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Vice President, World Wide Sales
Who is Kong?
Kong delivers a next-generation API and service lifecycle management platform designed for modern architectures, including microservices, containers, cloud and serverless. Offering high flexibility, scalability, speed and performance, Kong enables developers and Global 5,000 enterprises to reliably secure, connect and orchestrate microservice APIs for modern applications. Kong is building the future of service control platforms to intelligently broker information across services. For more information about Kong, please visit https://konghq.com/ or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.
Kong is seeking a global sales leader to help us build and grow the Kong API platform. You are a seasoned industry leader who will lead our sales organization globally and drive business results and revenue. Reporting to the CEO, this senior leadership position will have ownership and accountability to ensure Kong maximizes our market potential bringing in new customers as well as growing our existing clients. This leader will work closely with our other senior leadership to ensure decisions are driving the overall Kong business goals and our long term vision continues to thrive.
Location: Ideally San Francisco
Opportunity:
The incoming executive will play a part in reshaping and leading the incredible growth of Kong. It is the intention of the leadership team to build a high quality, sustainable and strong sales organization. To date, a significant amount of Kong’s success has been gained through the quality of our product, our global account base, our adoption by the open source community and by inbound leads. You will build and strengthen a quality, scalable, global sales organization focused on acquisition of new brands and targeted account plans. Kong is the perfect environment for you to have a significant impact and grow our amazing company. We are a people first organization and expect you to be the same.
Key Responsibilities:
- This leader will lead the global sales organization and be a key member of the leadership team with responsibility for the following:
- Deliver high quality and predictable sales results and growth globally.
- Be accountable for the sales forecasting, budgeting, reporting process.
- Hire, train and lead a global sales organization.
- Design/develop a sales organization structure to execute the company’s strategy and achieve growth objectives.
- Create cultural alignment and accountability within the global sales team.
- Drive collaboration with the executive team to achieve Kong’s overall goals
- Partner with Kong leaders (e.g. in Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and more) to achieve its quarterly, annual, and long-term goals.
- Consolidate quarterly updates of progress against plans.
- Lead, along with the relevant teams, key client and prospect relationships at an executive level.
Areas of focus:
- Sales execution and leadership.
- Develop a high performing experienced sales team that is aligned with company values (Global, Real, Unstoppable, Champions, Explorers ).
- Build a globally dispersed sales organization (direct sales, SDRs, ISRs, pre-sales and operations)
- Grow revenues from new customers and within existing clients in line with company targets and budgets.
- Improve financial visibility and strengthen accountability for forecasting, planning and performance management.
Target Candidates Profile:
- 15+ years of Industry experience in software technology, with at least 7+ years specifically in infrastructure software.
- Exceptional sales leader with demonstrable experience of scale and fast growth.
- Track record of building and leading global sales teams.
- Character and cultural fit is as important as sales results.
- Experience with open source technologies.
- Proven track record of developing systems and processes for scale.
- Field orientated player coach.
- International Experience.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to identify and provide comprehensive solutions for varying client needs.
- Strong business judgement and critical thinking skills with the ability to use data to quickly establish highest value priorities and develop a strategy to pursue them.
- Ability to drive results across cross-functional teams, manage by influence, and work effectively in a global organization.
- Demonstrated ability to coach teams on critical business skills, including large scale project management capabilities.
- Passionate about software innovation, keen to learn and understand the intricacies of Kong's products and technology.