Founding Sales Executive

Job Description

Founding Account Executive

AI-Powered Legal & Transaction Intelligence Platform

The Opportunity

An emerging AI company is seeking a Founding Account Executive to help drive new customer acquisition, manage enterprise sales cycles, and convert qualified opportunities into successful pilots and long-term customer relationships.

This is a mid-career, hands-on role for someone with demonstrable B2B SaaS sales experience, ideally selling legal technology, compliance solutions, risk intelligence platforms, data products, workflow automation tools, or other enterprise software into sophisticated professional services organizations and transaction-driven businesses.

The ideal candidate understands how to sell to discerning buyers, including law firms, corporate legal departments, private equity firms, corporate development teams, compliance organizations, and other enterprise stakeholders. You should be comfortable communicating the value of AI-powered intelligence and risk management solutions within high-stakes business environments.

This individual will own opportunities from qualified lead through pilot launch and commercial close while working closely with company leadership, customer success, and product teams. The role offers the opportunity to help shape customer use cases, influence product direction, and build a repeatable enterprise sales motion from the ground up.

Key Responsibilities

Sales Execution

• Own the sales process from qualified opportunity through pilot launch and commercial close.
• Guide prospective customers in understanding how the platform fits within their existing workflows and business processes.
• Identify high-value use cases, build urgency, and navigate complex stakeholder environments.
• Convert initial interest into pilot engagements, subscriptions, and expansion opportunities.
• Manage opportunities from discovery through proposal development, negotiation, and close.
• Conduct discovery meetings with legal, compliance, investment, corporate development, operational, and executive stakeholders.

Enterprise Account Development

• Clearly articulate the company's value proposition to sophisticated enterprise buyers, including law firms, private equity firms, institutional investors, and transaction-focused organizations.
• Develop account strategies and prioritize the highest-potential growth opportunities.
• Lead product demonstrations that connect platform capabilities to specific customer challenges and workflows.
• Build trusted relationships with senior decision-makers across legal, investment, compliance, corporate development, and executive functions.
• Structure pilots and proof-of-concept engagements with clearly defined success criteria, timelines, user groups, and commercial objectives.
• Maintain disciplined follow-up, stakeholder mapping, and opportunity management throughout the sales cycle.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Customer Success to ensure seamless transitions from sales through onboarding, adoption, renewal, and expansion.
• Track pipeline performance, activity, opportunity status, and customer intelligence within the CRM.
• Capture and communicate customer feedback, competitive insights, objections, and enhancement requests to leadership and product teams.
• Help establish scalable sales processes, messaging frameworks, objection-handling strategies, demo methodologies, outreach sequences, and account playbooks.
• Bring structure and consistency to founder-led sales and commercial conversations.
• Communicate complex product capabilities in a way that resonates with sophisticated enterprise buyers and decision-makers.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate combines practical enterprise software sales experience with a strong understanding of legal, transactional, compliance, or professional services environments.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of quota-carrying B2B SaaS sales experience.
• Experience selling legal technology, compliance software, data platforms, workflow solutions, AI applications, risk intelligence platforms, or related enterprise software.
• Demonstrated success managing complete sales cycles, including discovery, qualification, demonstrations, stakeholder management, proposal development, negotiation, and closing.
• Experience selling to law firms, legal departments, compliance organizations, private equity firms, investment banks, corporate development teams, or other sophisticated enterprise buyers.
• Understanding of how legal, compliance, investment, and transaction-focused teams evaluate software solutions and business value.
• Ability to communicate credibly and professionally with senior stakeholders, including partners, general counsel, compliance leaders, investment professionals, and executives.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong pipeline management, commercial judgment, and follow-through.
• Ability to thrive in an early-stage, fast-changing environment where priorities can evolve quickly.
• Familiarity with modern SaaS sales methodologies, including qualification frameworks, stakeholder mapping, forecasting, pilot programs, renewals, and expansion selling.
• Strong interest in AI, legal technology, deal intelligence, regulatory compliance, risk management, and emerging enterprise software trends.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience selling legal software or legal technology solutions.
• Experience managing enterprise pilots, proofs of concept, or complex software implementations.
• Familiarity with private equity, mergers and acquisitions, corporate development, investment banking, compliance, or transaction diligence workflows.
• Experience selling to professional services firms or institutional financial organizations.
• Hands-on CRM experience, including platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce, or similar systems.
• Experience within an early-stage startup or high-growth SaaS environment.
• Exposure to fintech, regtech, compliance technology, market intelligence, risk intelligence, or AI products.
• Prior experience working within or alongside law firms, legal departments, investment banks, private equity firms, corporate development teams, or consulting organizations.

Why This Role?

This position is ideal for a sales professional who has enough SaaS experience to independently manage enterprise opportunities while also possessing the curiosity and entrepreneurial mindset required to help build a company.

This is not a senior sales leadership position. Rather, it is an opportunity for a high-performing Account Executive to work closely with founders, influence the go-to-market strategy, own meaningful revenue opportunities, and grow alongside a rapidly scaling AI software business.