Jobs: UXer in Charge of Audit Sales & Support

Are you a service-minded person? Do you have a passion for project sales and customer support? Are you good at explaining UX methodology to others?

We’re seeking a remote full-time ‘sales and customer support’ person to handle all sales inquiries for Baymard’s UX Audit service, along with conducting occasional UX audits yourself.

Baymard Institute is an independent e-commerce UX research organization – beyond conducting our large-scale research studies for our Premium subscription platform, we also do client-specific work in the form of ‘UX Audits.’

This is a remote full-time position (preferred working hours is “early” if you are on the US East Coast or “late” if you are in GMT).

The Job

You will have three distinct job tasks in this role: ‘Audit Sales and Support’ (45% of your week), ‘Resource Planning’ (15%), and ‘Conducting your own client UX Audits’ (40%):

1) Audit Sales and Support: (45% of your workweek)

• Taking sales calls with leads that inquire about getting their website UX Audited by Baymard - see the UX audit sales page. (PS Baymard don’t do any in-person sales meetings, we only communicate by email, phone, and video conference calls. All customer leads reach out to us, and our projects are relatively low cost at USD 3k-20k, so mostly high volume with small degree of interaction)
• Guiding leads towards the Baymard service that will best match their needs.
• Teaching general leads about Baymard’s methodology, what we can do, and what we cannot do (e.g., we say no to several projects, we don’t do hourly projects nor UX consulting; we only do UX auditing)
• Configuring written audit proposals for clients that matches the project scope agreed with the client while staying within the limits of our audit service.
• Be the front-line in supporting Baymard Premium subscription customers (questions being, e.g., from the details of their subscription to our test methodology).

2) Resource Planning: (15% of your workweek)

• Managing the audit project pipeline/calendar for the entire audit team (5 persons), planning who takes what audit projects and at what time, along with handling last-minute rescheduling.

3) Conducting client UX Audits: (40% of your workweek)

• We believe the best person to sell and represent the UX audit service to leads and clients, is a person who also conducts UX audits themselves. So 30-40% of your time would be as a Baymard UX auditor.
• Baymard UX audits are performed as an extremely detailed heuristic UX evaluation using a proprietary system and workflow, where our research catalog of 750+ e-commerce UX parameters is used as weighted heuristics. The outcome is identifying and prioritizing UX findings for the client site into a set of suggestions for improvement, all written into a 50-100 page report, and presented in a 2-hour video call. (You will get detailed training in our auditing process and tools, but an understanding of the ‘fundamentals of UX’ is needed).

Depending on your qualifications several other roles will be possible over time (e.g., handling Baymard’s proactive marketing efforts, service strategy, etc.)

Qualifications

We’re looking for the following qualifications for this role:

7/7 Motivation for sales and customer support - you are a service-minded person with a flair and passion for sales and customer support. 2-3 hours per day is responding to inquiries from new leads via email and video conference. (Note: all our leads have found Baymard themselves and inquire about our audit service on their own. Baymard doesn’t do any cold-sales or any proactive marketing campaigns. Hence all leads are motivated, and the process therefore has more character of “servicing our leads,” rather than “selling” them.)

6/7 Ability to explain UX services and methodology to leads and customers in writing and verbally - our leads are anyone from C-levels with no UX background to 10+ year UX veterans, they come from companies of all sizes (2-person startup to Fortune 500), from all sectors (websites selling high-fashion, to auto insurance, to B2B pharmaceutical supplies). So, it’s critical you are able to quickly understand the client context, and adjust your language and clearly explain what Baymard’s UX methodology & auditing can and cannot do for them.

6/7 Ability to handle a constant stream of ongoing projects and loose ends at the same time - beyond the audit project you are conducting for a specific client, expect daily 5-20 emails that need answering and 2-3 calls with new leads, and 2-4 questions from your UX audit team colleagues about the projects you’ve sold. You need to be able to juggle this type of workflow, while still being precise in the individual client communication (e.g., not messing up “mobile site vs. mobile app” in a project description written in between two calls).

