Zelara→
Founding Account Executive at Zelara in Berlin
Job Description
About Zelara
Most CRM marketing still blasts generic messages at scale and calls it "personalization." Our founders experienced this firsthand in senior roles at HelloFresh, Salesforce, Uber, and others. Backed by top-tier VCs, they decided to build a better way.
Zelara is an agentic lifecycle marketing platform that improves with every interaction. It works with the CRM infrastructure our customers already use, replacing static journeys and manual segmentation with a system that creates content, makes individual-level decisions, and learns from every outcome.
With bunq, Europe's second-largest neobank, we delivered +7.4% activation and +66% reactivation uplift, measured against a control group. We raised a €3M pre-seed and are generating revenue with paying enterprise customers. Our founders still run the commercial side themselves. We are hiring the person who takes that over and turns it into a motion that does not depend on them.
The Role
This is not a role where you inherit a mature sales organisation and work a territory. Leads do not arrive from marketing, opportunities do not arrive from SDRs, and there is no playbook written by someone else for you to run.
This is a hands-on senior AE role: you carry a number and close your own deals. You own the commercial motion end-to-end at the moment it stops being founder-led: the pitch lands, the workshops work, paying customers are signing, and none of it is yet a system that someone other than a founder can repeat.
You own the full funnel, from identifying who is worth talking to through discovery, workshop, offer, negotiation, and signature, and on into the annual contract, expansion, and renewal. Annual contracts run €75–250k. Cycles run two to four months. Buying committees are a CRM champion, a technical stakeholder, and an economic buyer, and you need to know why each of them says no.
You and the Solutions Architect run each account as a pair, in a weekly rhythm and in the room together for the conversations that decide something. You are the account owner: pricing, proposals, contracts, conversion to an annual contract, expansion, renewal. They own the technical plan and the evidence behind those decisions. Before signature they lead technical discovery alongside you; after signature they become the customer's named technical lead. You close; they make the value real and defensible.
You will sell to CRM, lifecycle, and marketing leaders at mid-market and enterprise B2C companies across Europe: fintech, e-commerce, travel, and employee benefits.
What You Will Do
Own the full funnel from ICP identification to signed contract: source, qualify, run discovery, facilitate workshops, write offers, negotiate, and close
Close the next wave of customers alongside a founder, then without one, and turn closing from a personal skill into a system someone else can run
Win the build-versus-buy conversation: prepare it with the Solutions Architect, bring the evidence, and make the case to an engineering lead who would rather build it
Turn a working pitch into a documented playbook: write down what wins, retire what does not, and make the next hire productive from it
Run outbound as an experiment rather than a spray: test channels, messaging, and segments with a stated hypothesis and a result you are willing to act on
Shape ICP and positioning with real market signal, and feed what you hear in deals back to Product and Science rather than storing it in your head
Build the commercial foundation: pricing logic, contract mechanics, pipeline hygiene, and a forecast that holds up
Own the commercial side of expansion and renewal with the Solutions Architect: identify the opportunity, quantify the value, and de-risk the plan
Lead sales as the team grows: once the motion is repeatable, hire and coach the next account executives
You will not only work a pipeline. You will reason about every deal in terms of what it teaches us about the market, the product, and the motion, as part of a small, senior team, with real deals as your starting point.
Your First 90 Days
30 Days (Immersion): Learn the ICP, the pipeline, the case study, and our AI-assisted sales tooling in your first two weeks. From week three, run discovery calls yourself, with a founder as backup, and take over your first live deals.
60 Days (Ownership): Close your first customer on your own and run the weekly pipeline review instead of the founders. Document where the motion works and where it breaks.
90 Days (Engine): Own the pipeline end-to-end, with a measurable improvement at the stage you decided was the bottleneck, a repeatable outbound motion under way, and a written playbook that someone other than you could run.
Who You Are
You are a senior AE who still closes your own deals: several years carrying a quota for complex B2B deals.
You have domain experience: you have sold to CRM, lifecycle, or marketing teams at B2C companies, or you have sold martech (Braze, Bird, Iterable, Klaviyo, Customer. io, Emarsys, HubSpot).
You have start-up experience: you have built at least one commercial motion from scratch as a founder, a first sales hire, or the owner of a blank page, and you have closed complex B2B deals without a playbook or marketing-generated pipeline.
You have carried enterprise deals through a buying committee, and you can name the specific moment each of the three buyers almost said no.
You think in funnel metrics: conversion by stage, cycle length, where deals actually die, and what you changed about it.
You have sold a technical product and can hold your own in the room where a customer's engineers argue they could build it. You do not dismiss what they have already built.
You are credible with a CMO and with a Head of CRM and their data engineer, and you switch between them without losing either.
You judge a customer's business before you pitch into it: which metric their leadership is measured on, which one is decoration, and what matters that nobody has said out loud.
You take full ownership from first touch to signed contract, and you say the uncomfortable thing early. A commitment with a date on it is a commitment.
Ideally, you have led a small sales team while still carrying a number yourself.
You are AI-native in how you work. Research, outreach, prep, and follow-up in our motion are instrumented and AI-assisted, and you will extend that rather than work around it.
You are fluent in English. German is a strong advantage given our current market focus.
Bonus
You have been the operator on the other side, responsible for a CRM or lifecycle programme in-house.
You have converted pilots or design partnerships into multi-year contracts and can say what actually moved the decision.
You can point to multiple deals that only closed because of you.
How We Work
We are an AI-first team. We use spec-driven workflows and AI-assisted execution across engineering and go-to-market, adopting what makes us faster and discarding what does not. We value evidence, speed, and clear ownership over process theater, pipeline hygiene for its own sake, or mistaking activity for progress.
If you want to push the boundaries of how companies are built and sold, not just what gets sold, you will fit right in.
What We Offer
Work alongside founders who have built and sold an AI-driven SaaS business and led large-scale B2C operations from the customer's side of the table.
A founding commercial role, hands-on from day one, with room to lead as the team grows.
Ownership of the commercial motion and autonomy over pricing, positioning, process, and deal strategy.
A technical counterpart in every account, so you are not alone in the room when the conversation turns to data and integration.
Direct access to real customers, real pipeline, and a short path to Product, Science, and Engineering.
Based in Berlin with regular travel to European customers.
A competitive salary and a meaningful equity stake, early enough to shape the company's direction, de-risked by paying customers.
Your choice of a Deutschlandticket or bike subscription, plus a gym/fitness club membership.
Our Compass
We are guided by four core values:
Seek Truth: We ground decisions in evidence. When the facts change, we change our mind.
Act with Integrity: We build trust through transparency, reliability, and ownership.
Put Customers First: We succeed only when they succeed.
Accelerate Impact: We prefer speed, simplicity, and real learning over ceremony.