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.
Impact so far:
10M+ million alumni connected
1M+ students impacted
$50M+ donations facilitated
100M+ engagement opportunities created
#1 Alumni management software in the US (G2Crowd)
The Opportunity
Almabase is looking to hire a Sr. Account Executive to close new sales. In this role, your goal is to help universities & high schools understand how to grow 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 2 years of B2B software sales experience and understands solution-selling to mid-market/enterprise customers ($20k-$50k ACV).
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.
Benefits
Insurance: Medical, dental, and vision coverage, with the option to insure dependents/family members at a reasonable cost (Reimbursed through QSEHRA program)
Work from anywhere in the US
Unlimited vacation. Yes, you heard it right!
Stock options after 12 months, based on performance
Salary
$150k OTE ($75k base + $75k on-target commissions)
Commissions Uncapped (one of our AEs hit 200% OTC last year)
Annual Quota: $1.5M total contract value (TCV) (Translates to roughly $500k - 550k ARR)
Most of our customer contracts are three year contracts and include a one-time implementation/setup fee. The total contract value is calculated as the total revenue for the company from that contract over the three years including non-recurring fees.
Commission rate: 5% of total contract value (TCV). Accelerates to 7.5% TCV in each quarter you achieve over quota ($375k TCV)
Why should you join Almabase in this role?
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.
Key Responsibilities
KPIs - $ revenue closed won, opportunity to closed-won conversion rate, contributions to pipeline through conferences.
Handle qualification calls for new marketing qualified leads - Identify if the prospect’s BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, & Timing) are 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.
You are not required to develop your own pipeline, our DemandGen team will create most of the pipeline for you to close. However, we expect AEs to bring in at least 10% of their pipeline themselves through conferences that they attend.
You are required to work closely with partner organizations in co-selling opportunities. This is a key part of your job.
Requirements
Skills & Experience
2-3 years of B2B software sales (deal closing) experience to mid-market/enterprise customers in the nonprofit/education space
Experience closing $20k-$50k ARR deals is ideal
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.
Personality Traits
Fun & confident personality. Loves to meet new people and build relationships.
Pays great attention to detail, loves taking notes, and maintains discipline with CRM.
Highly motivated to work at a scaling startup.
Proactive with actions, but patient with results
What will a typical quarter and year look like for you in this role ?
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 prioritise the right leads to maximise your pipeline and close more revenue.
You will participate in weekly deal reviews along with the 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 strategy for the upcoming quarter.
You will typically attend 1 - 2 conferences per quarter (spread across the US).
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 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, prioritisation & context switching become critical skills. Otherwise, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
How did we do in 2024:
We hit our ambitious sales goals
We closed more enterprise deals than previous years combined
AEs hit president’s club - Hawaii here we come!
Closed one of our biggest deal in company’s history on the last day of the year.
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, the competitive landscape, provide you access to hundreds of recorded conversations, and existing marketing materials. Our CRM is a treasure trove :)
We will find an opportunity to 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 handling 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 will have a weekly syncup with the rest of the GTM team (SDRs, Marketing, etc) to stay aligned 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.
If all of this sounds exciting to you, join us for an exciting and fulfilling ride at Almabase.
