Junior Sales Development Representative

About Kadince

Kadince (pronounced cadence) is a fully remote software company founded in 2013. In a nutshell, we build tools to help financial institutions track and manage the good they do in their communities. 

Kadince has been profitable for several years (we’re fans of making more than we spend). We’re bootstrapped, which means we don’t have investors. So our owners answer to no one. And they aren’t just giving us commands from their vacation homes waiting to cash their next check. They’re fellow team members and in the trenches with us. 

Why We’re Hiring

There are around 10,000 financial institutions in the US. At Kadince, we’re working to help as many of them as possible better manage and track their community involvement efforts. We’ve only scratched the surface.

We want to give every financial institution in the country a chance to hear our story and see if we’re a good fit for their needs—we obviously think we are. In order to keep up with our outreach goals, we need a junior sales professional on our team.

Who We Want to Hire

To be a Junior Sales Development Representative at Kadince, you should have a lot of grit and drive, but are also humble and open to feedback. You work well in fast-paced professional environments and can juggle many things (bonus points if you can juggle actual objects). You have strong writing and speaking skills. Proper grammar and spelling don’t scare you (expect to write a lot of emails). 

You have a desire to continually learn and improve your people and sales skills. We love giving team members opportunities to improve their skills, whether through online courses, workshops, or learning from others.

You don’t need previous sales experience to excel in this role. Honestly, we’re looking for someone who’s ready to start their career from the ground up. The work you do won’t be super exciting or glamorous, but you’ll learn about sales and the fintech industry. If you prove yourself and want to continue on the sales path, we’d love to transition you into a regular Sales Development Representative here at Kadince.

Our vision, mission, and core values should resonate with you. That’ll be crucial to your success and happiness if you join the Kadince team.

Our Vision and Mission

Our vision and mission aren’t something we hung on the office wall and forgot about. Seriously, we don’t have an office, let alone a wall to hang them on. But our vision, mission, and core values sit on the desks of each of our team members. And we discuss them regularly in our meetings. Your goals (KPIs) will be developed to ensure you’re working to help us achieve our vision and mission.

Our vision and mission are what get us up each morning. They, in addition to our core values, help us make decisions. 

Vision - Setting the standard for operating a great software company.

We’re big fans of author Jim Collins and his best-selling book, Good to Great (bonus points if you’ve read it). While there are lots of good software companies out there, we want to be one of the great ones.

The first word of our vision is also significant. To go “high school English class” on you, the present participle “setting” illustrates that we’re not looking to set the standard and then be done, but that the standard is always moving and we’re always chasing it. We continually stop to recognize the awesome things we’ve done and then look for ways to do them even better. 

Mission - Building the best community involvement software for financial institutions™.

As Jim Collins taught in his Hedgehog Concept (told you we think he’s great—pun intended), great companies need to determine what they can be the best at in the world and focus on that. There are so many things we could solve as a software company, but we’ve found what we think we can be the best in the world at and we stick to it every day. 

Our Core Values

Our core values remind us who we are. They also guide us in the decisions we make. They’re listed in order of importance.  If we have a question when making a decision about people, for example, we look to the core value above it to make our decision. 

1. Integrity - We’re honest with ourselves and others.
2. People - We understand that people are the foundation of Kadince and we act accordingly.
3. Care - We love what we do and do it consistently and intentionally to the best of our abilities.
4. Remarkability - We provide remarkable experiences to all who come into contact with Kadince.
5. Growth - We accept yesterday and improve today.

What a Day in the Life of a Junior Sales Development Representative Looks Like

To start the day, you tackle auto-replies. Auto-replies are emails automatically sent from our prospects and customers when they are out of the office, often including details in their signature line like their direct phone number, mailing address, etc. These are a great way to verify information and get up-to-date mailing addresses, which empowers the Sales Team during their outreach. It’s your job to sift through them and update the appropriate fields in Salesforce. This isn’t very exciting—there’s a long list of replies—but with some music or a podcast playing, you’ll find your flow.

After making a sizable dent in those replies, it’s time to build out some financial institutions in Salesforce. There are around 10,000 banks and credit unions in the U.S., and we want them all to be reflected in our SF database (we’ve done a pretty good job, but there’s always room for improvement). You search LinkedIn for contacts with appropriate job titles and add them to SF. This makes it easy for our marketing and sales teams to know who to contact. You might even lay some groundwork on some of the more promising prospects. You may not be a full-blown sales rep yet, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get any practice  

For lunch, you decide to pack a sandwich and take your dog to the park. He runs around and gets all his energy out so you don’t have to worry about entertaining him for the rest of the day. Or, if you’re more of a cat person, you pat your cat on the head and head out for a quick run.

