Strategic Account Executive

Light Labs; Austin, Northern (TX, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Light Labs in Austin, TX is seeking a Strategic Account Executive to own and grow a select book of large manufacturers and brands in the CPG space. You will lead expansion testing programs, build executive relationships, and drive multi-stakeholder deals.

Average deals are around $250K and can reach $1–2M+. Expect about 80% of your time growing existing accounts and 20% hunting with a paired SDR, with substantial in-person visits to plants and HQs.

Qualifications

• A real go-to-market trajectory.
• A track record growing a book of business.
• Relationships that last.
• Relentless responsiveness.

Responsibilities

• Run your book like your own P&L. Know every account's health, whitespace, and growth plan, and own the expansion revenue it produces.
• Map the path to expansion, then drive it. Build a clear, executable plan for each account to land new testing programs, product lines, sites, and use cases. Your quota is expansion revenue, and the biggest growth here comes from going deeper with the customers we already have.
• Respond within minutes. Speed is the number one reason customers work with us. It's the standard for every email, call, and result question in your book.
• Always get on the plane. Nothing beats in-person time. Visit plants and HQs, walk the floor with quality and ops teams, and run business reviews on site.
• Be the customer's voice inside the lab. If we're about to miss a committed turnaround time, you get ahead of it, spell out the revenue impact, and push for real care in how it's handled. You're also the lab's voice with the customer, flagging risks before they become escalations.
• Solve problems instead of routing them. A failed result, a quality issue, a regulatory question: get creative and drive it to resolution.
• Learn the science. Methods, contaminants, specs, and regulatory thresholds like Prop 65. Enough to speak your buyers' language and earn trust with technical stakeholders, without waiting for someone to teach you.
• Go multi-threaded. Build trust across quality, operations, regulatory, procurement, and the executive team so no account hinges on a single champion.
• Feed it back. Bring what you hear from customers to product, marketing, and operations, and help shape where the company goes next.
• Build the playbook. What you figure out becomes how the rest of the team sells and serves.

Job description

LIGHT LABS

Powering a healthier food system through data, transparency, and accountability.

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Strategic Account Executive

Light Labs | Austin, TX (In-office, 5 days a week)

The Opportunity

Are you a salesperson who grows accounts by showing up, answering fast, and learning the customer's business better than they expect? Someone who can turn a first test into a seven-figure program? Then you'd be a great fit as our Sales Manager. You'll own and grow a book of some of the largest manufacturers and brands in CPG. There's no playbook yet. The team knows what works but hasn't written it down, and you'll help build the system the rest of the team runs on.

Why Light Labs

Testing is a cost line everywhere else. Here it's a growth line.

Brands publish their Light Labs results directly on their own product pages. That turns a QA budget item into something that moves conversion, which is why customers keep expanding what they test with us, and why the constraint on this business is lab capacity, not demand.

We've gone from zero to a multi-million-dollar run rate in under two years. Next up is 4x revenue over the coming year and a $50M run rate in 2027. We're on the verge of being introduced to roughly 20 new accounts, each worth at least $500K in potential spend, in an industry so tightly networked that doing right by one well-connected customer opens the door to the next three.

What You'll Own

This is a land-and-expand seat. Average deals run around $250K and reach $1–2M+ at the top end. There's no fixed contract term, accounts take about six months to mature, and customers are testing and evaluating us continuously, so nothing is ever set and forget. Expect to spend about 80% of your time growing your existing book and 20% hunting alongside a paired SDR.

• Run your book like your own P&L. Know every account's health, whitespace, and growth plan, and own the expansion revenue it produces.

• Map the path to expansion, then drive it. Build a clear, executable plan for each account to land new testing programs, product lines, sites, and use cases. Your quota is expansion revenue, and the biggest growth here comes from going deeper with the customers we already have.

• Respond within minutes. Speed is the number one reason customers work with us. It's the standard for every email, call, and result question in your book.

• Always get on the plane. Nothing beats in-person time. Visit plants and HQs, walk the floor with quality and ops teams, and run business reviews on site.

• Be the customer's voice inside the lab. If we're about to miss a committed turnaround time, you get ahead of it, spell out the revenue impact, and push for real care in how it's handled. You're also the lab's voice with the customer, flagging risks before they become escalations.

• Solve problems instead of routing them. A failed result, a quality issue, a regulatory question: get creative and drive it to resolution.

• Learn the science. Methods, contaminants, specs, and regulatory thresholds like Prop 65. Enough to speak your buyers' language and earn trust with technical stakeholders, without waiting for someone to teach you.

• Go multi-threaded. Build trust across quality, operations, regulatory, procurement, and the executive team so no account hinges on a single champion.

• Feed it back. Bring what you hear from customers to product, marketing, and operations, and help shape where the company goes next.

• Build the playbook. What you figure out becomes how the rest of the team sells and serves.

What You'll Need

• A real go-to-market trajectory. Ideally you've grown from SDR through AE or AM, stayed long enough to build something, and performed at the top of your team (President's Club-caliber).

• A track record growing a book of business. You've carried a quota and expanded existing accounts through complex, multi-stakeholder sales.

• Relationships that last. You've built and extended customer relationships over years, not just closed a transaction and moved on.

• Relentless responsiveness. You treat speed as a competitive advantage, not a courtesy.