Account Manager - Expansion

About Brightidea

Brightidea is the enterprise innovation management platform behind programs at Merck, J&J, AWS, Cytiva, and hundreds of other global organizations. We've been at this for 26 years, we're profitable, which means small surface area, short decision paths, and a lot of leverage per person.

About the role

You own a book of large, under-penetrated Fortune 1000 accounts where Brightidea holds a beachhead — a single department, a single program, a fraction of what the organization could be running. Your job is to crack those accounts open: build executive sponsorship from a small footprint, multi-thread across a complex organization, and grow toward enterprise-wide adoption while protecting what's already in place.

This is a hunter-builder seat, not a caretaker seat. It carries a real number and real accountability.

We've written it deliberately to screen out the standard enterprise SaaS account manager. If your value is relationship maintenance, QBR cadence, and renewal paperwork, this seat won't suit you and you won't enjoy it.

Why this isn't a traditional Account Manager role

• You have to build, not just sell. Our customers are innovation leaders at Merck, J&J, AWS, Cytiva and their peers, and many of them are now building with AI themselves. You'll sit across from people who can prototype, and you need to prototype alongside them — mock a workflow, model a use case, turn platform usage data into a commercial case without waiting on an engineer or an analyst.
• You have to hold the harder conversation. A customer who can build their own tooling will ask why they need a platform at all. Answering that credibly means understanding both what we do and what is genuinely hard to replicate. A polished commercial pitch won't survive that conversation.
• You'll find your own buyers. Roughly a third of your book is net-new footprint inside existing logos — new business units, new use cases, new executive sponsors who have never heard of us. Nobody hands you that pipeline.
• The business is changing underneath the role. Brightidea is evolving how it engages large enterprises, and this seat sits at the front of that. If ambiguity bothers you, this is the wrong company right now. If you want a role where the shape of the work is still being decided, this is a good moment to arrive.
• You carry a number and own the outcome. Blended retention plus growth, reviewed monthly with your manager and quarterly with the executive team. The targets are in this document because we'd rather you know them before you apply.

The bar: AI fluency is non-negotiable

This is a hard gate, not a preference. We won't make an offer to a strong commercial candidate who isn't genuinely AI-fluent, regardless of track record. We define it concretely:

• You've built things. Automations, agents, scripts, internal tools, integrations — something beyond prompting a chatbot. You should be able to walk us through what you built, why, and what broke.
• AI is in your daily workflow, not your toolkit. Account research, org mapping, territory planning, first-draft outreach, data analysis. We'll ask how you actually work, and we'll be able to tell.
• You can produce a working artifact in front of a customer. A mock, a prototype, a data cut, a solution sketch — fast enough to be useful in the meeting rather than in the follow-up.
• You can reason about where AI helps and where it doesn't, including the limits. We need someone who can tell a customer honestly that one thing is easy to build and another isn't.

What you'll do

• Treat each account as a mini-territory: build and execute a penetration plan that moves it from beachhead toward enterprise-wide adoption
• Build executive sponsorship out from a single champion or department, multi-threading across large, political organizations where your original contact may not be your path to the budget
• Own renewal negotiation and close, including price increases and multi-year terms against enterprise procurement
• Source net-new buyers inside existing logos — new business units, adjacent use cases, executives who have never engaged with us
• Convert platform adoption and usage data into commercial cases; program results are your ammunition, and you should be able to pull and shape that data yourself
• Position Brightidea credibly against build-it-yourself alternatives, including customers prototyping with AI
• Forecast accurately and keep a clean cadence across ~25 accounts, concentrating effort where the runway is greatest

 

What we're looking for

We care about the combination of commercial instinct and technical fluency, not the label on your last job. Three profiles fit:

• Enterprise expansion — you've carried a number expanding inside large, complex accounts, in an enterprise motion rather than SMB velocity. You've grown a logo from one business unit to enterprise-wide, or materially grown ARR inside a named account.
• Consultant / solution architect — you've delivered into large enterprises from a consulting or professional services background, with genuine commercial exposure: scoping, pricing, expanding engagements. You're comfortable being the person in the room who designs the answer.
• Founder / operator — you've built and sold something, carried revenue responsibility end to end, built your own tooling, and are comfortable with the ambiguity of an evolving business.

Required across all three:

• Experience navigating enterprise procurement, renewal negotiation, price increases, and multi-year terms
• Multi-threading in complex organizations, where you've built sponsorship starting from one contact and no budget
• A territory-development mindset with a concrete approach to whitespace