Sales Manager, Startups

About the team

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one lab together to accomplish this.

In pursuit of this mission, our Go To Market (GTM) team is responsible for helping customers learn how to leverage and deploy our highly capable AI products across their business. The team is made of Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals that work together to create valuable solutions that will help bring AI to as many users as possible.

About the role

Startups are creating many of the most disruptive and category-defining AI applications. The Startup Go To Market team’s mission is to help startups harness the power of AI models to drive these advances. You will lead a team that supports startups building effectively with OpenAI’s APIs, providing access to OpenAI teams and expertise to support their growth.

This role is a mixture of technical understanding, vision, partnership, and strategy.

This leadership role will be responsible for driving and implementing the sales strategy within our startups segment, recruiting and leading a team of technical sales professionals, and achieving successful deployments with startup customers.

The ideal candidate will possess significant sales leadership experience and a comprehensive understanding of AI technologies. This leader will have the capability to adapt to a complex and fast-changing technology environment. Responsibilities will include customer acquisition, account management, owning executive relationships, and more.

This individual will need to be a proven leader who can effectively collaborate cross-functionally with product, marketing, developer relations, operations, and core GTM teams, while guiding and mentoring a sales team towards achieving business objectives.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you'll:

• Lead a team of sellers

• Partner with solutions to build and execute complex customer programs and projects

• Manage consumption revenue forecasts

• Contribute to the development of programs and strategic initiatives focused on startup customers

• Serve as an advocate for improving the startup experience building with OpenAI, synthesizing product feedback from insights captured from our work with startups

• Closely monitor the industry landscape (people, competitors, partners, etc.) to contribute to product roadmap and other corporate strategies

• Support the recruitment and onboarding of other teammates

• Support the development of company culture

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• 8+ years leading Sales teams

• Deep experience working in the startup ecosystem either as a founder, early startup employee, or by working with startup customers

• Selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service at a product-led growth company

• Designing and executing complex deal strategies

• Supporting the growth of fast-growing, high-performance startups

• Leading high-visibility customer events (CAB, conferences, product launches, etc.)

• Gathering, distilling, and processing complex market (industry, competitor, customer, prospect) intelligence

• Reporting on customer success activities

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand your customer’s priorities and help them achieve their vision for using our models to improve their internal productivity and AI strategy. You build strong relationships with executives and professionals across functions and serve as a trusted advisor.

• Have a passion for or deep curiosity in artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy our technology in a way that benefits humanity. You’re excited to educate our customers on AI and how to plan for the future.

• Are a builder. You are excited to impact how our company operates and scales. Your passion is building strong systems and processes from the ground up and executing them with precision.

• Are excited by new challenges. You don’t have the answers to every question up front, but the process of solving them invigorates you. Bespoke issues requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you. You’re willing to experiment with new solutions.

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand go to market best practices and raise the bar for our organization. You think and plan forward on the order of years and bring internal and external stakeholders along with your strategy.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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