About The Role
Yard Stick is looking for a Director of Business Development to help us fight climate change with soil.
To date, two-ish people have done the bulk of Yard Stick’s customer discovery, business development, commercial strategy-setting, and selling: Chris Tolles (CEO) and Kelsey Chan (Head of Growth + Partnerships). To accomplish our ambitious climate impact and commercial revenue goals, Yard Stick must transition from being primarily a founder-led sales effort to one with dedicated team members and expertise 100% focused on growing the company’s top line. We have demonstrated incredible early traction and are ready to accelerate our efforts to win more and bigger contracts for work in our wheelhouse, namely soil C stock quantification on row crop and grazing agricultural soils in the US.
We’re looking for a biz dev powerhouse to build on our existing foundation and take commercial growth to the next level. This person will get inside the heads and hearts of our customers, build trust with prospects (often over months and longer!), iterate on our marketing/messaging for maximum resonance, craft home-run proposals, and generally sell the shit out of our offering.
This role must both be the type to knock down a door driving toward a signed contract, and be incredibly curious and empathetic in the way they collaborate with other Yard Stick stakeholders, both external and internal. It will start as a 100% IC role with potential to grow into a team lead for the right person, but the most compelling candidate must be thrilled if it doesn’t become a management role for even a few years.
This full-time remote role will report to Kelsey Chan, starting ASAP in 2025. To get specific, we have an all-company onsite planned for Feb 25-27, so ideally this role starts on Feb 25. 😳
If you have expertise in this domain, thrive in a high growth startup environment, and are ready to advance our soil carbon mission, read on!
About Yard Stick PBC
Yard Stick is a remote-first climate tech startup with a hardware lab in Oakland, CA and team members all over the US. We are on a mission to reverse climate change with agriculture. Scientists and farmers alike know that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric CO2 at gigaton/year scale. When these practices are adopted, more carbon is stored in soils, improving soil health and fighting climate change. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon efforts back - until now.
By reducing the cost of soil carbon measurement by 70-90%, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer income, and combat climate change.
Current soil carbon measurement technologies are slow, expensive, and cumbersome, relying on conventional soil cores and labs to quantify carbon stocks. In contrast, Yard Stick is fast and cheap - without sacrificing accuracy. As a testament to our technology’s potential, alongside our scientific collaborators, we were awarded $18M across six USDA Climate-Smart Commodities projects, and we have additional grant financing from ARPA-E, NSF, CDFA, and other discerning grant-makers. We’ve also raised another nearly $18M from top climate VCs, including Toyota Climate Venture Fund, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates’ climate fund), Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Extania, Pillar VC, MCJ Collective… the list goes on!
We offer competitive salary and equity (benchmarked to 75th percentile of high-growth US tech compensation), health/dental/vision insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. We have many team members with young families and have a strong track record of creative, flexible approaches to hours and communication expectations which let folks feel great about their commitments both to Yard Stick and their lives outside of work.
