SVP, Strategic Partnerships
About Catchafire
Catchafire is a full service, on-demand solution designed to address the wide-ranging and complex needs of nonprofits by connecting them with talented pro bono professionals. We partner with major funders (read more here) to provide unlimited access to Catchafire to tens of thousands of nonprofits ready to invest in the growth of their organizations and the impact of their service.
Our mission is simple: catalyze positive social change by building a stronger nonprofit sector fueled by talent abundance. Here are some ways to get to know us better:
About Role and the Department
Catchafire’s Strategic Partnerships team is our enterprise sales team and a key revenue driver of the company, supporting Catchafire’s mission by expanding and accelerating the adoption of Catchafire. The Strategic Partnerships Team is responsible for forging new and expanding existing business partnerships with grantmaking foundations and philanthropic institutions.
This is an exciting role for someone who is an expert seller and has successfully built and scaled an enterprise sales function. As the leader of the Strategic Partnerships team, you will be our most senior and expert enterprise sales person in addition to owning the management, building and scaling of this team and function. Your team is responsible for partnership development end-to-end: from setting a regional strategy to cold and warm prospecting and through shepherding partnership opportunities all the way through to close and beyond. This includes a mix of cold and warm outreach to new potential foundation partners, establishing meaningful relationships with senior leaders of existing foundation partners, developing and writing sophisticated and effective proposals, managing a robust pipeline, cultivating relationships with decision makers at various levels within the organization, and effectively communicating the value of Catchafire. Your role will be to ensure that we are setting the strategy, building the systems and processes, and hiring and developing the people to enable this work to flourish and grow.
As a member of the Executive Team, you will contribute to the evolution of our offering and of our organization, collaborating cross-functionally with other Catchafire leaders and strengthening our culture and values. We believe that building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team culture is critical to realizing our mission and our vision of an empathetic, inclusive, and loving world. We are seeking a leader who is committed to this journey with us.
Attributes
- Seasoned sales coach who sets the bar: You are adept at translating your ability to see and realize the long-term vision for partnerships and your ability to chart out the path to get there into clear expectations and a coaching style that elevates the performance of your teams. You have a hands on approach and provide specific and actionable guidance that enables your team to effectively address key areas of development successfully. The people you’ve coached progress in their careers and continue to come to you for continued advice because they trust your judgement.
- Rainmaker: You have demonstrated the ability to create demand and sustain relationships for a transformative and complex product or service. You are able to drive nuanced client discussions and co-create a compelling, long-term partnership vision that clients champion. You are highly skilled at ensuring that the proper balance of relationship and revenue is created and maintained as you advance strategic initiatives such evolving pricing and partnership structures or exploring new services.
- Empathetic but decisive people manager: Over the years you have developed an effective and intentional leadership style that is true to your own personality. You lead through listening, dialogue, and debate. Specifically, you have invested time in learning about how to build a diverse and inclusive team, and are a committed student in progressively learning how to do this better. You know that people management can be challenging at times, but you don’t shy away from tough situations and instead, take a measured approach and are incisive once you have the inputs you need. You manage to people’s strengths, and you are able to grow high potential individuals into people managers and leaders.
- Cross collaborative executive who is action oriented: You are often regarded as a thought leader, seeing opportunities before anyone else, and you bring your team and client along with you. You are highly skilled at managing cross-functional projects to fulfill business and impact objectives, giving clear, well-defined assignments, and managing people to own significant responsibilities. You create a sense of mutual accountability, build team spirit internally and externally, and follow up effectively to ensure momentum and create trust with your team through consistent behaviors.
Responsibilities
- People Management & Development: You will lead and manage a growing enterprise sales team that is currently 5 individuals. You will empower team members to grow and unleash their potential by setting clear expectations and creating valuable feedback cycles. By cultivating a strong team culture, you’ll create the conditions where each person feels a strong sense of belonging and where they are bought into the larger team vision and goals.
