What is it?
The Director of Sales & Customer Success will oversee and scale Descript’s high-touch (Enterprise) and low-touch sales pipeline.
Working collaboratively with our sales, customer success, and business development team, you will identify opportunities to scale our operational efficiency, implement new processes to accelerate our progress towards revenue goals, and continuously improve our team. You’ll be joining us in a leadership role on a rapidly expanding team and play a key part in developing best practices, processes, and infrastructure. Join and grow with us!
You will be attracted to this role if you’ve scaled and built a customer success or sales team - and, in the process, you realized that traditional sales and success approaches can be boring, wasteful, and uninspiring. We are not looking to build a massive human-powered sales and customer success organization; rather, we aim to use technology, creativity, experimentation - combined with industry best practices - to build our own playbook. For example, an ideal candidate could suggest that we build a customer prospecting and outbound motion - but would never suggest that we spam prospects like everyone else.
We do sales differently.
We want to empower our customers to achieve their outcomes quickly. Sales at Descript currently uses a customer-assist model, as compared to heavier-weight outbound sales models. Our entrepreneurial team operates in a non-commissioned sales environment - enabling our team to always make decisions that are consistently best for our customers and aligned with Descript’s long-term success. Rest assured, our competitive compensation, benefits, and equity incentive rewards the entire team for being part of Descript’s success.
Descript is a revolutionary product with incredible product-led growth and customer demand. Most Descript customers can purchase via self-service. Sometimes, small teams and small businesses have questions or clarifications that can benefit from low-touch interactions with our customer success advocates. We engage with these customers via chat, email, or short Zoom calls. We love customer interaction, and our goal is to rapidly empower these customers to buy in an ROI-positive manner. Our long-term goal is to build a product and sales process that speaks for itself and is easy to use and navigate. This will enable a high velocity and high volume self-service motion that can naturally address the needs of SMBs and smaller team-level pockets of users within Enterprises.
As customers expand beyond niche usage to mainstream enterprise use cases, this model then naturally progresses to an enterprise sales-led approach staffed by strategic sales account managers. These account managers will engage the customer to explore complex problems that require a more sophisticated customer buyer understanding and relationship development. Our most premier enterprise customers - Shopify, The New York Times, HubSpot, Spotify, and tons more - receive white-glove treatment from our Strategic Account Managers and Customer Success Managers as needed to support their purchase process.
This role is an opportunity to manage and grow it all: the full stack of our sales and customer success pipeline, from low-touch teams and SMBs, to Enterprise and wall-to-wall customer success.
What will you do?
You will lay the groundwork for our prospecting (lead generation), qualification, and sales process across low touch and high touch enterprise sales.
As Director of Sales, you will focus on enabling our team to successfully and efficiently source new leads, manage and close new accounts, and nurture and expand existing accounts. This role combines designing new processes and operationalizing programs to ensure they are executed and produce results. All with a focus on experimenting and trying new approaches, instead of relying on hiring a small army of sales reps.
Duties to include:
- Work both strategically and tactically: Assisting the sales organization in establishing the appropriate programs and cadences that will enable them to meet their short and long-term revenue objectives.
- Planning & Reporting
- Plan and Facilitate cross-functionally: Manage the week-to-week planning rigor to help teams keep their eye on the quarterly OKR goals, driving the cadence of planning, delivery, iteration, and measurement.
- Own new ARR and renewal forecasting, coverage plans, and account expansion opportunities.
- Provide timely and accurate forecasts and clear visibility on revenue performance.
- Maintain up-to-date knowledge of our evolving opportunities and processes.
- Design & Execute
- Diagnose where there are opportunities and gaps in our existing Sales process. Within a short time frame, scale the team and technology to fill gaps and improve team effectiveness.
- Set the charter for scaling and operationalizing our low touch and Enterprise sales.
- Scale the growth and adoption of Descript across our Enterprise and SMB segments.
- Manage the full sales cycle for Descript’s largest customers, from prospecting to close, through a consultative sales approach.
- Manage Customer Success: Own customer lifetime value through higher product adoption, customer satisfaction and overall health scores.
- Establish and scale a lead generation team and processes to augment our existing inbound sales process.
- Partner with Marketing leadership to represent B2B and Enterprise needs and use cases. Measure and reflect on the customer's previous programs with the teams and present insights, opportunities, and possible solutions to help create a roadmap for future programs.
- Be a Hands-On Leader
- Be actively engaged with new major customer Sales and customer projects, as needed.
- Work closely with cross-functional partners to develop and execute on lead generation campaigns and other tactics to drive pipeline growth across Product, Marketing, BD, and Finance.
What You Bring
- 5+ years of leading and scaling SaaS sales and/or customer success teams in B2B sales. B2C sales are nice to have. Intimate knowledge of the Enterprise sales cycle.
- Experience selling into Enterprise Accounts and navigating procurement and legal negotiations
- Consistent record creating and leading sales programs that require organizational change and cross-functional communication.
- Demonstrated history of building and maintaining long-lasting, strong relationships with customers while partnering with them to better understand their business objectives and needs.
- Understand Creator and media industry industry-specific trends and landscapes.
- Experience designing (or influencing the design of) revenue-producing sales campaigns and/or programs, campaigns, and go-to-market strategies.
- Gracefully manage multiple, concurrent programs and can effectively balance time between critical short-term issues and longer-term strategic goals.
- Experience with Salesforce, Pipedrive, or related tools.
About Descript
Descript is building the next generation of tools for communicating with video and audio. We are a team of 85 (planning to double in 2022) — with a proven CEO and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital). Descript HQ is in San Francisco, and our AI research team, Lyrebird, is based in Montreal.
Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.
As a small startup, Descript relies on employees who thrive in an environment where they are regularly called upon to translate high level goals into day-to-day priorities, and are regularly presented with technical and business challenges that extend beyond their comfort zone.
Benefits include a generous healthcare package, catered lunches, and unlimited vacation time. We currently have offices in San Francisco and Montreal, and are open to folks working remotely between PST and EST time zones. Whether you love WFH or can’t wait to get back to being in person, we're interested in offering an environment that works for you.
Descript is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.
