Key Accounts Executive

About Us

Shorthand exists to empower creative teams to produce and publish beautiful transformative content radically faster. We’re proud to count many of the world’s most iconic brands and institutions as loyal customers.

Shorthand is a growing, investor-backed company with customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), and there’s never been a more exciting time to join our band of geeks with art and heart.

We're looking for a talented Key Accounts Executive in the London area to join our Sales team on a fully remote basis.

What you’ll be doing

The mission of Shorthand is to build a beautifully informed world. To do that, we need to simplify professional visual storytelling for the web, otherwise it will remain prohibitively complex for iconic brands and institutions to elegantly inform and inspire their discerning audiences.

Key Accounts Executives play an important part in the Shorthand strategy. The purpose of this role is to proactively expand our existing large accounts across geographies and business units, and ultimately to win global deals. You’ll know you’ve been successful in this role when we continually achieve greater than 100% Net Revenue Retention (NRR) through expansions, upsells and referrals to different regions or departments of existing customers.

The successful candidate will join our Sales function, and report to the Vice President of Sales.

In this role you’ll:

• Become an expert in Shorthand.

• Work across a specific set of current enterprise client accounts, seeking to expand their usage into new geographies and business units.

• Consult on personalized best practices across various channels, leveraging strategies and playbooks for each channel and each vertical.

• Work collaboratively with Shorthand’s Customer Success, Sales, Growth, Marketing, Product and Engineering teams to ensure successful sales outcomes leading to happy clients.

• Build long-term, strategic plans in collaboration with internal business partners to maximize clients' success with the Shorthand platform while driving revenue for Shorthand; understand C-level initiatives at strategic clients and how Shorthand’s solutions map to those objectives.

• Forecast pipeline accurately, including expected close date, projected deal size, and projected deal probability.

• Selling products or services to clients to increase sales volume or profits for the company.

• Monitoring client satisfaction with current products or services to determine if adjustments are needed.

• Identifying new business opportunities with existing clients or potential clients.

• Developing long-term relationships with key clients to increase sales and broaden the company’s reach within the industry.

• Negotiating prices and terms of sale with clients on behalf of the company.

• Contacting clients regularly to ensure they are satisfied with their purchase experience

• Developing proposals and presentations to meet clients’ needs.

• Coordinating with other departments within the company to deliver high quality products and services to clients.

• Following up with clients after the sale to ensure they are satisfied with their purchase.

We are looking for someone who:

• Can demonstrate how they have expanded their contact base, influence, impact and revenue in key accounts for other organisations.

• Has utilised their internal team of colleagues to maximise customer expansion opportunities, effectively partnering with support, customer success, engineering and senior management.

• Is a savvy, customer-focused problem solver, with empathy in spades and always willing to go that extra mile.

• Is whip-smart, with exceptional attention to detail, demonstrably thinking through problems analytically and rigorously.

• Has outstanding written and face-to-face/online-meeting communication skills (we will be asking you to write your own Shorthand story as part of the recruitment process.)

• Can learn fast and ruthlessly prioritise competing demands, and stay calm under pressure.

• Preferably has experience collaborating with diverse, geographically-dispersed teams.

• Gains deep satisfaction from helping others achieve their goals.

Experience and Qualifications:

• Experience of successfully selling enterprise marketing solutions to CEOs, CMOs, VPs and Directors of Marketing, Content, Communications, Editorial, etc.

• Solid understanding of the digital marketing landscape for enterprise customers.

• Experience introducing new products to market.

• Proven track record of closing large, strategic and high quality deals.

• Technical aptitude and/or background in technology preferred.

• A consultative sales style and strong experience selling solutions in a fast-paced environment.

• Proven ability to sell collaboratively with multiple internal stakeholders and teams.

Personality Attributes: 

• You are a proactive self-starter who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful to find solutions to any challenge.

• You are not afraid to get your hands dirty, but you’re also collaborative and consultative.

• You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment, and possess a high level of curiosity.

• You are an agile, goal-oriented personality, driven to succeed and always up for a challenge!

• You are a supportive and proactive team player.

• You love working remotely.

• You are tech savvy and will (and will want to) become an expert in the use of the Shorthand platform.

Why work for us

We offer:

• Options for working your way: fully remote working, flexible hours, and an allowance for a co-working space if you prefer.

• The opportunity to work in a growing SaaS company that is still small enough that you can make a real impact.

• An allowance for setting up your home office, a laptop, and any peripherals you need to do your job.

• An Employee Option Plan for all team members.

• A Health and Wellness fund to support your healthy lifestyle, as well as access to coaching and counselling services.

• Paid parental leave if you are growing your tribe.

• A proudly a carbon neutral organisation, taking climate action with Trace as part of a broader sustainability strategy.

• The base salary range for this position is £50,000-£65,000. Base salary ranges are determined by multiple factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skills, experience and local market benchmarks.

Shorthand’s interview process

We value direct communication here at Shorthand and want to be transparent on how we hire. Our process involves:

• An initial Zoom screen: You’ll have an informal Zoom meeting with the hiring manager to discuss your background, the role, and what led you to apply.

• A work task: We’ll ask you to complete a take-home task, similar to the work you’ll be doing in the role, using our software platform. This should take approximately 2-4 hours. This helps you to develop familiarity with our platform ahead of meeting with the hiring panel and helps us to verify that you’d be a great fit for the role.

• Interviews: You’ll have interviews with the hiring panel over Zoom. This means you’ll typically get to meet another 3 people from Shorthand, including our CEO.

• Final checks: The successful candidate will undergo a reference and criminal history check prior to us sending the final employment agreement.

Our workplace is 100% distributed and all interviews are conducted virtually. Please let us know of any reasonable accommodations you may need during the interview process.