The posting
About Voting Works
Elections are the foundation of democracy, and democracy depends on elections that are broadly trusted. VotingWorks is a non-partisan not-for-profit building election technology that every American can trust.
This Role & Opportunity
We are looking for a trusted sales leader who understands that election administrators don’t buy voting machines, they buy trust, both in the equipment and in the vendor.
All 83 of Michigan's counties will soon open at once, and we are in the running for the state RFP enabling us to sell our voting machines. Incumbents will have to re-earn their contracts, and we'll be competing on equal footing for the first time.
This opportunity is time bound. Trust matters deeply in this market. Your job is to build relationships and earn credibility quickly with state and local election officials.
You will own the full Michigan territory. You're responsible for the entire sales process: building pipeline, running demos, navigating procurement, and closing deals. We want sustainable sales contracts that are technically sound, politically supported, and set up for a clean handoff to Customer Success. For your first demos, you’ll be paired with our Executive Director and our Head of Customer Success to learn the messaging and the product. Once you take on demos on your own, you should still know when to bring in executive support and when to handle things yourself.
This is a competitive market with a real window of opportunity. If you want to sell something that actually matters to Democracy, and you're energized by moving fast when the timing is right, we'd like to meet you.
Must-Haves
- Proven experience selling to local governments. You've navigated procurement, built relationships with elected officials and administrators, and closed deals in bureaucratic environments.
- Track record of hitting and exceeding quota for six and seven-figure deal sizes.
- Ability to present to a room with clarity and humility. You can hold your own in front of skeptical county boards.
- Strong written communication. You'll write proposals, customer emails, and internal strategy docs. They need to be clear and professional.
- Comfortable demoing a technical product and knowing when to bring in deeper expertise.
- Self-sufficient with tools. CRM, spreadsheets, docs, modern chat systems. You don't need hand-holding on productivity software.
- Startup tolerance. Our processes are still being built. You'll encounter gaps, imperfect tools, and ambiguity. You'll help us fix them rather than complain about them.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience in the election space or adjacent govtech
- Existing relationships with Michigan election officials
- Background selling into other highly regulated or politically sensitive markets
Compensation
We’re a non-profit and we compensate in cash and benefits exclusively. We're proud to offer a comprehensive benefits package. Compensation is commensurate with your skills and experience. 50% base salary, 50% performance bonus. Performance bonus will be indexed on closed sustainable sales.
Our Team
We are a small, tight-knit team. We strive to be a flat organization when it comes to ideas and input. We believe in good management, even as a small organization, so that every VotingWorks team member gets mentorship, feedback, and an opportunity for personal growth. We strive to be both confident in the skills and knowledge we each bring and humble in our interactions with each other and other stakeholders in the election space.
We’ve been thinking about the problems and rough edges of our democracy for a while – some of us for our whole career, others for “only” a few years. We’ve decided that talking about it isn’t enough - we must do something. We’re building actual solutions that solve real problems. If that sounds exciting, we hope you’ll consider joining our team.
We’re Mostly Distributed
We’re a mostly distributed organization, with team members working from home in nine different states. For many of our roles, you can live anywhere you want. For some of our roles, we need you in specific geographies. If there’s a geographical requirement, it’s never “just to be in the same room as the rest of the team,'' it’s for very clear reasons like customer need or working on physical hardware together.
This position must be located in Michigan. Significant travel around the state is expected.
We offer a flexible work schedule and we're on board with schedule flexibility: many team members have kids, pets, family members they care for, extensive hobbies, and other personal commitments that don’t always conform to a strict 9-5 schedule. We get that, and we think we’re a better organization if we adapt to that. We work hard, we just don’t work hard on a strict schedule. With flexibility comes responsibility: you should be comfortable with significant autonomous work. And of course, in this role, you do need to be often available during times where customers can reasonably expect demos, calls.
We’re Building a Diverse Team
We never discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, background, ability/disability or really anything that isn’t about your actual skills.
We strive to go beyond that: we want to build a diverse organization that truly represents the people of the United States of America. We especially want to encourage women and members of under-represented groups to apply. You’ll always be judged on your skills and contributions, and we know that a more diverse team in all dimensions is a better team.
