Key Account Director (Majors East)
Posted Updated
Description
- As a Key Account Director, Majors, Public Safety at Skydio, you will lead a regional team of Key Account Leaders selling into the largest public safety agencies in the country. This is a first-line leadership role, and the job comes down to three things: recruiting the right people, coaching them into great sellers, and keeping them here
- You will not carry your own accounts. Your number is your team’s number, and you will hit it by making each person on the team better: sharpening deal strategy, getting into the field on their most competitive pursuits, and building the territory, pipeline, and forecast discipline that makes a region predictable
- You will work alongside peer Directors leading other segments and geographies, and across Channel, Sales Engineering, Business Development, Marketing, Strategic Relationships, Government Relations, and Mission Success
- You will also set the standard for how the team works, not only what it sells. We sell autonomous flying robots and the artificial intelligence that powers them. Every seller here uses AI tools as a normal part of running a territory, and you will model that, coach to it, and hire for it
- This is a highly competitive market, and much of the work happens alongside our channel. Your team will sell against incumbent platforms and well-funded challengers, and you will set the standard for how they win
- Own hiring for your region: build a continuous talent pipeline, run a fast and rigorous process, and personally close the candidates you want
- Hire to the bar above: integrity, team instinct, conversational craft, and fluency with the tools matter as much as a closed-won history
- Screen for evidence, not adjectives: attainment stated year by year with the misses included, deal stories with the mechanics of how the customer bought, and something the candidate has built or changed in how they work in the last two years
- Run a structured process: the same core questions for every candidate, a live working session, independent scoring, and a debrief that decides on evidence
- Onboard and ramp new Key Account Leaders with a clear path from first day to first award, and hold the ramp accountable
- Run 1:1s and deal reviews that build judgment rather than just inspect pipeline
- Get in the field: join demos, customer meetings, and executive conversations, then debrief with specific, usable feedback
- Coach the competitive game: POV strategy, shaping requirements early, framing Skydio’s unique differentiators, displacement plays, and defending accounts under attack
- Build MEDDPICC rigor, channel fluency, and forecast honesty into how the team works, not just what they report
- Raise the team’s fluency with AI tools: build shared workflows for customer research, call prep, RFP response, and pipeline analysis, and hold the line that nothing AI-drafted reaches a customer unreviewed
- Build a team that people don’t want to leave: clear expectations, real development paths, and recognition that lands
- Own territory and quota design so assignments are achievable, equitable, and worth staying for
- Have honest career conversations early, address disengagement before it becomes a resignation, and be the escalation path your team trusts to clear obstacles
- Own the region number: pipeline coverage, forecast accuracy, linearity across the quarter, and the analysis behind them
- Partner with Channel on partner strategy, joint planning, and the deal structures that get customers to yes
- Act as executive sponsor on your team’s largest and most competitive pursuits: present in the room, without taking the deal over
- Represent your region’s customer insight, competitive intelligence, and product gaps to Marketing and Product
- Experience selling or leading teams into SLED customers, with working knowledge of procurement vehicles and budget and grant cycles
- 3+ years leading quota-carrying sellers as a first-line manager, with team attainment you can state year by year, including the year you missed and what you changed
- Executive presence with both customer leadership and your own team, and high personal integrity under quota pressure
- Fluency selling with and through channel partners
- Strong voluntary retention history, a record of developing people into larger roles, and the judgment to move quickly when someone isn’t right for the seat
- Ability to travel at least 50% of the time, and based in East Coast
- Demonstrated success recruiting sellers: a real network, a clear point of view on what good looks like, a structured process you can describe, and the ability to close candidates
- A coaching approach you can articulate, with specific examples of people who got measurably better working for you
- Obtaining FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees and required for certain positions
- 4+ years total in enterprise software, hardware, or SaaS sales, including personal success closing complex, multi-stakeholder deals
- Daily, systematic use of AI tools in your own work, and at least one workflow, analysis, or tool you built or changed in the last two years that made you or your team measurably better (we will ask you to show it, not describe it)
- Experience in public safety, specifically law enforcement, fire, or emergency management
- Experience building a team from a small base rather than inheriting a mature one
- You have built something with AI that other people use, whether a research tool, an analysis, or a team workflow, and you can talk about what the first version got wrong
- Curiosity that shows: you can explain how something outside sales works (an agency budget, an airspace waiver, the aircraft’s autonomy) in plain language, and you learn fast
- UAV, robotics, or emerging technology background, and comfort in a fast-moving environment
- Familiarity with MEDDPICC, Salesforce, Clari, BGov, GovWin, Slack, and Google Workspace
- We run a structured process and we tell you what it is
- A 30-minute conversation with the hiring manager
- A deep dive on your leadership record: hiring, coaching, retention, and the team number, year by year
- A working session where you use your own AI tools on a realistic problem from this region and walk us through your choices
- A panel on the public safety market and how you would run the region
- A conversation about how you think
- References with people who worked for you and with you
- Every interviewer scores independently against the same rubric before we compare notes
- On AI in the process: draft your resume yourself and refine it with AI if you like; we want your real experience, well expressed
- Use whatever tools you want to prepare
- Expect to use them in the working session
- Leave them off during the conversational interviews so we can see how you think in real time
- We use AI to draft job descriptions like this one and to take notes, and a human makes every hiring decision