Business Development Manager

Avela is at an exciting inflection point and growing quickly, with ambitions to raise additional venture capital in 2025. The Founder/CEO is looking for an ambitious growth hustler to partner directly with him, our Sales Lead, and our Marketing Lead, to grow the business.

Unlike our other go to market roles that focus on a specific area of sales or marketing, this individual will cover the full stack and spectrum from strategy to demand gen to meeting booking to qualification. They must have a marketer’s eye for strategy and scale, and a sales exec’s hustle and closing skills. This individual will play a key cross-functional, interdisciplinary role on the Go To Market team, and will ‘dotted line’ into both the sales and marketing teams. Given the exceptional interdisciplinary nature, the individual will initially report directly to the Founder/CEO, Greg.

The most common responsibility will be to execute targeted outbound campaigns to schedule meetings for the CEO and Sales Lead. Unlike a traditional BDR/SDR role who simply executes on predefined campaigns with prepared contact lists and call scripts, this individual will be expected to develop their own strategies, contact lists, email templates, call scripts, and followups.  See “Core Responsibilities” below.

This role will evolve significantly over the next two years, so we need someone who is excited to roll up their sleeves, wear many hats, and move fluidly between strategy, marketing, business development, and sales. This is a mid-level individual contributor role with significant opportunity for growth and future management potential. See “Role Evolution” below.

We are open to a range of experiences and seniorities for this role, and more senior candidates will have the opportunity to own more of the sales cycle and play a larger strategic role. See “Potential Responsibilities” below

Candidates must be outstanding communicators with 2+ years in client-facing roles. Management consulting, tech startup, or education experience strongly preferred. See “Qualifications” below.

 

Core Responsibilities

• Design and execute strategic outbound campaigns
• Develop outbound campaign strategy and target set based on company go to market priorities and quarterly OKRs
• Curate a list of individual targets, including name, title, organization, email address, and social media profiles.
• Draft outbound email templates, call scripts, and direct messages.
• Personalize and tailor each message to the recipient based on online research, Avela marketing materials, relevant customers (e.g. nearby districts), and mutual connections.
• Send emails to targets, follow up via social media, and finally cold calls where appropriate.
• Schedule meetings for senior leaders, including the CEO and Sales Lead
• Support follow-up and tracking of sales and partnership opportunities.
• Booking sales meetings for the CEO
• When the CEO is traveling (e.g. for customer meetings or a conference), it will be your responsibility to ensure his schedule is fully booked with local meetings.
• This could involve going through the conference attendee list and reaching out to the highest priority targets to schedule meetings with Greg.
• It could also mean looking at potential targets in the area, such as the local school district or large charter networks, and scheduling meetings.
• Note: CEO has an Executive Assistant for most scheduling, but this requires significant sales judgment, so will be owned by you.
• Support sales and marketing with a wide variety of other tasks, such as:
• Project managing and drafting of proposals and responses to “Request for Proposals” (RFPs)
• Tradeshow event support, particularly (1) working an exhibit hall booth and (2) contacting attendees to schedule meetings or invite to speaking sessions.
• Revenue operations and reporting, including sales analytics. 
• Support with social media campaigns, blog writing, etc.

Potential Responsibilities (for More Senior Candidates):

• Own revenue-generating partnerships, such as resellers and purchase consortiums.
• Own marketing partnerships and support joint marketing campaigns, such as cobranded webinars or co-hosted events.
• Explore adjacent markets and alternative routes to market 
• Building our and managing a sales development (SDR) and business development representative (BDR) team, including systematizing and automating outreach processes.

Requirements

• San Francisco Bay Area based
• 4-8 years of full time experience is preferred. Minimum of 18 months of post-collegiate work experience. 
•  2+ years in client facing roles, ideally consulting, client services, partnerships, or sales
• BA in Economics, Mathematics, or Engineering preferred with rigorous curriculum.
• Superb communicator (both written and oral) with native English fluency. 

Role Evolution

• This is an entry to a mid-level individual contributor role with significant opportunity for growth and future management potential.
• This role can evolve quite a bit over time. After 1-2 years, the individual could move into one of several roles:
• Partnerships
• Account Management
• Senior Sales AE
• Marketing Manager
• SDR/BDR Team Lead

Difference From SDR/BDR

• This is not an entry-level sales development representative (SDR) or business development representative (BDR) role.  
• That said, since we currently do not have an SDR/BDR and this role is focused on strategic outbound campaigns and pipeline development, the person will certainly play some of the SDR/BDR role until that is filled.
• Unlike a traditional BDR/SDR role who executes predefined campaigns with prepared contact lists and call scripts, this individual will be expected to develop their own strategies, contact lists, email templates, call scripts, and followups. 
• In my experience, entry-level SDR/BDRs require (a) significant coaching and management and (b) a well-tested, repeatable sales process. We aren’t in a position to offer either, which is why we’ve held off on building an SDR/BDR team. I hope that this individual will help to pave the way so that in late 2025 or 2026 we can start to build out a sales development team. This individual could move into an SDR Manager role, or could stay on the strategic business development and partnerships side of the house.

