BD Lead

About Agora:

Agora is working towards a new paradigm for group collaboration by creating the tools for communities to work together onchain. This is not yet-another-productivity-saas. We believe that to enable the next era of collaboration, we need software that can bend current and create new incentives. No amount of removing friction will change how we work together if our reward functions are misaligned.

So to this end, Agora is working tirelessly on the best end-to-end governance platform for crypto protocols – the first instance of at scale onchain collaboration. Leading communities like Optimism, ENS, Uniswap, Nouns, and more rely on Agora to coordinate their community around critical protocol upgrades, ecosystem funding, and steward their ecosystem for the future.

But that’s not where we stop. Our goal is to build deep collaboration tools for people who couldn’t care less about crypto so that one day (soon), your friends back home are using Agora without ever knowing we’re on Ethereum.

What you'll do

As our first Sales hire, you’ll be working directly with Charlie, our CEO, to identify and engage crypto protocols that need a governance solution. Your goal is to understand these potential customers’ needs and how the Agora products can meet those so you can close deals. Business Development Lead or Account Executive are perhaps fitting titles for this role as well; we care less about the title and more about closing deals.

As part of this role you will:

• Reach out to new leads via various communication channels and get them excited for an introductory call.

• Engage with potential customers, understand their needs, and explain how the Agora products solve those needs.

• Workshop with potential customers to identify their governance needs and guide them toward the best solution.

• Be the voice of our prospective customers, providing feedback on feature requests and insights to our Product and Engineering teams to inform product development and roadmap.

• Understand Agora’s product roadmap so you can discern where and how a potential customer’s needs match our current and future features and solutions, translating that into new customers and revenue streams.

• Own the full sales cycle from lead to close for pre-launch and post-launch protocols.

• Finally, our sales process is currently in its infancy. You'll be helping to shape a scalable sales process from the ground up, along with the tools and resources that go with it.

Despite already working with some of the most exciting crypto protocols such as Optimism, ENS, and Uniswap, we're just getting started. While we have a pipeline of interested parties, this role will heavily depend on your outbound efforts (90%) to achieve and exceed our ambitious targets.

Based on performance to date, we expect you to close on a $25K-$50K deal by the end of your first month (you'll work closely with our CEO on this). By your third month, you'll be on track to close larger mid-market and enterprise deals.

What we are looking for

• 4+ years of experience in a client-facing tech sales role selling SaaS or similar products.

  • Ideal candidate has some sales experience (e.g. 2 years) at a larger company + recently worked at a startup.

• B2B Sales experience: selling to SMBs or Mid-Market companies (or have recently transitioned into Enterprise Sales).

• Have closed 6 figure deals or larger contracts.

• Experience navigating complex orgs with multiple stakeholders. Self-starter with a proven track record in doing discovery, writing proposals, negotiating, and closing deals.

You’ll stand out if you have:

• Industry Context: extra points if you have a crypto-native network already and/or if you love onchain governance like us :)

• Technical Fluency: you’ll be selling a technical product so ideally you’ve done that in the past or have a background in engineering, computer science, or similar, allowing you to effectively communicate technical topics to non-technical audiences. Extra points if you have a background in open-source or selling dev products.

• Resourcefulness: you are driven, resourceful and willing to roll-up your sleeves to meet and exceed monthly sales quotas.

You might NOT be excited about this role if:

• The thought of 90% outbound prospecting sounds unappealing - you’d rather be the one to close on warm leads than generate them from scratch.

• You’re looking for a people management role - we need an experienced contributor at this stage, we’re not ready to build a sales team.

• You’re not excited to establish processes, implement tooling, or create sales materials from the ground up.

What we offer

• Ownership – both in responsibility and equity. We’re a small team with high trust and expectations of each other. We want you to own a sizable chunk of of the product and company, and structure our compensation accordingly.

• Competitive benefits – in addition to good health and dental benefits, we trust all employees with a no-limit company card and equal access to our executive assistant to leverage for their productivity.

• A strong team – we’re a small team that values experience, character and integrity. You’ll work with peers you respect, and who respect you.

• A seat at the table – you will come to all offsites, and be part of all strategic discussions. We’re hiring for a product leader, and will treat you as such.

• A path to grow – our goal is to retain all early hires as senior leaders as the company scales. We believe folks with the best expertise and deep context should lead organizations, even if they don’t traditionally self-identify as people managers.

Location

Preference for SF, but not a big deal for the right candidate. We are a remote team with members in SF, Toronto, Denver, NY and Portland - we meet in person quarterly for full-team offsites.