Founding Sales Executive

About the Role

This is the founding sales hire at a pre-seed industrial energy management SaaS company, working directly alongside the founders to own and scale revenue. The product is live at industrial scale across multiple verticals, and you inherit a validated customer profile, warm referral pipeline, and founders ready to hand you their calendars. Your work directly shapes go-to-market strategy as the company grows.

What You'll Do

• Close new logos across DACH industrials, from large Mittelstand groups to listed Tier-1 enterprises with multi-site energy portfolios.

• Own the full sales cycle end-to-end: outbound, discovery, demo, quantified business case, pilot scoping, procurement, security review, and contract close.

• Multi-thread complex buying committees spanning energy procurement, plant management, finance, IT, and executive stakeholders.

• Build your own outbound pipeline across email, LinkedIn, phone, events, and partner channels in both German and English.

• Expand won accounts into cross-sells, additional sites, and reference customers who generate further pipeline.

• Maintain rigorous CRM hygiene, account planning, qualification standards, and honest forecasting to build a repeatable sales playbook from scratch.

• Feed pricing, product, and ICP learnings directly back to the founders and product team.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years in B2B sales with at least 2 years of genuine full-cycle closing responsibility.

• Proven independent track record closing enterprise or upper-mid-market deals with ACVs of roughly €50k to €200k and multiple stakeholders.

• Experience selling AI or SaaS products to industrial, manufacturing, or energy buyers.

• Ability to generate your own outbound pipeline without relying on inbound leads, marketing, or SDR support.

• Comfort selling a complex, technical product with long sales cycles and new budget categories.

• Experience with pilot, proof-of-value, or land-and-expand motions.

• Fluency in German and English, written and spoken.

• Early-stage or startup experience, having performed without established enablement or sales infrastructure.

• Existing network in the DACH industrial or energy sector is a strong plus.

• Prior experience as a first or founding sales hire is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary:€100,000 to €140,000 annually, plus equity participation as a founding team member.

Location

On-site or hybrid fromMunich or Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany. Candidates should be based in, or able to relocate to, one of these cities.