Go-To-Market Manager (Contract)

About First Round

First Round is a venture capital firm that works with founders exclusively at the earliest stages of company building, often when all they have is an “imagine if.” We fill in where we can until the team is filled out, tackling crucial early hiring and equipping those who are great at building product with the skills to sell it, too. By getting the foundational firsts right, we increase the odds of finding extreme product-market fit. Our founders’ “imagine ifs” have turned into companies like Notion, Roblox, Uber, and Square.

Our goal on the First Round Founder Success team is to turn all First Round Founders into ardent advocates. We do this by creating and delivering remarkable, innovative, and relevant programs and services to support founders in successful company building. We have dozens of services and programs that support a founder’s Go-to-Market, Research, Recruiting, Learning & Development, and Fundraising.

The mission of the Go-to-Market work stream is to help founders get to PMF faster. One of our primary initiatives towards this mission is to assist founders in building their pipeline by getting them as many qualified “at bats” as possible. We’ve seen our companies massively scale when we can get our founders on the right initial foot and introduce them to their first target customers. We’re searching for someone to work hand-in-hand with founders to grow their early pipeline.

Your core role as GTM Manager will include:

• Deep Dive Into Company ICP/Personas: in order to tee up the most qualified intros possible, you’ll get intimately familiar with the Ideal Customer Profiles and Target Personas for the founders you’re supporting. You’ll help founders determine the right ICP/Personas to target first and help them manage an iterative process of determining the right ICP/Persona mix over time.

• Build targeted prospect lists: leverage the best tools and tactics to source prospects, compile and enrich high-quality, substantial prospect lists; to perform outreach at scale.

• Craft Effective Messaging: draft targeted, personalized, relevant and effective messaging for outreach across multiple channels, including emails and LinkedIn. Perform message testing to figure out the key message points that convert the highest.

• Facilitate connections within the First Round network: serve as a bridge between our founders and our extensive ecosystem of contacts. Monitor interactions to identify timely opportunities for connecting the right people and fostering successful collaborations.

• Be a Master of Your Trade: stay up to date on the latest tools, trends and best practices related to outbound and other types of demand generation tactics.

• Analyze and Iterate: keep accurate reporting of all outbound activity, founder introductions and closed won deals in CRM. Keep track of your conversion rates and proactively suggest experiments to run and changes to make to improve performance.

• Educate Founders: we don’t want to just fish for our founders, we want to teach them to fish as well. You’ll teach founders the key disciplines and best practices of successful sales development functions.

Key responsibilities:

• Generate research and sales intros for founders via cold and warm outreach (75%).

• Track progress of the intros over time (10%).

• Provide founders with coaching and advising to build their own successful outreach campaigns (15%).

You could be a great GTM Enablement Manager at First Round if:

• You’ve walked the early stage walk. You have at least 3 years of experience in a Sales Development or Business Development role at an early-stage B2B startup, generating pipeline from scratch for a relatively unknown entity.

• You work with a ton of urgency and ownership. While this role will collaborate with the VP, Founder Success, we’re really looking for a self-starter who can handle projects from start to finish on their own and contribute fresh ideas to strengthen not just our GTM efforts, but the whole team.

• You’re super organized and process driven. You’re a task management junkie who’s always looking for ways to become even more productive and effective. We’re supporting outreach and pipeline advancement for 10+ companies at any given time and aspiring to do more. You love building, pressure testing and iterating new processes.

• You’re a master communicator. You know how to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person, on the right channel to get a response.

• You’re always raising the bar. If you’re making 10 intros for a founder a month, you’re thinking about how to make it 20. You’re creative, resourceful and comfortable trying new things (and sometimes failing) in the name of finding the next big unlock in hitting your goals.

• You’re analytical. You’re a numbers nerd. You know your sales math like the back of your hand and you love trying to figure out how to improve each key leading indicator of intros.

• Tech fascinates you. You don’t necessarily need deep knowledge of venture capital or tech, but you should be willing to learn it fast. If you’re enthralled by what the future holds and how entrepreneurs leverage technology to get us there, that’s a great start.

This is a contract role running from April to August, with a pay rate of $80 per hour. While we welcome remote candidates within the U.S., our ideal hire would be based in New York City.

Our Values

At First Round, we value resourcefulness, team-play, excellence and hustle. To give you a sense of what our team is all about, check out our values that guide our work:

• Try harder for founders. They’re our customers — LPs are our shareholders. Going above and beyond for our founders is what we do. We strive to be a founder's most valuable investor. That’s why we don't pull term sheets, and we're always in for their second round. We respond to their emails in hours, not days. We build candidate pipelines, unprompted. We arrange meal deliveries when they become a new parent. Simply put, we go above and beyond to earn that right to be their first call every time there’s a bump in the road.

• Give your unvarnished opinions and unwavering support. We strive to be kind, not nice. One of the most (counterintuitively) compassionate things you can do is to offer your unvarnished opinion — along with your unwavering support. That willingness to risk a fleeting moment of discomfort in exchange for someone else’s growth is long-term kindness.

• Treat the little things like big things. Everything can always be made better. We’re all about the carefully crafted, the nitty-gritty, and the bespoke. Whether it’s hand cutting each nameplate, or debating the optimal shape of the dinner table, no detail is too small to sweat.

• Make speed a habit. Whatever you’re building, remember that now is better than two weeks from now. We’re fans of starting small and iterating quickly. No matter what we’re launching, you’ll likely hear this question in a meeting: “How soon can we get something out there?”

• Invent and wander. Never stop experimenting. The best ideas are born out of experimentation. Our flagship programs have always come from our penchant for going out on a limb and approaching problems with a different perspective.

• Build wider doorways and longer tables. We're in the business of backing people and betting on their ideas — no matter where they come from. While talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. First Round is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workspace and we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply!