Head of Sales Development

Job description

Our mission is clear and staggeringly important: we're building the manufacturing operating system of the future from the ground up, one that’s engineered to create network effects as we grow. A beautiful, sophisticated quantum leap forward for the most important core industry in the world. Manufacturing is important. It’s the fundamental industry on which everything else is built. We take it for granted. In 1989, 35% of the entire software industry was manufacturing systems. What was the first massive burst in productivity from technology has stagnated into diminishing returns and increasing complexity. We can only continue to add complexity for so much longer until the whole system collapses. "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein ### Who you are We’re less interested in whether you’ve followed a traditional Sales Development management path than whether you’ve developed the capabilities this job requires. Great candidates may come from SDR leadership, early-stage sales, founding SDR roles, outbound-heavy Account Executive roles, or other environments where they’ve had to build rather than inherit. What matters is whether you can create pipeline yourself, make other people dramatically better, understand the business through its numbers, and build an outbound function that keeps improving. - You can actually do the job you’re asking other people to do. You’re comfortable picking up the phone, cold calling prospects, testing messaging yourself, and learning directly from the market - You’re an exceptional coach because you can diagnose why someone is struggling—not simply tell them to make more calls or follow the script more closely - You understand the numbers deeply. You know where the team is relative to target, why performance is above or below plan, where the funnel is breaking, and what needs to change - You’re a builder. When a process, dashboard, training program, hiring motion, territory model, or playbook doesn’t exist, your instinct is to create a useful version quickly and improve it from there - You actively use AI to make yourself more capable and productive, and you’re excited by how quickly these tools are expanding what you can build, analyze, automate, and solve - You move quickly and experiment constantly. You develop hypotheses, test messaging and tactics, measure what happens, and would rather learn from a thoughtful V1 today than spend three weeks designing the perfect solution - You have high standards and are comfortable giving clear, direct feedback. You care about people, but you don’t confuse being supportive with avoiding difficult conversations - You have enough confidence to lead without needing to always have the answer. You’re comfortable being wrong, bombing a call in front of the team, changing your mind, and learning from someone who is better than you at something - You’re competitive, resilient, and accountable. You care intensely about results, can absorb rejection and bad weeks without losing momentum, and take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for someone else to tell you what to do next ### What the job is You’ll own Sales Development at Fulcrum, with responsibility for building a team and operating system capable of creating a significant portion of our new-business pipeline. This is not a traditional SDR management role where you inherit a mature playbook, monitor activity, run 1:1s, and make sure everyone follows the process. Fulcrum’s SDR motion is unusually demanding. Our team primarily cold calls manufacturers, often speaking with owners and operational leaders who have spent decades in the industry. Reps need to sustain very high activity while also becoming capable of having sophisticated conversations about how these businesses operate. Your job is to figure out how to systematically produce both. You’ll be expected to understand the work firsthand, coach individuals based on what is actually limiting them, know the business through its numbers, hire great people, and continuously improve the system around them. **You’ll:** - Own the SDR pipeline target and understand performance across the funnel—from activity and conversations through meetings and qualified pipeline—so you always know where the team is relative to plan and what needs to change - Cold call alongside the team regularly, particularly while learning the market, testing messaging, developing new plays, and understanding what prospects are actually saying - Develop deep expertise in Fulcrum’s customer, product, positioning, competitive environment, and the operational problems manufacturers face - Coach SDRs individually by diagnosing what is actually limiting them—activity, time management, confidence, product understanding, discovery, objection handling, closing, learning velocity, or something else—and creating a specific plan to improve it - Listen to calls constantly and create a culture where feedback is direct, specific, frequent, and expected - Hold a high standard for effort and performance, set clear expectations for what great looks like, and make timely decisions when someone is not meeting the bar - Recruit proactively, continuously improve how we identify the characteristics that predict success at Fulcrum, and raise the quality of our SDR hiring process - Build and improve onboarding so new SDRs become productive, knowledgeable, and confident as quickly as possible - Design and rigorously measure experiments across messaging, targeting, sequencing, call strategy, account selection, objection handling, and other parts of the outbound motion—and turn what works into repeatable behavior across the team - Build the dashboards, workflows, training materials, AI tools, and other systems the team needs rather than waiting for another function to build them - Use AI aggressively to analyze calls and data, create training, automate work, prototype tools, research problems, and increase the speed at which the SDR organization learns - Develop emerging leaders within the SDR organization and partner closely with Sales, Marketing, RevOps, and Product while remaining fully accountable for Sales Development performance ### Who you’ll work with - **SDRs** who range from brand-new reps learning how to cold call to high-performing, tenured reps who need increasingly sophisticated coaching - **Account Executives** who depend on the SDR team to create high-quality pipeline and provide feedback on which opportunities ultimately convert - **Sales Leadership** to set pipeline expectations, diagnose performance, develop talent, and continuously evolve our go-to-market motion - **Marketing** to improve targeting, messaging, campaigns, account selection, and our understanding of which markets and messages are producing results - **Product** and other teams across Fulcrum to continually deepen your understanding of what we sell, why customers change, and how our market is evolving ### Why this role is different Sales Development at Fulcrum isn’t about managing a group of people who execute a finished playbook. We sell into manufacturing businesses that often operate very differently from modern technology companies. Our SDRs may speak with a shop owner who has run the same business for thirty years and has little interest in talking to a software salesperson. Creating a real opportunity requires more than persistence. Reps need to understand how manufacturers operate, ask intelligent questions, handle skepticism, and create enough curiosity that someone is willing to reconsider a system or process they may have used for decades. At the same time, this is an extremely high-activity outbound environment. The answer can’t be to spend an hour researching every account or write perfectly personalized emails to ten prospects a day. Great SDRs here combine unusually high work capacity with increasingly sophisticated judgment. Building a team capable of both is the job. That means you can’t lead entirely from a dashboard. You need to stay close enough to the work to understand what’s actually happening—listening to calls, making them yourself, digging into conversion data, testing new approaches, and building what the team needs to get better. AI is also changing what’s possible. Sales Development leaders can now analyze thousands of calls, work with data, automate processes, build internal tools, create individualized training, and test ideas at a speed that wasn’t possible a few years ago. We want someone who sees that as an opportunity to rethink how a Sales Development organization should operate—not someone who occasionally uses AI to write an email. The job sits intentionally between two responsibilities: understand the craft deeply enough to know what great looks like, and build a system that makes the entire team better than you could ever be individually. If you want to inherit a mature Sales Development engine, manage primarily through process, and spend most of your time one level removed from the actual work, this probably won’t be a great fit. If you like building from incomplete information, competing against a number, getting close to customers, developing people, figuring out why something works, using AI to move faster, and turning what you learn into a better system, it probably will.