We’re also a PBC, or public benefit corporation, which is an alternative corporate structure which protects our ability to prioritize climate impact over profits if the two are in conflict. You can read more about PBCs in this article which also specifically features Yard Stick. ResponsibilitiesSell large, well-fit projects: Sales at Yard Stick is a more-complex process of understanding customer requirements, educating prospects regarding options, and iterating on pricing and project format in a collaborative mode. That said, the #1 KPI for this role is revenue signed, so with the right raw materials (e.g. tech maturity, basic market assets, strategic clarity), which you’ll help create and refine, you’ll win big soil carbon measurement contracts for the company quickly and consistently. You’ll identify the right customer targets, create account and customer segment strategies, plan outreach, present demos and proposals, negotiate contracts, and assist in smooth handoff to our Customer Success team as projects kick off. Build and own a healthy sales pipeline: You know the company goals and will execute effective inbound and outbound sales strategies to meet them. You will identify and qualify high quality leads and will prioritize and manage this pipeline in HubSpot with meticulous data hygiene and reporting used on the reg for all-team alignment. Inform overall commercial and product strategy: Since you’re the tip of the spear with customer prospects all day, you’ll understand the market in unique ways. Your insights will help refine the company’s ideal customer personas, define segment-specific commercial strategies, and inform new customer experiments we’ll want to run to build a lean, successful commercial organization. You will prioritize and execute high value partnerships when a straight selling approach isn’t ideal. You’ll also serve as a key internal voice of the customer to ensure our actual offering is well-aligned to market needs. Tell the company story: This is primarily a revenue-focused role rather than brand marketing, but guess what… we don’t have any dedicated marketing people! 😛 Where appropriate, you’ll attend industry conferences for prospect development, contribute to Yard Stick brand awareness in earned media and speaking opportunities, follow and guide market trends, influence key non-customer stakeholders, and broadly participate in the soil carbon sector with authority. Partner for success: Yard Stick’s offering spans hardware, software, soil science, and many other disciplines. You’ll partner with these folks to inform future product features/direction/tech priorities and to accurately scope the technical details of proposals with unique characteristics. This role will focus on scaling our “known” business of soil C stock quantification in row crop and grazing lands in the US, but you’ll allocate a reasonable % of your time to emergent commercial opportunities such as international work, which will require even closer collaboration with Chris, Kelsey, and members of the tech team who best understand what a new project context means for Yard Stick’s technical readiness and feasibility. Qualifications (Must Have)Demonstrable expertise leading relevant enterprise biz dev, GTM, or early sales efforts. People call this work different things - we don’t particularly care about vocabulary, but we care enormously about expertise. Put simply, you’ve done this job before. You’ve been given an early-stage thing to sell and have successfully sold it at the scale of many millions of dollars. “Relevant” in this case could include various kinds of overall with Yard Stick’s offerings: Services offerings, IRL “field”-based offerings, offerings sold it/to big ag companies, climate offerings, science-y/highly technical offerings, time-based offerings (e.g. something which is inherently recurring like measurement over time or “tracking” offerings), and/or offerings in regulated industries where “standards” and “protocol alignment” are important. You love relational business development where you must get “in the head” of your customer to educate, build trust, and get to yes. You’re not intimidated by education, proposal, and sales processes which can last months (or sometimes years!). You are hungry. You will run through a brick wall to hit your number. Comfort selling in emerging tech risk/complexity contexts. Yard Stick is literally the first company in the history of the world to deploy our technologies commercially. There are significant unknowns (Can we do almonds? What about peat?!?!?) but you can handle that. You will thread the needle with customers regarding what is known vs. not while all the while building trust. You won’t overpromise which risks under-delivery… nor will you get freaked out that we’re naturally building the airplane while we’re flying it. You deftly balance the key goal of getting a customer to “yes” while also being crystal clear about our technology’s more- and less-mature aspects.Excellent management of complex pricing and contracting processes. Offerings like ours which are priced uniquely on a per-customer basis don’t freak you out. You’ll gather the required details, operate and manage internal pricing/scoping tools, and figure out pricing which satisfies both customer willingness to pay and company ops/capacity/financial targets. A 12-page services agreement doesn’t faze you. You’re not a lawyer, but you understand how contracts work and will carefully and patiently trade edits until all parties are happy, pulling in expert support when necessary. Bespoke “enterprise” offerings which are larger in dollar value and smaller in number of deals is your happy place. Flawless