysismarket experimentationaccount managementtechnical fluency
Soft skills
leadershipcollaborationcoachingaccountabilitystorytellingentrepreneurial mindsetcommercial rigoradaptabilitycommunicationmission alignment