Strategy & Operations

What’s the Job Look Like? 

We’re looking for someone to drive demand side growth in our marketplace. 

Your mandate is to win markets. That market might be assisted living facilities in the state of Oklahoma, or it could be winning the hospitality market in New York City. You'll need to be able to dig for who to contact, connect with customers to understand what makes them tick, and then deliver solutions that we’ve already built into the problem space that you've defined. You'll deal with rejection frequently and can’t be deterred by 100 no’s - the 101st person you speak with might say yes. You can't be afraid to sell or pick up the phone. We expect you to do it all, but you'll start by picking up the phone, and you'll pick up the phone a lot.

You shouldn't be a person that says “here’s what I think we should do” - instead you'll just do it and report back what happened. We need an owner. 

What Might Onboarding Look Like?

There’s some variance here, but we’ve included a sample onboarding plan for someone who starts within by trying to win markets within our core marketplace. Industry experience isn’t necessary and you should be able to adapt to different customer types quickly. It's not necessary that you've been in a closing sales role or even a sales role before, but you will be expected to close contracts.

For the first 6 weeks you might pick up the phone for most of the day. In our core marketplace / flagship line of business, you'd be expected to produce 50 customer conversations from existing customers (40 of which will come on the demand side or workplaces, 10 from workers) in the first two weeks. In the following three weeks we expect an additional 1000 calls to prospects, yielding at least 100 meaningful conversations. You might take some of these conversations in person to help understand workflows and build more rapport if you want. Once you have a very clear understanding of customers (segments, personas, etc) you'd have the opportunity to put forward ideas that fall outside the scope of cold calling. You'd then be expected to execute on those (i.e. want to put up billboards? Find a vendor, design the billboard or hire a contract designer, get someone to take pictures in the area to make sure it looks how you want and then record the effectiveness).  

You might want to throw events, experiment with marketing, or try other experiments. These are all things we’d love to do, but opportunities to explore are gated by getting a very deep understanding of the customer via a high volume of customer conversations. 

To better define a deep understanding of the customer, we'd expect someone to be able to say “here’s what a day in the life of a <Job Title> in a <Workplace Type> looks like. Here’s how it differs from the <close but different job title>. If the customer segment is <small>, then the role usually doesn’t exist. The responsibilities of that role instead fall into <other role> which also does <other duties>.” 

Once we’re confident in your read on the customer, we’ll open the doors for experimentation.

What’s Success Look Like?

We’re expecting you person to win every market they enter by getting to know customers and breaking down barriers. You have to be comfortable where there isn’t a manual - You won’t just sell, you need judgment to know 1) what to sell, 2) how we should package / position what we sell, 3) what we can / can’t offer, and 4) how to negotiate / price / etc when we don’t have a pulse on where the market is for our product today. 

Judgment, hustle, business acumen, and curiosity are all required in spades. 

What’s Growth in This Role Look Like?

We have lots of opportunities within the company. Once you knock it out of the park in this role there's several options for what’s next:

• Build the manual for people who come after you

• Beyond that, hire and oversee the team who executes on your manual

• Do discovery in new parts of the business to distribute new products / gather new demand side customers

• Move into another part of the organization entirely

These aren’t guaranteed to be options, but for people who do an excellent job we have several opportunities. 

What Experience is Necessary for the Role?

We’re not a company that relies heavily on experience. We hire “general athletes” who embody the traits we think are necessary to succeed in the role. 

The only requirement for this role is that you are US-based and do not require sponsorship. This role could require some travel (on occasion, not regularly, and you can largely dictate how much travel is involved based on what you know about customers). 

The Process

You'll report to someone within our product organization. I’d read the following docs from our Product team prior to applying: the Product Team Standards, Product Team Recruiting, and Product Team Structure. The standards and thinking apply to the role while some of the specifics around recruiting and team structure do not. 

For this role, there will be 4 steps:

• Your application here

• An assessment analyzing some sales data and calls from a fictitious company, which you’ll use to craft a plan

• A conversation on that assessment

• A secondary assessment to vet your own sales ability, putting your skills to the test on a fictitious product in the real world

• 1-2 conversations about your skills test and background.

You’ll speak with our Head of Strategy and Operations at some point during the interview process. 

The process will move as quickly as you’d like - we’re expecting some people to go from application to accepting an offer in less than a week.

We’re excited to get you started!