3/7 Resource management & planning – you’re good at internal planning of resources within a small team. A typical audit is 5-15 workdays, and there are five auditors, but some audits require multiple auditors or specific auditors. With client deadlines on top of this, laying the “audit pipeline puzzle” will be something you do a couple of times per week.

3/7 Understanding of UX and user behavior – you’ll spend 30-40% of your time auditing a client’s website’s UX across Baymard’s 700+ parameters/heuristics. This will require a decent prior understanding of UX and web user behavior.

3/7 Finding attention to detail exciting – in each audit we analyze the client site across 700+ UX parameters, each of these has 4-7 defined implementation nuances the audit must account for. This requires an extreme level of attention to detail and excitement for exploring the smallest of UI nuances of a site.

4/7 Ability to communicate UX in writing – the primary audit deliverable is the 50-150 page audit report. This report relies on Baymard’s vast UX research catalog, but at the same time is a bespoke consulting project – you as an Auditor have to be good at accurately describing complex flows and user behaviors in writing. The audit reports are often read by a diverse team (managers, UXers, designers and developers) – they all need to understand the described UX issue, often in just 4 paragraphs of text.

(Each of the above qualifications is weighted, 7 is highest)

(Note that this is not a UX Designer or a UX Researcher job, if that’s what you are looking for, then sign up for our job alert as we do hire in those roles from time to time. The same applies if you are a good UX Auditor but don’t like the customer sales and support aspect that dominates this position).

Other Job Specs

• Salary: in accordance with qualifications.
• Start date: as soon as possible, at the latest before April 2020.
• Location: this is a remote full-time position. Preferred working hours is “early” if you are on the US East Coast or “late” if you are in GMT).
• Language: we expect you to be fully proficient in written and spoken english.
• Travel: is limited, expect only 1-3 weeks of travel each year.

How to Apply

If you’re interested in this position please send the following documents:

1. A cover letter (as a 1-2 page PDF).
2. A resume (as PDF file).
3. (optional) A screen sharing or audio recording where you try to explain Baymard UX audit service to a ‘new lead’ (max 10 min. long).

Send the above to info+sales-hire-2020@baymard.com

Deadline is February 3rd – but apply as soon as possible, as applications will be processed on an ongoing basis. A few selected candidates will be assigned a paid hiring test.

Tip, if you want to prepare the best possible consider:

• reading our audit sales page,
• watching our methodology video explaining our approach,
• reading the “work values” section at the end of this page.

Sincerely,
Jamie & Christian
Founders of the Baymard Institute

Referral bonus

If this job isn’t you, but you know someone who’ll be the perfect fit, please send them the link to this page. If we end up hiring the person you referred, we’ll give you a 1 year access to a Baymard Premium ‘Medium’ plan (normally $1560/year).

Key Work Values at Baymard

The following work values are central to us at Baymard and hopefully gives you an idea of our culture and what working at Baymard is like:

• Flat organization – Baymard is a small organization of just ~15 people. This means zero management layers between you and the final decision. You’ll have direct access to and impact on decision making.
• Lots of responsibility – From day 1 (OK, maybe day 2), you will be working on final products or services. We believe the best way to learn is to work on actual products and challenges, supplemented with rich early feedback.
• Long-term focus – Decisions are always based on their long term impact. We’re not interested in hunting after the next “quick win” — we want to make a lasting impact on the e-commerce industry and usually adopt a 5-year perspective in our decisions and projects.
• Remote from the ground up – 90% of the team works remotely. We’ve deliberately designed the organization around remote work. That said, we do bring the entire team together for a week once a year somewhere interesting in the world.
• Team of ‘subject matter’ nerds – Everyone geeks out a bit on their work interests. We love that, and once a week someone from the team does a 20min presentation on their latest obsession — whether it’s quasi-quantum-worlds or the proper usage of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.
• Founders engaged in the product – We believe it is essential that those orchestrating the work of the organization are keenly in tune with all aspects of it. The two founders of Baymard have therefore performed every type of task in the organization themselves (from programming to UX testing), and continue to work directly on the product.