 

 

$90,000 - $150,000 OTE

With generous stock option and benefits package. Compensation will include a mix of base salary and quarterly bonus.

 

 Avela is a Nobel Prize-winning edtech startup building the first platform for families to navigate their child's educational journey and a universal application for PK-12 education, daycare, and enrichment programs, promoting equity and access to education. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or “Mindbody for Schools.”

 

For students and families, this simplifies the process of finding and applying to educational programming. For schools and districts, this streamlines operations and helps increase enrollment (and hence, revenue).

 

We sell our application and enrollment platform directly to school districts, charter networks, other educational providers, cities, and states. We work with school districts and charter networks across the country, including in Oakland, Seattle, Hartford, Tulsa, New Orleans, Newark, and Jersey City. We also work with a range of nonprofits and NGOs, including Teach for America and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as the US Military.

 

Our platform has four parts to cover each stage of the application journey, from exploring options to applying and final selection and admission:

Avela Explore - Mobile-optimized school finder and opportunity navigator

Avela Apply - Streamlined application management system and tracking

Avela Match - Research-based admission and student assignment lottery system.

Avela Enroll - Online registration, transfers, and enrollment platform with document collection.

 

We also offer a range of consulting services to help districts implement enrollment reforms and advance equity in educational programs.

 

Learn more at avela.org.

 

 Avela was founded by a renowned team of visionaries, including Nobel Laureate Joshua Angrist, Clark Medalist Parag Pathak, and social entrepreneur Greg Bybee. We have a passionate team of entrepreneurs, engineers, economists, and data scientists - get to know us at https://avela.org/team. 

 

 We love our team and care about their wellness. We strive to offer the best benefits of our peers, including:

-- Significant equity

-- Flexible work policies

-- Unlimited vacation

-- Home office stipend or WeWork membership

-- 401(k) program

-- Flexible Savings Account (FSA)

-- Dependent Care Saving Plan (DCFSA)

-- Commuter Benefits

-- Life Insurance by Guardian (covered 100%)

-- Platinum Medical Plan by UnitedHealthcare (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)

-- Platinum Dental Plan by Guardian Health (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)

-- Platinum Vision Plan by Guardian Health (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)

 

Learn more at avela.org/careers.

 

 We are a flexible, fully remote company, however all full time employees must live in the United States and meet the work authorization policies below. We are building geographic "hubs" to facilitate collaboration, so prefer candidates who are located in/around Boston, New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or are willing to commute into them for monthly on-sites.

 

Colleagues are expected to work from a quiet location with reliable, high speed internet, during continental US hours, and in accordance with our collaboration norms outlined below. #LI-Remote

 

 Although we are strongly supportive of immigrants and individuals of all backgrounds, unfortunately, as a small startup, we are not in a position to sponsor visas and are only able to consider candidates who are authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to working together in the future.

 

 As a remote-first company, we think deeply about aligning on shared values and collaboration norms. We trust our team and empower everyone to find the right balance for their productivity, but also seek to facilitate synchronous collaboration and minimize asynchronous latency.

 

We ask everyone to have access to a quiet environment, free from distractions during working hours with high speed broadband internet. (One of our benefits is that we'll cover a WeWork membership!) Our default is video-on for meetings to foster relationships and allow non-verbal communication cues to come through, however we understand that from time-to-time it’s helpful to turn video off. We also ask colleagues to have a proper office setup with desk, external monitor, quality webcam, etc. 

 

For full time roles, we expect colleagues to work a normal business day in a continental US timezone of their choice, so long as there's overlap from 12pm - 6pm ET. This ensures sufficient time for synchronous collaboration, but also facilitates flexibility in your schedule. (We are open to other working arrangements, but this must be approved in advance before joining.) We also expect full time employees to join for biannual week-long team offsites (we cover the costs, of course).

 

Avela is a safe, inclusive workplace for people of all backgrounds and walks of life. We strongly encourage you to apply if you are from a marginalized or underrepresented group, even if you don't meet all of the job requirements. If you believe this is a role that you’ll be excited to work in every day, want to be a part of a culture like ours, and will be relentless about pushing boundaries to succeed, please apply.

 

Experience with our specific technologies is not required, even for engineering roles, and our stack is constantly evolving. Here's what we're using now:

 

-- React + TypeScript

-- Chakra UI with focus on a11y

-- Jest + React Testing Library for unit tests

-- Playwright for end-to-end tests

-- GraphQL with Hasura

-- AWS Lambda with NodeJS / TypeScript and Go.

-- AWS Serverless Services: Fargate, Aurora, S3, SNS

-- AWS RDS with PostgreSQL

-- AWS CDK for Infrastructure as Code

-- AWS CodeBuild and AWS Codepipeline

-- AWS Amplify for Front-End