Founding Account Executive (Full-Cycle)

Overview

You'll be an early full-cycle AE at Trellus, managing inbound leads and closing deals for one of their product lines. You'll work directly with co-founder Suji Goetzke to build out their sales process while carrying your own quota. This isn't a structured sales org with playbooks and enablement - you'll be figuring out what works.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Post-YC (W22), likely seed-funded

Size: 7 employees total

Growth: Hiring CSM, AE, and Content roles simultaneously - indicates inbound pipeline exists and they're ready to scale GTM

Market Position: Crowded space (competing with Orum, ConnectAndSell, Nooks for dialer; Gong/Chorus for call analytics). Differentiation is embedded integration - they plug directly into Clay, Salesloft, Outreach vs being standalone tools.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 60-70% Inbound - YC network, word-of-mouth, website conversions from SDRs using their dialer
• 20-30% Outbound - you'll need to prospect into your target accounts when inbound slows
• 10% Referrals/Partners - early integrations with Clay, Salesloft might drive some co-marketing leads

SDR/AE Structure: No dedicated SDR for you - you'll work inbound leads and self-source outbound

SE Support: No SE at 7 people - you'll run your own demos and technical deep-dives

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors:

• Parallel dialers: Orum, ConnectAndSell, Nooks, PhoneBurner
• AI call coaching: Gong, Chorus, Jiminny
• Sales engagement: Built-in dialers in Salesloft/Outreach

How They Differentiate: Embedded integration - reps don't leave their sales platform. Lower cost than enterprise tools. Founder is a former SDR (credibility in the community).

Common Objections:

• "We already have a dialer in [Salesloft/Outreach]"
• "How is this different from Orum?"
• "Our reps won't adopt another tool"
• "What happens if the integration breaks?"

Win Themes:

• Cost (cheaper than enterprise alternatives)
• No workflow disruption (embedded vs standalone)
• Built by SDRs for SDRs (founder credibility)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Active Deals (40%) | Prospecting/Outbound (25%) | Demos (20%) | Internal/Admin (15%)

Key Activities

• Inbound Lead Management: Triage demo requests from website, YC network, and content marketing. Qualify whether they're SMB (faster cycle, lower ACV) or mid-market (longer cycle, higher ACV). You'll probably get 10-15 new inbound leads per week.
• Discovery Calls: Understand their sales process, current tools, pain points (low connect rates, reps wasting time manually dialing, no call coaching). You'll need to ask technical questions about their stack (what CRM, what sales engagement platform, what data provider).
• Product Demos: Screenshare showing how Trellus embeds in their existing tools. You'll demo parallel dialing, real-time call coaching, and analytics. Expect prospects to ask detailed integration questions you might not know the answer to yet.
• Outbound Prospecting: When inbound dries up, you'll build your own lists (sales leaders at SMBs with SDR teams, RevOps folks at mid-market companies). You'll probably do 20-30 cold calls per day and send LinkedIn messages.
• Negotiation & Closing: Handle pricing objections (they'll compare you to free trials of competitors), navigate procurement (even SMBs have approval processes), and close contracts. You'll probably use DocuSign or similar.
• Building Sales Process: Work with Suji to document what works - email templates, demo scripts, objection handling. At 7 people, there's no sales ops team, so you'll build your own dashboards in HubSpot or whatever CRM they use.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• No sales infrastructure: No battle cards, no objection handling docs, no win/loss analysis. You'll create your own resources or go without.
• Product gaps: Early-stage products have missing features. You'll lose deals because they don't have integration X or feature Y. You'll need to sell the roadmap.
• Self-sourcing grind: Inbound won't fill your pipeline. You'll spend mornings prospecting, which means fewer hours for active deals. It's a trade-off.
• Founder selling style: Working directly with a co-founder means they'll have opinions on your deals. They might jump into late-stage opportunities, which can be helpful or frustrating.
• Market skepticism: Sales tools are a crowded space. Prospects have tried and abandoned multiple tools. You'll hear "we tried something like this before" constantly.

What Success Looks Like

• $40-60K in new ARR per month ($480-720K/year)
• 25-30% close rate on qualified demos
• 2-4 week sales cycle for SMB deals, 2-3 months for mid-market
• Building a repeatable sales process that the next AE hire can follow

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP Sales or Sales Managers at SMBs (50-200 person companies with 5-20 SDRs)
• RevOps or Sales Ops leaders at mid-market companies
• SDR team leads who own tool purchasing

What They Care About:

• SDR productivity: Connect rates, meetings booked per rep, time saved
• Adoption risk: Will their reps actually use this, or will it sit unused like the last tool?
• Integration stability: If it breaks their workflow, they churn immediately
• ROI: Can they show their CFO that spending $10K saved 100 hours of SDR time?

Requirements

• 2-3 years full-cycle sales experience (preferably selling to sales teams)
• Comfortable demoing technical products (integrations, APIs, sales tech stacks)
• Self-starter who can build their own pipeline when inbound slows
• Knows sales tools well (Salesloft, Outreach, HubSpot, Apollo, Clay) - you're selling to people who use these daily
• Okay with early-stage chaos (no sales ops, no enablement, priorities shift weekly)
• Willing to work at a 7-person company (equity over cash, minimal benefits, high autonomy)