Head of Sales, SMB
Take HeyHomie from referral-led to repeatable — and own the number end to end.
Location
Bangalore (in-office)
Work model
On-site
Type
Full-time
Experience
3–5+ years
Compensation
Base + variable + ESOPs
Reports to
Founder & CEO
Trajectory
IC → player-coach → leader
Referral-led is a wonderful problem. It doesn’t scale to thousands on its own.
We are an Official Meta Technology Partner. Store setup, payments, shipping, WhatsApp marketing automation and AI-powered lifecycle — one subscription. The product is real, shipping, and paying its way.
Close to 100% of growth has been referral or partner-led across 22+ categories. Small average ticket; volume, velocity and repeatability are the game. The partner GTM pieces — DMAs, agencies, community leaders — are on the table. The engine hasn’t been assembled.
We have a clear ICP and a ₹299 paid trial that gives a tight read on intent. This is the moment to install someone who can take what’s working, codify it, scale it, and own the number end to end.
“The founder still closes a meaningful share of deals. This is the role that makes that stop being the constraint — without losing the discipline.”
We are hiring someone to take HeyHomie from referral-led to repeatable.
Today, almost every paying seller arrived through word of mouth or a partner introduction. That is a great problem to have — and exactly why this role exists.
Over the next 12 to 18 months we want to onboard thousands of paying SMBs. Not by hiring a bigger team and hoping. Not by burning ad money against an unclear funnel. By building a sales engine that works: tight ICP, a sub-7-day sales cycle, a playbook a new joinee can run by week three, and CAC payback that holds up to honest scrutiny.
You build it — first as an IC closing deals yourself, then as a player-coach hiring and ramping a small team, then as the leader of a function that delivers quarter after quarter.
The founder still closes a meaningful share of deals. Your job is to make that stop being the constraint — without losing the discipline that founder-led selling brings.
You own the number — end to end.
Closing deals as an IC
You personally run discovery, demo, objection handling and closing for at least the first 90 days — and a meaningful share of strategic deals well beyond that. You don’t get to ask for an SDR before you’ve filled your own calendar. Staying close to the buyer is how you keep the playbook honest.
Building the playbook
ICP definitions, qualification, discovery questions, demo flow, trial-to-paid mechanics, objection scripts, pricing conversations, win-loss patterns. Usable by a new joinee in week one. Updated monthly, because no playbook stays right.
Hiring, ramping and managing
You write the BDR and AE JDs, define ramp expectations, design the comp plan with the founder, and hire people you’d want to work for. You coach weekly, run pipeline reviews, and part ways quickly and fairly with the ones who won’t make it.
Owning the number
Monthly, quarterly, annual. You commit, track, forecast and deliver. Misses come with data and a corrective plan, not narrative. Beats come with an explanation of what’s repeatable.
Channel strategy and execution
Inbound, outbound, partner-led, community-led, events. You decide the mix, allocate effort and report economics per channel — working with Marketing on lead quality and Partnerships on co-selling with DMAs, agencies and community leads.
Sales ops and CRM hygiene
You own the CRM: stage definitions, conversion gates, activity tracking, dashboards, forecasting cadence. Reps don’t get to “forget to update.” You set the standard and live by it yourself.
Pricing and packaging experiments
You collaborate with founder and product on pricing tests, and feed back what buyers actually say about the ₹299 trial, annual plans, add-ons and upgrades — controlled experiments, not gut-led changes.
Sales-to-CS handoff
You design the handoff so each seller is sold for the right reason, with the right expectations, and CS gets the context to deliver. NRR is downstream of you, and you treat it that way.
Reporting and forecasting
Weekly to the founder, monthly to leadership, quarterly to investors when relevant. You make the sales picture legible to anyone who needs to understand it.
Cross-functional leadership
You sit at the table with Marketing, Product, Customer Success, Partnerships and Finance — on lead quality, win-loss themes, onboarding handoff, expansion signals, commission design and unit economics.
Twelve to eighteen months in, here’s what working looks like.
You will be measured on outcomes, not activity.
Thousands of paying SMBs
Not just trial sign-ups — genuinely activated, paying, expanding sellers, brought in through a motion you designed and built.
A repeatable playbook
ICP, channels, qualification, discovery, demo, trial mechanics, objection handling, pricing, closing — documented so a new AE is productive inside 30 days.
A small, high-performing team
Likely 4–8 across BDR and AE by month 12, each with a clear quota, process and accountability — hired, ramped and coached by you.
Healthy unit economics
CAC payback inside an agreed threshold, trial-to-paid above benchmark, sales cycle in days not weeks, pipeline coverage at 3× or better, and CAC by channel you can defend with data.
A working multi-channel motion
Inbound, outbound where it pays back, partner-led (DMAs, agencies, communities like PULA, HEN India, FICCI FLO, JITO Ladies Wing, Gurgaon Moms) and event-led where the economics make sense — mix decided by data.
Forecast accuracy within tight bands
No hero quarters followed by dead quarters. Predictability.
A clean handoff to Customer Success
Customers who close don’t feel sold to and dropped. Downstream NRR, GRR and churn reflect the quality of who you brought in.
We don’t expect a parachute drop. We expect a deliberate ramp.
Days 1–30 · Listen, learn, sell
Most of your time goes into calls. You shadow the founder on every type of deal, talk to at least 20 customers (paying and churned), and close a handful of deals yourself end to end. You learn the product well enough to demo it cold, and audit the CRM, the data, the pipeline and every partner who matters.
Days 31–60 · Codify and test
You write version one of the playbook and define ICP with precision: who buys, activates, retains, expands, churns. You run controlled experiments on outbound, partner-led and inbound to separate repeatable from lucky. You design the BDR and AE comp plan and begin interviewing your first hire.
