Massively Parallel Procrastination

We're hiring again: SALES PERSON

ABOUT US

We're Best Practical Solutions, a small software company located
in Somerville, Mass. We build software and sell support, training,
consulting and custom development. Our main product, RT (Request Tracker)
is the premiere opensource issue tracking system, downloaded by about
3000 organizations every month. We've been around since the fall of
2001 and are entirely self-funded. O'Reilly and Associates published
our first book, /RT Essentials/, this summer. We're currently hard at
work on our next new product. Things just keep getting busier.

ABOUT THE JOB

We're looking for a new sales and marketing person to help make
sure we're getting our message across to potential customers, generate leads,
handle the ever-increasing tide of incoming sales inquiries, work with
the engineering team to spec and cost projects and ultimately convince
our potential customers and customers that they want to hand us big sacks
of cash to do work for them. And then to make sure they're happy with
the work we've done.

Most, but not all of our customers are fairly technically savvy and have
a good idea of what they want from us. A large part of your role will
be working with customers to get their requirements written down so that
we can figure out the best way to get them what they want, how much
work it will take and how much it will cost.

We're a small shop and have been very much engineering focused up to this
point. We care a lot about the software we produce and how it works for
our users whether or not they pay us. This means that we've tended to
focus a lot more on technical information than on florid prose extolling
our virtues and our competition's inadequecies. That's just who we are.
But our commercial side could always use more attention. You will help
lead us toward a more polished, but still open and honest corporate brand.
We don't expect you to walk in on your first day, announce a new slogan, logo,
color scheme and set of corporate values. (In fact if you did, that would
probably be your only day.) But yes, you will have a big hand in helping
to define the face we present to the corporate world.

Day-to-day, you'll be dealing with customers, engineers and the boss. You
need excellent written and verbal communications skills (for dealing with
customers) even if most of the time you're slumming with the rest of us who
aren't so hot with our capitalization and punctuation.

ABOUT YOU

You shouldn't be frustrated by computers or computer geeks.
Just about everyone here is a computer geek (though we all have other
interests). You'd be working closely with the main developers of RT, who
are a very bright and dedicated team. You'll be able to set your own hours
(though they will need to overlap largely with US business hours) and for
the most part telecommute from wherever you'd like to work. We do just
about EVERYTHING online and on the phone. You should be comfortable using
email and instant messaging systems to collaborate and get work done.

We're a small company and the boss is typically overextended.
He travels a fair bit and when he's not traveling, his schedule can
be fairly erratic. You should be comfortable working independently,
prioritizing tasks on your own, and juggling tasks & projects. You need to
be able to tell when you're out of your depth and ask for help.

We are a "virtual" office, with folks scattered around the US and around
the world though increasingly, we're mostly clustered in the Boston area.
This job doesn't formally require your presence in Boston, though it would
certainly be seen as an asset.

Required Skills:

You need strong written and verbal communications skills. We mean
it. Really. That BA in English _is_ good for something. You must have
prior sales and/or marketing experience. You need to be comfortable
asking questions, researching, reading documentation and experimenting
with software to better understand possibilities and to offer options
to customers.

Desired Skills:

We're not looking for a software engineer (not for this role anyway),
but if you've written a bit of code, that would certainly be an asset.

Compensation:

DOE - This is a full-time salaried position, but the details are negotiable.

How to apply:

Send a something approximating a cover letter, a resume
in plain text, HTML or PDF form and a writing sample to
resumes@bestpractical.com. Ideally the writing sample would be something
business-technical like a sales proposals you've written, but really
anything that demonstrates you can string words together should be fine.