Sales Manager, Startups | New Business UK&I

Job description

About the team The OpenAI Startups team helps founders build and scale products with AI. We combine technical understanding, commercial judgement and startup ecosystem relationships to help customers move from promising ideas to building and scaling their businesses with OpenAI. About the role You will lead one of our EMEA Greenfield sales teams, helping high-potential startups choose OpenAI, reach production and establish the foundations for growth. Greenfield covers two distinct motions: Early Stage, focused on activation and meaningful expansion, and Pursuits, focused on high-stakes conversion of the startups with highest potential and new customers with complex buying decisions. You will translate regional strategy into clear account priorities, hire and develop Account Directors, and coach the customer and commercial work appropriate to the team you lead. You will work closely with technical partners and VC Partnerships to turn founder access and technical engagement into customer value, qualified pipeline and consumption revenue. This role is based in London. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week. In this role, you'll: Recruit, onboard and develop a strong team of Account Directors. Set clear expectations, coach live customer work, sales methodology and deal strategy, as well as giving direct, actionable feedback. Build and execute the Greenfield GTM strategy and sales plan for your team. Prioritise companies using customer need, workload, decision timing, founder and funding signals, commercial potential and available technical capacity. Coach the motion your sellers own. For Early Stage, strengthen discovery, activation, first production use and initial growth. For Pursuits, strengthen competitive strategy, executive access, evaluation, migration planning and negotiation. Create a disciplined pipeline and consumption forecasting rhythm. Connect opportunity stages and revenue expectations to customer evidence, production milestones and specific next decisions. Build trusted relationships with founders, technical leaders and commercial decision-makers. Help the team explain how OpenAI can improve product quality, delivery speed and economics for the customer’s workload. Partner with VC Partnerships, Marketing and developer-facing teams on qualified sourcing and activation. Match direct sales effort, nurture and scaled engagem…