Account Executive

Overview

You sell Knak's no-code email and landing page builder to enterprise marketing teams. Your buyers are marketing ops managers, demand gen directors, and occasionally CMOs who are tired of waiting on their developers or dealing with broken templates in Marketo/Eloqua. You spend most of your time doing product demos, navigating multi-stakeholder approval processes, and competing against internal "build it ourselves" projects.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth stage (167 employees suggests Series B/C range)

Size: 167 employees

Growth: Actively hiring across sales team, recent AI feature launches

Market Position: Challenger in the MarTech space - competing against DIY solutions, legacy email builders, and bigger platforms trying to do everything

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40% Inbound - marketing teams searching for "Marketo email builder" or "Eloqua template tool" find them via content. Quality varies - some are tire-kickers, some have urgent pain.
• 40% Outbound - you target enterprise companies using Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, or Adobe marketing tools. Cold email and LinkedIn to marketing ops teams.
• 20% Referrals/Expansion - existing customers refer peers, or you expand within current accounts to new divisions.

SDR/AE Structure: Likely shared SDR pool for outbound, AEs work inbound leads themselves

SE Support: Likely shared solutions consultant for complex technical integrations, but you run most standard demos solo

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors:

• In-house dev teams ("we can build this ourselves")
• Legacy email builders and native platform tools
• Agencies who handle campaign creation
• Other MarTech platforms trying to add no-code features

How They Differentiate: Purpose-built for enterprise with brand governance controls, integrates with existing MarTech stack rather than replacing it, AI-powered campaign creation (new)

Common Objections:

• "Our developers can handle this"
• "Our current platform already does email"
• "We're locked into our agency relationship"
• Budget allocated elsewhere in MarTech stack

Win Themes: Speed to market (weeks to days for campaign launches), brand compliance without killing creativity, integration with existing platforms (not rip-and-replace)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Active Deals (40%) | Demos & Discovery (35%) | Prospecting (15%) | Internal (10%)

Key Activities

• Product Demos: You run 6-10 demos per week showing how Knak works with their existing Marketo/Eloqua/Pardot setup. You're screen-sharing through template creation, dynamic content, and approval workflows. Half your demos are to marketing ops people who get it immediately, half are to stakeholders who don't understand why their current tool isn't enough.

• Multi-threading deals: Most deals involve 3-5 people - marketing ops (your champion), their boss (holds budget), IT/security (needs to approve integrations), and sometimes procurement. You spend a lot of time scheduling calls where everyone can actually attend.

• Building business cases: You help marketing ops build ROI decks showing time saved per campaign, cost of developer hours avoided, and revenue impact of faster time-to-market. You're Googling average developer salaries and campaign metrics to make the numbers work.

• Integration workshops: For larger deals, you coordinate technical calls with their Marketo/Eloqua admins to walk through API setup, SSO requirements, and data sync. These can be tedious but they're necessary to move deals forward.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Deals stall in procurement or "we'll revisit next quarter" because marketing tools aren't urgent unless there's a major campaign launch forcing the issue. You'll have 60% of your pipeline slip quarters.
• You're often selling against internal dev teams who promise they can build the same thing (they won't, but it takes 3 months for your champion to prove that).
• Marketing budgets get reallocated constantly. A deal that looks solid in July disappears in August because they spent the budget on an event or ad campaign.
• The sales cycle extends when security/IT reviews take 4-6 weeks for what should be a straightforward integration approval.
• You need to know enough about Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Adobe, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to have credible conversations, which means a steep learning curve if you don't come from MarTech.

What Success Looks Like

• Close 8-12 new logos per year at $30-80K ACV
• Keep 4-6 active qualified opportunities in your pipeline at any time
• Demo-to-close rate around 20-25% (marketing ops buyers are sophisticated, they'll vet you hard)
• Generate 30-40% of your pipeline yourself through outbound to warm inbound leads

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Marketing Operations Managers (day-to-day tool users, your champion)
• Demand Gen Directors (care about campaign speed and quality)
• CMOs (care about brand compliance and team productivity)
• RevOps/Marketing Tech leaders (evaluate integrations and stack efficiency)

What They Care About:

• Time savings: How much faster can we launch campaigns?
• Brand compliance: Can we maintain guidelines without bottlenecking creativity?
• Integration: Does this work with our existing $500K/year Marketo investment?
• Team adoption: Will our marketers actually use this or fight it?
• ROI: Can we justify this cost vs. developer time or agency fees?

Requirements

• 3-5 years selling B2B SaaS, ideally in MarTech or adjacent categories
• Ability to learn technical concepts quickly (APIs, SSO, marketing automation platforms) even if you're not an engineer
• Comfort running your own demos - you need to be able to show the product confidently without always leaning on an SE
• Experience navigating enterprise sales with multiple stakeholders and long approval processes
• Understanding of marketing operations workflows or willingness to learn how enterprise marketing teams actually work
• Self-sourcing capability - you'll need to generate some of your own pipeline, not just work leads handed to you