Sales Account Executive

LOCATION: UK or GERMANY
Title: Account Executive
Reporting To : VP Sales
Member of : Sales team

About Us:

Platform9: Private Clouds Made Easy

Platform9 is the leader in simplifying enterprise Private Clouds. Founded by a team of VMware cloud pioneers, we are dedicated to transforming IT operations. Our flagship product, Private Cloud Director, turns your existing hardware into a full-featured, future-ready private cloud. We innovate across what we build and how we deliver it, staying focused on a next-generation, open private cloud while holding ourselves to one standard: exceptional customer outcomes.

Enterprises are selecting Platform9 to replace legacy virtualization because it eliminates operational risk and complexity. Private Cloud Director is designed for the experienced infrastructure team, offering a familiar GUI experience for managing VMs and containers, seamless integration with your existing hardware and third-party storage, and critical enterprise features (HA/DR, scale, reliability) built-in. This enables IT teams to gain robust API control and a user experience they trust—rooted in customer obsession and an owner’s mindset. We share context quickly and candidly to keep decisions moving.

With over 30,000 nodes in production at some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Cloudera, EBSCO, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace, Platform9 is the proven path to achieving true vendor independence and operational consistency. We are an inclusive, globally distributed company backed by prominent investors, supported by a partner ecosystem of resellers, systems integrators, MSPs, and technology vendors committed to driving private cloud innovation and efficiency. Our values—innovation, customer obsession, ownership, radical candor, and excellence—guide how we build and support every deployment.

Position Summary:

The primary responsibility is to create new opportunities, and to drive and capture opportunities to generate net new revenue in his/her defined territory.  To achieve that, the AE must ensure appropriate levels of activity in each stage of the sales process and appropriate levels of effectiveness in each activity of the sales process.  Working closely with PreSales Engineers and other teams, the AE will fully embrace a consultative selling approach, delivering value and insights to prospects.  Taking ownership from lead to close, the AE will drive the sales strategy and all activities associated with each phase.  

The AE will be business minded and develop a sales/business plan outlining how to meet or exceed revenue target in given territory, for each fiscal year and quarter.  The AE will take pride in timely and accurate reporting of the state of their business.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Create and capture opportunities:

• Create new opportunities to increase the size of the opportunity pipeline, through prospecting and lead follow through.
• Qualify leads and prospects to ensure the opportunity pipeline is of high quality, 
• Engage with C-level, VP-level and Director-level 
• Differentiate by engaging in high value conversations, providing insights on why prospects are not achieving the results they desire, evidence-based proof points for available remedies, risks to be mitigated, approaches for achieving desired results
• Qualify and report the reasons that the prospect should change, wants to change and their commitment to change
• Drive opportunities through the sales pipeline to successful closure
• Develop sales strategies, account plans, and win plans for opportunities in the pipeline
• Understand and execute each phase of the sales process with excellence
• Identify and qualify the prospect’s consensus team and their influencers
• Map our executives to the appropriate consensus team and/or influencers
• Exhibit high quality negotiation skills, ensuring business fundamentals are achieved for price and T&Cs
• Exceed monthly, quarterly and annual quotas and KPIs 

Product Knowledge/Industry Expertise:

• Obtain and maintain a complete knowledge of our narrative, target market, problems we solve, results we deliver, product and service we offer
• Obtain a good understanding of prospect’s business, products and services. 
• Keep current with the latest industry trends and news. 

Discipline/Admin/Pipeline Hygiene:

• Maintain and track all details of leads and opportunities in Hubspot and appropriate tools
• Utilize Hubspot and appropriate tools to properly track and report sales progress
• Forecast accurately
• Attend sales meetings and training programs.
• Prepare appropriately to achieve excellence in meetings and deliverables

Resourceful/Team Player:

Effectively leverage internal resources such as Sales Engineers, Inside Sales, Consultants, selected partners and Executives to successfully generate leads, create opportunities and capture new revenue 

Preferred Qualifications and Skills:

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with strong presentation skills
• Network on C-Level and VP-level
• Demonstrable track record of success with $250K+ deal size
• Exceptional prospecting skills
• Industry experience selling virtualization and containerization platforms and/or cloud native modernization solutions and/or container management and orchestration solutions.
• Start-up sales experience or start-up attitude preferred
• Sales 2.0 skill-set: use of Hubspot, LinkedIn SalesNavigator and similar tools;
• Must be prepared to travel
• Must be self-motivated, able to handle high-pressure situations and able to work in a target-oriented environment
• Bachelor degree is preferred.