Account Executive (United States)

The Company:

Our mission is to make education affordable by helping institutions increase alumni giving. The idea started from our founders’ struggle with the lack of scholarships when they were students. Watch this TEDx talk from Kalyan to learn more.

We are a bootstrapped company that has grown to be a leader in the alumni software space in the US. We’re slated for even faster growth on the path to becoming market leaders through a unique strategic partnership with Blackbaud (read more here & here)

Our customers are universities and high schools and in most cases, we’re working with staff in the alumni relations and fundraising office at these institutions. The value prop for them at a high level is simple - “Engage more alumni and raise more money from them”. 90%+ of our customers are from the US currently but we’re starting sales in UK and Canada this year so we’ll start to see some more customer regions this year. Our team is based in India and the USA. The India team is based in Bangalore and the US team is fully remote.

The Opportunity:

Almabase is looking to hire an Account Executive to close new sales. In this role, your goal is to help universities & high schools understand how to improve their Donor Pool using Almabase. You will be handed marketing-qualified leads that are generated through various inbound & outbound, Cross Sell, and partner channels. You will be responsible for handling that relationship until they sign a contract. Once they sign a contract, customer success will take over and help them succeed.

While most of the sales happen remotely over Zoom, you will also have opportunities to represent the company at various conferences around the US along with meeting potential customers and selling in person.

Our ideal candidate has at least 1-5 years of B2B software sales experience and understands solution-selling to mid-market/enterprise customers.

While a majority of our team is based in India, most of our AEs are based in the US. We are looking for someone located in the US for this role too. This is a remote job and you can work from anywhere in the US.

Salary

• $150k OTE ($75k base + $75k commissions on-target). Commissions uncapped.

• Annual Quota: $1.5mn total contract value (TCV) (Translates to roughly $500k - $600k ARR)

• Commission rate: 5% of total contract value

• Accelerated commissions (7.5% of TCV) each quarter once you go past quota.

WHY SHOULD YOU JOIN ALMABASE?

• Educational institutions are not the easiest to sell to. But that’s what makes this experience challenging and unique. Over the years we have developed some of the best practices in our sales motions.

• In this role, you will get to build on your skills and establish yourself as a successful salesperson. Given the relatively small team, you can have an outsized impact. Knowing that the work you do every day improves access to education for millions of students is highly motivating - it’s what keeps us going too.

Responsibilities:

• KPIs - Number of new deals closed, $ revenue added, an opportunity to closed-won conversion rate.

• Handle qualification calls for new marketing qualified leads - Identify if the prospect’s BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and timing) is in line with our expectations. It’s critical to empathize with the prospect and make sure their goals are aligned with our service.

• Handle product demos for sales-qualified leads - Show them how Almabase can solve their challenges and achieve their goals. You’ll also present pricing, according to their requirements.

• Handle all further conversations from product questions to contract negotiations after an opportunity is created to eventually close the deal and hand it over to the customer success team.

• Nurture all the marketing-qualified leads in your pipeline with high-quality follow-ups.

• You will be supported by the rest of the team whenever you need assistance. Eg: if there are deep technical questions, a Solutions Consultant will join the call with you. The SC will handle the questions about the product roadmap on the call. If you need help with negotiating a contract, the Sales Director will join the call with you.

• Identify insights and pain points from conversations with prospects, and contribute to the product roadmap by providing active feedback to the product team.

Requirements:

SKILLS & EXPERIENCE:

• 1-5 years of B2B software sales (deal closing) experience to mid-market/enterprise customers in the educational space.

• Excellent written and verbal business communication skills.

• Ability to learn quickly. Eg: learn the product, learn the market, learn solution selling methodology, etc.

• Experience with Hubspot or other CRMs is good to have.

WHAT WILL A TYPICAL QUARTER & YEAR LOOK LIKE?

• By the beginning of the year we’ll come up with the targets for each quarter, in terms of the number of new deals to be closed, and $ revenue to be added.

• Based on the targets, you will prioritize the right leads to maximize your pipeline and close more revenue.

• You will participate in weekly deal reviews along with the CEO and director of Sales to discuss and get tactical advice to drive closure.

• In the last two weeks of each quarter, we’ll start working on goals and strategies for the upcoming quarter.

WHAT WILL MAKE YOU SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE?

• First and foremost, you need to be good at building rapport with prospects. Relationship building is very critical to be successful as a salesperson in this market. Your prospects need to first trust you before buying anything from you.

• You need to get really good at solution selling. Our product is not a commodity with simple features. You need to be able to connect to the prospect’s needs, wear a consultant’s hat, and provide the right solution to them. That’s half the sale. You need to develop a good enough understanding of the product and the market to be effective at this.

• You need patience but you need to be proactive in nurturing the prospect to succeed in this role, it pays well to be patient in this role

• You need to be resilient, be ready to face rejections, and still keep going. Without an intrinsic motivation to perform well and constantly improve, this is a hard job. It will take time to succeed.

• You need to be disciplined and good at multi-tasking. When you have many deals in your pipeline at any time, prioritization & context-switching become critical skills. Otherwise, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

• How did the team perform in 2023:

• The sales team did 150% of their 2023 target

• All the 3 AEs achieved their quota

• 2 of them did over 130% of their quota

HOW WILL WE SET YOU UP FOR SUCCESS IN THIS ROLE?

• We will provide you with detailed training to give you a head start in the world of alumni relations and educational fundraising. We’ll also talk about our positioning, and the competitive landscape, and provide you access to hundreds of recorded conversations, and existing marketing materials. Our CRM is a treasure trove :)

• We will bring you to India to bond with the larger team and build relationships to help you be successful in this role.

• We will provide you with in-depth training into our product along with sandbox access to let you play around. The focus is for you to figure out how each piece helps toward solving the puzzle for customers.

• We’ll walk you through our current sales playbook and sales enablement materials. We’ll also do a deep dive on competitors and handle other objections, along with role plays to get you prepared.

• During the first 4 weeks, you will be invited to shadow plenty of sales calls just to listen in and understand how we go about sales currently. We believe everybody will learn different things from this process but it has worked very effectively in the past.

• We conduct 1 weekly standup of 30 minutes with the growth team to focus on being different each week. This allows you to stay aligned with SDRs and marketing and understand overall growth goals.

• You will have a quarterly 1:1 review with the Sales Director to discuss your career goals and overall success, apart from regular mentoring.

• We will provide you access to the best SaaS sales resources and add you to a few SaaS sales communities so you can discuss with other people in similar roles - learn and teach at the same time. We’ve found that this is the fastest way to improve your skills.

• Most importantly, we will help you set up a one-on-one casual chat with members of different functions of the Almabase team, so you get to know everyone well.

Benefits:

• Insurance: Medical, dental, and vision coverage, with the option to insure dependents/family members at a reasonable cost.

• Work from anywhere in the US

• Unlimited vacation. Yes, you heard it right!

• Stock options after 12 months, based on performance

If all of this sounds exciting to you, join us for an exciting and fulfilling ride at Almabase.