Growth Lead

Awarded is a fast-growing B2B SaaS company serving higher education institutions. Our platform helps financial aid and advancement teams at universities, from community colleges to the Ivy League, manage critical fund and donor workflows that were previously stuck in spreadsheets and legacy systems. We're a lean, senior team backed by strong investors, with best-in-class customer retention and a high-velocity product roadmap our customers are very excited about.

We're at the stage where the founder-led go-to-market motion is working very well — and we're looking for a highly motivated individual to help scale and run it. This isn't a sales leadership role, but more focused on strategy & operations.

This is a high-ownership role for an operator who wants to run the commercial engine of an early-stage company end to end. You'll take over the systems, vendors, processes, and day-to-day GTM execution currently handled by the CEO.

You'll see every part of how a SaaS company acquires, closes, and retains revenue — and work directly with the CEO daily. If you want to eventually start or run something yourself, there are few faster educations.

You are not a strategist who needs a team to execute, and you're not a systems admin who stays behind the dashboard. You're the person who builds the machine and runs it — and who measures success by how much faster and cleaner the whole commercial operation gets.

It's a hands-on lead position with real management responsibility and a direct line to the CEO, at a company where your work is visible in the numbers every week.

Pipeline & Outbound

• Manage our outbound program end to end

• Own list strategy, messaging iteration, and meeting quality — not just volume

Sales Team Operations

• Day-to-day management of our account executive function: pipeline reviews, deal support, coaching cadence

• Partner with the CEO on strategic and enterprise deals while independently driving mid-market opportunities forward

Deals & Commercial Execution

• Own proposals, RFP/RFQ responses, and the supporting content library

• Coordinate contracts and invoicing from draft through signature to billing

• Manage security/procurement questionnaire responses in partnership with our compliance resources

Systems & Data

• Own our CRM and GTM tech stack: administration, data quality, enrichment, and vendor relationships

• Evaluate, negotiate, and manage GTM vendors and tools

• Build the reporting layer: funnel metrics, conversion rates, pipeline coverage, forecast accuracy

• Identify repetitive commercial workflows and automate them out of existence

• 3–7 years in high-performance environments: early-stage B2B SaaS, management consulting, banking/PE, or a GTM/BizOps generalist role. If you're coming from consulting or finance, you should be hungry to trade analysis for ownership.

• You've carried or closely supported a sales motion perhaps as a former AE/SDR, an SDR manager, a deal desk owner, or an ops person embedded with a sales team or you've spent years driving complex commercial workstreams (proposals, RFPs, client deliverables) at an elite standard and want to own the outcome, not just the workproduct

• You've managed people or vendors and know the difference between delegating and abdicating

• You're systems-fluent (HubSpot or equivalent CRM, sales engagement tools, data enrichment) — or you're the kind of person who becomes systems-fluent in a month — but you never confuse buying a tool with solving a problem

• You build with AI, not just use it. E.g., you've turned real workflows into automations, prompts, or agents that run without you, and when you see a manual process your first instinct is "why is a person still doing this?"

• You're unbothered by unglamorous work (chasing an invoice, fixing CRM data, rewriting a cold email for the fourth time) because you care about the outcome, not the optics

• You write clearly, move fast, communicate directly, and are comfortable being measured on output

• You want ownership over a whole surface area, not a narrow lane at a bigger company

Nice to have, not required: experience selling to universities, government, or other procurement-heavy buyers; exposure to RFP-driven sales cycles; experience working with offshore or agency GTM teams.

• Competitive salary plus performance bonus

• Meaningful equity

• A role that expands as the company does (the scope you own in year two won't look like year one)

• Direct partnership with the CEO and real influence over company trajectory

• Full medical, dental, and vision coverage

• A team that ships fast, communicates directly, and doesn't do performative work