Founding Account Executive

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About the role

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 mot

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