Founding Sales Development Representative (SDR)

About telli

Every 10 minutes, 18 million interactions between consumers and businesses take place worldwide. Traditionally, these conversations have been frustrating—customers face long waiting times, automated menus, repetitive explanations, and often unhelpful assistance. Most individuals still struggle to communicate their issues naturally when contacting companies.

telli is transforming this landscape by enabling natural language conversations at scale using AI. Industry leaders—including B2C sectors like energy, telecommunications, and insurance—are adopting AI-driven voice agents to revolutionize customer engagement. While creating an initial voice agent is straightforward, maximizing its impact for both customers and businesses remains challenging.

At telli, we empower companies to create, implement, and continuously optimize AI voice agents for consumers. This technology is poised to become a crucial software category in the coming decade, and telli aims to lead this market.

Our team is compact, AI-focused, and passionate about solving complex problems across engineering, product development, and go-to-market strategies. We embrace rapid iteration, leverage AI capabilities extensively, take full ownership of our contributions, and maintain a humble, ego-free working culture.

Role Mission

As the founding Sales Development Representative at telli, you will be key in expanding our sales pipeline for a high-demand voice AI platform and progressively managing the entire sales cycle. This role offers an opportunity to influence and develop our sales playbook and build an effective sales team around it.

Key Responsibilities

• Generate a substantial volume of qualified leads aimed at increasing telli's revenue tenfold within a year.
• Identify potential prospects and establish engagement with them.
• Conduct outreach through multiple channels, including email, LinkedIn, and phone calls.
• Cultivate and sustain customer relationships.
• Progress to managing and closing deals independently, potentially within the first six months following excellent results.
• Oversee pipeline management and utilize CRM tools efficiently.
• Contribute to shaping telli’s go-to-market approach by creating reliable sales processes and refining outreach tactics.

Qualifications and Suitability

• Prior sales experience, preferably within startups or dynamic environments.
• Proven track record of consistently surpassing sales targets or performance metrics.
• Strong commercial insight to grasp complex business challenges and client needs.
• Willingness to undertake necessary, sometimes unglamorous, tasks with a hands-on attitude.
• Excellent communication skills in both English and German.
• Desire to collaborate with intelligent, approachable colleagues who value humility and have low ego.
• Availability to work onsite full-time, Monday through Friday, in Berlin.

Considerations for Fit

• This role may not suit candidates who require detailed guidance or avoid accountability.
• Applicants lacking fundamental product knowledge or sales experience might struggle.
• Those preferring strategic-only engagement without direct customer contact are unlikely to thrive.
• Remote work preference or desire for minimal collaboration is incompatible with this role.
• Candidates seeking a standard 9-to-5 schedule are discouraged.