Founding Sales Lead (m/f/d)

Hive Robotics builds RF communication and orchestration systems for unmanned platforms: connecting, controlling and commanding multi-vendor drone and robot swarms. Our systems are made in Germany, in serial production and deployed on active frontlines.

You’ll be our first sales hire. There is no sales team, no SDRs and no playbook to inherit. This is a hands-on role: you find the leads, make the calls, write the offers and negotiate the contracts yourself. You work directly with our founders, report to the CEO, and get a lot of trust and room to decide how you sell. We measure you on signed contracts.

Some leads come from our founders and Business Development. Many you’ll find yourself, through cold calls, cold emails, events and your own network. You take over a live pipeline and our existing customers, so we expect your first closes within three months.

You don’t need a defence background or an engineering degree. Our engineers and Field Application Engineers know the product in depth, and you can bring them in whenever a deal needs it. What we need from you is the ability to run large, complex deals to signature on your own.

• Close deals. Take opportunities from the first conversation to a signed contract, negotiate price and terms yourself, and bring in the founders when a deal needs them.
• Build your own pipeline. Leads from the founders and BD give you a start. The rest comes from your own outreach: cold calls, emails, LinkedIn, trade fairs and introductions you find yourself.
• Grow our existing customers through follow-on orders, new units and new use cases.
• Write the offer: configuration and pricing, terms, the business case on the customer’s own numbers and the plan to signature. Handle tenders and RFPs where they apply.
• Use trials to win contracts. Before a trial starts, scope, success criteria, pilot price and the path to the main contract are agreed in writing. Operations handles the paperwork.
• Keep a forecast the founders can plan with: disciplined qualification, an up-to-date CRM and a short weekly pipeline review.
• Set up the tools you work with every day, from offer templates to your CRM.

What you bring

• 5 to 10 years in B2B sales, ideally around 7, with a clear record of closing
• Deals of €2m to €10m and more that you personally negotiated and closed
• Experience with buyers who decide in groups: users, technical teams, procurement, legal and management
• You do the work yourself. You research accounts, pick up the phone and write your own offers, without a team preparing things for you.
• Closing is what drives you. You chase the next step, follow up until you get an answer and don’t let deals stall.
• You write down offers, decisions and customer commitments, so Operations and the founders can act on them without asking
• Willingness to travel 30-50%, mostly within Germany and Europe, sometimes further
• Fluent English; German is a strong plus
• Eligibility and willingness to undergo security vetting, which some customer sites require

Nice to have

• Experience selling hardware or other physical products with lead times and delivery commitments
• Experience with defence, public-sector or other long, regulated buying processes
• You’ve worked as the first or only salesperson in a company before

You start with a solid base salary that gives you a stable foundation. On top of that comes a strong variable component tied directly to the deals you close: the more you close, the more you earn, and strong performers earn well above their base. You also participate in Hive through our VSOP, so you share in the value you help build.