Days 61–90 · Build the engine
You hire your first BDR or AE and ramp them on the playbook you wrote. You start owning a monthly number and report to the founder weekly with cohort, pipeline and channel-level data. By day 90, the founder can step out of most deals without the pipeline noticing.
An operator who owns the number.
Experience (minimum)
- 3 to 5+ years of proven SaaS sales experience. Selling to SMBs — ideally Indian SMBs — strongly preferred. WhatsApp, commerce, marketing automation or D2C tooling is a plus, not a requirement.
- A track record of meaningful numbers, not vanity ones. You can talk ACV, AOV, sales cycle, win rate, conversion, CAC, CAC payback and NRR with real specifics.
- At least one stretch building from early stage to scale — second or third sales hire, a region from scratch, a segment from ground zero, or the first real playbook. Hitting quota inside a 100-person team is not what we need.
- Hands-on selling, not only management. You’ve closed deals in the last 12 months. If your last individual quota was three years ago, this isn’t the fit.
- Team building — you’ve hired, ramped and let go of sales people, and you know what good looks like in a BDR and an AE.
Skills we expect
- Fluency in SaaS metrics — and, more importantly, which ones matter at which stage.
- Sales process design: turning a messy founder-led motion into stages, conversion gates, qualification and a forecastable pipeline.
- CRM in anger (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho or similar) — pipelines, dashboards, automations, routing and reporting without depending on a vendor.
- Discovery and demo that uncover real pain — and a demo you can run in 12 minutes or 40.
- Forecasting to a 5–10% accuracy band by week six, plus the coaching instinct to fix a junior rep’s call in three notes.
- Crisp written communication — a one-page playbook section, a half-page weekly update, and a sales email that gets replies.
Attitude (non-negotiable)
- You take ownership of the number — not the leads, not the product, not the market. If the leads are wrong, you fix the leads.
- You sell with integrity. No overselling, no bait-and-switch. We sell to first-generation entrepreneurs; trust is the entire business.
- You build, you don’t maintain. You like ambiguity and figuring it out. You write the deck; you don’t wait for one.
- You’re coachable yourself — you take feedback from the founder, peers and reports, and you change behaviour because of it.
- You operate with urgency without panic. Speed matters; judgment matters more.
- You care about the homepreneur — often a first-time, often a woman building a business alongside everything else. If you can’t summon genuine empathy for that buyer, this won’t land.
From first close to function leader. By design.
Months 0–3 · The IC
You close deals yourself, end to end. You fill your own calendar before you ask for an SDR. You learn the buyer cold and prove the motion is real.
Months 3–9 · The Player-Coach
You hire your first BDR/AE and ramp them on the playbook you wrote. You own a monthly number while still closing strategic deals yourself.
Months 9–18 · The Leader
A team of 4–8 across BDR and AE, hired and coached by you. A function that delivers quarter after quarter — and a seat at the leadership table.
The path is owned by you. The faster you build the engine, the faster you lead it.
What this seat gives you that a bigger company can’t.
Base plus variable, structured competitively for senior SaaS sales leadership in Bangalore, with meaningful ESOPs — specifics aligned at offer stage, variable tied to outcomes you can directly influence. But the cash is not the reason to take this seat.
You build the engine, you don’t inherit it
Almost every seller today came by word of mouth. You design the repeatable motion that takes HeyHomie from referral-led to thousands of paying SMBs. That playbook is yours.
Direct founder access, every day
You report to the founder and take the deals off their plate. Every pricing test, every channel call, every forecast — you’re in the room, not waiting on a meeting.
A product that already earns its customers
PMF earned the hard way: a ₹299 paid trial that reads intent, 22+ categories, sellers who refer sellers. You scale demand that already exists, not demand you have to manufacture.
The seat where the function gets built
Not a corner office managing a finished team. The first real sales hire, building BDR and AE from zero, with equity that reflects a build role at an early-stage company.
“If you read all of that and the loudest thing in your head is still the cash number, this is not the role. We will not be hurt if you decide that. We will be hurt if you join and decide it after.”
You should apply if
- You have built a repeatable sales motion 0→1 inside another SaaS company — second or third sales hire, a region from scratch, or the first real playbook.
- You have closed deals in the last 12 months and are equally at home on a sales call and in a spreadsheet.
- You can talk about ACV, sales cycle, win rate, CAC payback and NRR with real specifics, not adjectives.
- You have hired, ramped and let go of sales people, and can back it up with references.
- You already have an opinion on the WhatsApp and SMB commerce space — before reading this JD.
- You want to build a category-defining sales engine and do the unglamorous work to get there.
Do not apply if
- You want a “give me leads and I’ll close them” seat. Here you generate, qualify and close — especially in the first six months.
- You’re built for 18-month consultative enterprise cycles. This is small deals, days-not-months cycles, volume and velocity.
- You want to manage from a corner. You’ll be on calls, in the CRM, and in the field with partners — there’s nowhere to hide, and that’s a feature.
- You’re optimising for the next title bump rather than building the engine.
- You want a remote-first or fully remote role. We’re in-office in Bangalore.
- You can’t summon genuine empathy for a first-generation entrepreneur, often a woman building a business alongside everything else.
How to apply
We read every application.
- 01Hit “Apply for this role” and complete the form. Include your CV.
- 02Add a short note (under 300 words) on the most repeatable sales motion you have personally built — what made it repeatable, and what you’d do differently today.
- 03Bring one number from a past role (a conversion rate, a sales-cycle reduction, quota attainment over time, CAC payback) with the context for why it was hard.
- 04Be ready to share two references — one from a peer, one from a direct report. We move fast: if it’s a fit, you’ll know within two weeks.
We are taking HeyHomie from referral-led to repeatable. This is the seat that builds it.
