Full-Cycle Account Executive, Mid Market at Nooks Communications, Inc.

What is Nooks?

Nooks is a platform transforming sales reps from manual laborers to scientists. With today’s technology, sales reps shouldn’t need to manually write hundreds of emails, research hundreds of websites/linkedins, and make hundreds of calls. They should instead focus on the parts of their job that actually require people - talking to customers, being creative, and problem-solving. With a combination of AI tools, automation and real-time collaboration, Nooks can do the rest.

About Nooks

• The team: Nooks is ~45 people. Engineering & product are mostly in SF and go to our office 2-3x/week. The go-to-market team is distributed across the U.S.
  • The founders (Dan, Rohan, and Nikhil) met studying AI at Stanford, have published in top AI journals, Forbes 30u30, worked at Scale AI, Tesla Autopilot, etc.
  • The engineering team has won international math & physics olympiads, has experience at Google, Facebook, Slack, Quora, Scale AI, Bolt, Snap, Flexport, and other fast-growing startups.
  • The sales team have been top-performers at companies like Gong, Amplitude, LeadIQ, and Orum
• Fast growth: We’ve grown $0 → ~$4M ARR in 20 months. We grew 4x in 2023 and expect to 3x by EOY 2024.
  

The problem

Sales pipeline is critical for growing companies. Many, especially B2B companies, have teams of sales/business development representatives (SDR/BDRs) or full-cycle account executives whose responsibility is to identify, contact, and qualify new potential customers. There are ~750,000 SDR/BDR’s in the US alone (e.g. Airtable, Brex, Databricks and many other tech companies have sizable SDR/BDR teams)

In their day-to-day, SDR/BDRs spend time on 3 main activities:

1. Prospecting & research - identify a list of potential customers using signals like industry, size, fundraising, headcount growth, new hires, job descriptions, etc.
2. Email & LinkedIn messaging - write messages to those contacts to convey the problem and pitch your product. The goal is for them to book a demo
3. Calling - Live phone conversations often have higher conversion than emails because they’re more personal, but there’s a lot more manual work involved

Most of the sales rep’s job can be automated with today’s technology: large language models, web scraping, automation, integrations, etc.

Nooks today

Our customers use Nooks for most of their day (avg ~3hrs/business day). Nooks currently owns end-to-end workflows around sales calls:

• AI dialer - automates the manual parts of the calling process: skipping answering machines, leaving voicemails, taking notes, logging calls, even figuring out what to say on a call
• Analytics - we record, transcribe, and analyze every call. Since these are all outbound calls with little context, these calls follow similar structure - opener, pitch, questions/objections, ask for meeting, etc. So we can answer questions like: “which reps struggle to book the meeting with prospects who showed interest” or “what are the most common objections across each of our key personas”
• Salesfloor - sales reps & managers can work together throughout the day, listen to each others’ calls, give real-time advice, coaching, shadowing, onboarding, training.

Teams that use Nooks often see a 2-3x increase in reps’ productivity within weeks! And we’re working on adding prospecting / research workflows (to-be-announced soon!)

The role

We’re looking for an early Account Executive, Mid Market to execute and refine our sales playbook from lead generation to closing. You shouldn’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and prospect yourself. You’ll be involved in closing deals and improving our sales strategy.

Responsibilities

• You’ll run discovery calls, align key stakeholders and close deals
• Source pipeline to help you hit revenue goals
• Land and expand: build process and funnel for manual top-down reach out, onboarding, activation, and expansion
• Evangelize the product and personally help close the largest deals
• Work collaboratively across teams - including Engineering, Product and Marketing
• Establish the inbound lead requirements needed to meet your sales objectives
• Provide full visibility into the sales pipeline at every stage of development

Requirements

• 4+ years of relevant sales experience and a track record of exceeding quota (SDR / AE management experience a strong plus)
• Experience selling to Mid-market and Enterprise
• Experience working as a Senior Sales Manager or Account Executive at a fast-paced SaaS company
• Possess extensive knowledge of sales principles and practices, and an ability to coach others on them
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills; ability to use hard data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations, and drive actions.
• Strong problem solving, issue-resolution, and multi-tasking skills, the ability to work in a deadline-driven work environment, and a keen attention to detail.
• Strong leadership and team building skills

Bonus if you have

• Been an early AE at another startup
• Sold to sales leaders in the past