Mid-Market Account Executive

Overview

You're selling Middesk's business verification and identity platform to mid-market fintechs, neobanks, and payments companies. Your buyers are typically Head of Product, Head of Compliance, and engineering leads who need to verify business customers during onboarding. You're replacing manual processes, competitor APIs (like LexisNexis or Dun & Bradstreet), or homegrown verification systems that don't scale.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series B (145 employees, funded by venture capital)

Size: 145 employees

Growth: Actively hiring across sales team, CRO posting directly on LinkedIn with referral incentives suggests strong growth momentum

Market Position: Category challenger - competing against legacy players (LexisNexis, D&B) and newer API-first companies in the business verification space

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 60% Inbound - Mix of website hand-raisers, developers who tried the API, and warm referrals from existing fintech customers. Quality varies—some are tire-kickers comparing options, others are actively building and need a solution now.
• 40% Outbound - You're prospecting into fast-growing fintechs, embedded finance companies, and digital banks. Cold calling works less well here; warm intros through investors, shared customers, or LinkedIn DMs to product leaders are more effective.

SDR/AE Structure: Likely shared SDR pool for outbound, but you're expected to work your own inbound leads and self-source some deals

SE Support: Solutions Engineer support for technical deep-dives and integration conversations, but you handle initial demos

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Dun & Bradstreet, Alloy, Persona, other business verification API providers

How They Differentiate: Fresher data, better API/developer experience, faster response times than legacy players; more comprehensive than newer point solutions

Common Objections: "We already have D&B," "Can't we just build this ourselves," "Your data coverage for [specific business type] isn't complete," price compared to legacy contracts

Win Themes: Data freshness, ease of integration, better accuracy for newer businesses (LLCs, gig economy), responsive support vs. legacy vendors

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting (25%) | Active Deals (50%) | Demos & Scoping (25%)

Key Activities

• Discovery calls with product and compliance teams: You're mapping out their current verification process, understanding their onboarding flow, and identifying where they're losing businesses or taking on risk. Most mid-market fintechs have some system in place—you're selling replacement, not greenfield.
• Technical demos and API walkthroughs: You're showing how the API works, walking through data fields returned, explaining match rates and coverage. You need to speak enough technical language to hold your own with engineering stakeholders, though the SE handles deep integration questions.
• Building business cases around false positive/negative rates: Compliance and risk teams care about how many good businesses they're rejecting (lost revenue) vs. how many bad actors slip through (fraud risk). You're pulling data from their current process and showing how Middesk changes those numbers.
• Multi-threading between product, compliance, engineering, and legal: Deals don't move unless all four are aligned. Product wants it, compliance needs to approve the vendor, engineering needs to scope integration effort, legal reviews the contract. You're constantly chasing next steps and keeping everyone moving.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Most prospects are comparing 3-4 vendors and running POCs with multiple options. You'll spend weeks in technical evaluation only to lose on price or a feature edge case.
• Integration timelines slip constantly. Engineering says "2 weeks to integrate," then it sits in their backlog for 2 months. Your deal timeline is hostage to their sprint planning.
• You're often displacing an incumbent (D&B, LexisNexis) who has a multi-year contract. Deals can stall waiting for renewal cycles, or you get stuck in a pilot/prove-it phase until the old contract expires.
• Data coverage questions are endless. "What's your match rate for Delaware LLCs formed in the last 6 months?" You're constantly looping in data/product teams to answer technical questions about specific business types or geographies.

What Success Looks Like

• Closing 1-2 deals per quarter in the $50-150K range, with a few smaller deals ($20-30K) filling in gaps
• Building a pipeline of 8-10 active opportunities at various stages (discovery, technical eval, contracting)
• Getting renewals to expand - most customers start with one verification use case, then add credit assessment or entity management modules in year 2

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Head of Product or VP Product (at mid-market fintechs/neobanks)
• Head of Compliance / Chief Compliance Officer
• VP Engineering or Engineering Manager (integration decision-maker)

What They Care About:

• Product: Speed of onboarding (how many businesses drop off during verification), data coverage for their target customer segment, API reliability and uptime
• Compliance: Audit trail, data sources and freshness, ability to meet KYB requirements, vendor risk management
• Engineering: API documentation quality, ease of integration, webhooks and automation, support responsiveness when things break

Requirements

• 3-5 years selling B2B SaaS or API products, ideally to fintech, payments, or financial services buyers
• Comfortable navigating technical conversations—you don't need to code, but you should understand APIs, data integrations, and how engineering teams evaluate tools
• Experience selling into buying committees with multiple stakeholders (product + compliance + engineering + legal)
• Track record hitting quota in a consultative sales environment with 2-4 month cycles
• Willingness to be in-office in NYC or SF (this is not a remote role)