Overview
You're selling Respondology's AI-powered social engagement platform to enterprise brands, agencies, e-commerce companies, and sports organizations. Full-cycle role - you prospect, demo, close, and hand off to the customer success team. The product moderates, analyzes, and responds to social media comments at scale across paid and organic posts.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Full-cycle AE (self-sourcing to close) |
| Sales Motion | Outbound-heavy with some inbound |
| Deal Complexity | Consultative - multi-stakeholder |
| Sales Cycle | 2-3 months typical |
| Deal Size | $20-80K ACV (estimated) |
| Quota (est.) | $400-600K/year |
Company Context
Stage: Growth-stage (82 employees, claiming strong product-market fit and YoY growth)
Size: 82 employees
Growth: Actively hiring for multiple AE roles, indicating expansion
Market Position: Niche player in social media management space - focused specifically on comment moderation/engagement vs broader platforms like Sprout Social or Hootsuite
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 25-30% Inbound - brands searching for comment moderation solutions, referrals from existing customers
- 65-70% Outbound - cold outreach to marketing directors, social media managers, digital marketing leads
- 5-10% Partnerships - may have some agency referrals
SDR/AE Structure: No dedicated SDR team mentioned - you're building your own pipeline
SE Support: Likely no dedicated SE given company size - you're running your own demos
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: Broader social media management platforms (Sprout Social, Hootsuite), manual moderation teams, general-purpose moderation tools
How They Differentiate: AI-native, purpose-built for comment moderation vs tacking it on as a feature. Works across paid and organic posts.
Common Objections: "We already have social tools", "We can moderate manually", "How accurate is the AI?", "What about false positives?"
Win Themes: Scale (brands with thousands of comments can't manually moderate), brand safety (catching toxic comments fast), ROI discovery (mining comments for insights)
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Prospecting (45%) | Active Deals (35%) | Internal (20%)
Key Activities
- Cold Outreach: 40-60 targeted touches per day (emails, LinkedIn, calls) to marketing leaders at brands with active social presence. You're researching who runs ads on Facebook/Instagram or has high social engagement, then personalizing why comment moderation matters to them.
- Discovery Calls: 5-8 per week with prospects who respond. You're diagnosing how they currently handle comments, what breaks, how much time their team spends on it, and whether they've had brand safety incidents.
- Product Demos: 4-6 per week. You're screen-sharing the platform, showing how it auto-moderates toxic comments, surfaces insights from comment data, and enables responses at scale. Demos are 30-45 minutes.
- Multi-threading: Chasing down stakeholders after initial interest. Social media manager loves it, but you need marketing director approval and IT to review data security. Lots of follow-up emails and calendar Tetris.
- Proposal & Negotiation: Building custom pricing based on comment volume and features needed. Navigating procurement, MSAs, and security reviews at enterprise accounts.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Most cold outreach gets ignored - social media managers are flooded with vendor pitches. Response rates are low.
- Multi-threading is painful - the person who loves your product often isn't the budget holder. You'll spend weeks trying to get a meeting with the actual decision-maker.
- Deals slip quarters regularly. "We love it but budget is locked until Q3" or "We need to see results from our current tool first."
- You're evangelizing a category that's not top-of-mind. Many brands don't realize comment moderation is a problem until you show them.
- Small team means you're wearing multiple hats - no sales ops to build your sequences, no dedicated CS for pre-sale questions, no marketing team generating tons of MQLs.
What Success Looks Like
- Closing 1-2 deals per month consistently
- Building a pipeline of 3-4x your quarterly quota
- Finding repeatable messaging that gets responses from your ICP
- Becoming the go-to person internally for a vertical (e-commerce, sports, enterprise SaaS)
Who You're Selling To
Primary Buyers:
- Director/VP of Marketing at mid-market to enterprise brands
- Social Media Managers/Directors at brands with high engagement
- Digital Marketing Leads at agencies managing multiple client accounts
- Marketing Operations at sports teams/leagues
What They Care About:
- Brand safety - catching toxic/inappropriate comments before they spiral
- Time savings - their team spends hours manually moderating comments
- ROI visibility - mining comment data for customer feedback and sentiment
- Scalability - current manual process doesn't work as ad spend and reach grow
- Integration - needs to work with their existing social ad platforms and workflows
Requirements
- 2-4 years of full-cycle AE experience, preferably in SaaS
- Strong outbound/prospecting background - you need to build your own pipeline
- Comfortable with consultative selling - this isn't transactional
- Experience selling to marketing personas (not IT/engineering)
- Self-starter mentality - small team means less structure and support
- Ability to articulate ROI for emerging/niche categories
- Willingness to work in startup environment with evolving processes