Account Executive (AE)

Overview

You take meetings from BDRs (and source some of your own pipeline) and run the full sales cycle with accounting firms. You're demoing AI tax workflow automation to partners and practice managers, quantifying ROI, handling concerns about implementation, and closing deals that typically take 1-3 months. You run your own demos and manage 15-25 active opportunities at once.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Early-stage (53 employees, likely Series A or bootstrapped)

Size: Small but growing GTM team—you're one of the first AEs as they scale

Growth: Actively expanding front line, moving fast, building out repeatable playbook

Market Position: Category challenger—competing against manual processes, legacy tools, and firm inertia

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 60-70% BDR-sourced meetings - Firms that BDRs have qualified as good fit
• 20-30% Self-sourced - You'll do some outbound to existing pipeline, warm referrals, conference leads
• 10% Inbound/Referrals - Some website demos, customer referrals

SDR/AE Structure: BDRs book meetings, you close them. You may still prospect into warm/existing opps.

SE Support: Unlikely at this stage—you run technical demos yourself. Product may be straightforward enough not to need SEs.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Legacy document management tools, other tax workflow platforms, and the biggest competitor: doing nothing (manual Excel/email processes)

How They Differentiate: AI-powered OCR/form vision, fully white-labeled platform, integrations with existing tax software

Common Objections: "Too expensive," "We're in the middle of tax season," "Our team won't adopt new tech," "We need IT approval," "Not enough ROI for our firm size"

Win Themes: Quantified time savings, reduced errors, better client experience, easy implementation, security/compliance (SOC 2)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Active Deals (45%) | Demos & Discovery (30%) | Prospecting (15%) | Internal (10%)

Key Activities

• Product Demos: You run 4-8 demos per week, walking partners through the platform. You're showing intake flows, AI form extraction, review processes. Expect lots of questions about data security, integrations with their tax software (Drake, Lacerte, ProSeries, etc.), and "how does this work with our process?"
• Deal Management: Following up with prospects who went dark after the demo, scheduling follow-up calls with other stakeholders, sending ROI calculations, negotiating pricing, managing procurement/legal review at larger firms.
• Qualification & Discovery: Understanding their current workflow (how many tax returns/year, staff size, pain points), identifying whether they're a good fit, and sussing out budget/timeline. Many firms will say "we're interested" but aren't ready to buy for 6-12 months.
• Self-Sourcing: Working your own leads from conferences, LinkedIn, warm intros from customers, or picking up where BDRs left off on older opps. Probably 10-15 hours/week of your own prospecting.
• Internal Coordination: Working with product/engineering on customer questions, coordinating with customer success on implementation timelines, updating forecasts, attending team standups.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Accounting firms move slowly and have compressed buying windows. Many want to "circle back after tax season" (which is Jan-April, so deals slip).
• You're often selling to partners who are skeptical of technology and worried about their team's ability to adopt it. Change management is a constant objection.
• Deals stall when you can't get the full buying committee together—partner wants to loop in the operations manager, who's busy, then they want to see it again in a month.
• Pricing negotiations can be tough—firms are cost-conscious and will push back on price, especially smaller ones.
• You're wearing multiple hats—you're the AE, the SE, and sometimes the CSM during the sales process.
• Small company means limited marketing/brand awareness—you're often explaining who Soraban is before you can sell the product.

What Success Looks Like

• Closing 2-4 deals per month consistently (mix of small, medium, larger firms)
• Maintaining a healthy 3-4x pipeline coverage
• Demo-to-close rate of 20-30%
• Fast follow-up cadence—getting second meetings scheduled while they're still warm
• Strong product knowledge—able to answer technical questions without punting to support

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Managing Partners at small-to-mid-size CPA firms (5-50 person firms)
• Tax Practice Directors/Leaders at larger firms (50-200 employees)
• Firm Administrators/COOs who oversee operations and tech

What They Care About:

• Measurable time savings (hours saved per tax return)
• Reducing manual data entry errors that cause rework
• Client experience—making it easier for clients to submit documents
• Security and compliance (CPA firms are paranoid about data breaches)
• Integration with their existing tax software (they won't switch)
• Staff adoption—they worry their team won't use it
• Price and ROI—they need to see payback within a season or two

Requirements

• 2-4 years of B2B sales experience (SaaS preferred, but not required)
• Comfortable running technical product demos without SE support
• Strong consultative selling skills—you're diagnosing workflows and prescribing solutions, not just pitching features
• Ability to speak to ROI and build business cases for skeptical buyers
• Resilience with long sales cycles and deals that stall/slip
• Self-sufficient—comfortable prospecting, demoing, negotiating, and closing on your own
• Must be in Austin and willing to work in-office daily (high-touch team environment)
• Bonus: Prior experience selling to professional services firms (accounting, law, consulting)