Sales Manager, Startups | New Business UK&I
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 engagement to customer intent and potential.
- Align with Solutions and AI Engineering on technical scope, evaluation criteria and support capacity. Bring in Product, Deal Desk, Legal and other partners when their expertise can advance the customer’s decision.
- Turn technical success into a credible commercial path and sustained paid adoption. Use approved programmes and commercial processes, and ensure customer commitments reflect a realistic production and consumption plan.
- Build reusable discovery guides, sales plays, competitive playbooks and migration plans. Route routine billing, credits and support requests to the right channels while retaining clear ownership of material customer blockers.
- Coordinate account transitions with Core and strategic coverage. Preserve customer context, relationships and the next growth plan, and keep ownership clear until a handoff is accepted.
We're seeking someone with experience including:
- Six or more years leading sales teams, including hiring, developing and managing technical sellers in fast-changing markets.
- Working closely with startups as a founder, early employee or commercial leader serving startup customers.
- Selling platform or software products in a product-led or consumption-based business, with a record of converting technical adoption into revenue.
- Leading the relevant Greenfield motion: scalable early-stage acquisition and activation, or complex competitive pursuits and production migrations.
- Building repeatable sales processes while preserving judgement about customer fit, account priority and the right level of support.
- Coaching both technical and commercial discovery, qualifying opportunities and managing evidence-based forecasts.
- Discussing AI applications, APIs, model evaluation and production economics credibly with founders and technical leaders, while drawing on specialist expertise when needed.
- Working across technical, product, marketing, operational and commercial teams, and translating customer learning into better products and programmes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- You understand founder urgency, earn trust through useful advice and communicate candidly about what is possible. You need to be comfortable with ambiguity and creating clarity and direction in an ever-changing landscape and priorities. You are curious about AI, comfortable with ambiguity and willing to learn quickly. You enjoy developing sellers and building systems that make a growing team more effective.
What success looks like:
Your team reaches the right startups early, advances customers into meaningful production use and builds a healthy path to customer value and growth. Qualified pursuits progress through clear technical and commercial decisions. Sellers become more capable, forecasts become more reliable, and the team scales its reach through repeatable programmes and effective handoffs.