Founding Enterprise Account Executive · France

telli; Paris; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

telli is building a small, mighty Paris-based team to make every customer interaction worth having. You will own outbound enterprise sales in France, closing major accounts, and shaping how we sell in this market. Expect a fast-paced, hands-on role with significant ownership.

As a founding Enterprise Account Executive, you will lead the end-to-end process from first outreach to signature, collaborating with the France team and international colleagues. Travel to prospects in France as needed.

Qualifications

• Sourced and closed complex B2B enterprise deals.
• Communicate with senior leaders and work through IT, security, finance, legal, and procurement.
• Enjoy prospecting, follow-up, and fixing what is broken.
• Bias for action, ownership, low ego; read the telli principles.
• Communicate in French and work with our international team (English).
• Based in Paris and able to travel, including two weeks in Berlin for onboarding.

Responsibilities

• Build your own enterprise pipeline through outbound, calls, referrals, and a deep understanding of French customer operations.
• Lead complex sales cycles end to end: discovery, demos, business cases, executive alignment, security, legal, procurement, and negotiation.
• Find the real problem behind a customer's interest in AI, quantify the value of solving it, and earn trust across the buying group.
• Work closely with the France team, founders, product, and deployment colleagues to turn early customers into lasting successes.
• Keep an honest forecast and turn wins, losses, and objections into a repeatable French sales motion.

Skills

Enterprise B2B sales

Outbound prospecting

Executive stakeholder management

French & English communication

Job description

about us

Every 10 minutes, 18 million conversations happen between businesses and consumers around the world.

For decades, the consumer side of those conversations sucked: long queues, robotic menus, repeated explanations, and advice that is often unhelpful. Most people today still cannot simply say what their problem is in natural language when communicating with businesses.

AI changes that. For the first time, companies can have natural conversations with customers at massive scale. Every B2C company - from energy providers to telcos to insurers - will use AI agents to talk to their customers. The number of conversations businesses will handle is going to explode in the coming years.

At telli, we are solving the challenges that come with that shift. Today, leading B2C companies like Sky are already using telli to deploy thousands of voice agents to provide their customers with a new experience. But building a first voice agent is easy, getting it to drive real outcomes for customers and businesses is the hard part. telli helps companies build, deploy, and improve consumer-facing AI voice agents at scale. This will become one of the most important software categories of the next decade, and we intend to win it.

We are a small, AI-pilled team that likes to solve hard problems. Be it engineering, product, or GTM - we build, experiment, and move fast, while heavily leveraging the capabilities of AI models. All of us like to challenge ourselves and take real ownership over what we do, all while still staying humble and keeping a low-ego culture.

Check out our principles to see how we work.

Your mission

telli is arriving in France. We are building a small, mighty team in Paris to make every customer interaction worth having. We have a product already used by leading B2C businesses, but the French market is still at the beginning. We will earn our place, one customer at a time.

We are outbound first. As a founding Enterprise Account Executive, you will create opportunities, win major French accounts, and help define how telli sells in this market. You will carry a quota and own the hard parts of the deal, from the first cold conversation to signature. Your work will shape the playbook for the team that follows.

What you'll do

• Build your own enterprise pipeline through thoughtful outbound, calls, referrals, and a deep understanding of French customer operations.

• Lead complex sales cycles end to end: discovery, demos, business cases, executive alignment, security, legal, procurement, and negotiation.

• Find the real problem behind a customer's interest in AI, quantify the value of solving it, and earn trust across the buying group.

• Work closely with the France team, founders, product, and deployment colleagues to turn early customers into lasting successes.

• Keep an honest forecast and turn wins, losses, and objections into a repeatable French sales motion.

What makes you a great fit

• You have personally sourced and closed complex B2B enterprise deals, ideally in software or AI, and can show how you earned them.

• You are comfortable speaking with senior business leaders and working through IT, security, finance, legal, and procurement.

• You enjoy the unglamorous work as much as the big meeting: prospecting, follow‑up, and fixing what is broken.

• You bring a bias for action, aim for excellence, take ownership, and work with low ego. Read the telli principles

• You communicate with confidence and care in French and can work effectively in English with our international team.

• You are based in Paris and can spend two weeks in Berlin for onboarding. You are ready to travel and visit prospects across France when needed.

You may not be a good fit if

• You don't believe voice is the future of how people and businesses talk to each other.

• You expect a ready‑made book of business or marketing to build your pipeline.

• You want to join deals only after discovery, and avoid cold outreach or the hard follow-through between meetings.

• You need a fixed playbook before acting or pass on ownership when a deal gets messy.

• You dislike working across executive, operations, IT, legal, and procurement stakeholders or learning openly from losses.

The reality of the role

France is a new market for us. There is no mature local playbook or book of business waiting for you. Some deals will be messy, and you will need to create momentum yourself. If you want ownership, direct feedback, ambitious colleagues, and the chance to do the best work of your career, this is the opportunity.

The hiring process

The hiring process itself is a case study in how you sell. Approach it as you would a complex account: research us, form a point of view, earn attention, ask and listen, follow through, and respond to feedback. We will evaluate how you create momentum and manage the process end to end, with the judgment and ownership you would bring to winning enterprise customers in France.

Compensation

€120,000–€180,000 gross annual on-target earnings (OTE), with a 50% base salary and 50% variable compensation at target, plus equity. We will discuss the equity terms during the hiring process.