- Player / Coach: You will be responsible for leading and executing partnership development on our most strategic, high potential enterprise accounts. You will cultivate strong relationships with senior, influential leaders and shape a vision for long-term, high impact partnerships as well as effectively navigate the arc of the sale from prospecting through negotiations and close. You will be our most expert seller, deeply understanding the different facets of the sale and translating that knowledge into excellent sales training to develop the team.
- Function Building: You will oversee the day-to-day operations and ongoing build out of our business development function. While we have many strong processes, there is much to design and to evolve in order to scale the function. This will include, among other activities: organizational & role design, systems & process design & execution, building management structures, and designing how business development works with other functions.
- Revenue Strategy: As a revenue leader, your role will be critical in helping to strengthen and evolve revenue strategy and our sales approach in collaboration with other revenue leaders and your team. This will include work such as: synthesizing sector trends and client needs to inform our value proposition and marketing materials, pricing design, deal structures, and go-to-market strategies. In addition, you will own a P&L and be responsible for driving revenue outcomes to a particular financial target on both revenue and expenses.
- Outcomes Management: Working in conjunction with the Director of Revenue Operations and the Head of Revenue, you will be managing the BD team to an overall healthy “sales desk” and deeply collaborating with the members of your team to drive to target short term (annual bookings) and long term outcomes (ensuring strong ramp-up of sellers, driving customer lifetime value growth). You will need to be appropriately in the weeds at times and be able to zoom out in order to properly assess the team, identify areas to bolster and to be able to balance short term and longer term priorities.
- As a member of our Executive team, you will also contribute in these meaningful ways:
- Serve as thought leader and thought partner with other Executive Team members to shape the strategy of Catchafire as a whole
- Lead in the shaping of our organizational culture in alignment with Catchafire mission and values
Experience / Background
In order to be successful in this role you must meet most, of if not all, of the following needs:
- Extensive sales and sales leadership experience (perhaps 15+ years). You have:
- Strong track record in building partnerships from prospecting to close at an enterprise level that are in new or particularly challenging regions, are particularly innovative, transformative, visionary, or previously unproven, and highly strategic involving multiple stakeholders and levels of decision makers (ideally closing significant deals in the past 5 years)
- Track record of operational excellence when managing multiple high stakes work streams that affect stakeholders across multiple departments
- Proven experience building a high performance, cohesive sales team, including organizational design, shaping an inclusive culture, and hiring and developing individuals with diverse identities and backgrounds
- Exceptional presentation and verbal and written communications skills that enable you to both pitch Catchafire to leaders of their field and communicate your long term vision and strategic process to your internal stakeholders
- Commitment, experience OR interest in the social good sector
- Though prior experience in the social good sector is not required, we are seeking individuals looking to learn deeply about this space and quickly progress into thought leaders
- Familiarity with and a commitment to continued learning and development in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) issues and topics through professional and/or personal spaces.
- This experience might include:
- Understanding of DEI issues within the Philanthropy and Nonprofit sectors
- Experience in partnering or working with underrepresented or marginalized groups and/or the organizations that support them
- This experience might include:
- Though travel is usually expected in this role for up to one third of your time, we are currently not expecting employees to travel due to COVID-19 through at least Spring 2021 (though maybe longer), and are happy to discuss any reasonable accommodations you would need to succeed in this role
How to Apply
If our values resonate with you, email your resume to [email protected]. Please specify "SVP, Strategic Partnerships"in the subject, and include short answers (150 words or less) to the following questions in lieu of a formal cover letter:
- Why do you want to work at Catchafire?
- Please describe an experience where you led a transformative, complex sale as you were building out a sales function and what you were able to accomplish and what you learned.
Catchafire’s office is based in New York City, though we will be working remotely until at least April 2021 due to COVID-19. We will continue to assess our return date as the situation progresses, and consider our employees’ safety as a top priority.
Catchafire is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We are also welcoming to any reasonable accommodations that can be made for candidates in our hiring process.
Apply here