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Sales Development Representative

San Francisco, CA
 
Avela is a Nobel Prize winning platform for families to navigate their child’s educational journey. Parents can find, apply, register, and pay for school and programs for their children, all from a common application system with saved profiles. Avela also powers backend admissions and operational workflows, making it easy for schools, districts, and educational providers to equitably serve students. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or “Mindbody for Schools.”

Role

Avela is seeking a Sales Development Representative to help drive sales and go-to-market alongside the founding team. This is a key position at an early-stage company, reporting directly to Avela's Sales Lead. 
 
In this role, you will be a critical driver of our sales pipeline, focusing on identifying, engaging, and qualifying potential partners. As Avela’s founding SDR, you'll be the front line of our sales process, leveraging your communication skills and sales expertise to uncover and nurture promising opportunities that align with our company's mission and solutions.

Location

We’re a semi-remote company with hubs in San Francisco and Boston. The San Francisco hub includes the CEO, Sales Lead, and Marketing Lead, so we strongly prefer candidates living in the SF Bay Area to facilitate in-person collaboration and social connection.

Responsibilities

  • Lead Generation and Prospecting: Develop and execute strategic prospecting plans using a variety of tools and techniques, including CRM databases, LinkedIn, industry networks, and targeted research to identify high-potential leads.  Conduct proactive outbound prospecting activities, including cold calling, emailing, and social media outreach, to generate new leads and build a robust pipeline.
  • Event Engagement: Represent Avela at industry conferences, trade shows, and networking events, identifying and engaging potential clients, and expanding our market presence through strategic in-person and virtual event participation.
  • Opportunity Qualification: Conduct thorough needs assessments with potential clients, understanding their specific challenges, goals, and pain points to determine alignment with our solutions and sales opportunities.
  • Relationship Nurturing: Maintain consistent and strategic follow-up with prospects, creating touchpoints that keep our company top of mind and progressively move potential clients through the sales funnel.
  • CRM and Sales Operations: Meticulously track and document all prospect interactions, maintaining accurate and up-to-date records in our CRM system to support team-wide visibility and sales intelligence.

Qualifications

  • 1-3 years of experience in a similar role, preferably in the education technology (EdTech) industry or SaaS sales.
  • Ability to prospect efficiently and at-scale via cold calling, email, and social media
  • Proficiency and willingness to use/update CRM and sales management tools, HubSpot preferred
  • Excellent communication, negotiation, and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex ideas clearly and persuasively.
  • Entrepreneurial spirit and drive; Extraordinary comfort with ambiguity
  • Legal ability to work in the US without Visa sponsorship

Nice To Haves

  • Experience as a K-12 Teacher/Educator or School/District Administrator is preferred.  Passion is required.

Compensation 

The reasonably estimated OTE for this role is $120,000 annually. The starting wage will depend on a number of factors including the candidate’s location, skills, experience, market demands, and internal pay parity.
 

Company

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.

Team 

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. 

Benefits

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.

Location

We’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a few days to work together onsite each month. So we are only hiring candidates for most roles who live within one of our two hubs:

  • San Francisco Bay Area - Office Downtown SOMA, San Francisco, CA
  • Greater Boston - Office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

Please review the specific job description carefully, as each role might have it’s own unique geographic requirements. For example, some roles might only hire in one hub where the hiring manager is located, and other roles might benefit from geographic distribution and support hiring outside of hubs (e.g. sales).

Outside of our occasional collaboration and social gatherings, we offer a flexible, work-from-home culture. We trust our employees to work from wherever they are most productive and comfortable for most of the time, as long as it is private with high speed internet.  We hope this offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility to work remotely most of the time (far more than a hybrid model), but still the benefits of in-person collaboration and socialization.

Just like we believe in the value of finding the right school for each child, we want to help candidates find the right company. To help you evaluate if Avela is the right fit, we want to be transparent about our evolving company culture and approach to onsite collaboration. You can read more this Community Hub Model and our collaboration norms here. Over time, we expect to spend more time working collaboratively in our hubs.

Work Authorization

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.

We Encourage You To Apply

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.

Tech Stack (for Product/Engineering Roles):

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:
 
Front-end:
-- React + TypeScript
-- Chakra UI with focus on a11y
-- Jest + React Testing Library for unit tests
-- Playwright for end-to-end tests
Back-end + Database:
-- GraphQL with Hasura
-- AWS Lambda with NodeJS / TypeScript and Go.
-- AWS Serverless Services: Fargate, Aurora, S3, SNS
-- AWS RDS with PostgreSQL
DevOps:
-- AWS CDK for Infrastructure as Code
-- AWS CodeBuild and AWS Codepipeline
-- AWS Amplify for Front-End

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