Founding Account Executive
Role
As Vessel's Founding Account Executive, you'll be responsible for new business sales across our all of our ideal customer profiles - both market-rate and affordable housing developers/operators. You'll own the full pipeline: doing your own outbound, further qualifying leads sourced by our BDR team, and guiding prospects through every stage of a complex, high value sales process to signed contract.
Do you want to help define how an early-stage company closes its largest, most complex deals?
Do you want to move fast, take on more responsibility, and grow alongside the business?
Are you energized by long, multi-million dollar, multi-stakeholder sales cycles where you have to build the process as you go?
If yes, this could be an incredible role for you.
This isn't a role where you'll simply inherit a playbook, a deal desk, or a pre-built deck library. We're looking for someone excited to build all of it - while carrying a quota of $10M+ deals.
Responsibilities
- Own the Full Cycle: Run new business sales end-to-end - from outbound sourcing through negotiation to signed contract - across both market-rate and affordable housing ICPs.
- Qualify and Advance Pipeline: Take leads generated by you, BDRs or our inbound motion, qualify them rigorously, and move them through a long, multi-stakeholder sales process with discipline.
- Navigate Complexity: Manage deals shaped by factors outside your direct control - land acquisition, permitting, zoning, financing - and keep momentum through long timelines and many moving pieces.
- Build the Motion: Help develop Vessel's sales process from the ground up - deal stages, qualification criteria, proposal structure, negotiation playbook - testing and refining what consistently works.
- Bring the Market Back to Us: Develop deep expertise in developer/operator decision-making, procurement processes, and objections. Share those insights with the broader team to sharpen our positioning and product.
- Work Closely With the Founders: Collaborate directly with Vessel's leadership on deal strategy, pricing, and go-to-market decisions.
- Help Build What Comes Next: As you find repeatable patterns, document them and lay the groundwork for the sales team.
Qualifications
- Bachelors degree or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of closing experience, ideally in complex, long-cycle, multi-million dollar sales
- Builder Mentality: You come from a scrappy, early-stage company- not an environment where resources, playbooks, and deal support were handed to you.
- Complex Deal Experience: You've sold into multi-stakeholder processes with long cycles and external dependencies, and you know how to keep a deal moving when you don't control every variable.
- Domain Fit: Either you've sold into our ICP (construction, real estate development, proptech) from an early-stage startup, or you're coming out of real estate/development itself and want to build a sales career in real estate.
- Highly Adaptable: Comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where priorities and strategies evolve quickly.
- Strong Communicator: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to engage and persuade technical, financial, and executive stakeholders alike.
- Bias for Action: Willing to try things, learn quickly, and iterate rather than waiting for a perfect plan.
- Resilient: Comfortable with the rejection and long slog inherent to $10M+, multi-month sales cycles.
What We Offer
- Competitive compensation: $130,000-$150,000 base salary + variable, OTE of $250,000-$300,000
- The opportunity to be the Founding AE and have a direct impact on how Vessel closes its largest deals
- Significant exposure to Vessel's leadership team
- A fast path to increased ownership and career progression as the company grows
- The chance to learn not just how to execute a sales motion, but how to build one
- A culture that values experimentation, learning, ownership, and high performance
- The opportunity to join early and help shape the culture, processes, and team that come after you