organization of complex information. Since you’ll often be the only person with a specific piece of customer/GTM information, documenting, interpreting, and sharing it well is paramount. Doubly so since Yard Stick is a remote-first company. You’re a little obsessive with folder organization and file naming conventions, and you love setting up lightweight systems to make sure everybody can see the right stuff at the right time without always asking you for help. You’ll have to keep track of dozens of leads at varying stages of maturity, and that’s fine - you’ll just design a process to keep it all under control (fwiw we’re spun up on HubSpot already). Notion or similar is your love language. You’re encouraged to learn that Yard Stick has a 10-page internal communication norms document. You write very well. Strong personal independence and entrepreneurial autonomy. You beg forgiveness rather than ask permission. You don’t sit around waiting for the CEO to answer your question, but rather get it done one way or another with what you’ve got. You assess the situation, consider solutions, make a plan, and execute. You tend to get way out ahead of everybody else and anticipate others’ needs well. Ownership and (appropriate) autonomy are key to your fulfillment. Nonetheless, you understand and respect what’s your job and what’s not, and you collaborate deeply and effectively with other teams at Yard Stick. Personal, durable enthusiasm for the challenge of climate change. It matters to you that you’re working on a problem of existential significance. You get fired up by the fact that your work can help avoid others’ suffering. You’re briefly overwhelmed by the scale of the problem... and then you’re right back in the ring doing your part. Qualifications (Nice To Have)Can start FAST. As mentioned above, we have our twice-annual all-company onsite starting Feb 25, and that’s the ideal start date for this role so they can make all the friends. The right person is much more important than the fast person, but all things equal a candidate who can start sooner (e.g. on Feb 25!) will be more competitive. Prior experience at a high-growth start-up. Yard Stick is a small, young, ambitious company. We move very quickly and have big goals. You understand the pace of early-stage tech startups and can move at a similar pace yourself. Note this is not about work hours per se - most people at Yard Stick work “normal” work hours. An appetite for growth means you know what a high-growth company feels like and expects, and you’re signing up for that experience. Prior experience and/or relationships in agriculture, soil science, carbon markets, land use, MRV, and similar. This isn’t required, but it’d obviously be super helpful to accelerate your time-to-impact at the company. If you already know people who need soil C MRV services, you will be way more attractive as a candidate! Comfort with any aspects of enterprise marketing. Can you write legit sales copy? Design a world-class pitch deck? Give a banger of a keynote? We’d love to know! To be clear, this role will not currently be supported by a marketing person, so you’ll have to do a bunch of this whether you’re an expert or not. You must be “passable” in these domains, but if you’re actually exceptional in any, please say so since that will significantly improve your attractiveness as a candidate. Familiarity with CRM/pipeline systems (e.g. HubSpot). Again not required, but if you don’t have experience with these tools, we’ll need to see evidence of prior work on similar software and would need confidence that you can get up to speed with HubSpot very quickly, since our working assumption is that switching CRM providers is not important in the early days of this role. Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Yard Stick’s impact goals go well beyond climate science. Why? Our company operates primarily in the US agricultural sector, which is predicated on centuries of mass land theft and disenfranchisement of Native and Black people. This harm continues today. If we’re going to work in this sector, we need to leave it better than we found it.
Consistent with our core value of “Pursue Justice,” we talk about these issues publicly, including when it’s uncomfortable, and we also put significant effort into ensuring that our own internal practices are Pursue Justice-aligned:
• We standardize our interview process and questions to reduce “likeability” bias when hiring. We benchmark salaries against industry databases to ensure fair pay for all, and we utilize tools like the Gender Decoder to ensure everyone feels welcome to apply.
• We work to create an environment where everyone feels confident sharing their ideas, problem-solving happens openly and collaboratively, and where mistake-making is welcomed. We evaluate ourselves against our core values twice-annually and discuss opportunities for improvement candidly as a whole team. Team members are evaluated formally once per year, and executive evaluations are done “360”-style.
• Great management is critical in this domain. We’ve formalized our expectations of high-performance management to ensure managers can be held accountable for healthy teams.
• We organize lunchtime all-team discussions on issues like labor equity in Florida produce, Pigford v. Glickman (the largest US civil rights settlement in history), whether carbon offsets are “good or bad,” and other contemporary moral concerns in agriculture and climate change.
Climate change is arguably the most complex challenge ever faced by humanity - we need all of humanity activated to fight back, and that motivates us to build a diverse, engaged, healthy, supported team.
