Overview
You're selling Remote's global HR and payroll platform to companies that need to hire, pay, and manage employees across multiple countries. Your buyers are HR leaders, CFOs, and sometimes legal/compliance teams at companies scaling internationally. The product is infrastructure - payroll, EOR services, contractor management - so you're selling on trust, compliance depth, and operational reliability, not flashy features.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Full-cycle AE (likely prospect-to-close) |
| Sales Motion | Balanced - some inbound from website/content, some outbound to expansion-stage companies |
| Deal Complexity | Consultative to Enterprise |
| Sales Cycle | 2-6 months (varies by deal size, compliance complexity, existing vendor) |
| Deal Size | $25K-$200K+ ACV (depending on employee count and countries) |
| Quota (est.) | $600K-$1.2M/year |
Company Context
Stage: Late-stage private (14,589 employees indicates significant scale)
Size: ~14,600 employees globally
Growth: New CBO hire signals GTM expansion and potential enterprise push
Market Position: Established player in global employment/EOR space - competing in a crowded but growing market where compliance is the moat
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 40% Inbound - companies researching global hiring solutions, content-driven leads, hand-raisers needing EOR services for specific countries
- 35% Outbound - targeting companies with 50-500+ employees showing international expansion signals (job posts in new countries, funding announcements, LinkedIn office updates)
- 25% Referrals/Existing customer expansion - companies adding new countries or converting from contractor to EOR
SDR/AE Structure: Likely dedicated SDRs for outbound, AEs work inbound leads and run full sales cycle
SE Support: Limited - product is more operational than technical, though you may loop in compliance/legal specialists for complex RFPs
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: Deel, Rippling, Oyster HR, Velocity Global, traditional PEOs
How They Differentiate: "Infrastructure and compliance depth" - positioning as the reliable, enterprise-grade option vs. faster/cheaper competitors
Common Objections:
- Price (competitors may undercut on per-employee fees)
- "We can handle this with our existing payroll provider"
- "We only need 2-3 countries, this feels like overkill"
- Switching costs from incumbent provider
Win Themes: Compliance rigor, country coverage, platform consolidation (vs. stitching together multiple vendors), trust for regulated industries
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Prospecting (20%) | Active Deals (50%) | Internal/Admin (30%)
Key Activities
- Qualifying inbound leads: You get demo requests from the website, but many are early-stage or just kicking tires. You spend time figuring out if they're actually hiring internationally in the next 6 months or just researching for "someday."
- Running discovery calls: You're asking about current headcount, which countries they're hiring in, what payroll/HR systems they use today, who owns vendor decisions. Deals involve 3-5 stakeholders minimum (HR, Finance, Legal, sometimes IT).
- Building business cases: You're pulling together ROI models showing cost-per-employee vs. setting up legal entities, comparing to competitor pricing, addressing compliance risk. Lots of spreadsheet work.
- Navigating procurement: Once they want to move forward, you're dealing with legal reviews of MSAs, security questionnaires, compliance audits. Deals that should close in 30 days stretch to 90 because of contract redlines.
- Internal coordination: You're pulling in country specialists, compliance experts, implementation teams for complex deals. Lots of Slack threads and internal calls to get answers for prospects.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Long, multi-threaded cycles: You're rarely selling to one person. HR wants ease of use, Finance wants cost control, Legal wants airtight contracts. Getting everyone aligned takes months and deals slip constantly.
- Price pressure: Competitors are aggressive on pricing. You'll lose deals to cheaper alternatives, especially when companies are just testing international hiring with 1-2 employees.
- Compliance complexity: Every country has different labor laws. You need to know enough to speak credibly, but you're constantly looping in specialists. Prospects ask questions you can't answer on the spot.
- Implementation anxiety: Buyers worry about migrating payroll mid-year or switching from an incumbent. You're selling change management as much as software.
What Success Looks Like
- Closing 2-4 deals per quarter in the $50K-100K ACV range, or 1-2 larger enterprise deals
- Maintaining 3-4x pipeline coverage (you need $2M+ in pipeline to hit a $500K quota)
- Getting deals from first call to signed contract in under 120 days (anything faster is a win)
Who You're Selling To
Primary Buyers:
- VP/Director of HR or People Ops (owns the vendor relationship)
- CFO or VP Finance (controls budget, cares about cost-per-employee and risk)
- General Counsel or Head of Compliance (veto power on contracts and legal entity questions)
What They Care About:
- Compliance confidence: Will this keep us out of legal trouble in 15+ countries with different labor laws?
- Operational simplicity: Can we run payroll for all countries in one place vs. juggling multiple vendors?
- Cost predictability: What's the all-in cost per employee per country, and how does it compare to setting up our own entities?
- Speed to hire: How fast can we onboard someone in a new country we've never hired in before?
Requirements
- 3-5+ years selling B2B SaaS, ideally HR tech, payroll, or other operational infrastructure
- Experience with 3-6 month sales cycles and multi-stakeholder deal navigation
- Comfortable with complex pricing (per-employee, per-country, EOR vs. payroll vs. contractor management)
- Ability to speak credibly about compliance, international employment law, and operational risk (or learn quickly)
- Track record of hitting quota in a competitive, deal-driven environment