Founding Account Executive (f/m/x)

ilert GmbH • Cologne, MN

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

ilert is hiring its first Account Executive to win new mid-market customers in DACH and across Europe. The role is focused on outbound prospecting, with no SDR team or inbound lead queue; the Account Executive sources, opens, and closes every opportunity and reports directly to the CEO.

The Account Executive owns the complete sales cycle, from account research and initial outreach through discovery, demonstrations, trials, security questions, negotiation, and signature. The role also involves learning ilert’s alerting, on-call, and incident response platform well enough to conduct credible technical demos, developing the initial sales playbook, sharing market feedback with product and marketing, and maintaining accurate pipeline and forecasts in HubSpot.

This is a full-time, permanent position based in Cologne, Germany, with a hybrid arrangement requiring three days per week in the Cologne office. The role sells to technical and business buyers in German and English.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of quota-carrying experience as a closing Account Executive in B2B SaaS new business; SDR experience does not count toward this requirement.
• A record of sourcing and closing deals through outbound prospecting, rather than relying only on converted inbound leads.
• Experience closing mid-market deals involving several stakeholders, a technical evaluator, and a budget owner, typically over weeks to a few months.
• Experience selling subscription software as a product, rather than services, consulting, or custom development.
• Experience selling to technical buyers; experience with DevOps, SRE, IT Operations, or engineering teams is especially relevant.
• Ability to conduct thoughtful, researched outbound prospecting and use modern tools, including AI, to work efficiently.
• Comfort building a sales motion from scratch without an existing playbook, SDR team, or sales operations support.
• Business-fluent German and English.
• Ability to work from the Cologne office three days per week.

Nice To Haves

• Experience selling monitoring, observability, ITSM, developer tools, or cloud infrastructure.
• Experience as an early or first sales hire at a SaaS startup.
• Knowledge of the incident management market, including PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and incident.io.
• Ability to run a technical demonstration independently.
• Experience with HubSpot.

Responsibilities

• Select target accounts, research them, and initiate outbound conversations with Heads of IT Operations, platform and SRE leads, and CTOs using channels such as email, phone, LinkedIn, events, and referrals.
• Own the full sales cycle, including discovery, demonstrations, trials, security questions, negotiation, and closing.
• Learn the product and deliver credible demonstrations to technical buyers, involving an engineer when appropriate.
• Develop, document, and establish the initial sales playbook, including effective segments, messaging, and channels.
• Share prospect requests and insights about wins and losses with product and marketing teams.
• Maintain accurate pipeline information and forecasts in HubSpot.

Benefits

• Opportunity to design the outbound sales motion and help shape the growing sales team.
• Direct reporting line to the CEO and co-founder, with decisions made through direct conversation.
• Opportunity to sell an established alerting and on-call product that teams rely on.
• Opportunity to sell an AI SRE that investigates real customer incidents alongside an established alerting and on-call platform.
• Hybrid work arrangement, with work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays and three days per week at the Cologne Rheinauhafen office, which has a roof terrace.
• Bootstrapped, profitable company focused on building for customers rather than pursuing another funding round.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed