Founding Account Executive

ABOUT ZELARA Most CRM marketing still sends the same message to everyone and calls it personalization. Zelara fixes that with agentic lifecycle marketing that improves with every interaction. It runs on the CRM stack a company already has and gets every customer the right message at the right time. 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. THE ROLE You work for Björn, our Co-CEO & Founder. At Uber he was responsible for 400 billion customer touchpoints a year. He has seen our buyers' problem from the inside. You are a hands-on senior AE. You close your own deals and build our sales motion, turning early traction into something repeatable. No inherited territory, no SDRs, no playbook. You sell to CRM, lifecycle and marketing leaders at mid-market and enterprise B2C companies across Europe. Annual contracts run €75–250k, cycles two to four months. You run each account with our Solutions Architect: you own the deal, they own the technical plan. WHAT YOU WILL DO - Run the full funnel: source, qualify, run discovery and workshops, write offers, negotiate, close - Close your first deals alongside a founder, then on your own - Win the build-versus-buy conversation, with the Solutions Architect beside you - Turn a working pitch into a written playbook - Run outbound as an experiment, with a hypothesis and a result you act on - Own pricing, contracts, forecast, expansion and renewal - Lead sales as the team grows: hire and coach the next account executives Within 90 days you close your first customer on your own, run the weekly pipeline review and have a playbook someone else could use. WHO YOU ARE - A senior AE with several years of closing complex B2B deals yourself, ideally SaaS, against your own sales target - You have closed mid-market and enterprise deals of our size (€75–250k a year) through a buying committee, and can say what made each buyer say yes. - Domain experience: you have sold to CRM, lifecycle or marketing teams at B2C companies, or sold martech (Braze, Klaviyo, Iterable, Customer.io and similar). - Start-up experience: you have built a sales motion from scratch as a founder, an early sales hire or the owner of a blank page, without a playbook or inbound pipeline - You judge a customer's business first: the metric their leadership is held to, and what we are worth to them in numbers - You are credible with a CMO, a Head of CRM and their data engineer, and hold your own when the engineers say they could build it, without dismissing what they built - You think in funnel metrics and say the uncomfortable thing early - Ideally, you have led a small sales team while still closing deals yourself - AI-native, fluent in English. German is a strong advantage. BONUS - You have run a CRM or lifecycle programme in-house - You have turned pilots into multi-year contracts WHAT WE OFFER - Work directly with founders who have built and sold an AI SaaS business and run large-scale B2C from the customer's side - A founding role, hands-on from day one, with room to lead - A technical counterpart in every account - A competitive salary and a meaningful equity stake - Berlin, with regular travel across Europe - A Deutschlandticket or bike subscription, plus a gym membership Our Compass: Seek truth. Act with integrity. Put customers first. Accelerate impact.