Go-to-Market Lead (Founding GTM Hire) at Zelara in Berlin, Berlin, DE

ABOUT ZELARA

Current CRM marketing is broken. It blasts generic messages at scale and calls it "personalization." Our founders lived this problem while leading global, tech-enabled B2C businesses — and decided to fix it.

Zelara is the AI operating system for personalized, digital customer experiences. Our platform uses generative AI and machine learning to build a self-optimizing system that personalizes every B2C interaction in real time — turning impersonal marketing into conversations customers actually welcome.

Early results with enterprise customers show up to 70% significant conversion lift, measured in controlled A/B tests.

We are well-funded, already generating revenue with paying enterprise customers, and seeing strong market pull. Now we are building the team to scale.

THE ROLE

This is not a role where you inherit a mature sales org and work a territory. It is not a role where leads come from marketing, opportunities come from SDRs, and your job is to run a playbook someone else wrote.

This is the chance to be the person who builds how Zelara goes to market — from the first touch to the signed contract — at the exact moment we are turning early traction into a repeatable motion. The pitch lands. The workshops work. Design partners are signing.

The foundation is solid — your job is to own the motion end-to-end and build the engine that takes us from our first design partners to a scaled commercial operation.

You will sell to CRM and marketing leaders at mid-market B2C companies across Europe. Design partner contracts are in the EUR 60-120k ACV range. Sales cycles are 2-4 months. Buying committees typically include a CRM champion, a technical stakeholder, and an economic buyer.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Own the full funnel from ICP identification to signed contract (source, qualify, run discovery, facilitate workshops, write offers, negotiate, close)
• Close the next wave of design partners alongside our founder — turn closing from a personal skill into a system
• Turn a working pitch into a repeatable playbook — document what wins, kill what doesn't
• Run outbound as an experiment, not a spray — test channels, messaging, and segments with rigor
• Shape ICP and positioning with real market signal — feed customer insights directly into GTM
• Build the commercial foundation: pricing logic, contract mechanics, pipeline hygiene, forecasting
• Partner with the founder on high-impact deals — run others independently

You will not just work a pipeline — you will reason about every deal in terms of what it teaches us about the market, the product, and the motion. You will do this as part of a small, senior founding-stage team — with real deals as your starting point and real ownership over what comes next.

YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS

30 Days (Immersion): You will immerse yourself in our ICP, pipeline, case study, and AI-assisted sales tooling. You will shadow active deals, sit in on workshops, and run your first discovery calls alongside the founder.

60 Days (Ownership): You will own deals independently. You will close your first design partner without the founder on every call. You will start documenting what works in the sales process and where the motion breaks down.

90 Days (Engine): You will own the full pipeline end-to-end. You will drive conversion improvements across the funnel, begin building a repeatable outbound motion, and own the commercial engine end-to-end.

WHO YOU ARE

• You have built a commercial motion from scratch — founder, early hire, or "blank page to first customers" owner — and closed complex B2B deals without a playbook or marketing-generated pipeline
• You think in funnel metrics: conversion rates, sales cycle length, stage bottlenecks
• You have sold technical products to buying committees (champion, technical buyer, economic buyer — and you know why each says no)
• You are comfortable with CMOs, Heads of CRM, and technical stakeholders — and can switch between them seamlessly
• You take full ownership from first touch to signed contract — you identify the highest-leverage deals and close them independently
• You are AI-native in how you work — you use LLMs and tooling to move faster
• You are fluent in English. German is a strong advantage given our current market focus.

Bonus

• Experience selling into lifecycle marketing, CRM, or martech
• Can point to specific deals that only closed because of you

HOW WE WORK

We are an AI-first team. That means more than using copilots. We embrace spec-driven workflows and AI-assisted execution across engineering and go-to-market. Our sales motion runs on a tightly instrumented system where research, outreach, prep, and follow-up are all augmented by AI.

We adopt what makes us faster and discard what doesn't. We use data and intellectual honesty to find the best solutions — and we execute with urgency. We have no patience for 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 deployed large-scale personalization systems.
• A role where go-to-market is not a support function — it is the engine that turns a working product into a company.
• Ownership of the commercial motion and autonomy over pricing, positioning, process, and deal strategy.
• Direct access to real customers, real pipeline, and a tight feedback loop to product and engineering.
• A fast-paced, low-bureaucracy environment focused on outcomes.
• A cutting-edge, AI-native working environment.
• Based in Berlin with regular travel to European prospects.
• A competitive salary and a meaningful equity stake — early enough to shape the company's direction, de-risked by paying customers and strong market traction.
• A Deutschlandticket and 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.