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) :

Requirements

Role Evolution

Difference From SDR / BDR

Compensation

$90,000 - $150,000 OTE

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

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

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 :

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