Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Distill is an AI-powered outreach company that helps founders and executives manage prospecting, personalized outreach, follow-up, and relationship building. The Founding Account Executive will own the customer journey from discovery through trials and signed quarterly commitments, while helping establish a repeatable sales process and coordinating handoffs to Account Strategists.
Responsibilities
- Run discovery calls that uncover a prospect’s goals, audience, current workflow, and challenges
- Deliver demos that connect Distill’s capabilities to the buyer’s specific needs
- Help prospects choose the right starting point: targeted outbound, conference outreach, existing-network campaigns, or warm introductions
- Use your outbound experience to assess targeting, messaging, and whether a proposed campaign is likely to work
- Agree on a focused use case, clear success criteria, and a timeline for evaluating the trial
- Help customers get set up, select their target audience, develop messaging, and launch their first campaign
- Stay close throughout the trial: monitor progress, address obstacles, and help improve targeting or messaging
- Keep customers engaged with proactive check-ins and clear next steps
- Bring in Account Strategy or Product when their expertise can help the customer succeed
- Review trial results with customers and connect those results to their business goals
- Address objections, align on expectations, and close signed quarterly commitments
- Own timely, thoughtful follow-up from the first conversation through conversion
- Keep the CRM current across sales opportunities and active trials, with clear next steps, owners, and timelines
- Partner with the CEO on calls and progressively take ownership of the full sales cycle
- Capture the customer’s goals, audience, campaign approach, trial results, and commitments made during the sales process
- Ensure Account Strategists understand what worked, what needs improvement, and what the customer expects next
- Coordinate the transition so customers maintain momentum and don’t have to repeat themselves
- Turn successful calls, common objections, effective follow-ups, and trial learnings into reusable materials
- Share buyer feedback with the founders, Product, and Account Strategy
- Practice calls, seek feedback, and test ways to improve discovery, demos, trial outcomes, and conversion
- Help define a sales process that future hires can learn from and build on
Skills
- **Prior SDR or BDR experience is required.** You have personally run outbound prospecting, including researching accounts, identifying decision-makers, writing outreach, following up, and booking meetings
- **Deep empathy for the buyer.** You understand outbound firsthand and can connect that experience to the needs of busy founders and executives who want qualified meetings without managing outreach themselves
- **Practical judgment about outbound.** You can recognize weak targeting or messaging, explain what needs to change, and help customers improve during their trial
- **Strong discovery and communication skills.** You listen carefully, ask useful questions, and explain recommendations clearly in writing and on calls
- **Curiosity and sound judgment.** You can quickly understand unfamiliar businesses and make thoughtful recommendations without relying on a fixed script
- **Hands-on ownership.** You're willing to work directly on customer setup, targeting, and messaging to help trials succeed
- **Excellent organization and follow-through.** You can manage multiple opportunities and active trials without losing context or momentum
- **Ambition and coachability.** You welcome feedback, enjoy practicing your craft, and want to work closely with a founder
- **Comfort with AI tools and startup ambiguity.** You're eager to learn an evolving product and help build the process as you go
- * Experience as an AE or converting trials into paying customers
- * Experience selling sales technology, recruiting technology, GTM tools, or workflow software
- * Familiarity with LinkedIn prospecting, conference campaigns, and warm-introduction workflows
- * Experience at an early-stage startup
Benefits
- Equity of 0.1% to 0.3%
- Remote-first team
- A high degree of ownership, autonomy, and trust
- Competitive compensation
Company Overview