Sales development manager Jobs in Berlin

This is our first GTM hire below founder level, focused on the DACH market. You will be on the phone in German every day.

We are a Berlin-based startup transforming how industrial materials are bought and sold across Europe. One of the oldest industries in the world still runs on Excel, PDF and email. We are replacing that with AI that runs the buying and selling workflow end to end, increasing liquidity, speeding up transactions and reducing waste for hundreds of steel and metal distributors.

We have strong early traction, real enterprise customers and committed investors. We are a lean, technical team scaling our enterprise pilots and building the AI infrastructure underneath them.

Tasks

1. Reach out and close
Own our outbound: call and message decision-makers at steel traders and stockholders across the DACH region, in German, every day. Get past the gatekeeper, open the conversation, and book qualified meetings for the team. Track follow-ups so no warm lead ever goes cold, and prepare the pre-call briefs that make each conversation land.

2. Build the pipeline
Build and verify our target lists: the right companies, mapped to the right person (Head of Sales, branch manager, MD). Keep our CRM (Attio) clean and trustworthy so the whole team can rely on it.

3. Extend our AI outbound engine
Improve the internal AI tooling that powers our outreach: research, enrichment and message drafting. Wire in new data sources and automate the manual steps that slow you down. You will use AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude) to ship, not just specify.

4. Help build the brand
Help shape how our software business shows up in the world: our brand, our messaging, and our presence on social media. Bring ideas for how we look and sound, help grow our audience across the channels that matter, and keep everything consistent as the product grows.

Requirements

You are genuinely comfortable picking up the phone, and you like finding smarter ways to work. The one non-negotiable: you can sell in German. Everything else you can grow into here.

• Excellent written and verbal communication in German (C1 or C2 must have, native not required) and solid English. You can run an outbound call with a German industrial customer end to end, and you are not thrown by a cold conversation.
• Enrolled student or recent graduate. We care about how you think and what you have built, not your years of experience.
• Comfortable with software, and keen to use AI tools like Cursor or Claude to work smarter. If you can build or automate things yourself, even better, though you do not need to be an engineer.
• Resourceful and thick-skinned. You take initiative instead of waiting to be told, and a "no" does not slow you down.
• Organized, and genuinely bothered by messy data.
• Based in Berlin or relocating before your start date, and legally permitted to work in Germany.

Nice to have: your own outreach or sales experience; a side project you have shipped; a portfolio, brand, or content you have built (a site, a social account, a newsletter); Python, React, or GTM tools like Clay, Apollo or HubSpot.

Benefits

• Direct line to a co-founder. You report to Simon, who owns sales, with no layer in between.
• First GTM hire below founder level. You shape the outbound function rather than inherit it.
• You build, not just use. You extend our AI outbound engine with Cursor and Claude and ship changes yourself.
• Full attribution. Every meeting on the calendar has your name on it.
• Study-compatible. Werkstudent at 16 to 20 hours from the winter semester is genuinely on the table.
• A real office in Prenzlauer Berg, a hybrid setup, and a small international team working in English.

Send us your CV. If you have built something, a site, a repo, a newsletter, a social account, a portfolio, add the link to your CV or drop it in the cover letter field. It does not have to be polished, we just want something concrete to look at.

Vanilla Steel is a B2B steel trading company based in Berlin. We trade steel across Europe, and we build the software our own traders use to do it.

That combination is unusual in our industry. One side of the business is trading: buying and selling with suppliers and buyers across Europe, with a particular focus on the DACH region. The other is a small product and engineering team building the tools that make that trading faster and more transparent than the phone and spreadsheet processes the industry still largely runs on.

We are around 25 people from a wide mix of backgrounds and nationalities. English is the language of the team, German and other European languages are the languages of our customers. We are small enough that people take on real responsibility early: one of our account managers joined as an intern and now runs their own portfolio of customers and suppliers.

We are VC-backed and still early enough that how we work is genuinely open to being shaped by the people who join.