Kong
Commercial Sales Director - Americas
Job Summary
The role involves leading and mentoring a sales team focused on the API management space within a high-growth SaaS environment. The candidate will develop strategic sales plans, build customer relationships, and collaborate with marketing and product teams to drive sales and expand the customer base. Significant emphasis is placed on sales leadership, pipeline management, and technical product understanding. The role also includes recruiting new team members, representing the company at industry events, and providing accurate sales forecasting.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
Are you ready to power the World's connections?
About the role:
- Lead and mentor a fast-growing team of Commercial account executives.
- Work closely with the Vice President of Sales to drive Kong’s success by adding new sales opportunities to the pipeline and closing them.
- Develop and execute strategic sales plans to achieve sales targets and expand our customer base in the region.
-Lead and mentor the regional sales team, setting performance standards, and monitoring progress.
- Build and maintain strong, long-lasting customer relationships, understanding their unique needs and how Kong’s solutions can meet them.
- Partner closely with the marketing team to identify and target key accounts, and to craft compelling value propositions for Kong’s solutions.
- Collaborate with the product team to relay customer feedback and ensure our solutions are aligned with market demands.
- Negotiate contracts and close agreements to maximize profits while maintaining Kong’s standard of excellence.
- Understand the competitive market landscape and position Kong’s solutions effectively.
- Represent Kong at industry conferences, tradeshows, and networking events to enhance brand visibility and generate leads.
- Provide detailed and accurate sales forecasting, leveraging Kong’s CRM tools for sales reporting and pipeline management.
- Recruit, onboard and ramp up new hires effectively
- And any additional tasks required by the manager.
What you'll bring to Kong:
- Minimum of 10 years of sales experience in the technology sector, with 3-5 years in a leadership role in a startup environment.
- Strong understanding of the API management space, cloud services, and the broader technology landscape.
- Experience building and leading high-performance sales teams at a high-growth SaaS company, selling a complex technical product.
- Experience in successfully selling SaaS solutions in a field sales capacity.
- Experience accurately forecasting and managing pipelines.A history of scaling teams quickly, with knowledge of effectively recruiting, training and ramping new hires.
- The ability to work cross-functionally, partnering closely with marketing, enablement, operations and other organisations within the company.
- Outstanding verbal and written communication skills.
- Strong understanding of the API management space, cloud services, and the broader technology landscape.
Kong has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently in different geographic markets. Compensation varies depending on a wide array of factors, including but not limited to specific candidate location, role, skill set and level of experience. Certain roles are eligible for additional rewards including sales incentives depending on the terms of the applicable plan and role. Benefits may vary depending on location. US based employees are typically offered access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, short and long term disability benefits, basic life and AD&D insurance, among others. The typical OTE pay range for this role in the US is $300,000-$325,000.
About Kong:
Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, is on a mission to enable companies around the world to become “API-first” and securely accelerate AI adoption. Kong helps organizations globally — from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — unleash developer productivity, build securely, and accelerate time to market. For more information about Kong, please visitwww.konghq.com or follow us on X @thekonginc.
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Kong
Kong is the most widely adopted API gateway and service mesh, powering the world’s APIs for modern architectures. Accelerate development and productivity today!
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