Back at work, you meet with your team for some sales training. You discuss different sales techniques and praise a team member for the great work she did this morning. There’s always something new to learn, and you can’t wait until you’re able to manage accounts and sell our software on your own. 

For your last big project of the day, you handwrite personalized messages on some marketing flyers you’ll be mailing. You’ve done the hard work of verifying the contact’s mailing address, it’s time to put that knowledge to use. But we don’t like to be the same as any other company, so we go the extra mile to add a little personal touch. If you learned anything neat on LinkedIn, you might even send your contact a gift. 

At the end of the day, you take a look at your calendar for tomorrow and plan accordingly. At night, you dream about auto-replies breakdancing at a carnival. 

When and Where You’d Work and What You’d Work On

Kadince is a principle-based company, which means we focus on principles, not policies. Since we’re a fully remote company, you’ll speak with Brandon Checketts, your leader, to determine when and where you’ll work. You’ll also work with your leader each week, month, quarter, and year to determine your goals (your KPIs or key performance indicators) and what you’ll work on.

The principle is to work wherever you want as long as you meet or exceed your KPIs. This may mean working when our prospects work, planning your day around team meetings, or working a longer day because you have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Overall, your schedule needs to help you achieve our vision and mission and demonstrate our core values. 

At Kadince, work won’t tie you down to one location. You’ll be free to travel or relocate as you get the itch to try somewhere new. Want to spend a month abroad, working from a hotel and exploring the rest of the time? Go ahead. Just make sure that wherever you plan to work has a reliable internet connection of at least 10 Mbps download and 1-2 Mbps upload (as if you would go anywhere without it anyway). And turn on the blurry filter during video calls so we don’t get jealous. One of our teammates once had zebras running around in the background of a video call during a team meeting. Come to find out he was working from the deck of his hotel at the Animal Kingdom in Disney World. Even though we were jealous, we thought it was pretty cool.

Who You’d Be Working With

We have over 40 team members (which makes us really happy since Kadince was started by two people in their basements). If hired, you’ll probably work with each team member in one way or another. Some of the people you’ll work with most frequently are:

Brandon is our wonderful Director of Sales. He’s been with Kadince since 2018 and loves to grow his professional skills. Brandon is a self-proclaimed aviation geek. He loves to watch airplanes and learn everything he can about them. He seems to be going somewhere new every week. Where will he be this weekend? Nobody knows

Ben is a Senior Sales Representative and has been with Kadince since the beginning of 2020. When he isn’t at work, you’ll likely find him skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, or doing something else outdoors. He’s an adrenaline junky, but has never broken a bone (hopefully he keeps that streak for a long time). Ben’s philosophy is that he should improve at least 1% each day, and we see that in his work at Kadince all the time. 

Jacob is a Sales Development Representative. He may be a great salesperson, but he’s also a killer cook (hopefully not literally). He once received 56 stitches and set the record at his university for number of basketball games played, although not at the same time. If he could do anything, he’d travel to Brazil and see an anaconda in its natural habitat. (Maybe his new friend could join a Zoom call?)

Benefits

Since we’re a remote company, we don’t offer office snacks and ping pong tables. But if you’re a fan of “core benefits” that bring great rewards and peace of mind, you’ll like what we have to offer. Competitive pay, 401(k) matching, generous paid leave, insurance (medical, dental, vision, life, short-term disability), a flex spending account, and profit sharing. Yeah, it’s pretty great... 

And we love to spoil our team. We celebrate big events with you, like birthdays and work anniversaries, so you can expect some pretty fun gifts. We once sent some high-quality lip balm to each team member so we could all play a prank on Scott, our Director of Product. We’re fun like that. And each year we give every team member the last week of the year off (we like to spread holiday cheer). 

How to Apply 

Applicants who stand out are those who are interested in working for Kadince, not just applying for as many positions as possible or trying to keep unemployment benefits. We’ve seen it all. No kidding, we once had someone ask us in an interview what the name of our company is. Needless to say, we could tell that person wasn’t really passionate about joining our team.

When applying to Kadince, please send us PDFs of your resume and cover letter. The cover letter is your opportunity to tell us why you would be a great fit for the position, but should be no longer than 300 words. Take advantage of this time. Seriously, sell yourself 

Thank you for your interest in Kadince.  We look forward to reviewing your application. 

Kadince, Inc. is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer.